History of the Rain (16 page)
Vincent was in the same class as Aeney once. He sat behind him in Mr Crossan’s, and for a while became his only friend. He’s thin and made up of angles. If you had to draw him using only straight lines you could. Even his hair is straight. It’s a little brown hedge rising evenly off the top of his intelligence. According to him I brought him to Literature. He says it like it’s this far-distant place and there was no way he would find out how to get there if it wasn’t for me talking about some book I’d read and him going off to find it. Of course once I knew that I started intentionally mentioning some of the Obscures. That’s part MacCarroll and part Impossible Standard. I’d say I read a great story by Montague Rhodes James, ‘A School Story’ (Book 555,
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
, Oxford), which told of a man found dead in his bed with the mark of a horseshoe on his forehead, and Vincent would head off, driving Eleanor Pender potty in the Mobile Library until she tracked it down and he’d read it and come hurrying back up the stairs here to say you were right Ruth, that was a good one.
‘Which one was that?’
‘ “A School Story”. You remember. The horseshoe on the forehead.’
‘That one? I’ve forgotten all about that one. I’m reading
Riceyman Steps
by Arnold Bennett now.’
Goodness provokes bitchiness. It’s mathematical. It’s somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely people are married to horrible ones. Read
Middlemarch
(Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London) if you don’t believe me. There’s something in me that can’t just let it be. Goodness is a tidy bow you just can’t help wanting to pull loose.
Besides, there’s the added complication: I’m not well. If I wasn’t, if I wasn’t the Number One Patient in the parish from the family that has already been visited by Doom, would he still be coming calling? Am I Vincent Cunningham’s path to Sainthood? You see, you just can’t trust goodness.
Sometimes after he’s gone I’ve wondered what it would be like to slip into a different story and actually end up being Mrs Vincent Cunningham. You know, Chapter XXXVIII, ‘Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and clerk were alone present.’ (Book 789,
Jane Eyre
, Penguin Classics, London.)
Cunningham is a bad surname, but it’s not dreadful. Not as bad say as Bigg-Wither. Mr Bigg-Wither (not kidding) was Jane Austen’s suitor. He fell in love with the sharp bonnet-pinched look, was very partial to one flattened front hair curl, and tiny black eyes. He pulled in his person and fluffed out his whiskers to propose to her.
Now that took courage. You have to grant him that. Proposing to Jane Austen was no walk in the park, was in the same league as Jerry Twomey proposing to Niamh ni Eochadha who had the face and manners of a blackthorn. Still, Bigg-Wither went through with it. He got out his proposal.
And Jane Austen accepted. Honestly, she did. She was fiancé-ed. She did her best impression of a Jane Austen smile then retired straight away to bed. Up in the bed she lay in her big nightie and couldn’t sleep, not, surprisingly enough, because of the bonnet, but because of the suffocating way the name Bigg-Wither sat on her. That, and the thought of giving birth to little Bigg-Withers.
The following morning when she came down to him negotiating his toast and marmalade in past the whiskers, she said, ‘I cannot be a Bigg-Wither,’ or words to that effect, the engagement was off, and all the world’s Readers sighed with relief. Because a happy Jane Austen would have been useless in the World Literature stakes.
One day, to advance his suitoring, Vincent leaned forward to the bed, raindrops sitting on the hedge of his hair, and told me that Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved nurse was a Cunningham.
He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there’s something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing
Treasure Island
he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word
adventure
means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his
The Art of Writing
(Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D’Artagnan from
The Three Musketeers
(Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: ‘When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.’ And when you read
Treasure Island
you feel you are casting off. That’s the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world.
For Vincent, bringing me the news of the Cunningham connection was the same as bringing me chocolates. He sat there by the bed looking as happy as, well, a Cunningham. He’d been reading up on RLS (as an engineer Vincent used the Internet; it’s slow and dial-up here, the minister is still Rolling Out broadband, but he must be Rolling It Out around his own house, Paddy Carroll says) and it had taken Vincent hours but he’d gathered up a fair bit of RLS knowledge and even learned off a bit of
The Land of Counterpane
in which RLS is sick in bed and plays with toy soldiers in an imaginary world on his blankets.
‘Aeney had soldiers,’ he said. ‘I remember them. He kept them in a biscuit tin. And he had a farm in there. Do you remember? Little plastic cattle and horses and pigs and things.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘He had fences too, didn’t he, and . . .’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I’m an idiot,’ he said after a little while.
Give me credit. I know this is when I’m supposed to say, ‘No, Vincent, you’re not, not at all,’ and take his hand nineteenth-century-style and let the moment be a little bridge between us, but of course I didn’t. You can’t go encouraging the Vincent Cunninghams of the world because the truth is boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they’re a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there’s just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.
‘RLS,’ he said, getting back to safer ground after another while. ‘The chest wasn’t great with him.’
Clare people don’t like to be too blunt.
‘He had tuberculosis, Vincent,’ I said (Book 684,
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
, two volumes, Thomas Graham Balfour, Methuen, London). My father only had a falling-apart second-hand Volume Two, a book that has been to sea, has water-buckled pages, two Chapter Fours, and smells of Scotland.
