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.
Everything was already in place; that was the thing. If he opened a drawer in the dresser he’d find it crammed with what appeared to be rubbish – dried-out Crayola markers, worn-down stubby pencils, tangles of string, rubber bands, playing cards with the Seven of Diamonds and the Three of Spades missing, a single red battery, a round flat box of hard sweets long stuck together, a golfball, a tiny screwdriver that came in a Christmas Cracker, matchbooks, a yoyo, a mouth organ – things unremarkable except in the aftermath of death when they take on themselves a portion of haunting.
Where would he fit in this house?
The kettle began to boil. ‘Are you sure you won’t have tea?’
‘That’s not boiled. Leave it boil a while.’ She didn’t look up. The dough was surrendering. ‘What are you intending to do?’
‘To do?’
‘Here. For a living.’ With full forearm force, bang!, she flung the dough down on to the floury table.
‘Well, there’s the land,’ Virgil said.
‘The land is bad. You’re not a farmer.’
‘I could learn.’
The kettle was at full steam now, an urgent plume racing to ten o’clock, but he didn’t lift it.
‘Do you know anything else?’ She didn’t look up. She gave the kneading the thumbs.
What did he know?
He knew Ahab, he knew Mr Tulkinghorn, he knew Quentin Compson and Sebastian Flyte and Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Bovary and Alyosha Karamazov, he knew Latin Declensions and French Verbs, Hernán Cortés, Euclid, Knots, the Capitals of the World, how to parse a sentence, how to live on tinned food and powdered milk, he knew what the sun looked like in the eveningtime in December off Punta Arenas, how the wind off Cape Town carried the scent of sage in spring, he knew tides and tempests, he knew there was an island in Cuba called La Isla de la Juventud that bore exact resemblance to the geography of RLS’s Treasure Island, but Virgil Swain did not know anything he could do in the County Clare.
Nan worked the dough into a rough circle, and then with the base of her hand chopped a cross into the top. ‘The land it will have to be then,’ she said. She rubbed her hands together, balling crumbs she slapped off her palms. ‘I’ll have tea, so.’ She drew on the last of the cigarette, turned on the tap and doused the ash, looked out the window at the haggard and the haybarn with the three panels hanging loose. ‘If you’re making it.’
Irish people hate to lose face. That’s Number One dictum. That’s why the Bust was what Kevin Connors called an unholy show, and why the whole nation was mortified at the carry-on of the bankers and developers. Not so much because it happened, but because everyone in the world now knew that it had happened and we were once again Those Irish. We’ll bear anything in the privacy of our own homes, as long as the world doesn’t have to know.
How Public, like a frog, is dear Emily’s version (Book 2,500, Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, Faber & Faber, London).
So, right then and there, Nan decided that if Virgil Swain was going to be a farmer he wasn’t going to be one that people would laugh at.
She opened the kitchen door, shouted, ‘Mary, come get your tea!’ and told Virgil, ‘Come with me.’
They went out on the acres, Nan in cuff-down wellies and hooded green army coat, Virgil in a too-long woollen jumper under the leather jacket and the low fishing boots that were already drinking mud before they crossed the Fort Field. They went in sinking Suck Mode, each step announcing itself, a kind of spluck-splosh procession that scattered the blackbirds back up into the rain and down into the next field, Nan travelling faster because she knew how to do the swaying-hip swing, dip and recover that people here know is how you walk these wet river fields, which means you don’t step down you sort of roll across them, which is great for waterland walking but maybe the reason the parish is Number One in Clare for hip replacements. She spoke curtly as she went. ‘The drain on the western corner needs clearing every month.’ It looked like it hadn’t been cleared in years. ‘A wet spring and you can’t travel this field till August.’ It had several silver ponds in it. ‘This is The Big Meadow.’ ‘This is the Small Meadow. My husband cut it by hand.’ She took him across every inch of the land in which we grew muck puddles, rushes and occasional grass. He didn’t say anything. They climbed the wall into Lower Meadow, because the gate was no longer attached to the pier, was tied with twine and looped with crazy brambles. He offered her his hand but she didn’t take it, stepped in front of him and crossed with goat nimbleness, turned to look back when she heard the clatter of falling stones as he came after. In the Bog Meadow she showed him the four cows. She called ‘Hup!’ to them on the top of the stile, maybe to alert them that here was the new farmer, to have them do that whole-body-shiver thing horses do and present their best profiles. But whether from the mesmerism of the rain, the dullness of having several stomachs full of twisted mulch or the fact they were wearing brown-stockings of mud to their hocks, the cows were in cow stupor and didn’t move. ‘That’s our stock,’ Nan said.
