History of the Rain (15 page)
As proof of
his impact, my father kept all the books Mr MacGhiolla gave him: Book 391,
The Crock of Gold
, James Stephens, Pan, London; Book 392,
Irish Fairy Tales
, James Stephens, Macmillan, London; Book 393,
The Three Sorrows of Storytelling
, Douglas Hyde, T. Fisher Unwin, London; Book 394,
Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes
, Kuno Meyer, Hodges, Figgis & Co., Dublin; Book 395,
Silva Gadelica
Volume II, Standish Hayes O’Grady, Williams and Norgate, London; and the tea-ringed Book 396,
Cuchulainn: The Irish Achilles
, Alfred Nutt, D. Nutt, London. From Mr MacGhiolla my father heard about the King who lived under the waves, about the Glas Gainach, the cow whose milk was almost butter. He heard about the Queen called Mor who lived in Dunquin and the herder who came from Under the Sea. Cathal the Son of Conor, the Black Thief, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Children of Lir, the Voyage of Bran.
For my father it was as if the world split open and out came this parade of The Remarkables.
If this was America they’d be Blockbuster material, there’d be CUCHULAINN VII in 3D by now with Liam Neeson in his long
Star Wars
hair, the Gáe Bolga instead of a Light Sabre, there’d be a side franchise for Oisín in Tír na nÓg and Diarmuid and Grainne would get a revamp as Greatest Love Story Ever and run for seven seasons as a daytime soap.
That material was
deep
.
And in all of it, in all of those tales, the hero faces impossible tasks.
And he triumphs.
With a brilliant student Mr MacGhiolla shone. It was simple: we are the storytellers. Imagination in Ireland was beyond the beyond. It was out there. It was Far Out before far out was invented in California, because sitting around in a few centuries of rain breeds these outlands of imagination. As evidence, think of Abraham Stoker, confined to bed until he was eight years old, lying there breathing damp Dublin air with no TV or radio but the heaving wheeze of his chest acting as pretty constant reminder that soon he was heading Elsewhere. Even after he was married to Florence Balcombe of Marino Crescent (she who had an unrivalled talent for choosing the wrong man, who had already given up Oscar Wilde as a lost cause in the Love Department when she met this Bram Stoker and thought:
he seems sweet
), even after Bram moved to London he couldn’t escape his big dark imaginings in Dublin and one day further down the river he spawned
Dracula
(Book 123, Norton, New York). Jonathan Swift was only settling into a Chesterfield couch in Dublin when his brain began sailing to Lilliput and Blefuscu (Book 778,
Gulliver’s Travels
, Jonathan Swift, Penguin, London). Another couple of deluges and he went further, he went to Brobdingnag, Laputa, Bainbarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and . . .
Japan
, before he went furthest of all, to Houyhnhnms. Read
Gulliver’s Travels
when you’re sick in bed and you’ll be
away
. I’m telling you. You’ll be transported, and even as you’re being carried along in the current you’ll think no writer ever went this Far. Something like this could only be dreamt up in Ireland.
Charles Dickens recognised that. He comes to Dublin August 25th 1858 for an imagination Top-Up. Stays in Morrison’s Hotel on Nassau Street (I know, scary that I know that, but I do. Roast Pork with apple sauce, Bread and butter pudding). He heads down to Cork four days later, checks in to the Imperial Hotel, where, according to the porter Jeremiah Purcell, the clock in the front foyer has been stopped at twenty to nine for about a year waiting on one of the Stokeses of Mac Curtain Street to come fix it. (Charles Dickens is a punctual man. He values punctuality above church-going. He stands looking at the clock. Jeremiah comes over and explains.
She’s stopped
. Charles looks at him. ‘She’s stopped?’
She is, Sir. Stopped. Wound, but won’t go beyond twenty to
.) Next day Charles takes an early-morning carriage to Blarney Castle, which is dark stone and dreary on the day on account of the rain, and that place sets him thinking. He skips up the steps, gets a small bit drowned, but carries on, lays down and does the whole backwards lean-over-the-edge, osteopathy no-no, to kiss the Blarney Stone.
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, Tr
ü
bner, 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.
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.