‘Now.’
There’s the pale gleam you have to get used to up here, especially because of the rain. The rain streams down the skylight so it looks like we’re under a river. In the sky.
‘Now, Ruth.’
‘Hello, Mrs Quinty.’
And while she gets her breath, Dear Reader, get acquainted. See how compact she is. See her pinched face, tight to the chin, as if Life was a very narrow thing you had to get through. Pointed, sharp-looking knees, charcoal skirt to shins, grey tights, shoes size six, laced, polished but puddle-dulled by the weathers of west Clare and by crossing our yard, mouse-coloured blouse with top button concertinaing together some flaccid cords in her throat and lending her voice that tendency towards – Sorry, Mrs Quinty – squeak, black cardigan with general dusting of chalk, tiny linen handkerchief in the sleeve at the ready. Her hair is a bun – sad reminder of Tommy the Cake-man who took all her Sweetness – her lips, where are her lips? There’s the faintest remnant of them, a trace-line of not quite pink, her cheeks powdered, an all-over De Valera Comely Aged look that was very popular when it first appeared behind the yellow cellophane in the window of MacMahon’s Drapery in Faha. Glasses of round rims make huge her eyes and in them you see fear and goodness. People here are good. They’re so good it takes your breath away. It’s the kind of goodness that shows best when something goes wrong. That’s when they shine. They’re mad and odd as cats on bicycles but they’ve been shining around our family now since Aeney. And none more so than Mrs Quinty.
Mrs Quinty, meet the Reader.
Mrs Quinty needs reading glasses but has not brought them. Instead she takes off her regular glasses to look at you.
While she does I sit pillow-propped and wonder about her surname. I wonder if they were Quincy not Quinty once, and some relation, say in 1776, say boarding a ship for the New World, hurried his handwriting, blotted his C to a T, or maybe he lost an eye, was nicknamed Squinty, and dropped the S on his return to Proper Life, Call me Quinty, or maybe was someone grand and founded Quincy Massachusetts but was later driven out in scandal, or maybe they were people called Quin and there was one signed himself T who . . .
Less, Ruth. Less.
Mrs Quinty hands me back the most recent pages of my book. I only give her the ones in which she doesn’t feature. I write like a man and I’m a bit Extreme, she has told me previously. I am that anachronism, a book-reader, and from this my writing has developed Eccentric Superabundance of Style, Alarming Borrowings, Erratic Fluctuations, and I must Must lose my tendency to Capitalisation.
Once when I answered that Emily Dickinson capitalised, Mrs Quinty told me Emily Dickinson was not A Good Example, that she was a Peculiar Case, and the way she said it you knew she regretted it right away because there was a little flinching around her mouth and you could tell she had already joined the dots and remembered Swains are pretty much the definition of peculiar. And so I never did ask her about what it meant to write like a man.
Two-handed, Mrs Quinty lifts the glasses free of the minor parsnip of her nose, holds them just in front of her and scrutinises the dust gathered there. Rain makes bars of light and dark down her face and mine, as if we’re inside the jail of it.
Mrs Quinty draws out her handkerchief, polishes, scrutinises again, finds more of the dust or smears school-life produces and cleans further. ‘What have you been reading, Ruth?’
I have already eaten all of Dickens – Pickwick to Drood. I can tell you why Charles Dickens is the greatest novelist there ever was or will be and why all great novelists since are in debt to Great Expectations. I can remember things you’ve forgotten, like when Pip drank so much tar-water he went around smelling of new fence, or when Mr Pumblechook was proud to be in the company of the chicken that had the honour of being eaten by the new gentleman Pip. I read that book first in the class of Miss Brady over in Faha N.S. where there was this wire-rack library with rag-eared paperbacks donated by parents, along with a full set of Guinness Book of Records 1970–80. But it wasn’t until Mr Mason when I was fourteen that I understood it was the Best Book Ever.
I’ve read all the usuals, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, but Dickens is like this different country where the people are brighter, more vivid, more comic, more tragic, and in their company you feel the world is richer, more fantastic than you imagined.
But right now I’m reading RLS. He’s my new favourite. I like writers who were sick. I like it that my father’s first book was Treasure Island, a small red hardcover Regent Classics (Book 1, Purnell & Sons Ltd, Paulton, Somerset) with the stamp on the inside page: Highfield School, First Prize.