Virgil looked at them. He had no clue what to say. The rain that was not called rain was falling on both of them. The river was running the way it is always running to get away and there was a little edgy breeze coming across from McInerney’s to remind you the back of your neck was wet. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.
Now that was not what Nan expected. She had no answer for that. She looked at him.
But Virgil was already away in the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In a way, it helped that the land was as bad as it was. It meant that here he would not only have to Out-Wiltshire Wiltshire he would also have to Out-Ashcroft Ashcroft. So the effect was not to discourage him, it was the contrary. I may be the only one who thinks that here in Muck-and-Drizzle land is the least-like-paradise place there is in the whole country, but even so you’d have to say it was going to take dreaming.
‘That’s all of it,’ Nan said, with the kind of low voice people use at the end of a long confession when everything terrible has been told. ‘We’ll go back so. Mary will be up.’
‘I’ll stay here. I’ll be back in a while.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘I know. But I’d like to.’
His eyes were dangerous. That’s what Nan must have thought. They had that look that told you they were seeing more than you were.
‘If you’re sure.’ She didn’t look at his eyes.
‘I’m sure.’
‘Right so.’
She hip-swung her way back across the fields. When she came in to the questions in her daughter’s expression in the kitchen, she said, ‘He wants to stay out.’ And in a single moment the two of them shared a look that said those things in silent mother-daughter language that would take a hundred books and more years to tell.
After the hens and the ware and the ashes and the peeling, Mary went out to find him. She was afraid his heart was cracked. She was afraid the reality of the place would have overwhelmed him, that she’d find him under a dripping hedgerow in a distant corner ready to announce they couldn’t make a life there. Then she saw him. He was on the far edge of the Bog Meadow inside a silver nimbus.
It was a trick of the light. Wanting to make his first impression on that landscape he had come upon a length of barbed wire buried in the grass. He’d started to pull it up and found that time and nature had firm holds. But he’d persisted in the way only my father could. The hopeless was his domain. He just kept at it. Barbs bloodied his fingers. One tore a long meandering scar on the back of his hand that years later Aeney and I said was like a river and my father said which river and we said the River Virgil. At last the grass made a resentful ripping and surrendered the wire. He’d worked his way along it then, finding the forgotten bounds, lifting the rotted sticks that were once the fence posts. But as he did, the wire freed from tension began to coil and tangle behind him. It was the way God played with my father. Even a small success was mercilessly pursued by failure. He’d gone back to try and straighten out the wire and by the time my mother saw him he was standing inside it, the coil shimmering glints in the rainlight and my father this soaked figure laughing in the trap of the practical.
I think she knew then he wasn’t giving up.
‘You look drowned,’ she said.
That evening Virgil went out after dinner to check on the cows. That, he knew, was an important part of farming. Just before darkness, Check on the Cows. If you’re getting some idea of my father you’ll already know he had no idea what to check for except their actual presence. If they were standing he pretty much thought they were okay. If they were lying down he’d Hup! a few times to get them to stand and then walk away, leaving the same ladies wondering why they were gotten up and wearing the cow expression of People are Puzzling. That first evening, while Mam and Nan did the dishes, he went across the fields. Darkness was falling. He was used to sea-dark which is darker than any. What he wasn’t used to was the sense of things flying invisibly above him. He had the impression the air was full of nightblack cloths, shreds, rags, falling out of the heavens. But not landing. With impossible swiftness one swooped, arced, vanished, and another came. He ducked, raised his hand over his head, and then realised the air was thronged with bats.
