But it must have been something to do with the Big Catch, the last salmon, or his own private Emergency, because when Grandmother saw him, caught a sniff of Eau de Salmon and her heart went butterflies, he didn’t run out of there.
At that time Grandmother was going by the name Margaret Kittering. She was what in those days they called a handsome woman, in that gaunt angular long-necked Anglo-Irish way. I think it means you could see breeding. Like horses, you could see by the teeth, the jaw. Let’s take a look, her dentist must have said, and then just stood back and applauded. Anyway, whatever the breeding, the Kittering jaw met the Swain. (Later of course the MacCarroll made a cat’s melodeon of it. But that’s for a different volume, Teeth of the Swain, ed. D.F. Mahony.) Margaret’s other features of note were light-curled auburn hair, delicate ears and the small perfect Kittering nose that later swam downriver and landed on my brother Aeney.
Teeth, ears and nose, what more could a man want?
For her part Grandmother had that no-nonsense Headmistress thing that made her think this man could be Knocked Back into shape, he could be Straightened Out, and with her fine boneage and those awesome elbows Grandmother was a born Knocker and Straightener.
The extent of her task was made clear when Grandfather brought her back to Ashcroft House. When they came in the avenue and she saw it, the jungle of briars he hadn’t noticed, the broken windowpanes, the rooks making attempt number 576 to get back up the chimney, she didn’t allow herself any expression of dismay. In The Salmon in Ireland it says that once she finds a spawning ground the hen salmon is fiercely focused. She will assume a vertical position and fan her tail furiously to dislodge pebbles big as balls until she has made a suitable pit.
Only a small Oh escaped Grandmother when the wolfhounds bounded up to join them on the bed.
Another when she caught the salty whiff of Grandfather.
Another when she got a first peek at his Catullus.
Sorry, fecund.
Still, Kitterings do not shirk, no, they have that good German-English blood in them, and the First Round of Knocking and Straightening (which lasted until Germany said Mein Gott and surrendered) produced a daughter, Esther.
Rounds Two and Three produced Penelope and Daphne.
By that time, Grandfather’s – what Brendan Falvey called lions – must have been nearly exhausted. He’d started late. But he still lacked a son. And seeing his three daughters already on their way to becoming little Kitterings he must have felt he was seeing Swains disappear from the world. By then he was already locked in the first silent skirmishes with Margaret, moving a chair back where he wanted it, leaving open a newspaper he knew she wanted folded away, opening windows she closed, already engaging in the ding-dong, attack-and-retreat that was their marriage as he realised with a peppery gall that he was the one who had been hooked.
But in those days once you were wedded you were in Holy Deadlock, and in Ireland the priests had decided that once a man entered a woman there was No Way Out. The vagina was this deadly mysterious wrestler that could get you in a headlock, well, metaphorically-speaking, and then, boys, you were rightly stuck.
That Will Teach You, was Number One sermon at the time.
Number Two was Offer It Up.
And so, with no way out, following the floods of September that year (Books 359–389, Old Moore’s Almanacs. Volumes 36–66) and the catch of a Salmon weighing 32lbs, he gave it, as Jimmy McInerney says, one last shake.
My father was landed in May. He swam out after fourteen hours of labour, was not yet dried of the birthwaters when Grandfather Abraham appeared in the nursery like strange weather, jutted the Swain jaw to study his only male progeny, and asked: what weight?
And in that moment, like a pinch of salt, he passed on the Impossible Standard.
He calls his son Virgil.
Honest to God.
Virgil.
Abraham eschews saints and when he’s asked for a middle name for Virgil he considers only a moment before replying: Feste. (See Book 888, Twelfth Night, W. Shakespeare, Oxford Classics.)
Could have been worse.
Could have been Worm.
‘Fester?’ In the front pew Clement Kittering dispatches an eyebrow. (The Kitterings consider the Irish in general to be Decidedly Odd, but often Quite Charming, and this curious Abraham is gone native, is turned Irish.)
‘No dear. Feste.’
