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.
I’m not an expert, but when a man finds Meaning in a woman it seems to me you know two things. One, you know you’re going Deep, and Two, you know this is the most high-risk kind of love there is.
For Mam the risk is already clear. She knows there will be no other Virgil Swain coming through Faha. She knows she has to stay there and take care of Nan because Mam has that good big heart of Spencer Tracy in her and she will never let you down. She’ll sacrifice whatever she has to. Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons. So she’s caught because she knows this is it. This is it. And despite every caution that the Central Council of the Faha Branch of the Irish Countrywomen Association might have offered, that a man not born in the parish, a man not born in the county, or even in The West, a man with no soil on his hands or cattle in his blood, would find it impossible to be happy here, Mam w
ants to believe he will love her enough to stay, and that once he does everything will be all right.
But she won’t ask him. She won’t go any further in the Book of Stratagems. There’s no summer dresses or lipstick or hairdos or perfume, no invitation to tea, no here’s a cake I baked or there’s a dance in Tubridy’s or I saw you fishing yesterday.
Nothing.
She waits and she suffers and he waits and he suffers, both of them like characters in a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.
Chapter 4
I’m an incurable romantic, according to Vincent Cunningham.
Incurable anyway, I said.
Then I told him that the Latin word for waiting is pretty much the same as suffering, and he went Wow, like I was the keeper of Cool Things and if he could he would have kissed my Knowledge.
My father started fishing. Right down by Shaughnessy’s he started. Mary saw him in the morning when she went to collect the eggs. She stalled in the pen, heard the softest whish wrinkling the air and turned to see his line floating its question mark over the river. ‘He’s fishing,’ she told the hens, who were not indifferent to the news because she spared a few eggs that day.
You and I know that Virgil Swain was not going anywhere. We know he had that same Swain certainty his father had in the candles in Oxford. This is what I am meant to do. And that was unshakeable iron in him.
Faith is the most peculiar thing. It’s Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it? For the Believers it doesn’t matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there’s no arguing. Pythagoras’s early life was spent as a cucumber. And after that he lived as a sardine. That’s in Heraclitus. That’s what he believed. Beside the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks’ Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks’ kitchen, and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don’t want to tax Heaven. Just in case. That’s in The Salmon in Ireland. Bridie Clohessy believes her weight is all water, Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things, Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer. With faith there’s no arguing.
Virgil Swain believed this was the place he was meant to be. This was the place of which, when I imagine him lying fevered and delirious below decks in the West Indies, or landed in Cape Town and gone ashore with whoever were the real-life versions of Abraham Gray and John Hunter and Richard Joyce, he was dreaming.
It was not so much that it was Faha itself. It was this bend in the river.
River bends have their own potency. Ever since some hand wrote a river flows out of Eden rivers and Paradise are pretty much inseparable. If you’re reading this in Persian think Apirindaeza, in Hebrew Pardes. As far as I can make out there are rivers in every Paradise. Though not always fishermen. Bishop Epiphanius in 403 ad had an epiphany and decided Paradise had in fact two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, but whether these flowed into or out of Paradise was not clear and Augustine made this even more confusing by saying a river flowed out of Paradise and watered Eden, which led to serious problems because according to all maps of Paradise that meant the water had to flow upwards. A conundrum until John Milton solved it by explaining that paradisiacal water defies gravity. We are all looking forward to that.
So, for my father it was this bend in the river.
It was probably only the land from here to McInerney’s and Fisher’s Step, the water thick and wide and the feeling of imminence that the river is about to meet the sea.
So the truth is he didn’t fall in love either, he fell into Faith, which was onetime maybe the Champions League of Love until the sponsors pulled out and now it doesn’t get coverage any more. It’s still in poetry though. That’s where you find faith. I’ll get to that later.
Virgil Swain stayed and fished. He out-waited the length of time it took for Mary MacCarroll to defeat her doubts and start thinking that maybe he was The One. Maybe he wouldn’t be going away.
The first time Dad stepped inside this house he had a salmon with him.
It wasn’t as odd as it sounds. Mam had seen him catch it. She’d seen the non-catching first, the days he spent casting the line and catching a large amount of nothing so that in the village the story was Your Man had nothing on the end of his line, no bait (or hook according to Old Brouder), that he was escaped from somewhere, or was Simple, and was hoping the salmon would catch him.
Mam had seen him and knew he was fishing. She’d seen the way he went about it, the rhythmic rituals he had, the musclework of back and forearm, the interplay of rod and line, pulling and unreeling, that little freeing of shoulder he did before casting into what was above him. She’d seen the fishing going on for days, the actual vigil it was as he stood there, remarkable both for persistence and patience, and the sort of trancelike state it seemed you could get into when you were a man hooked into a river.
