Reader, he does, even the World’s Most Bountiful Imagination, the Inimitable, needed a little of the Irish. And it works too; Charles Dickens isn’t back in London two days, size 8 walking brogues not yet dry by the fire, overcoat still smelling of turf smoke and Clonakilty blood pudding, when he begins ruminating on a dark stone house. He sits in his study, says to himself: twenty minutes to nine. Stop the clocks. Twenty minutes to nine. That’s all it takes. That detail is all he needs. Good man, Jeremiah. Thank you, Stokeses of Mac Curtain Street. Because now, Boz O Boz, Charles sucks a segment of orange in attempt number 37 to clear his palate of the Cork fry, spits a good-sized pip, ping, into the metal bin beside his desk, picks up his quill and creates Philip Pirrip.
‘Is that true, Ruth?’ Mrs Quinty asked, eyes enormous and brows lifted, missing altogether the point of stories.
For three years Mr MacGhiolla came to Ashcroft. The mark he left on our narrative was in my father’s mind. He made my father believe this was a country apart. He made him think it could be Paradise. And Mr MacGhiolla was the one who first inspired Virgil to think of writing.
Everything that followed flowed down the river from that.
Did you ever see how fast a river runs?
Maybe you did. Maybe you stood once on the banks in late springtime when the rains are running off the hills and the whole country is sort of flowing away faster than anything you can imagine. Maybe when you were small like Aeney and me you pulled the branches off ash trees and threw them on to the Shannon just to watch the whish and pull of the riverwaters, the way the branch landed on the moving world and went faster than your eye told you it could, faster and swirlier, bobbing and twisting before easefully floating just for a bit and going under and coming up again black and slick and smaller now flowing away off into the for ever after.
Grandfather Abraham went to meet the Reverend one afternoon in June when the salmon were running. He had finished writing The Salmon in Ireland the previous evening and sent it, wrapped in brown paper and tied with fishing line, to Messrs Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, Broadway House, 68–74 Carter Lane, London, E.C. He walked out with the inner lightness of an author who has delivered. He wore a green tweed with flap pockets, cast into the river at Rosnaree, began his heart attack, and entered the Afterlife just after his fly was taken.
Chapter 16
I have a suitor. His name is Vincent Cunningham.
Because I have Something, because I am Plain Ruth Swain and Snoot Ruth and bedbound and read too much, because I don’t go outside, because I am the pale untannable oddment of a freckled river child and there could be no right reason for a suitor as sweet as Vincent Cunningham to choose me, you might already have supposed there is something wrong with him. There is. He’s got that thing Mr Quayle has in Bleak House, a power of indiscriminate admiration. To him everything is a little bit luminary. Everything is fantastic and I it seems am beautiful.
That’s just mad.
As Margaret Crowe says, That boy is Un-real.
He first proposed to me when I was eight. Having little time during Small Break, and the yard of Faha N.S. not being listed on Most Romantic Spots for Lovers in Ireland, he chose the direct approach.
‘Ruthie, will you marry me?’
‘No.’
Like with Estella, and cream crackers, I thought it best to just snap his heart across. Otherwise there are all these messy fragments. To underline my position I added a deep frown, a shocked shake of my head, a sharp turn on my patent-leather shoes and the quickest possible walk across the yard.
But Vincent Cunningham being Vincent Cunningham he took encouragement in that, and set out off on a course of Distant Loving, which I think is in Ovid, and in the Primary School Edition must include putting Lovehearts in your pencilcase, tangled daisies in the pocket of your duffelcoat and writing the Adored One’s initials on the inside of your wrist where the lads won’t see it during Football.
He proposed again when he was ten, only slightly less directly. This time we were walking home from school. At least I was walking in the direction of home, he was walking in the exact opposite direction of his, a fact of which I took no notice at the time.
‘Ruthie,’ he said, ‘when we’re older, do you think you’ll like me?’
‘No.’
He nodded his Vincent Cunningham nod, like he’d expected that answer, like Ovid had already covered that and counselled the next approach should be: ‘Okay.’
Just that, and Walk Alongside Her in Perfect Quiet, which to give him credit he did beautifully right until we got to our gate and then he blew it by going pink-faced and frowny and boy-combustible, toeing a little urgent hole into the gravel, studying the excavation and not looking up as he said, ‘Well, I’ll love you.’
‘Vincent Cunningham.’
‘Yes?’ His eyes didn’t come up. They too are brown as hazelnuts. But he kept them down, reviewing the hole he’d made.
‘Don’t be silly.’
I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Some things happen before you’ve thought them through, the way Seamus Mac slashes the flowers off the fuchsia with a length of hydro-air pipe when he’s going for the cows. The smashed red blossoms are strewn all along the road making you think that’s why they call them Tears of God.
‘Okay,’ he said, like he was saying Fair Enough, and it hadn’t mattered at all, and he had to hurry home anyway because there was an Under-12s match in the park that evening, which there was and at it I heard later he played Out of his Skin, throwing himself into tackles, Most Valuable Player and whatever other medals they give out, until one of the over-age Quilty lads came over and broke his leg.
