History of the Rain (11 page)

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 Seamus Moran, whose wiry black hair all migrated to his knuckles after he ate out-of-date tinned sardines, told my mother once that his son Peter was Special Needs.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.

‘What did you say?’

‘At Highfield. Mr Figgs says Virgil is excellent.’

History repeats. That’s all there is to it. Patterns keep coming back, which either shows that people aren’t that complex or that God’s imagination just kept bringing Him back to these same obsessions. Maybe we are a way for Him to work things out with His Father.

Now that’s Deep.

Anyway, it’s not the Narrator’s weakness at characterisation. It’s that Grandfather is turning into Great-Grandfather.

He shifts his long legs back from the fire. Unbeknownst to him, the soles of his boots have been cooking nicely, and as he withdraws the long pole-vaulting legs and places the feet there’s a little singe-surprise, a little
dammit
sting, but he won’t betray it and give his wife that little I-told-you victory. Though Sarsfield, the more loyal of the hounds, raises an eyebrow in concern, Grandfather won’t let on. He just hears the word
excellent
and, as they said in those days, his hackles are raised. ‘Excellent? How is he excellent?’

He hates to hear it said out loud. That Swains never, ever,
ever
, praise each other openly, nor are they comfortable hearing other people praise them, is a dictum. They want their children to be excellent, to be beyond excellent, and invisible.

But, at the same time, the last thing Grandfather can tolerate is that any excellence of Virgil’s is claimed to be Kittering. It’s enough that Grandmother has scored three for her side already.

‘Generally. Excellent generally,’ she says. And then, out of that haughtiness she has, what in Flaubert is called
froideur
, and what in the Brouders is just Class-A Bitchiness, she adds, ‘He takes after my father.’

Phrase isn’t out of her mouth when Grandfather is walking his hot bootsoles to the door.

‘Virgil? Virgil, come down.’

Ashcroft House has two floors. (A Developer lives there now, but as Margaret Crowe says he bankruptured himself.) The upstairs rooms are too large for children and my father’s has a bed and table at opposite ends.

‘Virgil!’

He raises his head from Tennyson (a gorgeous red-covered gilt-edged edition, Book 444,
The Works of Alfred Tennyson
, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1 Paternoster Square, London, inside which there is a bookmark, Any Amount of Books, 56 Charing Cross Road). He’s in ‘Idylls of the King’.
There likewise I beheld Excalibur, before him at his crowning borne, the sword that rose from out the bosom of the lake
. But on his father’s calling of his name his heart leaps. He has that small boy adorableness and rushes down the big stairs. He opens and closes the door to the Drawing room swiftly and as a result sucks a great purgatorial pall of smoke out over his parents.

Margaret shoots off a spray.

‘Tell me. School, Virgil? How is it?’ Abraham asks.

My father has no idea he’s a cannonball. He has no idea he’s being readied, rolled in, prepared to be fired at his mother.

‘Good.’

‘Good?’

My father nods. ‘I like it.’ He smiles the big-eyed-boy adorable smile I will see in Aeney.

‘I see.’

‘It seems he’s very good at Latin. So Mr Figgs says,’ offers Grandmother. She has a way of speaking about you that makes you seem elsewhere. She allows a pause, before throwing to the window an under-her-breath: ‘Just like my father.’

‘I see.’ Abraham is backside-to-the-fire, hands behind back, chin at up-jut. ‘You find it hard, Virgil?’

‘No.’

‘I told you, Abraham. He’s excellent.’

Grandmother wasn’t great at smiling. She never got the hang of it as an expression of contentment. She approached the smile from the wrong end and started with the lips. The lips pulled back and up a little at the ends, but the eyes were saying something different.

The smile does it for Grandfather. There’s a moment he’s looking at Virgil and suddenly his blood stops. A chill comes up his back. It’s the same chill he had that night in Oriel College. It’s the chill that in three seconds is followed by a flush of heat and the flash of illumination. He’s helpless to stop or resist it. He’s looking at his son and in him he’s seeing Meaning, he’s seeing here’s the reason he fell wounded in the hole, here’s the reason
Tommy’s okay
, because although he’s fought against it ever since the Reverend died, although he’s tried to believe that in this life there’s nothing to believe in, in the end Swains can’t escape their nature.

‘Virgil,’ he says, ‘you will not be returning to Highfield School.’

Spray-spray. Spray-spray-
spray
. ‘What are you talking about, Abraham?’

‘That school has nothing more to teach him.’

‘Don’t be silly. How will he learn?’ She does the smile again. This time she adds an eyebrow in the manner of the Colonel.

Grandfather won’t have it. He won’t have eyebrows like that aimed at him. ‘That’s the end of it,’ he says and fires the full chin back at the raised eyebrow.

She gives him both eyebrows; he gives her the nostrils.

He’s taking Virgil over for himself, and that’s that. Let Grandmother have the girls – she already has – he will take Virgil. He will have one proper Swain. My father will be the reason the bullets missed Abraham’s heart. He will become The One.

For a more profound insight into the problem from a salmon’s perspective, see Mr Willis Bund’s
Salmon Problems
and
The Life of the Salmon
(Books 477 & 478, Sampson Low & Co., London). For my perspective, read on.