I like it that Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy, that his imagination sailed him away into adventures while his body was lying in his bed with the first stages of consumption. I like it that he called himself an inland castaway, and that as a young man he decided he wanted to go walking around some of France, sleep out à la belle étoile with a donkey he christened Modestine and who, he wrote, ‘had a faint semblance to a lady of my acquaintance’ (Book 846, Travels with a Donkey, Wadsworth Classics). I know that lady too.
I myself am going to write Travels with a Salmon when I get further downriver.
I want to tell Mrs Quinty all this, but just say: ‘Robert Louis Stevenson.’ And then, by way of passing comment, add, ‘I want to read all these books.’
‘All?’ She looks around at them, in proper terms my father’s library, but really just the enormous collection of books he accumulated which has now been brought up to my room and stacked from the floor to where the angle of the skylight cuts them off.
‘They were my father’s. I’m going to read them all before I die.’
Mrs Quinty doesn’t approve of any mention of dying. From her sleeve she takes the handkerchief and applies it with a light brushing to beneath her nose where the deadly word may be lingering. She catches what must once have been her lower lip in her top teeth. There is a little pinking, a flush of feeling that the powder on her cheeks cannot camouflage. She looks at the wild stacks, the ones that rise behind the others, so it seems we are in a sea and there are waves of books coming towards the boat-bed and somewhere in there my father has gone.
She doesn’t quite know what to say.
‘I don’t quite know what to say,’ she says.
‘That’s all right, Mrs Quinty.’
Against the cresting of emotion she tightens herself a bit more. She pulls in her narrow shoulders and presses her knees together and she actually seems to go in a little. I am sorry for upsetting her, and allow a time when we both just sit here, me in the bed and she beside it, and we let the sounds of the rain take the conversation away.
‘Well now,’ Mrs Quinty says, giving herself a little tug. ‘That is a lot of rain.’
And neither of us speaks again for some moments, we just sit up here in this sky-room flowing with rain. Then I turn to Mrs Quinty and nod towards the books that all smell of fire and rain and I tell her, ‘I am going to read them all because that is where I will find him.’
Chapter 3
I left my boy-blur in the air.
Always, you’ll be glad to know, from his vaults Grandfather landed; but always with an unsayable disappointment.
He excelled at the school of Mr Tupping and so was quickly moved to another. The Standard rose. He was moved ahead a year, and still excelled. He came home on holidays with glowing reports but the Reverend was in his church or out seeking the few roads in Wiltshire he hadn’t foot-stamped yet. The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard. We suck small hard-boiled stones of disappointment in everything. The Swain face is narrow and, in the case of my aunts, seems to chew its own cheeks.
Abraham went to Oxford to Prepare for Life, which was the Reverend’s term for what Abraham was to do while waiting to get The Call. He was to go up to Oxford and read Classics – which were not in fact the red hard-covered James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (Boo
k 7, Regent Classics, Somerset), the fat full water-swollen Oliver Twist (Book 12, Penguin Classics, London) that has come unglued at Chapter the Forty-Fifth, ‘Fatal Consequences’, and smells amazingly like toast, or even Tolstoy’s Master and Man (Book 745, Everyman edition, New York) which belonged once to someone who left no further mark on this world other than the peculiarly rigid handwriting with which he wrote belongs to Tobias Greaves on the flyleaf of that stiff paperback. It turns out that Classics meant none of these but a lot of Greek and Latin in slim matching volumes in red or green hardcovers with glossy cream pages intent on sticking together and sealing themselves for good.
Read and wait; that was the plan.
God had a good few clients in those days and He hadn’t had anyone invent mobiles or texting yet so it took time to get around to calling them each individually at whatever they were doing, so you just had to wait. The Vocation would come in due course; the Reverend was sure. Abraham was going into the Ministry. After all, Soul-polishing was the family business.
So my grandfather waited. He read his load of Latin. He found one of the venerable poles they had there in Oxford and with it he reached New Heights.
