Nan doesn’t reply but flaps the Champion at the fire and sends out a great curling cloud of smoke.
In reprisal, by way of commentary on Nan’s deficit and I suppose in testament to the superiority of their side of the family genetic, and the east of the country in general, the Aunts smile their full fierce perfect teeth.
‘O and here’s Ruth. Little darling Ruth. Come here, my dear, let us look at you. There is such intelligence in that face, isn’t there, Daphne? And what an interesting dress, dear.’
Another great pall of turfsmoke.
‘Now, Ruth, come and tell us everything. Let us look at you.’
What is it they see? I am thin but not of the sylph kind, more the gawky lanky kind which may be what constitutes the Swain Beautiful but feels Rangy Ruth to me. My knees are actually sharp. At that age I am officially Waiting for My Chest. The Chest Fairy is on the way from Boozoomia or somewhere and all the girls in my class are going to sleep at night in their own state of Great Expectation, waking up and checking: is that it? – throwing their shoulders far back and breasting the world, as if the task of womanhood is to balance the weight that lands on your chest and could easily topple you over.
Which in a way I suppose is true.
Anyway, The Chest Fairy passes me by. I’m still Waiting. So when the Aunts look at me there can’t be much that impresses.
I’ve learned that you can never see yourself as another person does. You can never really know who you are for them, at least not until much later. That’s what I think now. I stand and look at my aunts. They have amazing coats and dresses. Their dresses are of a woven cloth on which patterned flowers in subdued colour have been embroidered the way I’ve only seen on wallpaper. Their coats have huge black buttons and when they hand their coats over they are heavy as blankets and smell like cupboards.
‘I’m sure you’re best in your class, Ruth, aren’t you? Good girl, good girl. You’re such a bright girl you will just grow up and dazzle. Won’t she, Daphne? She’ll dazzle.’
‘Dazzle dazzle dazzle.’
‘Mother says you like to read. Do you?’
I do.
‘Of course you do, because you’re so bright, you little angel. If your grandmother was alive she’d – No. No, Penelope, I’m not. I’m not no.’
‘Handkerchief ?’
‘Thank you, Penelope.’
‘We’ve brought you a present, dear.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s just for you.’
It’s a hardcover of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and on the inside front page there’s this little oval black and white picture of her with a baby’s bonnet on her head and a kind of ironic smile like She Knows. Jane knows what stupid insensitive people there are in the world and that’s what is behind every word she writes. Look at her portrait, She Knows. I think Dear Jane had a bit of the Impossible Standard herself although maybe it wasn’t even that impossible, maybe it was just some kind of decency and awareness she was expecting.
‘It’s Jane Austen, dear,’ Aunt P says.
‘What?’ Nan asks from the fire.
‘JANE AUSTEN,’ Aunt roars.
‘EXHAUSTING?’ Nan bellows back. ‘YES,’ and starts the Aged P nod.
Neither of my aunts, I am convinced, ever drank tea from a mug. The china cups are out for them.
They are a pair in the world, the two of them, and trade in exchange one to the other an entire currency of startled, dismayed and disapproving looks. The world fails the Impossible Standard constantly. Sometimes I imagine a whole gallery of their failed suitors, scrubbed jowly farmers of Meath, tweeded-up and cow-licked down, sent up to evenings in Ashcroft. The Meath men have surnames like Castlebridge, Farns, Ainsley. The sisters kill them off afterwards with cutting remarks. One sentence will do for each one.
‘Those hands he has.’ Castlebridge.
‘Did he seem to mumble terribly, dear? Could you, I couldn’t understand him. But perhaps you’re fond of him?’ Farns.
‘Actually I’ve never seen a fork used quite like that.’ Ainsley.
Pursed mouths, raised chins, arched eyebrows: each sister destroys the other’s suitors like she’s scissoring paper dolls. They find none up to standard. Their souls select their own society as the best and they become the pair they are.
‘Is that a?’
‘Tart,’ Mam says.
‘Tart. Pie, yes. I see. Apple?’
‘Rhubarb.’
‘Rhubarb. Well, well. Rhubarb, Daphne.’
‘Yes. Rhubarb.’
