History of the Rain (2 page)

Just a brief shiver of great-grandfather.

What the Reverend bequeaths to our story is the Swain Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In the year eighteen hundred and ninety-five he leaves it to his son at the christening, dipping the boy into the large cold name
Abraham
, and stepping back from the wailing, jutting the jaw. He wants his son to aspire. He wants him to outreach the ordinary and be a proof to God of the excellence of His Creation. That is how I think of it. The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can’t ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. You have to keep polishing your soul ahead of Entering the Presence. Something like that.

And Grandfather Abraham began polishing straight away. By age twelve, nineteen hundred and seven, he was a medal magnet. For Running, One Hundred Yards, Two Hundred Yards, Long Jump, Hop Step and Jump, Grandfather was your man.

Then he discovered the Pole-vault.

In St Bartholemew’s School for Boys (established 1778, Headmaster, Thomas Tupping, a man notable for nothing but having eight too many teeth and lips that never touched) Abraham took the Reverend’s restlessness to new heights, tearing down the runway with his lance and firing himself into the sky.

And that’s where he arrives in my imagination, my mad grandfather, a blur-boy of white singlet and shorts, short sharp hair, blue eyes, charging like a knight towards an invisible enemy. There’s no one watching. It’s just him after school on a grey afternoon. Blackbirds have settled on the playing fields. The bounce of his stride echoes in the pole. It’s not fibreglass but wood. The wind must think it’s a mast and he a sail too small for lifting.

His pace quickens, his knees lift, the blackbirds turn. Down the cinderway he comes, crisp
crunch-crunch-crunch
, man on the end of a stick. Mouth pursed out and open he blows a wind-note with each step,
whuu-whuu-whuu
, announcing himself, warning the air that he is coming. His eyes are locked on the concrete trap. It’s his entranceway. The pole lowers, wavers slightly. A hard clack is the last sound Grandfather hears on earth.

And here he is, Abraham in lift-off, his soul bubbling as he climbs, entering the upper air with perfect propulsion and ascension both. An instant and he no longer needs the pole. Hands it off. It falls to ground, a distant double-bounce off the solid world below. The blackbirds take fright, rise and glide to the goalmouth. Amazement blues my grandfather’s eyes. He’s at the apex of a triangle, a pale angular man-bird. His legs air-walk, his everything unearthed as he crosses the bar above us all. There is a giddy gulp of the Impossible and he sort of rolls over in the sky, pressed up against the iron clouds where God must be watching. His mind whites out. His body believes it is winged, has vaulted into some other way of being. Abraham Swain is Up There and Away, paddling the air above the ordinary and just for a moment praying:
let me never fall to earth
.

Chapter 2

Mrs Quinty says I have Superabundance of Style and must trim back. She was once my English teacher and comes now Tuesdays and Thursdays from the Tech after she finishes. I’m on her rounds. I’m her Tuesdays with Ruth (and Thursdays). Because of me Mrs Quinty will be taking the bypass around Purgatory and shooting straight on into Heaven.

She predicts a Brilliant Career for me if I will only Trim Back.

I will also need to stay alive.

Before she comes upstairs to my room she has a few words with my mother about My Condition.

Mrs Quinty is a small tight bow. I mean,
tight
. Everything is to be kept neat and precise. But since the departure of Mr Quinty, a lorry driver with black curls who left our narrative some time previous, she now fears something secretly loosening in her all the time. To address this she frequently gives herself a little pull in, a little sharp tug on her blouse or jacket that goes unremarked in these parts because people know her circumstances and allow for oddities. If Mr Quinty had Passed On it would have been better. If he had Gone to His Reward. Mrs Quinty would cope; she suited widowhood, and had the wardrobe. But as it was, despite Tommy Quinty being heavily pregnant with eighteen years of Victoria Sponge, Lemon Drizzle, Apple Upside Down, Rhubarb Custard Tart and Caramel Eclairs, a brazen long-legged hairdresser called Sylvia in Swansea Wales managed to overlook the Collected Cakes and see only the black curls of the same Tommy.

He stopped in for a Do, Nan says, and he’s not Done yet.

