History of the Rain (23 page)

‘Morning,’ Nan says to her daughter.

But Mary goes straight out the back door and across the haggard to the hen run. She lifts and pulls open the mesh-wire gate and the hens raise an excited clucking. The older ones see that she’s bringing no margarine tub of Layers Mash and turn away and the younger ones in terror run into the wire and poke their heads through it, for a moment scrabbling at the ground for propulsion going nowhere but squawking mad because they know something unusual is happening. Which is true, something has happened. She crosses the Run and stoops in to the House and from the wooden crate that has Satsumas inked into it and a bed of patted-down hay she takes six eggs.

She comes into the kitchen and starts cracking them straight away into a bowl.

Nan knows enough of the human heart not to pass comment.

The eggs get beaten. They get beaten big-time. They get salted and peppered. Then they get beaten some more.

Then they get abandoned. She just stops beating them mid-whisk and leaves them and goes out the back door again, this time not going into the haggard but out the pencil-gravel way where the grass grows up through it in wet April and makes a kind of slug-road into the garden. She goes out the gate and walks with her arms folded across her and her green cardigan pulled over but not buttoned. She never buttons it. There’s something in her can’t stand confinement. It’s a MacCarroll thing. She walks down the road and Marty Mungovan passes her in his van coming to collect the breads and gives her the nod and she just inclines her head slightly in briefest greeting. She hasn’t brushed her hair, she hasn’t done one thing of all the things she might have done in getting ready to go and meet her future husband.

Because right then she’s just curious, she wants to know, that’s all. And she marches down the road that runs parallel to the river and takes its curves from it until she gets to Murphy’s gate and for an instant she hesitates, just one moment, just one moment in which she might say to herself
what the hell are you doing?
and turn back, just one moment which flies away into the mad chirruping of the birds, then she climbs the gate.

She sees him right away. He’s there, in the same place, in the same pose, watching the river in the same way.

Just the fact of it, just the strangeness and the stillness and the
solidity
of him of whom she’d been thinking all night, takes her breath. She’s aware her heart jumps into the side of her throat. She’s aware the ground has a spongy spring to it and the sky is huge. He’s there again, standing, looking westward. He’s there. It’s like the French Lieutenant’s woman in the
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
only in reverse, and with the river instead of the sea, but there’s the same inevitability, the same sense of things just about to go bang.

What’s he doing there?

Mary hasn’t worked out the next step. She didn’t really expect him to be there and came half in the hope that his having vanished again would free her of thinking about him. But now she has to figure out what happens next. She’s crossing the field to the mucky track again and she’s got her arms tighter around her and her head lowered a bit now, but she’s thinking
Has he been here all night?
And in that there’s madness and attraction both. Right then she doesn’t have the words to explain it. It’s like Colette Mulvihill over in Kilbaha who left The Church and took up Leonard Cohen and when Father Tipp asked her why she just said Mystery, Father, which was a blow to him because the Church had spent fifty years taking the mystery out of it so that now uncaught criminals like Kieran Coyne and Maurice Crossan could become Eucharistic Ministers and the Hosts arrive in a blue van from Portlaoise that says Maguire Bros, Clergy Apparel & Supplies, All Religions, right on the side and
Wash Me Please
in finger-writing underneath.

Mystery, Father
, was about right.

Mary walks along the track. She’s not looking at him. She won’t. But she’s fallen so far in Curiosity there’s no way she’s going to be able to go home again until she’s found out something. Her mind is pulling at the mystery, and it’s flying past River-stalker, Inspector of Riverbanks, Surveyor of Soils & Erosion, Fisher-scout, Salmon-spy, Pathfinder, Priest, but it never gets to Man at the End of Living, it never gets to Man Who has Come to Drown, because she’s not yet acquainted with anything Swain. She doesn’t know about Grandfather Absalom waiting in the candles for The Calling or the pole-vaulting or the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. She doesn’t know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there’s nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising. She hasn’t read Eileen Simpson’s
Poets in their Youth
(Book 3,333, Picador, London) or John Berryman’s
The Freedom of the Poet
(Book 3,334, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) or Peter Ackroyd’s
Blake
(Book 3,340, Vintage, London), Paul Ferris’s
Dylan Thomas
(Book 3,341, Dial Press, New York), Paddy Kitchen’s
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Book 3,342, Carcanet Press, London) or any of the others my father gathered together in a mad company under the slope of the skylight where once the fire smoked and the hose soaked them all. She doesn’t know that he has seen much of the world, but she feels it. She doesn’t know he has come back to Ireland carrying a caustic disappointment in himself, that he feels
is this all there is?
, that his life has amounted to nothing, that nothing has happened but Time, and that now he has walked across Ireland Swain-style, fishing the rivers his father described, and is that most dangerous of things, a man looking for a sign. No sign had been seen, until yesterday, when he came to that spot in the river and for no reason that can be explained fell into the conviction that he was
meant
to be there.

He has no more idea of why than she does.

But he has that Swain ability to believe in the outlandish. The family has history in it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks him. The thing is too big in her to get out delicately.

He doesn’t move. He’s been standing too still and too long and maybe he thinks it is his own mind asking. But then there’s the difference in the air. There’s something he can’t see but feels and he turns and looks at her.

The French Lieutenant’s woman’s face is unforgettable and tragic. Its sorrow wells out as naturally as water, Fowles says. And I think that’s what Mary sees too. He turns and she sees the sadness and right away she’s sorry for her bluntness and being so MacCarroll and she wishes she could wind the moment backwards.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise I shouldn’t be here.’

‘No,’ she says, a little too quickly. ‘It’s all right.’ Her arms are still about her and she rubs her hands a little back and forth on them as if she’s cold but she’s not cold.

