History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘At Highfield. Mr Figgs says Virgil is excellent.’

  History repeats. That’s all there is to it. Patterns keep coming back, which either shows that people aren’t that complex or that God’s imagination just kept bringing Him back to these same obsessions. Maybe we are a way for Him to work things out with His Father.

  Now that’s Deep.

  Anyway, it’s not the Narrator’s weakness at characterisation. It’s that Grandfather is turning into Great-Grandfather.

  He shifts his long legs back from the fire. Unbeknownst to him, the soles of his boots have been cooking nicely, and as he withdraws the long pole-vaulting legs and places the feet there’s a little singe-surprise, a little dammit sting, but he won’t betray it and give his wife that little I-told-you victory. Though Sarsfield, the more loyal of the hounds, raises an eyebrow in concern, Grandfather won’t let on. He just hears the word excellent and, as they said in those days, his hackles are raised. ‘Excellent? How is he excellent?’

  He hates to hear it said out loud. That Swains never, ever, ever, praise each other openly, nor are they comfortable hearing other people praise them, is a dictum. They want their children to be excellent, to be beyond excellent, and invisible.

  But, at the same time, the last thing Grandfather can tolerate is that any excellence of Virgil’s is claimed to be Kittering. It’s enough that Grandmother has scored three for her side already.

  ‘Generally. Excellent generally,’ she says. And then, out of that haughtiness she has, what in Flaubert is called froideur, and what in the Brouders is just Class-A Bitchiness, she adds, ‘He takes after my father.’

  Phrase isn’t out of her mouth when Grandfather is walking his hot bootsoles to the door.

  ‘Virgil? Virgil, come down.’

  Ashcroft House has two floors. (A Developer lives there now, but as Margaret Crowe says he bankruptured himself.) The upstairs rooms are too large for children and my father’s has a bed and table at opposite ends.

  ‘Virgil!’

  He raises his head from Tennyson (a gorgeous red-covered gilt-edged edition, Book 444, The Works of Alfred Tennyson, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1 Paternoster Square, London, inside which there is a bookmark, Any Amount of Books, 56 Charing Cross Road). He’s in ‘Idylls of the King’. There likewise I beheld Excalibur, before him at his crowning borne, the sword that rose from out the bosom of the lake. But on his father’s calling of his name his heart leaps. He has that small boy adorableness and rushes down the big stairs. He opens and closes the door to the Drawing room swiftly and as a result sucks a great purgatorial pall of smoke out over his parents.

  Margaret shoots off a spray.

  ‘Tell me. School, Virgil? How is it?’ Abraham asks.

  My father has no idea he’s a cannonball. He has no idea he’s being readied, rolled in, prepared to be fired at his mother.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good?’

  My father nods. ‘I like it.’ He smiles the big-eyed-boy adorable smile I will see in Aeney.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It seems he’s very good at Latin. So Mr Figgs says,’ offers Grandmother. She has a way of speaking about you that makes you seem elsewhere. She allows a pause, before throwing to the window an under-her-breath: ‘Just like my father.’

  ‘I see.’ Abraham is backside-to-the-fire, hands behind back, chin at up-jut. ‘You find it hard, Virgil?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I told you, Abraham. He’s excellent.’

  Grandmother wasn’t great at smiling. She never got the hang of it as an expression of contentment. She approached the smile from the wrong end and started with the lips. The lips pulled back and up a little at the ends, but the eyes were saying something different.

  The smile does it for Grandfather. There’s a moment he’s looking at Virgil and suddenly his blood stops. A chill comes up his back. It’s the same chill he had that night in Oriel College. It’s the chill that in three seconds is followed by a flush of heat and the flash of illumination. He’s helpless to stop or resist it. He’s looking at his son and in him he’s seeing Meaning, he’s seeing here’s the reason he fell wounded in the hole, here’s the reason Tommy’s okay, because although he’s fought against it ever since the Reverend died, although he’s tried to believe that in this life there’s nothing to believe in, in the end Swains can’t escape their nature.

  ‘Virgil,’ he says, ‘you will not be returning to Highfield School.’