Although everyone in the parish knows this since Martin Conway took the Under-Sixteen-and-a-Halfs over to a match, stopped in Swansea for chips and toilets and saw Tommy in an outrageous quiff, powder-blue blazer and
white
shoes, no one lets on to Mrs Quinty. As if by secret agreement it was decided Tommy Quinty would drop out of all conversation. Sometimes he’s in a whisper down in Ryan’s or a joke out at the Crossroads on the night of a forty-five drive when the tarts are served, but for the most part he has Left the Narrative.

But in doing so he left Mrs Quinty a chill. Also migraine attacks, tinnitus, inflammation of the ear, Eustachian catarrh, occasional left-sided deafness caused she will tell you by retracted membrana tympani, swelling of glands, lacunar tonsillitis, dizziness, disorders of the digestive system – All Sorts – and what she herself diagnosed as cheese-breath.

Mrs Quinty suffers. Of illnesses she has whatever is going. Her only hope is to keep the little bow of herself tight and teach on. The teaching keeps her going. When I was her pupil a hundred years ago her classes were notable for being the only ones in which absolute silence reigned. Even though her frame was diminutive and her dress sense very Costume Drama, everyone knew: you don’t mess with Mrs Quinty. She came in and the first thing she did was open the windows. It could be hail and gale outside. Mrs Quinty opened the windows. Then she took out these little wipes and wiped down the surface of the desk. That lady brought with her her own
environment
.

Still, the Tech was the last place you’d think she should be. The native population of that school was at no point under the control of Mr Cuddy. Perplexity at managing teenagers had given him a face like the letter Z and he kept it largely in his office where he pursued more available consolations by solving crossword puzzles. From school-life, one example: one Christmas week the crib was set up in the Assembly Hall, a life-size alabaster Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, two not-life-size camels, two lambs, one cow, one donkey, and three very Islamic-looking Magi. They were laid out on a bed of genuine hay (used) that Jacinta Dineen brought in her bag. Then, while Mrs Murphy in Room 7 was synthesising ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, Baby Jesus was kidnapped. A ransom note was left in the hay. It said: ‘We have Jesus.’

Mr Cuddy called in every student for questioning –
Have you seen Jesus?
– and eventually announced that unless Jesus was returned immediately there would be no Christmas Mass.

Baby Jesus did not return. He had not been seen on any of the school buses heading in the general direction of Kilrush or Kildysart or Ennis and so it was concluded: Our Lord was still in the Tech.

The First Years were recruited to help look for Jesus. Every desk, cupboard, locker was opened. But nobody could find Him.

Another note appeared in the hay. It said: ‘Stop serching’.

By this stage the whole school was on the side of the kidnappers and false sightings were announced hourly. Jesus was in the Chemistry Lab. He was in the Girls’ Changing Room before Games. He was taking French Oral with the Sub Miss Trigot.

That lad is everywhere, Thomas Halvey said.

Mr Cuddy decided to call the kidnappers’
bluff; he reversed himself and said Christmas Mass was going ahead anyway. He figured when the parents came in Baby Jesus would be back in his crib. The Mass would shame the kidnappers into surrendering their hostage.

It didn’t.

We all attended that Mass with the crib on the altar and, in the place of the Infant, a lamb on whose forehead someone had taped the word ‘Jesus’.

No, the Tech is the last place you’d expect to find Mrs Quinty. But somehow the teaching saves her from herself. In the classroom she’s invincible. It’s ordinary life she finds hard.

When Doctor Mahon asks her why she doesn’t retire from teaching on Medical Grounds her answer is: I have My Cross.

When she comes in downstairs Mrs Quinty rests her cross and asks my mother what I am on. Like Synge on Aran I hear the world through a neat knothole in my floor.

‘Is her mouth very dry? Mine was terribly dry.’