I know them. I’ve seen their grandchildren. They go home into this tiny hole in the angle of the eaves at McInerney’s. More come out than go in, which has always been true of McInerney’s house. I’ve grown up in the country, bats don’t frighten me. But Virgil’s blood was chilled, as if bats were a portent, as if he was being reminded right then paradise isn’t going to be easy, there’s darkness in the world, and instead of coming back across the field he clambered out over the crooked gate on to McInerney’s road.
The gravel underfoot was helpful. The bats didn’t overfly the road. He walked between the high shoulders of the wild fuchsia.
Then he saw the torches.
In the wide deep dark we have in Faha a single torch can be seen a long way. These were dozens. They were a lighted river, winding out from the village, thinning in places, thickening in others, but all coming towards our house.
Virgil’s first thought was guilt. Father Tipp says the two signs of saints are guilt for no reason and being caught in a constant tide of undeserving. I think my father thought he deserved what was coming. I think he knew he had taken the most beautiful girl in the parish and so his first thought was They are coming for me.
He’d been away, remember. He’d been on the sea with his imagination a long time, and in that imagination this was the kind of thing that happened in William Faulkner, they came with torches. They let their disapproval out in fire. They were going to come and burn down our house.
But this was not a few men.
This was everyone. The whole parish was on its way.
He stood in the road. That’s the thing that gets me in this story. That’s the thing that surprises me when I force Tommy Devlin to tell it. Virgil just stood in the road. He didn’t come running to tell Mam and Nan, didn’t rush in, bolt the door, push the table up against it cowboy-style and say Injuns. He stood in the road and waited and that river of lights kept coming.
When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s he saw it was not made of men. They were figures out of phantasm, Tommy says. He enjoys that word. Phantasm. Some had cone heads and misshapen bodies. Some had masks and were huge tall women with dresses that couldn’t button over bosoms. Some were white and mountain-shaped, a sheet thrown over them, others in sacks and straw, their faces blackened. There was not a single recognisable human being.
When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s it saw Virgil Swain.
And it stopped.
To stop a river that long is not easy, and so all the way back along it there was jostling and pushing and a great murmuring that rose and went along the length. The murmur didn’t materialise into language proper. But there was a chorus of shshshshshshshshshsh and then Virgil was standing a hundred yards from our house face to face with a figure whose head was a wicker cone that rose to eight feet.
‘Turn back,’ my father said. He said it just the way Spencer Tracy would have, because, although outnumbered by three hundred and twenty-seven to one, he wasn’t going to let them come burn down the house.
Coney shook his head. The river wouldn’t turn back but wouldn’t say why either. Cone Head didn’t want to give himself away. That was the bit that made it difficult. He shook the cone more eloquently. The whole front row of cone-heads shook theirs. There was a whole lot of shaking going on.
‘Turn back!’ my father shouted out over the entire river, which was swelling and thickening now at the headwaters. Masked figures were pressing forward to see what was happening.
‘Turn back. Go home!’
There was more head-shaking, gestures of confusion and refusal. But still none would speak.
And I suppose it might have remained a stand-off but for Mam calling ‘Virgil!’ in this hard whisper behind him. ‘Virgil!’ He turned to look back at her and she was waving frantically for him to come to her. ‘They’re our bacochs,’ she said. ‘Straw Boys. They’re here to celebrate our wedding.’
Virgil looked at the river that was made of the men and women of the entire parish in what varied ingenious and bizarre disguises they could manage, and he saw that some were carrying not weapons but fiddles and bodhráns and he took a step backwards, and then another, and Mary put her hands over her mouth to hold the laughter but it was giggling up in her eyes and she took his hand and they ran the last of the way back along the road and in the gate and were in the house just moments before the river poured in after them.
Chapter 6
Are you there?
Days like this when I wake and feel more tired than I did when I went to sleep I can’t quite believe in you.
Dear Reader, are you a figment?