But she didn’t know Virgil was trying to catch his father.
She didn’t know that once he stood on the mucky bank at Shaughnessy’s and the hook went into the water he had to plant his feet to stop the tide of regret pulling him in. He knew he was on the threshold of real life, that real life was just behind him up in our house and that here was an Impossible something he was going to do. And now he was stricken by the urging of some kind of basic human need: he wanted to tell his father. He wanted to say Dad because he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually said that to Abraham when he was alive. Dad, I’ve found what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what you couldn’t do. I’m going to make happiness. And I’m going to make it here.
Abraham didn’t reply. But maybe he looked down and saw the candles burning in his son’s eyes because right then and there Virgil caught a salmon.
To you, Dear Reader, this may not seem a Major Plot Point. But to those of us versed in Swaindom, we know it was a blessing.
If you’re like Mona Boyce, who has the narrowest nose in the parish and is permanently engaged in the science of hairsplitting, you’ll say it was a sea trout. But I know it was a salmon.
Nan looked at him in the doorway. He was a jumble of angles. If he wasn’t cradling the salmon his arms would be too long. His hair and face were wet and his eyes glossed with a dangerous amount of feeling. ‘Mary!’ she called over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from him. ‘Mary!’
Mam had come in only moments before him. She’d seen him lift the fish in the sky and had come home running. She’d come in and gone to the blurry grey-speckled mirror in the bathroom and had a fight with her hair. She tousled it loose and it laughed at her, then she tied it up too tight and it felt like a hand had grabbed her from above and was pulling the top of her head off, then she released it again and patted it like it needed reassurance and if it got enough it would sit just right, for just this once, please.
‘Mary!!’
When she came out Dad was still standing in the doorway with the salmon and Nan was still looking at him, like there was a language barrier, like between Swains and MacCarrolls there was this ocean, which of course was true because Swains were basically English and MacCarrolls Irish and I am the child of two languages and two religions, and the most male female and the oldest young person to boot.
‘Hello,’ she said. In my version she said it the Jane Austen way, like he was Captain Wentworth and they were in Lyme Regis and a covering of coolness was needed in case she just went over and grabbed him by the wet jacket and started kissing him, for although they’d Gone Walking, which was the first step on the road to intimacy, this was another step altogether, this was coming inside the house and meeting Nan.
‘I caught one.’
‘At last,’ she said.
He looked at her, but he didn’t move.
The thing that was moving was Nan’s mind. She was flickin
g the pages fast, like when you read every third paragraph to try and get ahead of the story. Nan stood looking at the two of them looking at each other. ‘I’ll cook it, so,’ she announced.
Sometimes when I’m lying here and the day outside is that warm mugginess we get in wet summertime, when you know the sun is shining somewhere high above the drizzle but all we have is this jungle-warm dampness thronged with midges, my mind goes a little García Márquez-meets-Finn MacCool and when Nan cooks the fish by the fire the whole house becomes imbued with salmon-ness and foreknowledge. The whole history of us fills the air.
Virgil is to sit at the table.
‘Sit at that table,’ Mary says. She’s all business. She has that no-nonsense practicality of a countrywoman and in a flash she’s back and across the kitchen with mugs, plates, cutlery. She’s filling the milk jug from the larger jug, sawing into a loaf, plating slices, feeding turf to the fire, and at no time looking at Virgil Swain.
He sits. In Spencer Tracy’s chair.
‘That was my husband’s chair,’ Nan says, taking the head off the fish.
‘I’m sorry.’ He shoots up like he’s been stung, stands in the perplex of the moment until Mary says, ‘It’s all right, go on, sit.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sit.’
‘Will I take this . . . ?’
‘Sit.’
He sits back down but on the very edge of the chair. His trouser legs are dark flags to his thighs, boots leaking the river, and down the slope of the floor run two little streams of his arrival in their lives.
‘Not a bad fish,’ Nan says, head-down and doing serious industry with the knife.
It is in fact an incredible fish. It’s an Elizabeth Bishop fish and can be found in her Collected Poems (see Book 2,993), but Nan believes that praise is a forerunner of doom. The head and tail go in a pan with butter and salt. They spatter out the possibility of conversation. Then Mary carries them on a plate, calls ‘Sibby Sibby Sibby’ at the front door, and although I’ve never met a cat in Clare not called Sibby this one knows it’s her and comes from where all day she sits on the roof of the henhouse watching the Hens Channel. Virgil can see Mary through the window. He watches the way her hair falls as she bends to the Sibby, her dress holding the line of her knee, her fingers playing on the cat’s head and confusing it into choosing between two pleasures, wanting the caress and the salmon at the same time.
History of the Rain Page 17
