Niall Williams - History of the Rain

My father took the bait. He liked being singled out. You’ll already know he liked feeling that he was rising . He didn’t mind the hook in his mouth. Beneath the curls the head hummed. The class he left in his wake. At breaktimes he stayed in, avoided games of War in the yard, and Figgs opened a little further the doors of his mind.

And what a mind it was. It devoured everything. Figgs could not believe his luck. He took my father’s first name as a hint and tossed him a piece of the Aeneid . My father leapt and took it. A little Horace (Book 237, Horace’s Odes , Humphrey & Lyle, London), a book whose cover is neither paper nor card but a kind of amazing amber fabric that makes the softest whisper when you flick it, a snippet of Cicero (Book 238, Cicero’s Speeches , Volume I, Humphrey & Lyle, London), burgundy card-covers, stiff and formal, and smelling of asparagus, some Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Book 239, De Bello Gallico, Volume I, Humphrey & Lyle, London) which Father Tipp thought was Garlic Wars, and I didn’t correct him, it made no difference. My father devoured them all. He read at the same rate and with the same enthusiasm as the other boys excoriated their nostrils.

Nor was Latin his only excellence. On language and literature his brain fired. Figgs fed him poetry. Gave him Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and, while working his own nose behind the fumigate flag of his handkerchief, watched as Hence loathed Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born worked its way into my father’s imagination.

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 Seamus Moran, whose wiry black hair all migrated to his knuckles after he ate out-of-date tinned sardines, told my mother once that his son Peter was Special Needs.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