Mary comes back in. She doesn’t look at Virgil as she passes. She has the air of having so much to do. The air of Feeding the Guest. It’s a country thing. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. The Welcome is more important than anything else. You can be dying, you can have no money in the bank, your heart can be breaking from any number of aches, but still you have to lay the Welcome. Feed the Guest. Tomatoes have to be sliced, lettuce run under the tap and dabbed dry, three leaves on a plate. A scallion. Are there boiled eggs? There are. Bread, butter, salt. Whatever is happening in your life is of no consequence when you have to do the Welcome.
‘You sit,’ Nan says to Mary. She isn’t used to being Cupid. This is her first and only go and she’s that bit rough.
‘I’ll get napkins.’
Nan gives her the look that says Napkins? which is in subtitles only MacCarrolls can read.
Do they have napkins?
They do. They are paper Christmas ones. Mary puts one on each plate. Then she turns and presses her hands together and looks at the kitchen like there must be something more she could bring to the table. ‘You want something to drink,’ she says. It’s not a question. ‘We have Smithwick’s.’ She looks to Nan. ‘Don’t we?’
‘There’s a bottle of Guinness.’
‘Smithwick’s or Guinness?’
Her face turned to him makes his answer choke at the base of his throat. ‘Actually . . . just water would be fine.’
That’s when Nan turns. That’s when she knows this is a story she hasn’t read before.
‘Just . . . water. If . . .’ The words are trapped somewhere.
Both of the women look at him. What is he going to say? If you have any?
‘I don’t drink.’ He lends it the tone of apology. ‘When I was at sea there were many . . .’ That’s all he says. That’s the whole story. He lets the rest of it tell itself. There’s a moment of stillness while that story passes. Fighting the salmon-head Sibby makes the plate rattle on the flagstone outside. ‘Just water would be lovely.’
‘Water,’ Nan says to her daughter and turns back to tinfoiling the salmon.
Mary fills the big white jug with the blue bands on it. She fills it too full and lands it with a topspill on the table in front of him.
‘Lovely,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’ He doesn’t just mean the water. There is this thing about him then, this quality that I imagined when I sat in lectures on Edmund Spenser or Thomas Wyatt, an old-world gentlemanly chivalry and courtesy about Virgil Swain, as if everything that comes to him in those moments is so unexpected and marvellous that what he feels is grace.
‘You sit now,’ Nan says, still not quite managing the Cupid.
And because once the table is set and there’s absolutely nothing left in the press that can possibly be put out – cold-slaw, Colman’s mustard, pepper, ketchup – the next bit of The Welcome is to sit and ask How do you like it here?; Mary pushes her palms twice down her dress, jabs her fingers into her hair, gives up, crosses the kitchen, sharply pulls back the chair opposite him, and asks, ‘So, how do you like it here?’
‘Very much.’
‘Good.’
That exhausts the dialogue. She realises she hasn’t folded the napkins and takes hers and begins to press it in halves. Virgil does the same. Both of them are useless at it. Maybe evenness is a thing intolerable to love. Maybe there’s some law, I don’t know. She lines up the halves of hers, runs her forefinger down the crease. When she picks it up the thing is crooked. So is his. She undoes the fold and goes at it again, but the napkin wants to fall into that same line again and does so to spite her, and does so to spite him, or to occupy both with conundrums, or to say in the whimsical language of love that the way ahead will not be a straight line.
She doesn’t give up, and he doesn’t give up. And in that is the whole story, for those who read Napkin.
Mary and Virgil are sitting by the set table at the river window, Nan’s folded Clare Champion is on the sill, and at the fold there’s this ad saying The Inis Cathaigh Hotel for Weddings, so maybe Nan has more of sly Cupid in her than she is given credit for. They sit and look out at the all-knowing river rushing past and the Sacred Heart light is burning red overhead and the smell of the salmon rises and takes the place of conversation.
