History of the Rain (32 page)
She’s very like him, isn’t she?
Spitting image sure
.
Which, Dear Reader, is revolting. When I asked her Mrs Quinty gave the more polite interpretation saying that she thought it was not spitting but
splitting
image and that it came from splitting a piece of wood and matching the pieces perfectly, the join of the back of a violin say. But Vincent Cunningham says it’s
spit and image
, a person being literally both the fluid and picture of the other, which to an Engineer brain apparently makes perfect sense and is not disgusting at all.
Either way, we began as marvels. Faces peered in at us.
Can you tell them apart?
It is something to be innocent of your own marvellousness, to just have it, the way the beautiful do, and to bathe in the knowledge of being blessed. For me of course it did not last, but there was a time, and on good days I like to think some radiance of that entered me and no matter what happened after, no matter the pale thin face I see in the mirror, no matter these eyes, no matter the exhaustion and the sadness, somewhere inside it remains and there could yet be a time when what I feel is marvellous.
When Dad held us he could not speak. His eyes shone. I know I’ve said that. Reader, be kind. I have no better phrasing. It was like there was excess of shining in him. He kept
filling up
. Brimming. He lifted us in his arms and had to tilt his head skyward to stop the tears falling out.
When you are born into a great tide of love, you know it. Though you are only minutes old you know. And when you are days and weeks old and can only receive you know that what you are receiving is love. Aeney and me, we knew. We knew when we were being pushed in the big-wheel pram down the Faha road, when Mam and Dad’s faces, sun and moon, came and went over us, when we lay on the blanket in the kitchen and found a huge finger fitted into our tiny hands, and how by just holding tight you made a smile, we knew when we were in handknit jumpers laying on a blanket in the bog while Mam and Dad footed the turf, picked bog-cotton ticklers for our noses, when the cuckoo sang and Mam sang back to it, when she played butterflies under our chins, we knew and learned the strange and beautiful truth that being adored makes you adorable.
Vincent Cunningham comes up the stairs with Vincent Cunningham bounce. He’s off for Reading Week, which is the only thing not done that week.
‘What’s new?’ he says.
‘Well. I’m still here. Still in bed. Still exactly the same. So, that would be nothing.’
Turns out engineers don’t get irony.
‘Hair is good,’ he says. He puts his hands down between his legs and rubs the palms together in a kind of boys o boys way. ‘Your mam says you’ve had no breakfast.’
‘I have to wait an hour or I vomit.’
He tries to let that pass. He has to negotiate a route around the fact that I will be going to Dublin for a while, and he has to do so without mentioning illness. I watch the skylight. The clouds are closed doors in a hospital sky.
‘I couldn’t wait an hour,’ he says. ‘No way.’
‘Why? You’d die?’
I don’t really mean to be so, aspic. It just comes. And I have the face for it.
‘Still raining?’ I say at last to help him, like I can’t see it on his shoulders and on his hedge-cut hair and how always it makes the skin of his face so amazingly fresh-looking.
‘Still raining,’ he says, and then turns on me his great big Little Boy Smile and adds, ‘Wettest year since Noah.’
It was the brimming that brought my father to poetry. We were to blame. By the time we were born Virgil was already a familiar in the second-hand bookshops of the county, knew the floorboard groans under the twenty thousand volumes in Sean Spellissey’s in Ennis; the busted book boxes in the Friary that on them said Donal O’ Keefe, Victualler, but were filled topsy-turvy with donated paperbacks, Corgis and Pans mostly but also occasional mottled hardcovers with peeling-off
From the library of
nameplates; the backdoor bookshelves of Honan’s Antiques, where the volumes smelled of candles and Brasso; the haphazard find-it-yourself emporium that was Nestor’s where brandy-smelling books were thrown in for free if you made a purchase, explaining why on separate occasions Virgil bought the quarter-ounce, the half-ounce and the ounce weights that sit on the second shelf of the dresser; Mulvihill’s where deceased priests’ libraries were sold, all hardcovers; Neylon’s bar in Cranny which as draught-excluders had bookstacks in the windows and from which
Our Mutual Friend
was rescued,
M. Keane
written in blue biro on the flyleaf; Madigan’s in Kilrush into which the Vandeleur library dispersed and where Maurice Madigan guarded over it, wearing the moustache he got from his father, who got it from his back in the day when shoeshine brushes were a facial style of command.
Before we were born, Virgil knew them all. Perhaps because he did not go to university, perhaps because he felt a lacking which proved impossible to ignore, my father wanted to read everything. Because he could not afford new books, and because he disliked the temporariness of library loans, wanted to keep a book that mattered to him, he haunted the second-hand shops. If, as was rare, he read a book that he thought valueless he would bring it back to Spellissey’s or Honan’s and return it, in the kindest way letting them know the book was worthless, and suggesting he choose something else. I know because I have stood beside him at these mortifications, turning my shoe and pulling down from the hand holding mine while with his most reasonable voice he negotiated the unreasonable. These encounters were sweetened by the fact that after, in my father’s quiet triumph, we would go (literally) to Food Heaven, on the Market, for Chocolate Biscuit Cake, or take possession of one of the soft deep couches of The Old Ground Hotel, and there, while the fire heated the twin ovals in Virgil’s soles, and Mr Flynn flew up and down the hall addressing crises, we shared Tea for One and read with the leisurely disregard Jimmy Mac says is the hallmark of proper gentry.