‘Did you bring any cake?’ Nan calls from her seat by the fire. Nan is Mam’s mam, she’s a Talty, ninety-seven or ninety-nine, is shrunk to a doll-sized grandmother with large hands and feet. She has what Margaret Crowe calls the All-Simons, which is basically a refutation of the invention of time; all time is the same to Nan, she has that most remarkable of skills, the habit of living, and has it so perfected now that death has given up and gone away. In her Foxford blanket and ancient pampooties Nan is part-Cherokee, part-Mrs Markleham in
David Copperfield
. Mrs Markleham was the one who was nicknamed The Old Soldier, a little sharp-eyed woman who always wore the one unchangeable hat. Mrs Markleham’s was ornamented with artificial flowers and two hovering butterflies; Nan has the same sharp eyes and hers is a man’s tweed cap. It’s flat and old and faded, but plays a part later on.

‘How is she doing today?’

‘No change, really,’ Mam says.

As politeness dictates, the conversation goes on, but we have no time for it. Mrs Quinty tightens up and brings herself up the stairs. Thirteen steep steps, more a ladder than a stairs proper, rising from the up-slope of the flagstones across from the fire and up over the dresser. For a woman with so many illnesses she has a firm step, even carrying her cross. Here she comes.

‘Now,’ she says when she enters the room. She says it as though she’s bringing herself into focus, or as if to herself she’s announcing her own landing in this bedroom with the big rough handmade bed, the skylight and the three thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight books.

It allows her to regain her breath, to consider the racing of her heart, some murmurous inner pulsing –
gall bladder?
– and to adjust her eyes to entering the sky.

‘Now.’

There’s the pale gleam you have to get used to up here, especially because of the rain. The rain streams down the skylight so it looks like we’re under a river. In the sky.

‘Now, Ruth.’

‘Hello, Mrs Quinty.’

And while she gets her breath, Dear Reader, get acquainted. See how compact she is. See her pinched face, tight to the chin, as if Life was a very narrow thing you had to get through. Pointed, sharp-looking knees, charcoal skirt to shins, grey tights, shoes size six, laced, polished but puddle-dulled by the weathers of west Clare and by crossing our yard, mouse-coloured blouse with top button concertinaing together some flaccid cords in her throat and lending her voice that tendency towards –
Sorry, Mrs Quinty
– squeak, black cardigan with general dusting of chalk, tiny linen handkerchief in the sleeve at the ready. Her hair is a bun – sad reminder of Tommy the Cake-man who took all her Sweetness – her lips, where are her lips? There’s the faintest remnant of them, a trace-line of not quite pink, her cheeks powdered, an all-over De Valera Comely Aged look that was very popular when it first appeared behind the yellow cellophane in the window of MacMahon’s Drapery in Faha. Glasses of round rims make huge her eyes and in them you see fear and goodness. People here are
good
. They’re so good it takes your breath away. It’s the kind of goodness that shows best when something goes wrong. That’s when they shine. They’re mad and odd as cats on bicycles but they’ve been shining around our family now since Aeney. And none more so than Mrs Quinty.

Mrs Quinty, meet the Reader.

Mrs Quinty needs reading glasses but has not brought them. Instead she takes off her regular glasses to look at you.

While she does I sit pillow-propped and wonder about her surname. I wonder if they were Quincy not Quinty once, and some relation, say in 1776, say boarding a ship for the New World, hurried his handwriting, blotted his C to a T, or maybe he lost an eye, was nicknamed Squinty, and dropped the S on his return to Proper Life,
Call me Quinty
, or maybe was someone grand and founded Quincy Massachusetts but was later driven out in scandal, or maybe they were people called Quin and there was one signed himself  T who . . .

Less, Ruth. Less.

Mrs Quinty hands me back the most recent pages of my book. I only give her the ones in which she doesn’t feature. I write like a man and I’m a bit Extreme, she has told me previously. I am that anachronism, a book-reader, and from this my writing has developed Eccentric Superabundance of Style, Alarming Borrowings, Erratic Fluctuations, and I must Must lose my tendency to Capitalisation.

Once when I answered that Emily Dickinson capitalised, Mrs Quinty told me Emily Dickinson was not A Good Example, that she was a Peculiar Case, and the way she said it you knew she regretted it right away because there was a little flinching around her mouth and you could tell she had already joined the dots and remembered Swains are pretty much the definition of peculiar. And so I never did ask her about what it meant to write like a man.