‘I’ll go.’

But he doesn’t go. He uses the future not the present tense, and between those two is our life and history.

She feels him looking at her. She feels for a moment arrested by it, and in that arrest there’s danger and warning and dizziness, but mostly there’s the irresistible pull of when a pair of eyes are matched, because although she doesn’t know it yet here’s Love and Death in the same breath, here’s one of those moments upon which a story turns, and right now, just by the way she lifts her face and smiles, my mother is about to save my father.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘You can stay.’

(‘Mam, how did you meet Dad?’

‘I just met him.’

‘But how?’

‘He was just there. That’s all.’

‘There?’

‘Yes. He was just
there
.’)

I’ve decided it’s the Elsewhere in him that draws her. Like now, Faha back then was a parish of two minds. In one, there was nothing that happened anywhere in the world that was nearly as interesting or noteworthy as what happened in your own parish. To them travel was a waste of time and money.
What would you be wanting to go there for?
was delivered with such vinegar disregard that the legs were cut from under the very idea and to even consider travelling beyond the Faha signpost was evidence of some genetic weakness. To the others, there was nothing of any significance that ever happened inside the bounds of the parish. As proven by the RTE evening news, in which Faha had never appeared, the world happened somewhere else. Thus far the whole of human history had bypassed the parish and the sooner you could get on the N68 and out of it the sooner you could encounter actual life. It wasn’t until the Bust when those with Mindset One had no choice and all the tilers and painters and chippies and plasterers had vanished and the Under-21 team stopped existing altogether that Mindsets One and Two, Home and Away, started getting mixed up. Then girls like Mona Fitz and Marian Callinan set up Faha-in-Queens, Faha-in-Melbourne and started e-publishing versions of the parish newsletter with times of Mass in Faha, this week’s Epistle Readers, the WeightWatchers meeting, the Old Folks Cake Sale and the Under-14 fixtures, just so people could pretend they weren’t Elsewhere.

It’s the Elsewhere in Virgil Swain that draws her. He is a stranger. It’s the oldest plot. But it’s a good one. She tells him he can stay, as if it is in her power, as if she is somehow already in charge, and she’s decided the best way to hide her attraction to him is to deny it exists.

It’s in the Book of Women’s Stratagems.

She says he can stay and then she walks away.

But really they are already in a relationship. Already she’s thinking of the places he’s been and already she wants him to tell her, and that telling will be the first bridge between my mother and father. His stories will bring her across to him.

He stays in the village in the unofficial B&B that Phyllis Thomas opened when her husband left her for a Gourmet Tart in Galway. After three days he is no longer just a stranger but The Stranger, like a DC Comics version that’s drawn in purple or grey, because that was when the only strangers in the parish were there for funerals or weddings and there was no such thing as tourists in Faha and it was still twenty-five years before Nolan’s would start selling the Polish beer and the kind of bread that tastes like wood. He stays in the village and he walks the roads of the parish in a way that’s already noted as peculiar. Farmers don’t walk if they can take tractors. Men only walk if their cars are broken. Nobody back then walks just for walking. The only time there are Walkers on the road is when Mass is on. So Virgil is already building a mythology. He’s tall and quiet and the Readers of Character who occupy the tall stools in Carmody’s or prop on Mina Prendergast’s post-office windowsill before and after Mass are already tonguing their thumbs and flicking the pages of Who He Might Be.

Mary doesn’t know what to do with him. She knows she wants him in her day. She likes that he’s there, that if she goes out on her bicycle with eggs or bread she’ll see him somewhere. She’ll see his tall figure over a stonewall, see the looping stride, the long back, the uplift of his chin as he goes, that Swain angle, as if he’s always half-looking above.

And then he’s so quiet. And there is something irresistible in that.

They become what Dilsey Hughes from Dublin calls An Item.

It’s a walking item, mostly.

They walk. That’s what Mam says. They walk everywhere. Sometimes he doesn’t talk and she sticks these little barbed comments in him to get him to respond. She says something to get his seriousness to collapse and when it does she laughs and then he smiles and she feels this flood of warmth coming over her and she knows now this is more than curiosity, but she won’t say the word Love. He’ll have to say it first.

But now she’s afraid he might go. She’s afraid that one day she might wake up and he will be gone in the same way that he came.

So she sees if she can drive him off. The MacCarrolls have that little perverse streak in them. She’d rather break her own heart than have it broken. There’s an Irish logic to it. But maybe you have to be here a hundred years in the rain before you understand it. She tries Not Showing Up. That’s another stratagem. She’s mad to be out walking and bumping against him but she won’t let herself. She stays in the house and beats eggs. She keeps an eye to the window to see if he’ll come in the gate. But he doesn’t. He has the Swain thing where disappointment and hurt are first nature and he stands out by the river and feels the nails being driven into his heart.

Between the Swain thing and the MacCarroll thing it’s not looking great.

When I tell it to myself at this stage I’m worried for me and Aeney.

Because both of them are so good at suffering. Dad has come back to Ireland and believes that in Mary MacCarroll he’s found meaning. And I mean Meaning. Which in ordinary language is significant enough, but in Swain-song is pretty much the tops. He believes everything up to now has been pointless.
What have I been doing?
The voyaging, the high-walled seas, the lightless-night horizons, the fevers, sicknesses, the frizzled scorched skin of his brow and the tops of his ears, the sailings in and the sailings out, the whole kit and caboodle, the whole Boy’s Own, Melville and Conrad, conceit of it, all of it has been a running away, an avoidance of what has been flowing in his blood all the time, the sense that
there is something I must do
. And what must be done is in fact here, in this parish, by this river, with this woman.