Niall Williams - History of the Rain

He has no more idea of why than she does.

But he has that Swain ability to believe in the outlandish. The family has history in it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks him. The thing is too big in her to get out delicately.

He doesn’t move. He’s been standing too still and too long and maybe he thinks it is his own mind asking. But then there’s the difference in the air. There’s something he can’t see but feels and he turns and looks at her.

The French Lieutenant’s woman’s face is unforgettable and tragic. Its sorrow wells out as naturally as water, Fowles says. And I think that’s what Mary sees too. He turns and she sees the sadness and right away she’s sorry for her bluntness and being so MacCarroll and she wishes she could wind the moment backwards.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise I shouldn’t be here.’

‘No,’ she says, a little too quickly. ‘It’s all right.’ Her arms are still about her and she rubs her hands a little back and forth on them as if she’s cold but she’s not cold.

‘I’ll go.’

But he doesn’t go. He uses the future not the present tense, and between those two is our life and history.

She feels him looking at her. She feels for a moment arrested by it, and in that arrest there’s danger and warning and dizziness, but mostly there’s the irresistible pull of when a pair of eyes are matched, because although she doesn’t know it yet here’s Love and Death in the same breath, here’s one of those moments upon which a story turns, and right now, just by the way she lifts her face and smiles, my mother is about to save my father.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘You can stay.’

(‘Mam, how did you meet Dad?’

‘I just met him.’

‘But how?’

‘He was just there. That’s all.’

‘There?’

‘Yes. He was just there .’)

I’ve decided it’s the Elsewhere in him that draws her. Like now, Faha back then was a parish of two minds. In one, there was nothing that happened anywhere in the world that was nearly as interesting or noteworthy as what happened in your own parish. To them travel was a waste of time and money. What would you be wanting to go there for? was delivered with such vinegar disregard that the legs were cut from under the very idea and to even consider travelling beyond the Faha signpost was evidence of some genetic weakness. To the others, there was nothing of any significance that ever happened inside the bounds of the parish. As proven by the RTE evening news, in which Faha had never appeared, the world happened somewhere else. Thus far the whole of human history had bypassed the parish and the sooner you could get on the N68 and out of it the sooner you could encounter actual life. It wasn’t until the Bust when those with Mindset One had no choice and all the tilers and painters and chippies and plasterers had vanished and the Under-21 team stopped existing altogether that Mindsets One and Two, Home and Away, started getting mixed up. Then girls like Mona Fitz and Marian Callinan set up Faha-in-Queens, Faha-in-Melbourne and started e-publishing versions of the parish newsletter with times of Mass in Faha, this week’s Epistle Readers, the WeightWatchers meeting, the Old Folks Cake Sale and the Under-14 fixtures, just so people could pretend they weren’t Elsewhere.

It’s the Elsewhere in Virgil Swain that draws her. He is a stranger. It’s the oldest plot. But it’s a good one. She tells him he can stay, as if it is in her power, as if she is somehow already in charge, and she’s decided the best way to hide her attraction to him is to deny it exists.

It’s in the Book of Women’s Stratagems.

She says he can stay and then she walks away.

But really they are already in a relationship. Already she’s thinking of the places he’s been and already she wants him to tell her, and that telling will be the first bridge between my mother and father. His stories will bring her across to him.

He stays in the village in the unofficial B&B that Phyllis Thomas opened when her husband left her for a Gourmet Tart in Galway. After three days he is no longer just a stranger but The Stranger, like a DC Comics version that’s drawn in purple or grey, because that was when the only strangers in the parish were there for funerals or weddings and there was no such thing as tourists in Faha and it was still twenty-five years before Nolan’s would start selling the Polish beer and the kind of bread that tastes like wood. He stays in the village and he walks the roads of the parish in a way that’s already noted as peculiar. Farmers don’t walk if they can take tractors. Men only walk if their cars are broken. Nobody back then walks just for walking. The only time there are Walkers on the road is when Mass is on. So Virgil is already building a mythology. He’s tall and quiet and the Readers of Character who occupy the tall stools in Carmody’s or prop on Mina Prendergast’s post-office windowsill before and after Mass are already tonguing their thumbs and flicking the pages of Who He Might Be.

Mary doesn’t know what to do with him. She knows she wants him in her day. She likes that he’s there, that if she goes out on her bicycle with eggs or bread she’ll see him somewhere. She’ll see his tall figure over a stonewall, see the looping stride, the long back, the uplift of his chin as he goes, that Swain angle, as if he’s always half-looking above.

And then he’s so quiet. And there is something irresistible in that.

They become what Dilsey Hughes from Dublin calls An Item.

It’s a walking item, mostly.

They walk. That’s what Mam says. They walk everywhere. Sometimes he doesn’t talk and she sticks these little barbed comments in him to get him to respond. She says something to get his seriousness to collapse and when it does she laughs and then he smiles and she feels this flood of warmth coming over her and she knows now this is more than curiosity, but she won’t say the word Love. He’ll have to say it first.

But now she’s afraid he might go. She’s afraid that one day she might wake up and he will be gone in the same way that he came.

So she sees if she can drive him off. The MacCarrolls have that little perverse streak in them. She’d rather break her own heart than have it broken. There’s an Irish logic to it. But maybe you have to be here a hundred years in the rain before you understand it. She tries Not Showing Up. That’s another stratagem. She’s mad to be out walking and bumping against him but she won’t let herself. She stays in the house and beats eggs. She keeps an eye to the window to see if he’ll come in the gate. But he doesn’t. He has the Swain thing where disappointment and hurt are first nature and he stands out by the river and feels the nails being driven into his heart.

Between the Swain thing and the MacCarroll thing it’s not looking great.

When I tell it to myself at this stage I’m worried for me and Aeney.

Because both of them are so good at suffering. Dad has come back to Ireland and believes that in Mary MacCarroll he’s found meaning. And I mean Meaning. Which in ordinary language is significant enough, but in Swain-song is pretty much the tops. He believes everything up to now has been pointless. What have I been doing? The voyaging, the high-walled seas, the lightless-night horizons, the fevers, sicknesses, the frizzled scorched skin of his brow and the tops of his ears, the sailings in and the sailings out, the whole kit and caboodle, the whole Boy’s Own, Melville and Conrad, conceit of it, all of it has been a running away, an avoidance of what has been flowing in his blood all the time, the sense that there is something I must do . And what must be done is in fact here, in this parish, by this river, with this woman.