Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Mam had come in only moments before him. She’d seen him lift the fish in the sky and had come home running. She’d come in and gone to the blurry grey-speckled mirror in the bathroom and had a fight with her hair. She tousled it loose and it laughed at her, then she tied it up too tight and it felt like a hand had grabbed her from above and was pulling the top of her head off, then she released it again and patted it like it needed reassurance and if it got enough it would sit just right, for just this once, please .

‘Mary!!’

When she came out Dad was still standing in the doorway with the salmon and Nan was still looking at him, like there was a language barrier, like between Swains and MacCarrolls there was this ocean, which of course was true because Swains were basically English and MacCarrolls Irish and I am the child of two languages and two religions, and the most male female and the oldest young person to boot.

‘Hello,’ she said. In my version she said it the Jane Austen way, like he was Captain Wentworth and they were in Lyme Regis and a covering of coolness was needed in case she just went over and grabbed him by the wet jacket and started kissing him, for although they’d Gone Walking, which was the first step on the road to intimacy, this was another step altogether, this was coming inside the house and meeting Nan.

‘I caught one.’

‘At last,’ she said.

He looked at her, but he didn’t move.

The thing that was moving was Nan’s mind. She was flicking the pages fast, like when you read every third paragraph to try and get ahead of the story. Nan stood looking at the two of them looking at each other. ‘I’ll cook it, so,’ she announced.

Sometimes when I’m lying here and the day outside is that warm mugginess we get in wet summertime, when you know the sun is shining somewhere high above the drizzle but all we have is this jungle-warm dampness thronged with midges, my mind goes a little García Márquez-meets-Finn MacCool and when Nan cooks the fish by the fire the whole house becomes imbued with salmon-ness and foreknowledge. The whole history of us fills the air.

Virgil is to sit at the table.

‘Sit at that table,’ Mary says. She’s all business. She has that no-nonsense practicality of a countrywoman and in a flash she’s back and across the kitchen with mugs, plates, cutlery. She’s filling the milk jug from the larger jug, sawing into a loaf, plating slices, feeding turf to the fire, and at no time looking at Virgil Swain.

He sits. In Spencer Tracy’s chair.

‘That was my husband’s chair,’ Nan says, taking the head off the fish.

‘I’m sorry.’ He shoots up like he’s been stung, stands in the perplex of the moment until Mary says, ‘It’s all right, go on, sit.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sit.’

‘Will I take this. .?’

‘Sit.’

He sits back down but on the very edge of the chair. His trouser legs are dark flags to his thighs, boots leaking the river, and down the slope of the floor run two little streams of his arrival in their lives.

‘Not a bad fish,’ Nan says, head-down and doing serious industry with the knife.

It is in fact an incredible fish. It’s an Elizabeth Bishop fish and can be found in her Collected Poems (see Book 2,993), but Nan believes that praise is a forerunner of doom. The head and tail go in a pan with butter and salt. They spatter out the possibility of conversation. Then Mary carries them on a plate, calls ‘Sibby Sibby Sibby’ at the front door, and although I’ve never met a cat in Clare not called Sibby this one knows it’s her and comes from where all day she sits on the roof of the henhouse watching the Hens Channel. Virgil can see Mary through the window. He watches the way her hair falls as she bends to the Sibby, her dress holding the line of her knee, her fingers playing on the cat’s head and confusing it into choosing between two pleasures, wanting the caress and the salmon at the same time.

Mary comes back in. She doesn’t look at Virgil as she passes. She has the air of having so much to do. The air of Feeding the Guest. It’s a country thing. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. The Welcome is more important than anything else. You can be dying, you can have no money in the bank, your heart can be breaking from any number of aches, but still you have to lay the Welcome. Feed the Guest. Tomatoes have to be sliced, lettuce run under the tap and dabbed dry, three leaves on a plate. A scallion. Are there boiled eggs? There are. Bread, butter, salt. Whatever is happening in your life is of no consequence when you have to do the Welcome.

‘You sit,’ Nan says to Mary. She isn’t used to being Cupid. This is her first and only go and she’s that bit rough.

‘I’ll get napkins.’

Nan gives her the look that says Napkins? which is in subtitles only MacCarrolls can read.

Do they have napkins?

They do. They are paper Christmas ones. Mary puts one on each plate. Then she turns and presses her hands together and looks at the kitchen like there must be something more she could bring to the table. ‘You want something to drink,’ she says. It’s not a question. ‘We have Smithwick’s.’ She looks to Nan. ‘Don’t we?’

‘There’s a bottle of Guinness.’

‘Smithwick’s or Guinness?’

Her face turned to him makes his answer choke at the base of his throat. ‘Actually. . just water would be fine.’

That’s when Nan turns. That’s when she knows this is a story she hasn’t read before.

‘Just. . water. If. .’ The words are trapped somewhere.

Both of the women look at him. What is he going to say? If you have any?

‘I don’t drink.’ He lends it the tone of apology. ‘When I was at sea there were many. .’ That’s all he says. That’s the whole story. He lets the rest of it tell itself. There’s a moment of stillness while that story passes. Fighting the salmon-head Sibby makes the plate rattle on the flagstone outside. ‘Just water would be lovely.’

‘Water,’ Nan says to her daughter and turns back to tinfoiling the salmon.

Mary fills the big white jug with the blue bands on it. She fills it too full and lands it with a topspill on the table in front of him.

‘Lovely,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’ He doesn’t just mean the water. There is this thing about him then, this quality that I imagined when I sat in lectures on Edmund Spenser or Thomas Wyatt, an old-world gentlemanly chivalry and courtesy about Virgil Swain, as if everything that comes to him in those moments is so unexpected and marvellous that what he feels is grace.

‘You sit now,’ Nan says, still not quite managing the Cupid.

And because once the table is set and there’s absolutely nothing left in the press that can possibly be put out — cold-slaw, Colman’s mustard, pepper, ketchup — the next bit of The Welcome is to sit and ask How do you like it here? ; Mary pushes her palms twice down her dress, jabs her fingers into her hair, gives up, crosses the kitchen, sharply pulls back the chair opposite him, and asks, ‘So, how do you like it here?’

‘Very much.’

‘Good.’

That exhausts the dialogue. She realises she hasn’t folded the napkins and takes hers and begins to press it in halves. Virgil does the same. Both of them are useless at it. Maybe evenness is a thing intolerable to love. Maybe there’s some law, I don’t know. She lines up the halves of hers, runs her forefinger down the crease. When she picks it up the thing is crooked. So is his. She undoes the fold and goes at it again, but the napkin wants to fall into that same line again and does so to spite her, and does so to spite him, or to occupy both with conundrums, or to say in the whimsical language of love that the way ahead will not be a straight line.