The moment the christening is complete Abraham startles Grandmother by taking the child from her. With quick leather shoeslap he bears my father down the aisle like a trophy. The boy is brought out and on the gravel apron before the front archway he’s raised towards the glowering sky of the County Meath.
It’s as if Abraham believes the old Reverend won’t have been able to stay away. He’ll have stridden across the stippled coals of Purgatory to see the new Swain, and to see if maybe this baby will be The Next Big Thing in holy world. Abraham holds his son and behind him like a murmuring river the congregation flows out and around the front porch, and the baby’s not crying, God love him, he’s not, he’s gazing up out of the intricate lacework of what looks like a mini-priest’s robe that Margaret had made for him, he’s sort of fluttering his eyelids with the breezes that are trapped there. And then to the Reverend, and for all and sundry to hear, Abraham declaims, ‘This boy will never step inside a church again.’
Chapter 9
Uncle Noelie, who was not an uncle but a cousin, dressed for his death every night. One time he woke in the morning with a holy fright. (It was probably the fooking forestry that had surrounded him, unbeknownst, Sean Hayes says. You’ll hear words like that here, little bits of leftover Shakespeare. Unbeknownst. Unbeknownst to itself the Department had destroyed the countryside with pine trees. Unbeknownst, they’re going to do the same with windmills.) Anyway, Uncle Noelie woke up in a mortifying panic in his holey mouse-coloured underpants and vest, went to Patrick Bourke’s in the Square in Kilrush and asked for a funeral suit Best Quality and right enough they sold him the suit, shirt, tie, socks and shoes and asked who it was that had passed on.
Which, I’m sorry, is just weird. Passing on. It’s not even grammatical. It just hangs there, vague and inconclusive. It’s like saying he went up to.
Passed on to where, exactly?
Anyway, the outfit was for his own funeral. Uncle Noelie came home, laid the suit shirt and etceteras on the bed, the shoes beneath. All day he worked his few fields in his farming trousers boots woolly jumper and what-have-you, but when he went to bed at night in that small farmhouse he put on the suit shirt and tie, left the shoes, laces undone, below, then he lay out, hands-joined, posed, so if he died in the night he’d be dressed for Departure.
Joe Brogan passed his house most days on his way to the buildings back in the time when there was buildings happening and between them down in The Crossroads one evening they’d worked out that Uncle Noelie was to open his curtains when he woke and that way there was no need for Joe to come in to check on him. He could just drive by, because, both bachelors, they weren’t intimate on that level, there’d be no calling in, no need for tea and goldgrains, they were both clear on that, none of that, no, there’d just be this business of the curtains because Uncle Noelie had related his two mortal fears. The first was Not Being Found, of Mouldering Away, Sean Hayes says (and you’d moulder faster in among all those trees). How long you would be mouldering would depend on whether you went to Mass or not. Not because of mystical preservation but because if you were a Regular you’d be missed after two Sundays. There’d be that gap in the back of the Men’s Aisle where you stood with the Head-downers. That was the unsaid secret advantage to church-going. But if you were an Irregular like Uncle Noelie then who knows, you could be Not Found until the trees fell through the roof and some of the Hourigans came in to rob the place.
The second fear was Being Found. If you were taken unawares, if you were found in what Nan calls your All Together, then the shame of that, the thought of the whole sl
ew coming poking around your kitchen nosing into the front bedroom and seeing you with your what Mona Moynihan calls croissant just sort of sitting here, would be enough to ruin the first several weeks of your time in Heaven.
So Uncle Noelie came up with his plan. Each night he pulled the curtains, combed the little bit of hair crossways on the front of his head, put on the suit and lay out on the bed ready for take-off.
And it worked too.
It worked two ways. It worked first that when he woke up in the morning in the suit and he realised he wasn’t at his own funeral he smiled. He smiled that lovely small round nut face of his and thought how well he looked and what a surprise it was no woman had ever found him. He rose and undressed with the sort of secret knowledge of his Happy End ahead. And it worked too because when one morning Joe Brogan drove by and the curtains were closed Uncle Noelie was only Gone a short while, and later that evening Mrs Quinty told my mother he made A Beautiful Corpse.