You’d think that with him being so often that bit nearer the sky, and having that big-hint name, Abraham, he’d have gotten The Call right away. It was like he was knocking at the door. I suppose God might have thought it was a bit forward of him. He might have thought Abraham had a case of the Mickey Nolans who Nan says thinks three fingers of hair gel and pointy shoes makes him The Chosen One. Ever since it worked on Pauline Frawley, hoisting her skirt up four inches in the Ladies in Ryan’s before going out to shake her altogether in front of him to TJ Mooney’s version of Neil Diamond, he’s convinced he’s God’s Gift.
Well, anyway, turns out God had enough gifts right then, and didn’t have any great need for Abraham Swain. There was Grandfather sitting in the library all morning reading his lyric verse in Latin, his Catullus and Horace and getting on first-name basis with the Hendecasyllabic, the Lesser and Greater Asclepiad, the Glyconic, those boys, and in the late afternoon vaulting himself like an offering up against the damp skies of Oxford, as if he was shouting Helloooo Lord.
But no, The Call didn’t come. The Almighty Fisher wasn’t fishing.
I suppose the son of a different Reverend might have faked it, might have gone home and said yes Dad, He hooked me Wednesday, but my grandfather was a Swain, and he expected perfectly clear and personal communication because the whole Philosophy is based on the notion that one thing alone is for certain: God meets the Standard.
When He calls you you’re Called.
And so my grandfather couldn’t lie. He thought maybe The Call would come in a church and so he spent a fair bit of time in the evening candles. And from his kneeling intensity some soul-absorption must have happened, genetically unmodified, because our family has paid a small fortune to chandeliers Rathbone & Sons, Dublin, and we have the only house in Faha whose curtains smell of candle wax.
(I thought I should call our village something else. I spent a whole week writing names in the back pages of an Aisling copy. Musical ones like Shreen, Glaun, Sheeda, mysterious ones like Scrapul, meaningful ones like Easky, which is fishy, or Killbeg, which is basically Small Church. I was going to use Lisnabrawshkeen which is the village in the skinny white paperback of The Poor Mouth (Book 980, Flann O’Brien, Seaver Books, New York) and has the opening line ‘I am noting down the matters which are in this document because the next life is approaching me swiftly’ but every time I said Lisnabrawshkeen I felt I was spraying a little speech impediment at the reader. Lisnabrawshkeen. I was afraid of using Faha because if these pages get out in the world there’ll be right roolaboola, not because of scandal, not because of outrage, but because everyone will try to find out if they’re In It. In these parts to be in a book is still something.
‘Will I get a mention?’ Father Tipp asked me, sitting in beside the bed, tugging both knees of his trousers to protect the crease and, in the Good Cause of Less Ironing, giving display to the scariest three inches of white shin you ever saw. That priest is a lovely man, but his skin is seriously white.
To be Left Out of the Narrative is catastrophe altogether.
What did you do to her to be Left Out? I can imagine the long faces, like the man in Pickwick who found fly buttons in his sausage.
Irish people will read anything as long as it’s about them. That’s what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we’ve gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves. We are simply amazing. So, even while I’m writing these words in my copy, there’s a whole throng, Allens Barrys Breens Considines Cartys Corrys Dooleys Dempseys Dunnes Egans Flynns Finucanes Hayes Hogans and – don’t even begin the Macs and Os – all angling over my shoulder in the bed here to see if they’re In.
The Ark.
Sit back. Leave room. If I live I’ll get to you all.)
God couldn’t get to Abraham Swain, but He sent a message. He sent it queerways through a nineteen-year-old called Gavrilo Princip who was waiting by the bridge over the innocent River Miljacka in the city of Sarajevo. The message went loudly from Gavrilo’s gun into the passing head of Archduke Ferdinand and from there out through the mouth of Lord Kitchener in England. It was a fairly blunt system actually, download speed slower than Faha dial-up, but one hundred thousand men a month got the message and signed up to fight For King and Country. My grandfather heard it in a crowded room in Oriel College where pale young men with no practical knowledge of the world but the gleaming white foreheads of those who handled beautiful ideals voted en masse to join the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. They poured out into the night afterwards, the starlight, the spires, Mr Alexander Morrow, Mr Sydney Eacrett, Mr Matthew Cheatley, Mr Clive Paul (these and all The Fallen listed in the index of Book 547, The Gleaming Days: History of the Ox & Bucks, Oxford), all of them feeling like jumping, like dancing, as if for each a weight had been replaced by a lightness, as if that’s what it meant, Light Infantry. You signed your name on the line and you felt a little lighter, a little ascension. Life was not so heavy after all. Now you only had to go and tell your parents.