From care, or meanness as Nan says, the aunts are thin women. When they lift the cups of tea they do so with thumb and forefinger only, the other three fingers an extended fan for balance and grace. They lean ever so slightly forward and, eyebrows raised and lips tightened to the smallest puckered nub, sip the startling dark brew my mother has made.
‘Rhubarb? Well well, Daphne.’
Dad arrives late. He comes into the kitchen in his wellingtons and there is sudden excitement. His sisters fly up like ravens.
‘O Virgil.’
They flutter about him a few moments – ‘Virgil, are you getting thin? What is this you are wearing?’ – and show their love in questions.
My dad is easily embarrassed.
That man is an ocean of emotion, Jimmy Mac said.
Knowing the aunts were coming, Mam has everything just as tidy as can be. She’s put a load of things away inside the dresser, she’s hidden the tea-towels we usually use and taken out these cream ones I’ve never seen; for the duration of The Visit the Normal Life of our house has been tidied away. I like it in a way. There’s a sense of occasion. So here’s my dad standing in his wellies and he can see how tidy the place is even as his sisters circle. He can see all the effort Mam and I have made and his eyes have that kind of shining they get when the feelings are these waves rising in his heart.
‘O Virgil, are you getting thin?’
My father was always thin and his hair was always silver. His eyes were the bluest blue, the way the water looks when in the sky over it you think you can see Heaven. In my mind the thinness and the silveriness and the blueness were all connected.
‘He is getting thin, isn’t he, Daphne?’
Aunt D twitches her beak. She wants to be nicer than her sister; she wants to speak to her brother in his world, and so all the way across Ireland she has considered what she will say. Now she makes this high, brow-pencilled smile and asks: ‘How are your cows doing, dear?’
Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter. This is something I have learned. All this time Aeney is sitting in the narrow stairs that go up over the dresser to our bedrooms. He broke his leg falling from the sycamore and is perched up there, his cast out in front of him, and he’s watching and listening. He has a smile people describe as winning, a winning smile, a smile that wins you to him no matter what, you just love him.
‘Oh now, Aon-us,’ Aunt P says. She can never get the hang of his name and wants to say Aeneas and Aengus together and she’s a little surprised he’s been there all the time but she’s not cross because you can’t be cross with Aeney, you can’t be cross with that smile. You see that golden hair and that smile and some part of you is sort of quietened, like you know he’s different somehow. I don’t mean that in the way some people do, like it’s a bad thing, I mean just the opposite, like you feel a little awe, a little O my God. You look at him and you think golden boy.
‘Oh now, there you are. Come down here and tell your aunts all about you.’
We drove for four hours to see The Consultant. We saw him for thirty-three minutes.
Something in your blood is wrong, he said.
Then we drove back across the country in the ambulance, Mam holding my hand, and Timmy and Packy not talking at all. The daylight was all gone and the road was this long winding river of yellow headlights going home towards the we
st. When we passed Tipperary we were back in the rain.
Chapter 12
Your blood is a river.
Chapter 13
The drizzling dawn of my father’s fourteenth birthday, Abraham appeared in the big draughty bedroom and shook his son awake.
‘Come on.’
Virgil dressed at top speed, was down the stairs and in the kitchen in no time, buttoning his last buttons as his father finished packing their lunch, a hodgepodge of bread, spread, pickles, cheese and apples.
They stamped into wellingtons, Abraham shook the tin box of flies, gave a kind of up-flick of his head and went out the front door, Grandfather banging it to so the bang fired into his daughters’ dreams upstairs and startled a flush of blackbirds off the front lawn.
It was one of those perfectly still mist-laid mornings, the fields wearing that silver drapery in imitation of Heaven, the air smelling green, sticky new leaves unfurling, and father and son with rods skyward heading for the river. I leave them on that road a while, soft clump-thud of their boots, metal-clasps jinglejangling on Grandfather’s shoulder-bag. They’re a good way gone when Grandfather says: ‘Arma virumque cano.’
He doesn’t slow down, doesn’t break stride or look sidelong at his son.