It’s not a fish smell like Lacey’s where since Tommy lost the job they only eat mackerel and out-of-date Lidl bread, or the Creegans, who since the buildings stopped live off river eels, and like the Zulus Dickens saw in Hyde Park and said were fair odoriferous; it’s this warm pink insinuation into the air. It’s lovely and gentle and penetrating and smells of the supernatural. To my mind that cooking salmon is pretty much the Swain version of the Thurible, and Nan has become the Thurifier, pokering the turf into life, turning the fish, peeling back the foil to check the progress, revealing the pink flesh and releasing a great waft of the impossible.
And I think right then Virgil looks at her. He looks across the table and when she feels him looking she flushes pink and warm and keeps her eyes on the river outside. She’s looking at the river and he’s looking at her looking at the river and there’s no way back for him now. This is his life right here, the salmon is telling him. This is it, the salmon says, and because the salmon is knowledge and knows everything Virgil knows it’s true. The air itself is changed, and what seemed impossible, that he might stop travelling and stop seeking a better world somewhere else, is suddenly not only possible but inevitable and here, in this woman’s face, it begins.
‘That’s done now,’ Nan says, licking the burn on her finger, and ferrying the fish to the table.
Chapter 5
You can’t really imagine your parents kissing. I can’t anyway.
You can’t imagine your own origin, the way you can’t imagine the beginning of the world. Not everything can be explained, is a standard Swainism. You just can’t imagine the consequences that led to you, or imagine those consequences not happening. You can’t imagine the world without you because once you do everything else takes on this kind of temporary sheen like breath blown on a window. I know I shouldn’t even be thinking of this, but maybe it’s because like Oliver in Chapter the First of Oliver Twist I am unequally poised between this world and the next. That’s my excuse anyway. You can’t imagine your own origin. It’s like this mysterious source or spring somewhere. You know it happened; that’s all.
Mam and Dad married in St Peter’s Church, Faha, and had a dinner after in the Inis Cathaigh Hotel, Kilrush. The Aunts were the only guests of the groom, and all of Faha came for the MacCarrolls, filling the Bride’s Side pews to bursting and giving the church the perspective of tilting to starboard. Though Mam didn’t know it yet, their wedding day was my father’s first time in a church since his own christening. He had never been confirmed, but Father Mooney, not a big believer in paperwork, a lover of roast beef, and in his last year before retiring into the saintly surrounds of Killaloe, supposed the certificate was on its way in the post and went full steam ahead.
It was a noted wedding in the parish memory. I think it was because Dad was still that DC Comics figure, The Stranger, and because none of the men in the parish could believe that Mam hadn’t chosen one of them. Long before the Consecration, before the head-bowing part when the Bride and Groom are up there kneeling together and there’s this sense of Something Big happening, men’s hearts were already breaking. Bits of longing and dreams were cracking off and sliding away the way Feeney’s field did into the sea. Father Mooney must have felt it, this giant ache that filled his church. In the Men’s Aisle there were some with prayerhands clasped knuckle-white, cheeks streaked with high-colouring, thin nets of violet, and their Atlantic blue eyes boring down into the red-and-black tiles hoping for an Intercession. When it didn’t come they did what men here do and by midnight had emptied the bar at the Inis Cathaigh and the emergency crates and barrels that were brought up from Crotty’s.
Mam didn’t care. She was only thinking here is my life, here it was beginni
ng, and although she had only heard the vaguest bits of the Swain story, only knew a few paragraphs of different chapters, she didn’t mind. When she was a girl, Mam had some wildness in her. She had a bit of the Anna Karenina thing, not in the Other Man sense but in the way Anna longed for life with a capital L. I’ve read Anna Karenina (Book 1,970, Penguin, London) cover to cover twice, and both times couldn’t help thinking that in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there’s some kind of holiness. I’m with Anna. She’s the greatest woman character ever created and the one I most wish would come up the stairs and sit by the bed and tell me what to do with Vincent Cunningham.