Abraham prepared his speech on the train. He wrote out separate Key Phrases on different pieces of paper and laid them on the table. The problem was The Swain Way allowed for no vanity. He couldn’t say: I have to Save My Country. He couldn’t say: God wants me to do this more than that. It couldn’t be that becoming a soldier was in any way better than becoming a Reverend.
A sticky wicket, Alexander Morrow said.
Abraham decided he’d go with Not Yet. God didn’t want him to go into the Church just yet, first there was this war business, Father, and it would be vain and self-serving if he thought himself better than others.
He’d use The Swain Way against itself.
He got off the train and walked up past the graveyard and the tilting tombstones with that look of Elsewhere. This is the thing about the men in this family; they all look like they are on some Secret Mission. They’re here with you and doing the ordinary everyday but secretly all the time some part of them is away, is thinking of their mission. It’s the thing women fall in love with, the elusive bit that they think they can fish back out of the deep Swain pool. But that’s for later. I’ll get to Women & Swains later.
Abraham told his mother Agnes and she excused herself from the room the way ladies did those days so she could go and Have a Moment while a wolf ate her heart.
The Reverend came in and jutted his jaw.
‘Abraham?’
‘Father.’
Maybe the Reverend knew right then. Maybe that was all it took. The Swain men aren’t great for talk. What I imagine is the darkening of the Reverend’s shave-mask, the cold fish-glitter of his eye, narrow-nosed inhale as he realises this is his punishment for imagining Abraham would be The Next Big Thing in Holy World. He turns away
to the long window, clasps one hand in the other, feels the chill of the Presence and begins to pray that his son will leap to a glorious death.
Preface
Let me begin by stating what, although perhaps evident to even the most inexperienced of anglers on their first day in this country, nonetheless deserves repetition here: Ireland is a paradise for the salmon-fisher. The plenitude of her rivers, the particular clarity of her waters and the undiminished beauty of her topography all combine towards the creation of the fisherman’s idyll. Indeed in certain weather it may seem that every part of this country is lake and stream and the angler can hardly journey a few miles without encountering waters teeming with salmon or sea trout. In times of flood from numerous miniature rivers fish freely ascend. Wet weather, which is usually plentiful, suits most rivers best and if the angler is properly attired and of sturdy character there is no reason why salmon-fishing in Ireland should not provide him with an experience as close to angling paradise as can be found anywhere.
It is the intention of the author that herein shall be a complete description, drawn from personal experience, of all of the salmon rivers of Ireland. We shall provide detail of the most noteworthy runs, annual close times, dates when netting may be plied, rods plied, as well as the best Irish salmon flies, tacklemakers, etc etc. While this alone would constitute all that is required of an angler’s guidebook it is the author’s belief that it would be remiss if this were all when writing of salmon in Ireland. For in this country to the salmon is attributed a magical character. Here it is not forgotten that he is in a figure of two worlds, both fresh and salt water, mystical, mythic, and in many eyes no less than an alternate God. It is not only that the salmon strives after the impossible, not only that he seeks to be a creature of air as well as water, but that in moments of startling beauty and transcendence he achieves just this. Nor is such appreciation confined only to salmon-fishers. The Irish admire the heroic and all who endeavour against outrageous odds. To give but a flavour, a small boy in Galway or Limerick or Sligo will tell you the story of Fionn MacCumhaill as if it were yesterday’s news. Fionn speared the Salmon of Knowledge, he will tell you, at the falls at Assaroe on the Erne. The salmon had derived its knowledge from eating the hazelnuts that dropped in the stream and now from the salmon Fionn learned that to make a poet you need: Fire of Song, Light of Knowledge and the Art of Recitation, thereby for ever sealing salmon and poetry in the Irish mind. All of which the author believes can only serve to enrich the salmon-fisher’s experience in Ireland. There shall therefore be occasional anecdotes, fragments of lore, superstition and belief, all of which in this country are inextricably entangled, not least because in Ireland Saints and Salmon have for a long time been on first-name basis.
History of the Rain Page 2