It’s hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You’re all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you’ll feel better and you won’t wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept. The whole country is living in the future now. We’re in this Terrible Time but in the future we’ll be all right again. We just have to keep hoping. But Moira Colpoys got first-class honours in her Social Science degree and Mrs Quinty says she sent out a hundred CVs in Dublin, every and any kind of job, got only one reply and when she went to the interview there were three hundred people and two hundred of them had been working for ten years and so yesterday Mr and Mrs Colpoys took her to Shannon and by now she’s arriving in Perth and tomorrow she’ll start looking to find the Davorens who she doesn’t really know but they’re from the parish and went out there last year and got a start in a tyre factory. The Colpoys are both in their sixties and she’s their only. Mrs Quinty says when Mr and Mrs Colpoys stopped into Maguire’s for petrol and milk on the way back they looked ten years older. They’re just going to hope things improve, Mrs Quinty says. They have that big damp old house they rattle around in, the one that looks like a tall grey shell and was my first model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House and has already been robbed twice since the Bust, and in there they’ll be, wearing three pairs of socks and sitting close to the fire, and hoping.
To have hope you have to have faith. That’s the crazy bit. You have to believe things could get better. You have no idea how exactly, but somehow. It’s a blindness thing, faith. But I seem to see too much. I lie here in the boat-bed when I wake up. I’m supposed to call Mam right away so she’ll come and pull open the curtains and use her best cheery voice to banish any gloom, but some days I don’t. I wake and feel the exhaustion of morning. I wonder where I go from here, and how any going could possibly happen, and look across the room at all the books and I wonder if maybe I am doing what I set out to do, if maybe I am finding my father.
I look grey. I actually do. Mirrors should be banned, the same way Uncle Noelie banned the News. Both are enemies of hope. Uncle Noelie said he couldn’t take listening to the wall-to-wall Doom experts who were the Boom experts before, most of them like a dark neighbour secretly delighted to be part of an important funeral, and so, because the time called for extreme tactics and because your heart has to be sustained by something, he switched over to Lyric FM for Marty in the Morning and shook hands with Mozart. But you can’t switch off the mirror, it’s right there over the bathroom sink, it’s hard to avoid, and in it I’m grey.
‘Do I look grey?’ I asked Vincent Cunningham.
‘What?’ He did that thing people do when they hope a question will go away. He did his Robert De Niro, which is to smack three invisible bits of lint off the knee of his trousers, and then examine his fingers closely and frown at what only he could see there. If, like Mr Pecksniff, he had a hat he would have looked inside it for an answer.
‘Which word do you not understand? Grey? My face, does it look grey?’
‘No. No. Of course not.’
‘What colour would you say I look?’
‘Normal colour.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Obviously I’m not, never have been, and never will be normal.’
‘No but you know what I mean.’
‘Under my eyes. Circles. What colour?’
‘Normal.’
‘Vincent.’
‘Blue-ish.’
‘Blue-ish grey?’
‘Blue-ish pale.’
‘Which is what people call grey.’
‘If you don’t feel well maybe you should go to hospital.’
There were so many reasons why that was ridiculous I didn’t even begin. In the county hospital the Winter Vomiting Bug had arrived, the Autumn Vomiting Bug having presumably departed for Africa, greyness was not a condition with swift remedy, as my eating any amount of beef, lentils, beans, spinach, and double doses of Hi-Dose Iron tablets could already testify, and the fact that my insides at this point were a magical swings-and-slides playground for Pfizer, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, and the Star Trek-sounding folks at AstraZeneca, meant that I gave this suggestion only My Look.
‘Just admit it. I look grey.’
‘You do.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
I got less satisfaction than I had hoped. ‘My hair is like old straw.’
‘Ah, Ruth, no it’s... Yes, yes it is.’
‘Thank you.’
If you’re feeling hopeless you want someone else to feel hopeless too. That’s one of the better contradictions in human nature. But Vincent Cunningham has one of those cork hearts that keep bobbing up when you try and push it under.
‘I’ll wash it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Come on. I’ll wash your hair.’
‘Fly around the room first why don’t you?’
‘Come on, it’ll make you feel better.’
‘I’m not letting you wash my hair.’
He was already heading to the bathroom. ‘I’ll get the water ready.’
