History of the Rain (18 page)

Daphne and Penelope had each other. They were never a problem to Grandmother. They were their own mini-company and, as I said, from early on they Selected their own Society and shut the door.

But what was Grandmother to do with Virgil? Without his father she feared her son would, well, I’m not sure what she feared exactly, but considering Abraham and considering The Reverend, maybe it was safe to suppose something Swain-odd. By that stage Ashcroft was in the first stages of dilapidation. It’s another truth universally acknowledged that a woman without a husband suddenly notices the frailties of her accommodation. She knew it hadn’t happened overnight but she woke one morning and noticed that dry, wet and medium damp rot had settled throughout the house, that paint was leaving the upper walls of the drawing room in alarmingly large bubbled flakes, the floorboards in the foyer were being eaten at their ends, the piano lid had a subtle but certain buckle and the guest-room chimney was lying out in the middle of the Front Circle. So while she figured out what to do with Virgil she told him to attend to these.

That was Grandmother’s style.
Attend to these please, Virgil
. And off out the door with her, doing the Kittering version of Queen Victoria, and keeping her nose tilted up just enough to keep breathing in sweet denial.

Clearly she had never met my father.

Two things were certain. One, that he would set about the tasks with that fierce boy-concentration I remember seeing in Aeney, and two, that he would fail hopelessly. Still, he banged and sawed, he painted over the dark stains coming on the walls and he stuffed the gaps between the window sashes with newspaper.

Ashcroft was in a time warp. I’m not sure it was even in this country. Whenever my father told of it the story was always in bits and pieces, fragments he’d drop into some telling, but the moment I heard them I was already creating the imagined version. The version where the boy is expected to become the man in the big house that’s falling down and where these beefy Meath-men Gaffney and Boucher come up the drive with ladders tied to the top of their van and scratch their heads that there are still people living like this in Ireland. The men are served tea and biscuits in the back kitchen, but they’re served it in Aynsley china cups with hairline cracks in them. My father does the serving. He’s Little Lord Swain I suppose. His clothes come from Switzers in Dublin which is Top Notch but they’re threadbare and wrong-sized, and to Messrs Gaffney and Boucher eccentric. He wears slippers inside the house and out and his red-stockinged toes peek through. He has three layers of shirt, some with collars some without, none tucked in. He has that English kind of hair that is too unruly for a comb and is now speckled with paint but he seems not to mind in the slightest. While he brews the tea on the Aga the men talk of things in Meath and my father stands reading a book. He has no idea what they’re talking about, they may as well have been telling the news from Brobdingnag. I’ve looked for this scene in Elizabeth Bowen (Book 1,365,
The Last Septembe
r
; Book 1,366,
The Death of the Heart
, Anchor, New York) and in William Trevor (Book 1,976,
The Collected Stories
, Penguin, London) and Molly Keane (Book 1,876,
Good Behaviour
, Virago, London) and in
Birchwood
(Book 1,973, John Banville, W.W. Norton, New York) but I’ve never quite found it, and so have to believe my father didn’t invent it, it must be true; he stands reading Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
, holding the book in his left hand while with his right he pours the tea, his eyes not leaving the page. This act stops the men’s talk. Oddball they expect him to be, he’s a Swain in Ashcroft, but tea-pouring and Hemingway has a certain skill to it they recognise. That’s what Lost-in-a-Book looks like they’re realising, and they have a kind of natural countrymen’s appreciation. When Boucher asks my father why he’s not at school Virgil doesn’t stop reading, he’s feeling the pain of Jake Barnes and the fascination of Lady Brett Ashley. He’s standing in the damp basement kitchen of Ashcroft on an overcast summer’s day but he’s on his way to the boiling-hot bullfights in Pamplona, and so without taking his eyes from the page says, because I’m going to be a writer.

Teenage boys can be insufferable with certainty. It’s true. It’s their horror moans, Margaret Crowe says.

