Niall Williams - History of the Rain

The thing is, the more he pursues his line of admiration and wonder and general sweetness the more I find myself being sour. It’s part Swain-contrariness, part Estella Syndrome. I can’t help myself.

‘I look like. . I don’t know what I look like. What do I look like?’

‘You look beautiful.’

‘There are no beautiful women writers.’

‘Yes there are.’

No there aren’t. Well, except for Edna O’Brien, who is actually a kind of genius and gained my undying admiration when she said plots are for precocious schoolboys (Book 2,738, Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews , 7th Series, Secker & Warburg, London).

‘Here, look at Emily Dickinson,’ I said, and showed him the passport-sized photo on the back cover of the Collected Poems . ‘Her face, two prunes in porridge.’

‘I don’t know, I think she looks nice,’ he said.

‘ Nice ?’

‘She does. She looks interesting.’

Reader, pick any Brontë. Any one, doesn’t matter. What do you see? You see intelligence, you see an observer, you see distance, you don’t see beauty. Look at Maria Edgeworth, Mrs Gaskell. Look at Edith Wharton, she’s Henry James in a dress. Henry called Edith the Angel of Devastation, which is not exactly Top Score in the Feminine Charms department. Agatha Christie is a perfect match for Alastair Sim when he was playing Miss Fritton in the Tesco box-set of the old St Trinian’s . You can’t be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you’re beautiful people will be looking at you .

‘I don’t care. You are beautiful,’ Vincent Cunningham says, and with those three words firmly keeping his place in the Least Likely Irishman. Even I think I must have invented him.

‘You’re a hopeless idiot.’

‘I know.’ He smiles. He sits here beside the bed and his whole big face just beams. It’s ridiculous how happy he can be. It runs in the Cunninghams. His father is a Stop-Go man for the Council. Johnny Cunningham appears around the county wherever they’re doing roadworks, sets up with his big red and green lollipop and when he makes the traffic flow he gives a thumbs-up and shines the same smile. For some people the world is just heaven.

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.’