The library that grew in our house contained all my father’s idiosyncrasies, contained the man he was at thirty-five, and at forty, at forty-five. He did not edit himself. He did not look back at the books of ten years ago and pluck out the ones whose taste was no longer his. So absorbed was he in the book he was reading that the library grew without his noticing. Though he needed new clothes, though his fashion sense evolved into Too Short Trousers, Mismatched Socks, The Patched and the Missing Button Look, Mam became his conspirator and on birthdays and at Christmas gave him not clothes but books. It was in her way of loving. She was selling brownbreads and tarts then, and would come from town with flour and bran, apples, raisins and rhubarb, and a paperback she’d leave by his plate for when he came in from the land.
Perhaps because my father had discovered that, despite the weather, there was some profound affinity between the Deep South, Latin America, and the County Clare, on his shelves in various editions are almost all of what Professor Martin called the dangerously hypnotic novels of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickens is the only other whose work is so present. Prompted perhaps by his own name, Virgil liked the epic quality, the messiness of generations, the multitude of figures drifting in and out and the certainty that time was not a straight line. Ever since Ashcroft he liked to be lost in a book. It was firstly the Elsewhere thing. It was the pull of other worlds that, though he would jab Up-Jut at me for saying so, went all the way back to The Reverend. Old Absalom, Old Shave-Shadow, was the forerunner because there was something in a Swain that was drawn out of this world, something that made them Look Up or Out or Over and which at its best was somewhere between pole-vaulting salmon-sense and Robert Louis Stevenson Syndrome and at its worst resulted in the Reverend’s ignoring wife and child to go graveyard-walking under starlight and becoming addicted to beeswax candles.
But it was also
nourishment
, a thing I only came to understand later.
So yes, Virgil liked to be lost in a book, and he read with the smallest rocking of his upper body, a kind of sea-sway that if you listened hard because you were laying in his lap and were supposed to be asleep was accompanied by the thinnest murmuring. I was already The Twin Who Doesn’t Sleep (which, Dear Reader, is an out-and-out lie. I did sleep, in fact, slept sweetly and soundly, beautifully actually, but only when held, which is
not
weird but perfectly sensible and if you don’t believe me you haven’t read your
Hamlet
and should sit in a corner and do some deeper thinking about the Undiscovered Country then you too will want to be held while sleeping. So,
please
) so I was on his lap and could hear the steady sound of his reading. It’s not that he mouthed the words. It’s that they sort of
hummed
in him. It’s like there was a current or a pulse in the page and when his eyes connected to it he just made this low low thrum. John Banville would know the word for it, I don’t. I only know the feeling, and that was comforting. I lay in his lap and he read and we sailed off elsewhere. Dad and I went up the Mississippi, to Yoknapatawpha County, through the thick yellow fog that hung over the Thames or in through those dense steamy banana plantations all the way to Macondo. We went in the large lumpy blanket-covered Sugan boat-chair that was placed in by the Stanley range where our cribs were put to keep us warm and where Aeney slept like the Pope Nan said but I cried and was lifted, swaddled in West Clare Tropic, sucked my tiny thumb and was ready for departure.
I fell asleep in strange places. Dear Emily said there is no frigate like a book to take us away, and as I told Vincent Cunningham even though Emily couldn’t put a straight parting in her own hair and had a face that Never Saw the Sun she was World’s Number One Explorer of the Great Indoors, and in that too she was right. Dad and I went some places, and because some things, most things in my experience, are more vivid when you haven’t seen them, I know Mississippi better than Moyasta.
What none of us realised and what at first of course Virgil didn’t realise either was that the library he was building would in fact become a working tool, a consultancy, and that it was leading somewhere.
He had no intention of writing.
He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.
How could you even start? Read Dickens, read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any page in any story by Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go
ah lads
, put down their pencil and walk away.
But Swains and Reasonableness, you already know, are not best acquainted. And anyway the certainty of failure was never a Swain deterrent. (See: Pole-vaulting.) Besides, I think there was already something in my father that wanted to
aspire
. It was pre-set in the plot, and only waiting for the day when the brimming would reach the point of spilling.
Aeney and I were that day.
First he went outside. He went out through the nods and mumbles, the drizzle-heads, the Well-Dones and the Good-Mans, marched down to the river which was sort of his version of church and tramped along at Reverend-pace, wordless and grave and impossibly full, rain veils billowing the way old Richard Kirwin tried to convince me once was how angels appear in Ireland, between sky and earth this vaporous traffic.
Virgil couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that we were born, that he was a father. It’s not that he was ignorant of biology, or that for months my mother hadn’t carried us with MacCarroll aplomb. She had. The whole parish knew that at least one of us was coming, and though our sex was polled variously, Mam carrying-to-the-front, to-the-side, to-the-other-side, depending on personal bias, political affiliation and glasses prescription, there was never a doubt that Virgil was about to be a father. But still our arrival was a shock. The moment we appeared in the kitchen, Aeney pink, shining and wondrous, I hairy, Virgil’s life was changed. And he knew it. It was risen up. That’s the part you have to understand. I suppose it may be so in all fathers, I don’t know. It was a sort of epiphany, Ecstasy even, which as far as I can tell has more or less disappeared out of life now ever since the Church went wonky and sport took over the terrain of Glory. But if you cross your Swain & Salmon lore, add in a little of the lonely depths of Virgil when he was a boy, you’ll come to it.
At the plashy bend just past Ryan’s wet meadow, there where they have the bockety homemade sort-of-jetty where for reasons private the Ryans keep loops of baler twine, rope and buckets, he stopped, turned his face to the sky. He had to breathe. Joy was a huge balloon inflating in his chest. Or a white flame scorching it. Or a dove rising. I wish I was a poet.
Point was, he couldn’t contain it.
He was a father
. And in the same instant, by the curious calculus of the heart, he missed his own father. It was not Abraham himself but a better, kinder interpretation, an Abraham that had not existed except as possibility, but who now took over the role as in my father was proven the truths the New Testament is more humane than the Old and the world looks joyous to the joyful.