  Spray-spray. Spray-spray-spray. ‘What are you talking about, Abraham?’

  ‘That school has nothing more to teach him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. How will he learn?’ She does the smile again. This time she adds an eyebrow in the manner of the Colonel.

  Grandfather won’t have it. He won’t have eyebrows like that aimed at him. ‘That’s the end of it,’ he says and fires the full chin back at the raised eyebrow.

  She gives him both eyebrows; he gives her the nostrils.

  He’s taking Virgil over for himself, and that’s that. Let Grandmother have the girls – she already has – he will take Virgil. He will have one proper Swain. My father will be the reason the bullets missed Abraham’s heart. He will become The One.

  For a more profound insight into the problem from a salmon’s perspective, see Mr Willis Bund’s Salmon Problems and The Life of the Salmon (Books 477 & 478, Sampson Low & Co., London). For my perspective, read on.

  While his sisters went to school, a parade of tutors came to Ashcroft House for my father.

  Some days when I am Poor, when I haven’t the energy to lift myself on the pillow, when the rain washes down the skylight and I want to sleep for ever, they visit.

  Mr O. W. Thornton.

  Mr J. G. Gerard, Mathematician.

  Mr Ivor Naughton, Latin, Greek & Classics.

  The young Mr Olde.

  The old Mr Ebbing.

  Mr Jeremiah Lewis.

  They are walk-on parts. Each of them was hired and eventually fired once they made the fatal flaw of declaring Virgil brilliant.

  Only one, Mr Phadraig MacGhiolla, makes a lasting impression. He’s the one who brings the folktales. He’s the one in the too-tight black suit with the up-forked red hair and fiery eyes of a nationalist who speaks Irish mythology. Teachers don’t always know when they’ve lit the torch paper. But MacGhiolla knew. He knew he’d entered Virgil Swain’s imagination and held up a flame when he told him of a boy who fell in love with a girl called Emer who said he could not have her unless he completed Impossible Tasks. The boy was sent to study warcraft in Scotland under the tutelage of the female warrior Scathach-the-Shadow. Scathach-the-Shadow was about twenty centuries ahead of Marvel Comics. Gaming was in the early development stages back then. One in every two gamers died. Being Scottish and a warrior meant that Scathach was ferociousness itself. She didn’t have a Console, she had a hawk with talons. The boy was sent to her to learn how to achieve the impossible, and when he did, when Scathach had brought him up through all the Levels, showed him all the Cheats, and listed him on the Roll of Honour as All-Time Number-One Player, he came back and entered the fortress where Emer was guarded.

  He entered it by going upriver against the current.

  The method he used was salmon-leaps.

  Not kidding.

  Virgil tried it out for himself. One day he sneaked out the back door into the rough tufted grass that looked like a green sea behind Ashcroft. He put his hands down by his sides, straightened himself to salmon-slimness, sucked in as much breath as he could and then, with face turned to blue sky, he blew hard, arching his back into bow-shape, and tried to leap upward.

  Maybe it did work. Maybe he’d inherited something from the pole-vaulting legs. He felt sure there’d been some take-off. Definitely more than if he just jumped. Yes, there was definitely some ascent.

  That was the beginning. And MacGhiolla, Son of the Fox, knew. What he didn’t know was that his own position was guaran
teed the day he told Grandfather that Virgil was hopeless in Irish History, Culture & Language.

  In the meantime, between husband and wife battle proper was commenced. Knocking and Straightening long over, Grandmother now took to a new field; she would not be outdone by Grandfather and so marshalled the girls into various endeavours of high achievement.

  Piano was a particular favourite. Esther, Penelope and Daphne were each instructed by a Mrs Moira Hackett whose sense of humour was no longer intact and who personally had no music in her but employed the Irish Academy ruler-on-knuckles method to significant effect. The three girls were soon able to perform like upright porcelain pianists, backs a perfect plumb-line, shoulders squared, and only the curved claw-shapes of their fingers moving, producing a kind of flawless mechanical music only a little worse than the cheapest wind-up musical boxes. One evening when Abraham returned from fishing he was called in to the drawing room to hear three sequential versions of Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu.

