Niall Williams - History of the Rain

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 September ; 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.