Mam took a leap. That’s the thing. She took a leap with a man who had no employment or apparent friends, whose sisters were strange gazelles in long wool coats with fierce buttons, a man whose mystery was encapsulated in the phrase Away at Sea, who had come back for no reason other than to find her. She couldn’t possibly know she would be happy with Virgil Swain, not really. But she was the daughter of Spencer Tracy, and there was something in him she trusted. She couldn’t have explained it. It was a mystery. But she believed in it. It’s that MacCarroll thing, Tommy says, belief in mystery. It’s well known. He married his Maureen because they ran out of crisps in Cusack Park and she had a bag.
The honeymoon was one night in Galway.
When they came back Nan had prepared The Room. Dad moved in with the baffled deepsea shyness of a character just arriving in a story already underway. He had the awkwardness of an alien. It was his first home, but it wasn’t his. Like Mr Lowther in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Book 1,980, Penguin Classics, London) he’d never be quite at home in his own home. There were MacCarrolls in the stones, MacCarrolls in the rafters, MacCarrolls up the chimney. And then there was Nan.
In those first weeks he had to sail around her. The kitchen was hers. She was already in it when he woke. She was still in it when they went down to bed in the evening. The first sounds of morning were the leaden thump of the bread dough.
‘Morning, Bridget.’
He sounded like an American to her. She took a puff on her cigarette. ‘Morning.’ She couldn’t get around his name yet.
He had to stoop to look out the deep-sill window. ‘Not raining,’ he said.
‘Yet.’
‘Would you like tea?’
‘I’ve had tea.’
‘I’m going to make some for Mary.’
Thump. She flipped the dough on its back, knuckled its swollen belly, picked up the cigarette and gave it another puff. Because she hated the sight of butts, because she associated them with the men with Italian accents who always got shot first in the black-and-white movies, Nan had already developed the ability to smoke cigarettes entire without losing a fragment of ash. After the first few goes she smoked upwards, turning her head sideways and in under the cigarette chimney-style so the little tower of ash balanced off her hand and never fell.
Virgil moved the kettle from the side of the range on to the hot plate, and stood, heating his hands that didn’t need heating, his eyes travelling the shelves, the walls, the dresser, taking in everything, the small silver trophy one of Grandfather’s greyhounds won an age ago in Galway, the little stack of Memoriam Cards standing face out with the memory of the latest Late, the plastic Infant of Prague, the twist of brown paper holding unused carrot seeds from Chambers’s in Kilrush, the Sacred Mission Fathers calendar with the one picture of black African children, the Saint Martin de Porres one that was never used with a picture of Peruvians and permanent January, the ESB bill standing upwards in a mug so as not to be forgotten, the three white porcelain eggcups with miniature hunting scenes that were a gift from Peggy Nottingham and were never used for eggs but hoarded thumbtacks and sometimes hairclips and two spare red Christmas lightbulbs, a whole history of things that made Our House.
Everything was already in place; that was the thing. If he opened a drawer in the dresser he’d find it crammed with what appeared to be rubbish – dried-out Crayola markers, worn-down stubby pencils, tangles of string, rubber bands, playing cards with the Seven of Diamonds and the Three of Spades missing, a single red battery, a round flat box of hard sweets long stuck together, a golfball, a tiny screwdriver that came in a Christmas Cracker, matchbooks, a yoyo, a mouth organ – things unremarkable except in the aftermath of death when they take on themselves a portion of haunting.
Where would he fit in this house?
The kettle began to boil. ‘Are you sure you won’t have tea?’
‘That’s not boiled. Leave it boil a while.’ She didn’t look up. The dough was surrendering. ‘What are you intending to do?’
‘To do?’
‘Here. For a living.’ With full forearm force, bang!, she flung the dough down on to the floury table.
‘Well, there’s the land,’ Virgil said.
‘The land is bad. You’re not a farmer.’
‘I could learn.’
The kettle was at full steam now, an urgent plume racing to ten o’clock, but he didn’t lift it.
‘Do you know anything else?’ She didn’t look up. She gave the kneading the thumbs.
What did he know?