‘Still, he bought four hundred acres in Upolu, Samoa,’ Vincent said. The Cunninghams are addicted to looking on the bright side.
‘He fell in love with a Fanny,’ I told him.
He allowed that a moment.
‘When he went to live there he took the name Tusitala. It means Teller of Tales,’ he said, smiling like this was a deeper layer of chocolates.
‘So did Keats.’
‘Took the same name? Wow.’
‘Loved a Fanny.’
‘Oh.’
The rain tattooed the skylight while his brain went back a few Windows on the search, then he remembered: ‘He was supposed to design lighthouses.’
‘His father did.’
‘So he was a sort of engineer really,’ he said triumphantly, having completed his own feat of mental engineering, connecting Vincent Cunningham to RLS and so to me. This kind of thing doesn’t feature in Ovid, but it will in
Vincent’s Way
if I ever get to write it.
He was just too happy-looking then so I said, ‘He hated engineering.’
There was no coming back from that. He sat quiet for a bit and I lay back against the awful pillows and thought
Ruth Swain you’re horrible
. And the rain fell some more and Vincent studied his hands in his lap, until at last I said: ‘When he died on the island on Samoa they cleared a path through the jungle all the way up to Mount Vaea so that he could be buried on the summit and see the sea. So I suppose there was some engineering in that.’
And Vincent said, ‘Ruth Swain,’ just that, just
Ruth Swain
, and he shook his long head like I was a wonder of some class and his face broke into this big smile he has like something was mended or Hope Renewed or I’d actually kissed him.
Un-real.
My father loved Aeney more than anything in the world. I’m allowed to say that. I’m not saying it out of hurt or disappointment or to undo some twist in my heart. I’m not saying it in a Bitch-of-the-Brouders God-Forgive-Me way, back of the hand covering the mouth, eyes wide and a hot whisper spreading some viciousness sideways into the world. I’m saying it because it’s true and because you’ll need to understand that. Aeney was a magical boy. I knew. We all knew. Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this
Ah
, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling
why am I so ordinary?
, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.
Aeney’s shining started Day One. He swam down the River Mam ahead of me and when he was landed he landed in the amazed wet eyes of my father. He was lifted gleaming in the gentling giant arms of Theresa Dowling, District Nurse, and she said
There now
and smiled the big dimple smile she has even though Aeney had started crying. He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say. Not the bumping rocking in the plump boat-hams of the District Nurse, not the view he was carried to of the swirling Shannon, not the first super-delicate cradling of Dad nor the warm damp breast of Mam stopped him. In the family legend, Aeney cried until I swam downriver after him, until Theresa Dowling said
Oh
and out I came, Australian front-crawling, red and gasping and apparently particularly hairy. Then he stopped.
Because, just like his father, our father was not young when we were born, there was an extra-ness to the joy. It’s not that we were unexpected, it’s that until his children were in his arms he hadn’t actually gotten further than the imagining of us. He was a poet, and the least practical man in the world. And a baby is a practical thing.
Two babies, well.
Right away Aeney was better at things than me. He knew the first skill of babies, Put On Weight, and thrived into early handsomeness before he was one year old. He was the kind of baby people peered in at. He was Number One Baby at Mass. Our first Christmas Maureen Pender wanted him to play Jesus on the altar, and he only lost out because Josephine Carr on the committee disqualified him saying Jesus was not a twin and put forward her tiny three-year-old Peter who God Bless Him she must have been feeding birdfood because he ended up not growing at all, playing the Faha Jesus until he was five, and is a trainee jockey above in Coolmore now.
Aeney had the golden hair nearly right away. His eyes blued. We both have the same eyes, but his grew blue as our father’s, as if he’d swam up through some underworld Mediterranean and some of it glinted still in the pools of his eyes.
How do you capture a brother as elusive as Aeney? How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?
His favourite foods, apples, Cheddar cheese, purple Cadbury’s Roses, Petit Filous.
His favourite colour, red.
His favourite sound, the singing of the cuckoo when it came, and which he always wanted to be first to hear, and for which he would go hunting by Ryan’s and McInerney’s, but would always be beaten by Francie Fahy who held the title: First in Faha to Hear the Cuckoo. But as Jimmy Mac says, Francie had family connections there.
Aeney’s favourite clothes, a pair of muddy blue no-brand runners whose laces were so stained you couldn’t tell they were once white except for the places beneath the eye-hole flap, a pair of khaki trousers whose knees Nan patched so many times they looked padded, a red jumper that was two sizes too big for him and which he wore holding the cuffs that came halfway down his palms. The cuffs frayed from being held and every so often Mam trimmed back the strands. He wore the jumper again and they frayed again and she trimmed them again but she never threw it out. He liked holding on to something. When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world.
His favourite thing to do, run. He’s a flier, Mr Mac said the year he formed the new Community Games Committee and decided Faha was going to be Put on the Map. Aeney was going in the Under-Eights on Honan’s field.
At that stage it was generally presumed that I was not someone who was going to Put Faha on the Map and so once the races started I was to share with Dympna Looney the important job of Holding the Ribbon at the finish line, which I didn’t think very important but my father said was Homeric, and though I didn’t know what that meant it made me feel a little flush of importance.
