Niall Williams - History of the Rain

She doesn’t give up, and he doesn’t give up. And in that is the whole story, for those who read Napkin.

Mary and Virgil are sitting by the set table at the river window, Nan’s folded Clare Champion is on the sill, and at the fold there’s this ad saying The Inis Cathaigh Hotel for Weddings , so maybe Nan has more of sly Cupid in her than she is given credit for. They sit and look out at the all-knowing river rushing past and the Sacred Heart light is burning red overhead and the smell of the salmon rises and takes the place of conversation.

It’s not a fish smell like Lacey’s where since Tommy lost the job they only eat mackerel and out-of-date Lidl bread, or the Creegans, who since the buildings stopped live off river eels, and like the Zulus Dickens saw in Hyde Park and said were fair odoriferous; it’s this warm pink insinuation into the air. It’s lovely and gentle and penetrating and smells of the supernatural. To my mind that cooking salmon is pretty much the Swain version of the Thurible, and Nan has become the Thurifier, pokering the turf into life, turning the fish, peeling back the foil to check the progress, revealing the pink flesh and releasing a great waft of the impossible.

And I think right then Virgil looks at her. He looks across the table and when she feels him looking she flushes pink and warm and keeps her eyes on the river outside. She’s looking at the river and he’s looking at her looking at the river and there’s no way back for him now. This is his life right here, the salmon is telling him. This is it, the salmon says, and because the salmon is knowledge and knows everything Virgil knows it’s true. The air itself is changed, and what seemed impossible, that he might stop travelling and stop seeking a better world somewhere else, is suddenly not only possible but inevitable and here, in this woman’s face, it begins.

‘That’s done now,’ Nan says, licking the burn on her finger, and ferrying the fish to the table.

You can’t really imagine your parents kissing. I can’t anyway.

You can’t imagine your own origin, the way you can’t imagine the beginning of the world. Not everything can be explained, is a standard Swainism. You just can’t imagine the consequences that led to you, or imagine those consequences not happening. You can’t imagine the world without you because once you do everything else takes on this kind of temporary sheen like breath blown on a window. I know I shouldn’t even be thinking of this, but maybe it’s because like Oliver in Chapter the First of Oliver Twist I am unequally poised between this world and the next. That’s my excuse anyway. You can’t imagine your own origin. It’s like this mysterious source or spring somewhere. You know it happened; that’s all.

Mam and Dad married in St Peter’s Church, Faha, and had a dinner after in the Inis Cathaigh Hotel, Kilrush. The Aunts were the only guests of the groom, and all of Faha came for the MacCarrolls, filling the Bride’s Side pews to bursting and giving the church the perspective of tilting to starboard. Though Mam didn’t know it yet, their wedding day was my father’s first time in a church since his own christening. He had never been confirmed, but Father Mooney, not a big believer in paperwork, a lover of roast beef, and in his last year before retiring into the saintly surrounds of Killaloe, supposed the certificate was on its way in the post and went full steam ahead.

It was a noted wedding in the parish memory. I think it was because Dad was still that DC Comics figure, The Stranger, and because none of the men in the parish could believe that Mam hadn’t chosen one of them. Long before the Consecration, before the head-bowing part when the Bride and Groom are up there kneeling together and there’s this sense of Something Big happening, men’s hearts were already breaking. Bits of longing and dreams were cracking off and sliding away the way Feeney’s field did into the sea. Father Mooney must have felt it, this giant ache that filled his church. In the Men’s Aisle there were some with prayerhands clasped knuckle-white, cheeks streaked with high-colouring, thin nets of violet, and their Atlantic blue eyes boring down into the red-and-black tiles hoping for an Intercession. When it didn’t come they did what men here do and by midnight had emptied the bar at the Inis Cathaigh and the emergency crates and barrels that were brought up from Crotty’s.

Mam didn’t care. She was only thinking here is my life , here it was beginning, and although she had only heard the vaguest bits of the Swain story, only knew a few paragraphs of different chapters, she didn’t mind. When she was a girl, Mam had some wildness in her. She had a bit of the Anna Karenina thing, not in the Other Man sense but in the way Anna longed for life with a capital L. I’ve read Anna Karenina (Book 1,970, Penguin, London) cover to cover twice, and both times couldn’t help thinking that in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there’s some kind of holiness. I’m with Anna. She’s the greatest woman character ever created and the one I most wish would come up the stairs and sit by the bed and tell me what to do with Vincent Cunningham.

Mam took a leap. That’s the thing. She took a leap with a man who had no employment or apparent friends, whose sisters were strange gazelles in long wool coats with fierce buttons, a man whose mystery was encapsulated in the phrase Away at Sea , who had come back for no reason other than to find her. She couldn’t possibly know she would be happy with Virgil Swain, not really. But she was the daughter of Spencer Tracy, and there was something in him she trusted. She couldn’t have explained it. It was a mystery. But she believed in it. It’s that MacCarroll thing, Tommy says, belief in mystery. It’s well known. He married his Maureen because they ran out of crisps in Cusack Park and she had a bag.

The honeymoon was one night in Galway.

When they came back Nan had prepared The Room. Dad moved in with the baffled deepsea shyness of a character just arriving in a story already underway. He had the awkwardness of an alien. It was his first home, but it wasn’t his. Like Mr Lowther in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Book 1,980, Penguin Classics, London) he’d never be quite at home in his own home. There were MacCarrolls in the stones, MacCarrolls in the rafters, MacCarrolls up the chimney. And then there was Nan.

In those first weeks he had to sail around her. The kitchen was hers. She was already in it when he woke. She was still in it when they went down to bed in the evening. The first sounds of morning were the leaden thump of the bread dough.

‘Morning, Bridget.’

He sounded like an American to her. She took a puff on her cigarette. ‘Morning.’ She couldn’t get around his name yet.

He had to stoop to look out the deep-sill window. ‘Not raining,’ he said.

‘Yet.’

‘Would you like tea?’

‘I’ve had tea.’

‘I’m going to make some for Mary.’

Thump . She flipped the dough on its back, knuckled its swollen belly, picked up the cigarette and gave it another puff. Because she hated the sight of butts, because she associated them with the men with Italian accents who always got shot first in the black-and-white movies, Nan had already developed the ability to smoke cigarettes entire without losing a fragment of ash. After the first few goes she smoked upwards , turning her head sideways and in under the cigarette chimney-style so the little tower of ash balanced off her hand and never fell.

Virgil moved the kettle from the side of the range on to the hot plate, and stood, heating his hands that didn’t need heating, his eyes travelling the shelves, the walls, the dresser, taking in everything, the small silver trophy one of Grandfather’s greyhounds won an age ago in Galway, the little stack of Memoriam Cards standing face out with the memory of the latest Late, the plastic Infant of Prague, the twist of brown paper holding unused carrot seeds from Chambers’s in Kilrush, the Sacred Mission Fathers calendar with the one picture of black African children, the Saint Martin de Porres one that was never used with a picture of Peruvians and permanent January, the ESB bill standing upwards in a mug so as not to be forgotten, the three white porcelain eggcups with miniature hunting scenes that were a gift from Peggy Nottingham and were never used for eggs but hoarded thumbtacks and sometimes hairclips and two spare red Christmas lightbulbs, a whole history of things that made Our House.