I was thinking about Uncle Noelie today when I was in the Regional. I was thinking about being Gone and wondering where Gone was and what it would be like and what the weather there would be. It’s a thing you just never hear, the weather in the next life.
On the one hand it can’t be raining there all the time.
But then if you were an African maybe that’s what you’d be hoping for.
On the other hand if it was blazing hot like it was that one summer when Nan went salmon-coloured and couldn’t stand up for falling down, Mick Mulvey started sporting the sombrero and olive-oiling himself and Father Tipp had to ask Martin Malone to stop wearing the micro-shorts to Mass, well that would be no fun at all. Irish people would be a freckled show in a sunny Heaven.
Just before Doctor Naradjan came in to do my Check-Up I was starting to wonder if you can only get to Heaven if you believe in it. Is it like Santa, where once you stop believing he stops coming? I know, thinking too precisely on th’event, but when you’re lying in bed with your body going nowhere your mind sort of heads off. Anyway, just for a minute then I had maybe a glimpse of Ruth’s Version because I was seeing Uncle Noelie in the Good Suit walking across his own fields and none of the forestry was there and across the river the hill fields weren’t thumping with windmills and it was just the right kind of All-Ireland weather in September. Noelie’s hair was still combed crossways and he had his teeth so he was smiling natural and he was back in a better version of his own familiar place. He was carrying a small Clare flag for the hurlers like he knew this year with Davy the lads were going to do it, and he was coming closer and I knew he had something he wanted to tell me and I tried to say his name out loud but I couldn’t because I was in a ward in the Regional and I lost belief or vision or whatever and the whole scene sort of passed into nothing, the ground unreal and the story failed.
Chapter 10
A salmon egg dropped from waist-height will rebound, quite in the manner of a tennis ball.
I thought you’d want to know that.
My father wasn’t immediately aware of any burden on him.
Perhaps on Sunday mornings when Grandmother led the girls to church in Trim, that formidable line of what Nan calls the Polished Shoe Brigade, Head Girl material each one, marching up to that front pew in pleated wool coats with natural imperiousness and sitting so astonishingly upright because Nan says something in the breeding meant they had no backsides, perhaps then he wondered. He was left to himself in the house, and played Orphan.
He read. He read everything he could find. He loved books about explorers. Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés. The names alone took him away. I see him looking up from a page, it’s the strange deadened quiet I know on country Sunday mornings when the Christians are at Mass and you feel so other that you have to occupy your time or you fear the Old Testament God himself will come up the stairs and say YOU! The rain is streaking down the long rattling windows of Ashcroft. The unfired chimneys are singing. He reads of those ships sailing into the New World and after a time he looks up and to no one but his own imagination says, ‘Hernán Cortés,’ which is maybe the only time anyone has said that name aloud in the County Meath but works as a kind of super-economy SwainAir flight to take him into the Aztecs. He can feel the sun scorch his brow. Those ancient oak floorboards of Ashcroft are a softly swaying deck, arriving under an azure sky, creaking in the surprise of the sudden furnace, discovering salt in all its wounds. And he says ‘Vasco Núñez de Balboa’ and in that damp room in the dead Sunday morning my father becomes the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.
One Sunday in the attic Virgil found his father’s rubbery black gasmask. When he put it on he became an alien, sucking breath through the heavy nozzle filter and crawling along the floorboards like he was a creature out of his element or newly landed on the planet. He loved that. He loved the strange privacy of being different. He loved the secret life inside him and could stay there in that inner country all day. What he thought of not going to church he never said. He never went. That was that. And when Aeney and I were old enough to realise this was a little odd, and that no one in Faha had a father who played Mozart at full volume to the river while the rest of us went to Mass, it was just another small piece of the puzzle we already knew: our father was a genius.