  My father began the piano the next day.

  His three sisters were all started on the violin.

  Chapter 11

  We pause here because The Narrator has to go to Dublin.

  In general, I no longer go outside. It’s hard to explain. Unless you’ve felt it yourself, once you hear that you think Oh-oh, you look away but you think She’s bonkers, a little case of the Do-Lallies here, because who doesn’t go outside? Well, excuse me, I don’t. Get over it. Once I returned from university I had this dread pressing in on my chest. If I got to the front door my legs stopped working. That was it. I couldn’t breathe. I’d turn back in and sit on the arm of Nan’s chair. But the feeling didn’t pass. Glasses of water, air, deep breaths, blowing in a brown paper bag that had been emptied of onions, arm-pinches, Vicks inhaler, hot water with Vicks, more air (fanned Clare Champion), more water (sparkling), vinegar, a squirt of lemon, and a mouthful of whiskey, made no difference, neither did the little parade of the parish’s amateur psychiatrists who came and sat on the bed and played a game of Questions-with-no-Answers. What is it you are afraid of, dear?

  Please.

  But now I have to go to Dublin. For Timmy and Packy this is a Big Day. Uniforms are ironed, boots cleaned, and Hair has met Comb. It’s like we’re going up for the All-Ireland, only instead of a team of lads in those too-short shorts and shin-high socks they wear in GAA, I’m going to be facing The Consultant.

  In a secret room somewhere long ago, Jimmy Mac says, the leaders of the Medical Profession decided the best way to turn consultants into millionaires was to only have about four for the whole country. Once they had the four the doors were locked. So it takes about ten years to get to see one. Consultants are mystical as Magi, but in inverse, you have to travel to them. You have to be in Serious Condition to be sent, and if you are it’s pretty much the end of the yellow brick road. Mary Houlihan in Knock was three years buried when she got called. Her husband Matty said he’d a right to dig her up and bring her corpse, only Dignam the ticket inspector in Ennis probably wouldn’t allow her the free pass.

  I come down the stairs in the stretcher. I’m trying to breathe all the time but it feels like I’m underwater.

  ‘It’s okay, love,’ Mam says. ‘It’s okay.’ Her hand takes mine at the bottom of the stairs, and with Timmy holding up the top and Packy the bottom we sail out the front door.

  The sky is huge and jellyfish-grey and there’s no light in it at all. There’s just this watery expanse leaking drops as we go down the garden to the ambulance.

  Timmy and Packy have the inside of it shining. Mam sits beside me. You can see the bravery in her. You can see how she will not be defeated, how the world has thrown sadness after sadness at her and knocked her down and she’s still getting up, she’s older than she was and there’s these few silver hairs coming at her temples and her eyes have that extra deepness of knowledge that makes her more beautiful in a kind of lasting way. It’s like she’s this eternal Mother, my mam, this wall around me, holding back the sea that keeps coming for me. I can see it in her eyes. I can see the way she’s hoping so hard that this might be the time, this might be Help Coming.

  She’s hoping and trying not to hope at the same time.

  And that’s the saddest thing.

  Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

  We drive out of Faha for Dublin when the fields are just waking to today’s rain. Today it’s a soft silveriness that Packy says suits Intermittent 4 on the wipers but Timmy thinks should be 5. They talk the whole way. If we were driving to Moscow they’d talk the whole way there too.

  I’m okay inside the ambulance, because somehow it’s not the world.

  Conversation follows the road. While we’re still in the parish the talk is all Faha. It’s Martin & Maureen Ring whose daughter Noelle has gone off with one of the Muslims of Mayo, the Ballyhaunis Meat Men. It’s the bachelor Brothers Hayes, who are in their sixties, who each buy a copy of the Champion even though they live together in the same three-room bungalow. The brothers have a teabag mountain outside the front door, a giant steaming mound that’s supposed to be composting in the front bed but is resisting because of the rain Timmy says, lends the air at their front door a bit of a tang of India in monsoon season. If we have a flood there’ll be a tea-Ganges heading down to McCarthy’s.

