Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘I’m sure you’re best in your class, Ruth, aren’t you? Good girl, good girl. You’re such a bright girl you will just grow up and dazzle. Won’t she, Daphne? She’ll dazzle.’

‘Dazzle dazzle dazzle.’

‘Mother says you like to read. Do you?’

I do.

‘Of course you do, because you’re so bright, you little angel. If your grandmother was alive she’d — No. No, Penelope, I’m not. I’m not no.’

‘Handkerchief?’

‘Thank you, Penelope.’

‘We’ve brought you a present, dear.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s just for you.’

It’s a hardcover of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and on the inside front page there’s this little oval black and white picture of her with a baby’s bonnet on her head and a kind of ironic smile like She Knows. Jane knows what stupid insensitive people there are in the world and that’s what is behind every word she writes. Look at her portrait, She Knows. I think Dear Jane had a bit of the Impossible Standard herself although maybe it wasn’t even that impossible, maybe it was just some kind of decency and awareness she was expecting.

‘It’s Jane Austen, dear,’ Aunt P says.

‘What?’ Nan asks from the fire.

‘JANE AUSTEN,’ Aunt roars.

‘EXHAUSTING?’ Nan bellows back. ‘YES,’ and starts the Aged P nod.

Neither of my aunts, I am convinced, ever drank tea from a mug. The china cups are out for them.

They are a pair in the world, the two of them, and trade in exchange one to the other an entire currency of startled, dismayed and disapproving looks. The world fails the Impossible Standard constantly. Sometimes I imagine a whole gallery of their failed suitors, scrubbed jowly farmers of Meath, tweeded-up and cow-licked down, sent up to evenings in Ashcroft. The Meath men have surnames like Castlebridge, Farns, Ainsley. The sisters kill them off afterwards with cutting remarks. One sentence will do for each one.

‘Those hands he has.’ Castlebridge.

‘Did he seem to mumble terribly, dear? Could you, I couldn’t understand him. But perhaps you’re fond of him?’ Farns.

‘Actually I’ve never seen a fork used quite like that.’ Ainsley.

Pursed mouths, raised chins, arched eyebrows: each sister destroys the other’s suitors like she’s scissoring paper dolls. They find none up to standard. Their souls select their own society as the best and they become the pair they are.

‘Is that a?’

‘Tart,’ Mam says.

‘Tart. Pie, yes. I see. Apple?’

‘Rhubarb.’

‘Rhubarb. Well, well. Rhubarb, Daphne.’

‘Yes. Rhubarb.’

From care, or meanness as Nan says, the aunts are thin women. When they lift the cups of tea they do so with thumb and forefinger only, the other three fingers an extended fan for balance and grace. They lean ever so slightly forward and, eyebrows raised and lips tightened to the smallest puckered nub, sip the startling dark brew my mother has made.

‘Rhubarb? Well well, Daphne.’

Dad arrives late. He comes into the kitchen in his wellingtons and there is sudden excitement. His sisters fly up like ravens.

‘O Virgil.’

They flutter about him a few moments — ‘Virgil, are you getting thin? What is this you are wearing?’ — and show their love in questions.

My dad is easily embarrassed.

That man is an ocean of emotion, Jimmy Mac said.

Knowing the aunts were coming, Mam has everything just as tidy as can be. She’s put a load of things away inside the dresser, she’s hidden the tea-towels we usually use and taken out these cream ones I’ve never seen; for the duration of The Visit the Normal Life of our house has been tidied away. I like it in a way. There’s a sense of occasion. So here’s my dad standing in his wellies and he can see how tidy the place is even as his sisters circle. He can see all the effort Mam and I have made and his eyes have that kind of shining they get when the feelings are these waves rising in his heart.

‘O Virgil, are you getting thin?’

My father was always thin and his hair was always silver. His eyes were the bluest blue, the way the water looks when in the sky over it you think you can see Heaven. In my mind the thinness and the silveriness and the blueness were all connected.

‘He is getting thin, isn’t he, Daphne?’

Aunt D twitches her beak. She wants to be nicer than her sister; she wants to speak to her brother in his world, and so all the way across Ireland she has considered what she will say. Now she makes this high, brow-pencilled smile and asks: ‘How are your cows doing, dear?’

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter. This is something I have learned. All this time Aeney is sitting in the narrow stairs that go up over the dresser to our bedrooms. He broke his leg falling from the sycamore and is perched up there, his cast out in front of him, and he’s watching and listening. He has a smile people describe as winning, a winning smile, a smile that wins you to him no matter what, you just love him.

‘Oh now, Aon-us,’ Aunt P says. She can never get the hang of his name and wants to say Aeneas and Aengus together and she’s a little surprised he’s been there all the time but she’s not cross because you can’t be cross with Aeney, you can’t be cross with that smile. You see that golden hair and that smile and some part of you is sort of quietened, like you know he’s different somehow. I don’t mean that in the way some people do, like it’s a bad thing, I mean just the opposite, like you feel a little awe, a little O my God. You look at him and you think golden boy .

‘Oh now, there you are. Come down here and tell your aunts all about you.’

We drove for four hours to see The Consultant. We saw him for thirty-three minutes.

Something in your blood is wrong, he said.

Then we drove back across the country in the ambulance, Mam holding my hand, and Timmy and Packy not talking at all. The daylight was all gone and the road was this long winding river of yellow headlights going home towards the west. When we passed Tipperary we were back in the rain.

Your blood is a river.

The drizzling dawn of my father’s fourteenth birthday, Abraham appeared in the big draughty bedroom and shook his son awake.

‘Come on.’

Virgil dressed at top speed, was down the stairs and in the kitchen in no time, buttoning his last buttons as his father finished packing their lunch, a hodgepodge of bread, spread, pickles, cheese and apples.

They stamped into wellingtons, Abraham shook the tin box of flies, gave a kind of up-flick of his head and went out the front door, Grandfather banging it to so the bang fired into his daughters’ dreams upstairs and startled a flush of blackbirds off the front lawn.

It was one of those perfectly still mist-laid mornings, the fields wearing that silver drapery in imitation of Heaven, the air smelling green, sticky new leaves unfurling, and father and son with rods skyward heading for the river. I leave them on that road a while, soft clump-thud of their boots, metal-clasps jinglejangling on Grandfather’s shoulder-bag. They’re a good way gone when Grandfather says: ‘ Arma virumque cano .’

He doesn’t slow down, doesn’t break stride or look sidelong at his son.

My father is not sure he’s heard. Grandfather’s pole-vaulting legs carry him in two strides what takes Virgil three. He’s always a little in the old man’s wake. He looks at Abraham who is not looking back but marching on. And without question or comment Virgil replies: ‘ Troiae qui primus ab oris italiam .’