He knew Ahab, he knew Mr Tulkinghorn, he knew Quentin Compson and Sebastian Flyte and Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Bovary and Alyosha Karamazov, he knew Latin Declensions and French Verbs, Hernán Cortés, Euclid, Knots, the Capitals of the World, how to parse a sentence, how to live on tinned food and powdered milk, he knew what the sun looked like in the eveningtime in December off Punta Arenas, how the wind off Cape Town carried the scent of sage in spring, he knew tides and tempests, he knew there was an island in Cuba called La Isla de la Juventud that bore exact resemblance to the geography of RLS’s Treasure Island, but Virgil Swain did not know anything he could do in the County Clare.
Nan worked the dough into a rough circle, and then with the base of her hand chopped a cross into the top. ‘The land it will have to be then,’ she said. She rubbed her hands together, balling crumbs she slapped off her palms. ‘I’ll have tea, so.’ She drew on the last of the cigarette, turned on the tap and doused the ash, looked out the window at the haggard and the haybarn with the three panels hanging loose. ‘If you’re making it.’
Irish people hate to lose face. That’s Number One dictum. That’s why the Bust was what Kevin Connors called an unholy show, and why the whole nation was mortified at the carry-on of the bankers and developers. Not so much because it happened, but because everyone in the world now knew that it had happened and we were once again Those Irish. We’ll bear anything in the privacy of our own homes, as long as the world doesn’t have to know.
How Public, like a frog, is dear Emily’s version (Book 2,500, Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, Faber & Faber, London).
So, right then and there, Nan decided that if Virgil Swain was going to be a farmer he wasn’t going to be one that people would laugh at.
She opened the kitchen door, shouted, ‘Mary, come get your tea!’ and told Virgil, ‘Come with me.’
They went out on the acres, Nan in cuff-down wellies and hooded green army coat, Virgil in a too-long woollen jumper under the leather jacket and the low fishing boots that were already drinking mud before they crossed the Fort Field. They went in sinking Suck Mode, each step announcing itself, a kind of spluck-splosh procession that scattered the blackbirds back up into the rain and down into the next field, Nan travelling faster because she knew how to do the swaying-hip swing, dip and recover that people here know is how you walk these wet river fields, which means you don’t step down you sort of roll across them, which is great for waterland walking but maybe the reason the parish is Number One in Clare for hip replacements. She spoke curtly as she went. ‘The drain on the western corner needs clearing every month.’ It looked like it hadn’t been cleared in years. ‘A wet spring and you can’t travel this field till August.’ It had several silver ponds in it. ‘This is The Big Meadow.’ ‘This is the Small Meadow. My husba
nd cut it by hand.’ She took him across every inch of the land in which we grew muck puddles, rushes and occasional grass. He didn’t say anything. They climbed the wall into Lower Meadow, because the gate was no longer attached to the pier, was tied with twine and looped with crazy brambles. He offered her his hand but she didn’t take it, stepped in front of him and crossed with goat nimbleness, turned to look back when she heard the clatter of falling stones as he came after. In the Bog Meadow she showed him the four cows. She called ‘Hup!’ to them on the top of the stile, maybe to alert them that here was the new farmer, to have them do that whole-body-shiver thing horses do and present their best profiles. But whether from the mesmerism of the rain, the dullness of having several stomachs full of twisted mulch or the fact they were wearing brown-stockings of mud to their hocks, the cows were in cow stupor and didn’t move. ‘That’s our stock,’ Nan said.
Virgil looked at them. He had no clue what to say. The rain that was not called rain was falling on both of them. The river was running the way it is always running to get away and there was a little edgy breeze coming across from McInerney’s to remind you the back of your neck was wet. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.
Now that was not what Nan expected. She had no answer for that. She looked at him.
But Virgil was already away in the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In a way, it helped that the land was as bad as it was. It meant that here he would not only have to Out-Wiltshire Wiltshire he would also have to Out-Ashcroft Ashcroft. So the effect was not to discourage him, it was the contrary. I may be the only one who thinks that here in Muck-and-Drizzle land is the least-like-paradise place there is in the whole country, but even so you’d have to say it was going to take dreaming.
History of the Rain Page 18