  The talk is of the Apostolic Works whose workers are all women in their eighties now and who still meet in Faha N.S. seven o’clock on the evening of the First Tuesday, carrying their glowing Ever-Readies along the road like genuine Illuminates and making the decision now to team up with the troop of the Legion of Mary whose Legionnaires are down to two. It’s the news that when Sean & Sheila Maguire came down to Faha graveyard Wednesday to dig up her grandfather that got buried in the wrong grave they found an actual snake slyly slithering between Ciaran Carr’s plot and that of the woman he was meant to marry, Una Lyons.

  We pass Dan Byrne in his black suit and string vest out by the Cross. A big believer in the visuals, Dan lost his shirt on bank investments sometime after the Banks passed their first Stress Test.

  The dogs in the street knew the country was cooked, Packy says. Because of me he won’t say fooked.

  The Nationwide got narrow, Timmy says.

  We get out on to the Ennis road and down to Icarus at the Roundabout. He’s in the conversation for twenty miles. Icarus used to be inside at the Market but flew over to Greece for a bit and came back not the better for it, Packy says. He needed a bit of hammering. He’s not gold enamelling or anything, he’s not the full Byzantium, but he’s Clare’s best Greek and people are kind of fond of him, even if a naked man with arms out and legs akimbo was a bit much for the youth. People didn’t take kindly to his wings getting dinted. He’s erected now in the centre of the Rocky Road roundabout with the CCTV because Packy says The Lads would have him for melting if he was out there without the Eye on him.

  ‘They would,’ says Timmy. ‘He’s better there anyhow.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘When he was in The Market the scholars from Flannan’s were always putting the traffic cone on his head.’

  ‘They were.’

  ‘One time he had a bra and panties.’

  ‘I didn’t see that.’

  ‘One time they strapped a traffic cone over his . . .’

  ‘I remember that all right.’

  ‘Flannan’s lads.’

  ‘Good hurlers though.’

  ‘They might do it this year.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘You have no belief. That’s your problem.’

  The National Conversation takes the new motorway all the way from Ennis to Dublin and between those shallow naps you have in seatbelts I hear: Why the country is destroyed; why the last crowd were the worst crowd to ever run this country; why bankers should be locked up and criminals let out; why we’ll never see the like again.

  The best thing we could do, Packy says, is cut oursel
ves free.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I said. The best thing we could do as a country. Just cut the rope. Cut the rope and sail away.’

  The Consultant doesn’t have an office. He has Rooms. He has some really nice furniture. All his magazines are this month’s. And they have no creases in the covers. When you’re waiting for the Consultant you don’t really want to read about the Ten Best Places to Eat by Moonlight.

  I sit with Mam and we wait. I get so tired I can’t even

  The piano-playing Aunts come to visit us after Aunt Esther dies. I am eleven years old. Their visit is announced well in advance, the Aunts are very Old School like that. I think they imagine it’s proper to send word ahead so that the maids and servants can start fluffing floors and polishing pillows. They imagine there must be buffing to be done. I think it’s well-intentioned but Nan won’t credit it. She believes my father’s sisters are powdered witches sent from the east with the sole aim of denigrating the people of the west.

  Unlike everyone else who uses the back door, the Aunts come in the front. They make the latch of the kitchen door seem a contrivance of intentional backwardness.

  Here they are:

  ‘Hellooo? Hellooo?’

  They peer in and at the same moment both angle back their heads, as if they have taken a position a little too close to a panoramic screen. They are tall and big-boned and look like men playing women’s parts in a play by Oscar Wilde.

  ‘Nan, Verge’s sisters are here,’ my mother says loudly.

  But Nan already knows, and furiously pokers the fire to try and smoke them back out. Nan here is The Aged P only with more mischievousness than Mr Wemmick’s in Great Expectations, the only book of which my father kept two copies (Books 180 and 400, Penguin Classic & Everyman Classics editions, London), both of which I have read twice, deciding each time that Great Expectations is the Greatest. If you don’t agree, stop here, go back and read it again. I’ll wait. Or be dead.

  Grandmother Bridget, the Aunts call her.

  ‘Grandmother Bridget, hello!’ they call out.