My father is not sure he’s heard. Grandfather’s pole-vaulting legs carry him in two strides what takes Virgil three. He’s always a little in the old man’s wake. He looks at Abraham who is not looking back but marching on. And without question or comment Virgil replies: ‘Troiae qui primus ab oris italiam.’
And away they go, playing a little game of Aeneid and cutting across the fields of the County Meath.
When he’s had his fill of the Latin, Grandfather says, ‘ “O that this too sullen flesh . . .” ’
And Virgil gives him back ‘ “. . . should melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew . . .” ’ He knows the five soliloquys spoken by Hamlet. He can go from the sullen flesh to the rogue and peasant slave to how all occasions. He’s learning the four in Macbeth.
Not once does Grandfather stop. He doesn’t look sideways at his son nor show any outward marvel at him but somewhere inside, somewhere in the Swain Unreachable, out in the unknown deeps where that part of him that was once a gleaming youth in Oriel College, somewhere there I know his spirit leaps.
Fat Meath cattle, tongue-tearing the first right succulent grass of spring, look up and watch Hamlet & His Father passing.
My father is in a new version of Heaven. He hasn’t time to consider it yet, whether he is happy because he is hastening along the road with his father as day breaks, or just because he was asked to come and that now this is actually happening, or because he has been asked for a speech from Shakespeare and the phrases are coming like a long golden thread out of his mouth even before he has time to think of them. The words are there, and flow, as he works hard to, and now matches the long pole-vault strides of his father.
In some ways my father’s whole life is in this moment. In this are all the years ahead, all the poems, all the rapture and the yearning and the grief too.
Abraham makes no comment, but my dad knows. He knows he is being heard. He knows this is a kind of perfection, and everything – the morning light, rods over shoulder, glistening fields, the thick and intense gaiety of the birdsong – enters him and leaves this permanent shine far down in his spirit. He knows it. And I think that for just these moments, the two of them hurrying to the river for the first casts, leaving the world behind, crossing the fat fields of the Fitzherberts to the dark rush of the waters, for just these moments Virgil Swain meets the Impossible Standard.
When Grandfather comes back to Ashcroft that evening he draws a sheaf of pages from the top drawer of his desk, dips his pen, and writes the first sentence of The Salmon in Ireland: ‘Ireland is a paradise for the salmon fisher.’
Chapter 14
When my father told it, they caught a salmon that day.
I think it is an imagined one, but I didn’t say so.
From the look on my face he could tell. ‘O Ruthie, you don’t believe anything,’ he said and crumpled his face to a small boy’s dismay.
I do, Dad. I do. I believe everything.
‘Ruth,’ Mrs Quinty says. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Her face is smaller, her eyes larger than ever. She keeps them wide open to hold all her tears. In them is the news of my blood gone wrong.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Quinty.’
‘Life is so unfair.’
There’s nothing I can say to that. Life is unfair is in History of Swain, Volumes 1 through 20. It’s not only unfair it’s outrageous. It’s harder than anything you could imagine and on top of that It Makes No Sense. God calls you and then changes His mind. Germans shoot at you then save you. You try and die quietly and someone gives you a fortune.
‘I’ve brought you this,’ she says.
It’s a cassette of The Shawshank Redemption.
(Have I told you I have TV up here? Jimmy Mac ran the wire up through the floorboards so I could watch Home and Away. And even though I’m The Smart Girl and was studying Thomas Wyatt – they flee from me that sometime did me seek – and Philip Sydney and the whole Gartered Stocking Brigade of Poets I still like going Down Under to those beaches in Sydney. It’s the only time I see the sun.)
‘Thank you, Mrs Quinty.’
‘I haven’t seen it myself, but Mrs Quinlavin says it’s good. She showed it to the Transitions and it kept even them quiet.’
‘Because it’s about an impossible escape.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘maybe it won’t be any good.’
‘Mrs Quinty?’
‘Yes, Ruth?’
‘Did you ever hear of a story where a character separated from his shadow? He separates from it and spends the rest of the story trying to catch back up to it. Something like that?’