But Virgil was right in one way. There was no point in his going to school. He’d have to pretend he didn’t know as much as he did. School in Ireland back then was pretty much a priest and civil-servant factory depending on your proclivities. Rejects were sent into trade, because money and making money were generally frowned upon. If you failed at the Higher Subjects and didn’t show any skill at Maths and Latin you were sent into Commerce, which was basically a dirty word back then. I guess it took half a century to reverse this, to get to the place where the Maths and Latin boys were the lower division and a newsagent like Seanie O could buy four hotels in Bulgaria and like a Lesser Dictator drive through Faha in a black-windowed Land Rover. Either way my father was not going to school.

But he was next to useless around the house. For a time Grandmother didn’t notice, or she pretended not to. To keep him busy she gave him chores.

‘The banister, Virgil, will you see to it?’

‘Virgil, the door to the guest room on the upper landing,’ she said in passing, handing him the porcelain knob that had come off in her hand.

Things like that. They were strangers to each other and were living in the big vacuum that came after Abraham. It happens in the Bible too, a big character leaves and there’s a natural hole while God figures out who He’s going to send on next. In the Bible Abraham dies when he’s 175 years old. He was a good character and God didn’t want to let him go. After a while He sent on Esau. He was a doozie. When he first came forth, it says, he was red all over
like a hairy garment
.

I’m just saying.

Dad was able to fix nothing but between chapters he tried. There was just him and his mother rambling around in the big house then.

‘Virgil, be a dear and bury Sarsfield.’

History had turned violent again and Mr MacGhiolla with a special gleam in his eyes had departed for the North. He left my father books with trapped strands of red hair and a faint sulphuric whiff of nationalism trapped within the pages.

My father and his mother lived on in dust and dilapidation, ate little nothing meals of Branston Pickle on toast, tinned kippers, the unfortunately named Bird’s Custard, and had BBC radio crackling on in the background. Grandmother didn’t believe things should have Eat Before dates. She didn’t believe things went off until well after you had cut off the blue parts and the parts that were furred, and even then there was always a portion that was perfectly fine, Virgil.
Perfectly fine
. Eat Before dates were all nonsense as far as she was concerned, a conspiracy of shopkeepers to fool the less discerning into purchases. Here was some Marmite that was supposed to be gone off a year ago. But it was Perfectly Fine.
Marmite cannot go off, Virgil
. Her shopping was virtually non-existent, and without speaking of it there developed inside Ashcroft a strategy of improvisation; you looked in the cupboard and you chose a tin of something, you opened it and sniffed. If you were still standing you went ahead. There was still a large wine cellar, and Grandmother began on the oldest bottles, reasoning, like your narrator, that she could be dead before she reached the present. In Abraham’s study my father found a vast supply of cigarettes, and in the autumn evenings when he read Hemingway at the top of the stairs under the one bulb that was replaced he took up smoking, and almost at once arrived by his father’s side in the battlefields of France.

One summer’s day a banker called Mr Houlihan, for whom I always see Mr Gusher in
Bleak House
, a flabby gentleman
with a moist surface
, rang the non-ringing doorbell. He attended a while, turned to consider the fallen chimney in the Front Circle, turned back, dabbed his forehead to no effectiveness, chewed the blubbery excess of his lower lip, rang the non-ringer again, looked up at the ruined majesty of Ashcroft, looked down at the polish of his shoes, knocked on the knocker peremptorily, three firm raps as befitted his station, attended once more, dabbed once more, and was in the process of his third attempt when Virgil came round the side and told him that door didn’t open any more.

Virgil was wearing his pyjamas under a too-big blue blazer of Abraham’s. He brought Mr Houlihan down the steps and in through the basement, passing through the kitchen where Purvis the cat licked the Branston lid and four empty bottles of milk of various period soured the general air, then up the back steps, Mr Houlihan’s shoes squeaking, taking care to put no weight on the fourth from top, arriving into the gloom of the windowless corridor where a lightless lightbulb hung, Virgil leading with the confidence of the blind in a world gone blind, Mr Houlihan feeling his way with a moist horror.

Circuitously then, they arrived in the front hall just inside the same front door and Virgil said, ‘I’ll get Mother.’