After that his suiting went underground. In the Tech when it was discovered I was in fact useless, Nul Points, in Maths, he came to the house and gave me classes. His knees tried to do some suiting then. So did his Pythagoras. Because Vincent Cunningham helped Dad on weekends and in the summer holidays and because he could drive a tractor at fourteen he was in and out of our house and yard and only sometimes would he let loose his Ruth-I-Want-To-Marry-You look, the way smouldering boys can, just to let me know it was still there. It was a little W.B. Yeats Syndrome who, until he was fifty, proposed to Maud Gonne every couple of weeks even though she said no way no how, was addicted to unsuitables, and her name was Maud.
So now here we are, Vincent Cunningham grown streaky tall with mad long eyelashes over the hazelnuts, a nature sweet as anything, and two years of Engineering among the micro-skirts in Galway failing to budge him from his eight-year-old certainty.
The thing is, the more he pursues his line of admiration and wonder and general sweetness the more I find myself being sour. It’s part Swain-contrariness, part Estella Syndrome. I can’t help myself.
‘I look like . . . I don’t know what I look like. What do I look like?’
‘You look beautiful.’
‘There are no beautiful women writers.’
‘Yes there are.’
No there aren’t. Well, except for Edna O’Brien, who is actually a kind of genius and gained my undying admiration when she said plots are for precocious schoolboys (Book 2,738, Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, 7th Series, Secker & Warburg, London).
‘Here, look at Emily Dickinson,’ I said, and showed him the passport-sized photo on the back cover of the Collected Poems. ‘Her face, two prunes in porridge.’
‘I don’t know, I think she looks nice,’ he said.
‘Nice?’
‘She does. She looks interesting.’
Reader, pick any Brontë. Any one, doesn’t matter. What do you see? You see intelligence, you see an observer, you see distance, you don’t see beauty. Look at Maria Edgeworth, Mrs Gaskell. Look at Edith Wharton, she’s Henry James in a dress. Henry called Edith the Angel of Devastation, which is not exactly Top Score in the Feminine Charms department. Agatha Christie is a perfect match for Alastair Sim when he was playing Miss Fritton in the Tesco box-set of the old St Trinian’s. You can
’t be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you’re beautiful people will be looking at you.
‘I don’t care. You are beautiful,’ Vincent Cunningham says, and with those three words firmly keeping his place in the Least Likely Irishman. Even I think I must have invented him.
‘You’re a hopeless idiot.’
‘I know.’ He smiles. He sits here beside the bed and his whole big face just beams. It’s ridiculous how happy he can be. It runs in the Cunninghams. His father is a Stop-Go man for the Council. Johnny Cunningham appears around the county wherever they’re doing roadworks, sets up with his big red and green lollipop and when he makes the traffic flow he gives a thumbs-up and shines the same smile. For some people the world is just heaven.
Vincent was in the same class as Aeney once. He sat behind him in Mr Crossan’s, and for a while became his only friend. He’s thin and made up of angles. If you had to draw him using only straight lines you could. Even his hair is straight. It’s a little brown hedge rising evenly off the top of his intelligence. According to him I brought him to Literature. He says it like it’s this far-distant place and there was no way he would find out how to get there if it wasn’t for me talking about some book I’d read and him going off to find it. Of course once I knew that I started intentionally mentioning some of the Obscures. That’s part MacCarroll and part Impossible Standard. I’d say I read a great story by Montague Rhodes James, ‘A School Story’ (Book 555, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, Oxford), which told of a man found dead in his bed with the mark of a horseshoe on his forehead, and Vincent would head off, driving Eleanor Pender potty in the Mobile Library until she tracked it down and he’d read it and come hurrying back up the stairs here to say you were right Ruth, that was a good one.
‘Which one was that?’
‘ “A School Story”. You remember. The horseshoe on the forehead.’
‘That one? I’ve forgotten all about that one. I’m reading Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett now.’
Goodness provokes bitchiness. It’s mathematical. It’s somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely people are married to horrible ones. Read Middlemarch (Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London) if you don’t believe me. There’s something in me that can’t just let it be. Goodness is a tidy bow you just can’t help wanting to pull loose.
Besides, there’s the added complication: I’m not well. If I wasn’t, if I wasn’t the Number One Patient in the parish from the family that has already been visited by Doom, would he still be coming calling? Am I Vincent Cunningham’s path to Sainthood? You see, you just can’t trust goodness.
Sometimes after he’s gone I’ve wondered what it would be like to slip into a different story and actually end up being Mrs Vincent Cunningham. You know, Chapter XXXVIII, ‘Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and clerk were alone present.’ (Book 789, Jane Eyre, Penguin Classics, London.)