About a month after the Aunts visited a package arrived in the post, brown paper, neatly tied string, and inside it the mixed company of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell and a rather bulky, I might say contented, Thomas Hardy lying between them. I read them all, read them one by one with a kind of constant hunger as if they were apples that fed and made you hungry at the same time. I don’t mind saying I loved nothing as much as having those books upstairs in my room. Maybe it was because I knew they were Swain, maybe because it was true that deep down I was Snoot Ruth and didn’t want to be MacCarroll or because there was something kind of appealing about the Philosophy of Impossible Standard so that when you were told these books were beyond you it meant those were the very ones you wanted to read, and did read. What Sister Margaret-Mary in Kilkee did for Mass-going, I did for reading, World Champion Standard. When I was eight and Mum took me to Ennis to get my first pair of glasses the very first question they asked was Does she read a lot? like it was A Sign, like it said Smart Girl right there on your face, and when I got them and wore them to school you’d swear I was Little Miss Porcelain-face – Jane Brouder who had elected herself Mother Hen of our class, and who at age eight had an encyclopedic knowledge of Things That Could Go Wrong With You, sort of cordoned me off and screamed at anyone who came within ten feet of me: ‘Mind! She’s got glasses!’ I was just that bit more delicate than the others, or less vain or more posh or something, because there were others who couldn’t see well, others you saw squinting or looking into the copy next to them when there was something to be taken down from the board, but either they wouldn’t allow their beauty compromised by the thick brown-rimmed glasses the Mid-Western Health Board had decided was the best anti-boy device they could think of, or their parents didn’t think seeing was so important for girls.
In Faha it was easy to be different. One time the aunts sent me yellow satin slippers and when I wore them to Mass you could feel the whole church noticing and Mary Maloney thinking Protestant Shoes and Swain Notions and making her whole self shudder a little in her good coat as she coughed on this great hairball of resentment until between the Offertory and the
Consecration she found solace in the idea that the slippers would be filthy in a day. I saw her. I knew. I am the kind of girl who notices. But that wouldn’t have stopped me wearing them. I’m that much a Swain anyway. I’m that much like my dad with whatever stubbornness foolishness or willpower he had to have to arrive here with a name like Virgil Swain, Latin-speaker, when the first question anybody back then asked would have been just – Swain? That would be enough. In that would be the whole story. It wouldn’t be like now with the Kwietcowskis and the Secas and the Pawlavs; back then the worst thing would have been to say: Not Related. When you’re different you’ve got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.
I was already different because I was a twin. Funny how you can say that: I am a twin.
Not I am one of twins, but I actually am A Twin.
Like there’s two of me all the time, this other one right here beside me whether you can see him or not.
Or as if you’re saying, I’m a Half.
Twins are not rightly understood as a concept in the parish anyway; before us there were the identical twins Concepta and Assumpta Talty who somehow merged in the parish mind into the one, Consumpta; whichever one was met was called that and if both were together people said Hello Consumpta and the girls said hello right back. The parish can be odd like that. Mary Hegarty pushed a pram through the village for nine years after her son Seanie had died as a baby and not one person ever said, ‘Mary, your pram is empty,’ they just let it be and she went on wheeling her grief through the village and out the back roads by the river where all grief flows.
Down in Faha N.S. Mrs Conheedy was the principal. She had come over from some mountainy place in Kerry and all I’ll say is when I first met her I thought she was Mr Conheedy. I know it’s not polite but when you’re in my position with something in the blood you have Special Privileges, and number one is you can tell the truth. Mrs Conheedy had a face lumpy as a turnip and shoulders you could imagine her carrying a sheep on. There were no dentists where she came from. She was the last disciple of Crimplene, a sensible cloth that couldn’t wrinkle or fade, that defied both time and humanity and always looked the same. Her dresses had this big zip on the back of her neck. She always left it sticking up, a little square hole in it, like she had a secret hope that one day a hook would come down from the sky and get her. I certainly hoped it would. Jimmy Mac said she had Gone-into-Teaching because it was the only place where she could rule without reprisal; where she could give free rein to the awesome dimension of her need to crush things. Mr Conheedy it seemed had enjoyed this for the first three months of their marriage, but then had run off, Nan said, to try and find a female Mrs Conheedy next time round.
History of the Rain Page 9