Mr Houlihan attended and dabbed and considered the aspect. He had not been inside Ashcroft before. As a boy he had once climbed the orchard wall. He’d once viewed the exotic kingdom it was from the wild grass of the Long Meadow, and once, walking home from the Brothers, Abraham had driven past him in the dusty old Humber that was such a dark brown it looked
plum
. But now here he was, in Ashcroft, on the bank’s business. He gave a firm down-tug to the bottom of his jacket. Dampness foreshortened it. He chewed at his lips and blinked. In the front hall were two tall mahogany chairs against the wall either side of the front door. They were chairs that no one ever sat on. They were the sort of excess furniture people had in houses like that. These were wedding gifts, one-for-Him, one-for-Her sort of thing, His and Her Majesty kind of chairs with stiff backs and faded embroidered seats that some seamstress had done in the early Louis times. They were the sort of thing French people love, because they’re beautiful and completely impractical and because only French derrières could ever really fit in them. When I saw the Hers one day in Aunt Daphne’s I couldn’t imagine an Irish backside ever sitting on it.

But Mr Houlihan’s did. Perhaps overcome by the anxiety of the occasion, perhaps to escape the squeak of his shoes which seemed to undermine his authority, Mr Houlihan sat up onto the chair.

No sooner had he landed then he realised the proportions of the chair were more decorative than human because his feet did not touch the ground.

‘Mr Houlihan,’ Grandmother boomed.

Grandmother’s English heritage meant that she had that Empire voice, that come-out-of-your-grass-huts-and-give-us-your-treasures-for-our-museums kind of voice. The woman could boom. It was seriously terrifying. Even years later when my father imitated her and she seemed part Margaret Thatcher and part horse Aeney and I were still frightened.

She boomed out his name and walked ahead of him into the drawing room. She didn’t say
How do you do
and she didn’t ask his business, she just led on. There’s a certain kind of presumption that comes with Kitterings. They can’t help it. They expect people to follow in their wake. Mr Houlihan scrambled to get down out of the chair and followed in his squeaking shoes.

Grandmother took the best seat at the top of the dining table, the window behind her so she was statuesque and mostly bust.

Like Mr Gusher, Mr Houlihan found his moistness getting excessive. He shone. Shining was in itself not problematic and could be interpreted as passionate. But then shining produced a general appearance of actual
wetness
.

‘Are you hot, Mr Houlihan?’

‘Not at all, no thank you, Mrs Swain.’

‘Kittering-Swain.’

‘Excuse me. Mrs Kittering-Swain. Well, perhaps yes, just a bit. Warm, actually. Hot. Yes. Is it hot in here?’

‘I don’t believe it is.’

The drawing room in summer produced flies. Though the long windows were never opened and my father had stuffed the gap between the sashes with newspaper, the flies found their way. Perhaps they came down the chimney. They lived in the middle air between floor and ceiling and though many died and remained on the floor until dust there always seemed what my father called a general population. Within five minutes they had found the moist peeled onion that was Mr Houlihan. No sooner had he opened his case and taken out a slim file and said, ‘The actual finances, Mrs Kittering-Swain,’ than he had to start batting away at the first of them.

Flies did not dare approach Grandmother.

‘The finances?’

‘Yes, well, Mr Swain didn’t actually . . .’ Houlihan ducked below a bluebottle. He paused, gnawed some more on the rubbery consistency of his lower lip. ‘The mortgage that he took on the house . . .’ The bluebottle came back at him.

And so it went on. Years later my father made a pantomime of it. He lay on the bed and Aeney and I played the flies. We buzzed our fingers through the air and sought out the florid face of Mr Houlihan as he tried to tell Grandmother that Grandfather had borrowed against the house and not repaid a penny. We flew into Mr Houlihan’s mouth as he asked her to agree to a repayment schedule he had drawn up. We screamed with laughter when Mr Houlihan swallowed a fly and coughed and spat and flapped his fat hands and made big wide bulbs of his eyes. We tickled Mr Houlihan in the place below his ribs where he was helpless to stop and couldn’t finish his sentences except to cry out
But the money, Mrs Kittering-Swain, the money!
and then he fell off the bed crash! on to the floor and was silent and Aeney and I giggled a bit and then got worried and looked over the edge and down to where Dad lay, his face soaking wet with laughter or tears we couldn’t say.