Cunningham is a bad surname, but it’s not dreadful. Not as bad say as Bigg-Wither. Mr Bigg-Wither (not kidding) was Jane Austen’s suitor. He fell in love with the sharp bonnet-pinched look, was very partial to one flattened front hair curl, and tiny black eyes. He pulled in his person and fluffed out his whiskers to propose to her.
Now that took courage. You have to grant him that. Proposing to Jane Austen was no walk in the park, was in the same league as Jerry Twomey proposing to Niamh ni Eochadha who had the face and manners of a blackthorn. Still, Bigg-Wither went through with it. He got out his proposal.
And Jane Austen accepted. Honestly, she did. She was fiancé-ed. She did her best impression of a Jane Austen smile then retired straight away to bed. Up in the bed she lay in her big nightie and couldn’t sleep, not, surprisingly enough, because of the bonnet, but because of the suffocating way the name Bigg-Wither sat on her. That, and the thought of giving birth to little Bigg-Withers.
The following morning when she came down to him negotiating his toast and marmalade in past the whiskers, she said, ‘I cannot be a Bigg-Wither,’ or words to that effect, the engagement was off, and all the world’s Readers sighed with relief. Because a happy Jane Austen would have been useless in the World Literature stakes.
One day, to advance his suitoring, Vincent leaned forward to the bed, raindrops sitting on the hedge of his hair, and told me that Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved nurse was a Cunningham.
He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there’s something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: ‘When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.’ And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That’s the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world.
For Vincent, bringing me the news of the Cunningham connection was the same as bringing me chocolates. He sat there by the bed looking as happy as, well, a Cunningham. He’d been reading up on RLS (as an engineer Vincent used the Internet; it’s slow and dial-up here, the minister is still Rolling Out broadband, but he must be Rolling It Out around his own house, Paddy Carroll says) and it had taken Vincent hours but he’d gathered up a fair bit of RLS knowledge and even learned off a bit of The Land of Counterpane in which RLS is sick in bed and plays with toy soldiers in an imaginary world on his blankets.
‘Aeney had soldiers,’ he said. ‘I remember them. He kept them in a biscuit tin. And he had a farm in there. Do you remember? Little plastic cattle and horses and pigs and things.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘He had fences too, didn’t he, and . . .’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I’m an idiot,’ he said after a little while.
Give me credit. I know this is when I’m supposed to say, ‘No, Vincent, you’re not, not at all,’ and take his hand nineteenth-century-style and let the moment be a little bridge between us, but of course I didn’t. You can’t go encouraging the Vincent Cunninghams of the world because the truth is boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they’re a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there’s just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.
‘RLS,’ he said, getting back to safer ground after another while. ‘The chest wasn’t great with him.’
Clare people don’t like to be too blunt.
‘He had tuberculosis, Vincent,’ I said (Book 684, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, two volumes, Thomas Graham Balfour, Methuen, London). My father only had a falling-apart second-hand Volume Two, a book that has been to sea, has water-buckled pages, two Chapter Fours, and smells of Scotland.
‘Still, he bought four hundred acres in Upolu, Samoa,’ Vincent said. The Cunninghams are addicted to looking on the bright side.
‘He fell in love with a Fanny,’ I told him.
He allowed that a moment.
‘When he went to live there he took the name Tusitala. It means Teller of Tales,’ he said, smiling like this was a deeper layer of chocolates.
‘So did Keats.’
‘Took the same name? Wow.’
‘Loved a Fanny.’
‘Oh.’
The rain tattooed the skylight while his brain went back a few Windows on the search, then he remembered: ‘He was supposed to design lighthouses.’
‘His father did.’
‘So he was a sort of engin
eer really,’ he said triumphantly, having completed his own feat of mental engineering, connecting Vincent Cunningham to RLS and so to me. This kind of thing doesn’t feature in Ovid, but it will in Vincent’s Way if I ever get to write it.
He was just too happy-looking then so I said, ‘He hated engineering.’
There was no coming back from that. He sat quiet for a bit and I lay back against the awful pillows and thought Ruth Swain you’re horrible. And the rain fell some more and Vincent studied his hands in his lap, until at last I said: ‘When he died on the island on Samoa they cleared a path through the jungle all the way up to Mount Vaea so that he could be buried on the summit and see the sea. So I suppose there was some engineering in that.’
And Vincent said, ‘Ruth Swain,’ just that, just Ruth Swain, and he shook his long head like I was a wonder of some class and his face broke into this big smile he has like something was mended or Hope Renewed or I’d actually kissed him.
Un-real.
Chapter 17
My father loved Aeney more than anything in the world. I’m allowed to say that. I’m not saying it out of hurt or disappointment or to undo some twist in my heart. I’m not saying it in a Bitch-of-the-Brouders God-Forgive-Me way, back of the hand covering the mouth, eyes wide and a hot whisper spreading some viciousness sideways into the world. I’m saying it because it’s true and because you’ll need to understand that. Aeney was a magical boy. I knew. We all knew. Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this Ah, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling why am I so ordinary?, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.
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