While his sisters went to school, a parade of tutors came to Ashcroft House for my father.

Some days when I am Poor, when I haven’t the energy to lift myself on the pillow, when the rain washes down the skylight and I want to sleep for ever, they visit.

Mr O. W. Thornton.

Mr J. G. Gerard, Mathematician.

Mr Ivor Naughton, Latin, Greek & Classics.

The young Mr Olde.

The old Mr Ebbing.

Mr Jeremiah Lewis.

They are walk-on parts. Each of them was hired and eventually fired once they made the fatal flaw of declaring Virgil brilliant.

Only one, Mr Phadraig MacGhiolla, makes a lasting impression. He’s the one who brings the folktales. He’s the one in the too-tight black suit with the up-forked red hair and fiery eyes of a nationalist who speaks Irish mythology. Teachers don’t always know when they’ve lit the torch paper. But MacGhiolla knew. He knew he’d entered Virgil Swain’s imagination and held up a flame when he told him of a boy who fell in love with a girl called Emer who said he could not have her unless he completed Impossible Tasks. The boy was sent to study warcraft in Scotland under the tutelage of the female warrior Scathach-the-Shadow. Scathach-the-Shadow was about twenty centuries ahead of Marvel Comics. Gaming was in the early development stages back then. One in every two gamers died. Being Scottish and a warrior meant that Scathach was ferociousness itself. She didn’t have a Console, she had a hawk with talons. The boy was sent to her to learn how to achieve the impossible, and when he did, when Scathach had brought him up through all the Levels, showed him all the Cheats, and listed him on the Roll of Honour as All-Time Number-One Player, he came back and entered the fortress where Emer was guarded.

He entered it by going upriver against the current.

The method he used was salmon-leaps.

Not kidding.

Virgil tried it out for himself. One day he sneaked out the back door into the rough tufted grass that looked like a green sea behind Ashcroft. He put his hands down by his sides, straightened himself to salmon-slimness, sucked in as much breath as he could and then, with face turned to blue sky, he blew hard, arching his back into bow-shape, and tried to leap upward.

Maybe it did work. Maybe he’d inherited something from the pole-vaulting legs. He felt sure there’d been some take-off. Definitely more than if he just jumped. Yes, there was definitely some
ascent
.

That was the beginning. And MacGhiolla, Son of the Fox, knew. What he didn’t know was that his own position was guaranteed the day he told Grandfather that Virgil was hopeless in Irish History, Culture & Language.

In the meantime, between husband and wife battle proper was commenced. Knocking and Straightening long over, Grandmother now took to a new field; she would not be outdone by Grandfather and so marshalled the girls into various endeavours of high achievement.

Piano was a particular favourite. Esther, Penelope and Daphne were each instructed by a Mrs Moira Hackett whose sense of humour was no longer intact and who personally had no music in her but employed the Irish Academy ruler-on-knuckles method to significant effect. The three girls were soon able to perform like upright porcelain pianists, backs a perfect plumb-line, shoulders squared, and only the curved claw-shapes of their fingers moving, producing a kind of flawless mechanical music only a little worse than the cheapest wind-up musical boxes. One evening when Abraham returned from fishing he was called in to the drawing room to hear three sequential versions of Chopin’s
Fantasie Impromptu
.

My father began the piano the next day.

His three sisters were all started on the violin.

Chapter 11

We pause here because The Narrator has to go to Dublin.

In general, I no longer go outside. It’s hard to explain. Unless you’ve felt it yourself, once you hear that you think
Oh-oh
, you look away but you think
She’s bonkers
, a little case of the
Do-Lallies
here, because who doesn’t go outside? Well, excuse me, I don’t. Get over it. Once I returned from university I had this dread pressing in on my chest. If I got to the front door my legs stopped working. That was it. I couldn’t breathe. I’d turn back in and sit on the arm of Nan’s chair. But the feeling didn’t pass. Glasses of water, air, deep breaths, blowing in a brown paper bag that had been emptied of onions, arm-pinches, Vicks inhaler, hot water with Vicks, more air (fanned
Clare Champion
), more water (sparkling), vinegar, a squirt of lemon, and a mouthful of whiskey, made no difference, neither did the little parade of the parish’s amateur psychiatrists who came and sat on the bed and played a game of Questions-with-no-Answers.
What is it you are afraid of, dear?

Please.

But now I have to go to Dublin. For Timmy and Packy this is a Big Day. Uniforms are ironed, boots cleaned, and Hair has met Comb. It’s like we’re going up for the All-Ireland, only instead of a team of lads in those too-short shorts and shin-high socks they wear in GAA, I’m going to be facing The Consultant.

In a secret room somewhere long ago, Jimmy Mac says, the leaders of the Medical Profession decided the best way to turn consultants into millionaires was to only have about four for the whole country. Once they had the four the doors were locked. So it takes about ten years to get to see one. Consultants are mystical as Magi, but in inverse, you have to travel to them. You have to be in Serious Condition to be sent, and if you are it’s pretty much the end of the yellow brick road. Mary Houlihan in Knock was three years buried when she got called. Her husband Matty said he’d a right to dig her up and bring her corpse, only Dignam the ticket inspector in Ennis probably wouldn’t allow her the free pass.