Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Circuitously then, they arrived in the front hall just inside the same front door and Virgil said, ‘I’ll get Mother.’

Mr Houlihan attended and dabbed and considered the aspect. He had not been inside Ashcroft before. As a boy he had once climbed the orchard wall. He’d once viewed the exotic kingdom it was from the wild grass of the Long Meadow, and once, walking home from the Brothers, Abraham had driven past him in the dusty old Humber that was such a dark brown it looked plum . But now here he was, in Ashcroft, on the bank’s business. He gave a firm down-tug to the bottom of his jacket. Dampness foreshortened it. He chewed at his lips and blinked. In the front hall were two tall mahogany chairs against the wall either side of the front door. They were chairs that no one ever sat on. They were the sort of excess furniture people had in houses like that. These were wedding gifts, one-for-Him, one-for-Her sort of thing, His and Her Majesty kind of chairs with stiff backs and faded embroidered seats that some seamstress had done in the early Louis times. They were the sort of thing French people love, because they’re beautiful and completely impractical and because only French derrières could ever really fit in them. When I saw the Hers one day in Aunt Daphne’s I couldn’t imagine an Irish backside ever sitting on it.

But Mr Houlihan’s did. Perhaps overcome by the anxiety of the occasion, perhaps to escape the squeak of his shoes which seemed to undermine his authority, Mr Houlihan sat up onto the chair.

No sooner had he landed then he realised the proportions of the chair were more decorative than human because his feet did not touch the ground.

‘Mr Houlihan,’ Grandmother boomed.

Grandmother’s English heritage meant that she had that Empire voice, that come-out-of-your-grass-huts-and-give-us-your-treasures-for-our-museums kind of voice. The woman could boom. It was seriously terrifying. Even years later when my father imitated her and she seemed part Margaret Thatcher and part horse Aeney and I were still frightened.

She boomed out his name and walked ahead of him into the drawing room. She didn’t say How do you do and she didn’t ask his business, she just led on. There’s a certain kind of presumption that comes with Kitterings. They can’t help it. They expect people to follow in their wake. Mr Houlihan scrambled to get down out of the chair and followed in his squeaking shoes.

Grandmother took the best seat at the top of the dining table, the window behind her so she was statuesque and mostly bust.

Like Mr Gusher, Mr Houlihan found his moistness getting excessive. He shone. Shining was in itself not problematic and could be interpreted as passionate. But then shining produced a general appearance of actual wetness .

‘Are you hot, Mr Houlihan?’

‘Not at all, no thank you, Mrs Swain.’

‘Kittering-Swain.’

‘Excuse me. Mrs Kittering-Swain. Well, perhaps yes, just a bit. Warm, actually. Hot. Yes. Is it hot in here?’

‘I don’t believe it is.’

The drawing room in summer produced flies. Though the long windows were never opened and my father had stuffed the gap between the sashes with newspaper, the flies found their way. Perhaps they came down the chimney. They lived in the middle air between floor and ceiling and though many died and remained on the floor until dust there always seemed what my father called a general population. Within five minutes they had found the moist peeled onion that was Mr Houlihan. No sooner had he opened his case and taken out a slim file and said, ‘The actual finances, Mrs Kittering-Swain,’ than he had to start batting away at the first of them.

Flies did not dare approach Grandmother.

‘The finances?’

‘Yes, well, Mr Swain didn’t actually. .’ Houlihan ducked below a bluebottle. He paused, gnawed some more on the rubbery consistency of his lower lip. ‘The mortgage that he took on the house. .’ The bluebottle came back at him.

And so it went on. Years later my father made a pantomime of it. He lay on the bed and Aeney and I played the flies. We buzzed our fingers through the air and sought out the florid face of Mr Houlihan as he tried to tell Grandmother that Grandfather had borrowed against the house and not repaid a penny. We flew into Mr Houlihan’s mouth as he asked her to agree to a repayment schedule he had drawn up. We screamed with laughter when Mr Houlihan swallowed a fly and coughed and spat and flapped his fat hands and made big wide bulbs of his eyes. We tickled Mr Houlihan in the place below his ribs where he was helpless to stop and couldn’t finish his sentences except to cry out But the money, Mrs Kittering-Swain, the money! and then he fell off the bed crash! on to the floor and was silent and Aeney and I giggled a bit and then got worried and looked over the edge and down to where Dad lay, his face soaking wet with laughter or tears we couldn’t say.

Where are you, Aeney?

You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you?

‘Mrs Quinty, can you see the earth from Heaven?’

‘O now, Ruth.’ Mrs Quinty pulled herself up a bit tighter and clutched the balls of her knees.

‘Can they see us? Right now? Through the roof or through the skylight? What do you think?’

Mrs Quinty doesn’t really like to say.

‘I don’t really like to say, Ruth.’

‘But what’s your opinion?’

‘I really don’t think it’s right to talk about it. And I’ll tell you why.’

‘You believe in Heaven?’

Mrs Quinty took a little sharp inbreath, like the air was bitter but medicinal and had to be taken.

‘Well, can you or can’t you see what’s happening here when you’re there?’

Mrs Quinty made dimples of dismay. She gave herself a little tightening tug and glanced towards the door where she could see into Aeney’s room where Mam had all the washing hanging on chairs and stools because there’s no drying outside now and because despite the rain up here in the sky-rooms is the driest place in Faha and though it looks like a kind of ghost laundry, like that description I read in Seamus Heaney of spirits leaving their clothes on hedges as they went off into the spirit world, like Aeney’s room is this secret Take-off Launching Pad, it’s practical. Mrs Quinty kept looking in there while working her way up to an answer. Maybe she was thinking of an official response. Maybe she was doing her own inner mind-Google and really for the first time looking up Heaven . She didn’t have to go Pindar, Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas. She didn’t have to open some of those books of my father’s, the ones that came from a monastery sale and smell like frankincense or blue cheese, De laudibus divinae sapientiae of Alexander Neckham, the Weltchronik of Rudolf of Ems, the translated Le Miroir du Monde of Gauntier of Metz, composed 1247, who located Paradise precisely ‘at the point where Asia begins’. All those writers who got themselves in a geography-bind trying to explain how it was that Paradise didn’t get washed away during Noah’s Flood. Or those who had to explain that when Heaven was generally considered to be above us that was when they thought the world was flat. Because for the Departed say in, I don’t know, Australia, if they went Up to Heaven they’d likely come up in Leitrim, which might be Paradise to wet-faced welly-men from Drumshambo but would be a holy fright, as Tommy Fitz says, to sun-loving sandal-wearers from Oz. No, Mrs Quinty didn’t have to go from Saint Brendan to Dante, all she did was turn the shining eyes to the rainlight and she was back in Low Babies in Muckross Park College, Dublin, one rainy afternoon looking at a picture of holy people standing on clouds and a white nun saying: ‘Now, girls, this is Heaven.’