Eventually, Virgil was sent to Highfield School to Mr Figgs. Figgs was a bald low-sized little sneeze who came from Brighton and was soon dismayed to find Irish weather the perfect seedbed for headcolds. His face was never free of his handkerchief. It dabbed, wiped, rubbed and received the sniffled sneezed and blown expressions of the Figgs nostrils. Still, Figgs knew his figures, knew language too, and quickly saw that Virgil Swain had Serious Potential. To save him from contamination from the Dolts he put my father in the front row next to the Sniffleodeon that was his own desk. While the Michaels and Martins, the Tommys and Timothys of Highfield got about the business of educating each other through Advanced Ink-drinking, Higher Thumping, Desk-kicking, Flicking snot and/or spitballs into the miry curls of the boy up front, Mr Figgs taught my father in a conspiratorial whisper. His handkerchief he lay on the desk at the ready. Across a pale nimbus of free-associating germs he craned his damp pink face and spoke Algebra.
My father took the bait. He liked being singled out. You’ll already know he liked feeling that he was rising. He didn’t mind the hook in his mouth. Beneath the curls the head hummed. The class he left in his wake. At breaktimes he stayed in, avoided games of War in the yard, and Figgs opened a little further the doors of his mind.
And what a mind it was. It devoured everything. Figgs could not believe his luck. He took my father’s first name as a hint and tossed him a piece of the Aeneid. My father leapt and took it. A little Horace (Book 237, Horace’s Odes, Humphrey & Lyle, London), a book whose cover is neither paper nor card but a kind of amazing amber fabric that makes the softest whisper when you flick it, a snippet of Cicero (Book 238, Cicero’s Speeches, Volume I, Humphrey & Lyle, London), burgundy card-covers, stiff and formal, and smelling of asparagus, some Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Book 239, De Bello Gallico, Volume I, Humphrey & Lyle, London) which Father Tipp thought was Garlic Wars, and I didn’t correct him, it made no difference. My father devoured them all. He read at the same rate and with the same enthusiasm as the other boys excoriated their nostrils.
Nor was Latin his only excellence. On language and literature his brain fired. Figgs fed him poetry. Gave him Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and, while working his own nose behind the fumigate flag of his handkerchief, watched as Hence loathed Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born worked its way into my father’s imagination.
Each day my father carried home the neatest copies ever written, each page scored with so many half-winged ticks of Mr Figgs’s Merit Marks it appeared a coded language of flight. And it was too. It said: This boy is ascending.
What it might also have said was: This boy has no friends.
But back in those days nobody
read those parts. Child psychology hadn’t reached Ireland yet. Not that it has exactly left the starting blocks now either. Seamus Moran, whose wiry black hair all migrated to his knuckles after he ate out-of-date tinned sardines, told my mother once that his son Peter was Special Needs. ‘You know, Authentic.’
‘Mr Figgs says Virgil is an excellent student,’ Grandmother tells Grandfather one wet evening in March.
See two studded-leather wingback armchairs, battle lines, either side of the fire, two table lamps, twin amber glows. A large room with high ceiling, long sash windows, a floor rug of brown and orange, once thick and vibrant but now flat and lifeless with a going-threadbare patch where the hounds lie their drool-heads sideways before the hissing fire, logs are burning but not satisfactorily. Rain somehow spits down the full length of the chimney. The room smells of damp and smoke, that particular combination Grandmother believes is Ireland and against which she combats day and night with several purple squeeze-ball perfume bottles, shooting little sprays at the enemy with only momentary success, but impregnating her with a permanent cheap air-freshener scent as the ultimate triumph of Ireland over Kitterings.
Grandfather sits one side of the fire, Grandmother the other. Without television, they do a lot of that. Watching-the-fire is Number One on the TAM ratings back then. Grandfather smokes his cigarettes to the butt and looks in the fire at Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul in the Next Life. He’s pure Swain like that, the distant, the invisible, the depths, all big draws for the Swain mind. And he’s arrived at that place where he wishes the Germans had been a bit more efficient and aimed two inches to the right and found his heart.
History of the Rain Page 7