‘Vincent! Vincent?’ I could hear the taps running. It takes a while to get the hot water up here. My father put in the bathroom using a second-hand Reader’s Digest Guide for Homeowners (Book 1,981, Reader’s Digest, New York) he got from Spellissey’s in Ennis. The bathroom proved an arduous task, the book’s spine is broken on the water-warped pages showing Basic Home Plumbing and it appears that either my father or the original owner near-drowned the book in the attempt. You turn on the tap and nothing happens. When I was younger I used to imagine the water had to come from the river, and didn’t mind waiting because of the engineering miracle my father had worked. At first nothing happens; you turn the tap full on, and it’s as if you are being tested in a prime belief, that water will in fact come, and once you believe that you can actually hear this tiny suspiration escaping the spout which affirms your belief that soon the air will become water if you can just put up with standing in the cold a bit longer. The water runs cold for ages. It runs cold until you get to the place where you’re thinking there is no hot and then begins a knocking out of Macbeth. It’s somewhere in the house, but no one’s sure where. The knocking becomes a clacking behind the wainscoting and the pipes sound the way arthritis must feel, an achy resistance to fluidity, but at last you know your belief has paid off and the hot comes with a series of airy belches and a sudden splashy gulp of triumph.
Vincent came in carrying the bath towel. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘Right what?’
‘You’ll feel better.’
‘Gone insane, is that it?’
‘Yep,’ he said, hedge-hair high and mad eyelashes batting as he began to pull back the duvet. ‘Come on.’
‘Listen, Vidal, it’s not that I don’t appreciate...’
He’d already got his arm around my back and under me. He was already finding out that I was lighter than he had imagined, that I had such little substance that for a moment he must have thought his arm had passed through me, that he had dreamt me, except if he had he probably wouldn’t have dreamt the grey skin or the straw hair or quite possibly the attitude. He held me up. I held on to him. ‘You’re mad,’ I think I said. I was too surprised for long sentences.
He had the wooden chair backwards against the sink, a towel double-folded as a neck support. The water was steaming.
‘Here.’
‘You’ll scald me.’
He seated me gently then lifted his arm away, pausing just a moment to see that I was still sitting there. Shoving up his sleeves, he turned to the sink.
‘Vincent.’ I had my back to him.
‘I know.’ He dipped his elbow.
‘No but?...’
‘Now.’ He took my hair. ‘Lay back.’
‘Have you ever...?’
‘Ruth, lay back.’
I put my head on the support. And now my hair was in the water. His hands were drawing the water to it, treating it the way they might treat the golden hair in a fairy tale. Then he was cupping and letting the water flow on to my head and dipping his hands and cupping again and letting flow again, in what was somehow now the most ancient and natural rhythm in the world, the flowing of water over a head. And I was leaning back and my eyes were looking up at him, but he was looking only at my hair and the job he was doing, and he had that look you see in boys and men when they are engaged in a task grave and intricate and vital. His fingers moved the shampoo through my hair. My head was a comforting hardness, I knew, a bone at last of substance, and he worked a foam against it, and then smoothed the length of my hair, sometimes letting the hair move between both his palms, sometimes one hand laying the soap and the second pooling water over it. It came over my brow and he apologised and I said it was all right but with a kind of supreme gentleness he dabbed my eyes with the towel end and then returned to the washing with the same intensely focused tenderness. By now there was nothing I could say. I lay there in the towel while he changed the water. Then he began the rinsing. Water did not feel like water. It felt like a dream of water flowing over me and I closed my eyes and felt Vincent’s hands and the water and the flowing and a kind of impossible sensation of freeing and pouring and cleansing, as if this was a baptism, simple and pure and fluent in grace, as if there were grounds for hope yet.
Chapter 7
My father did not know how to drive. He had gone from the hothouse island of Ashcroft away to sea and bypassed the years when he should have learned. Mam knew how. She had learned in the big back meadow in her father’s cabless Zetor when she was eleven, sitting on Spencer’s lap, thrilling to the loud and bouncing propulsion across the open ground and the fact that you could go here, or there, or over there, just because you wanted. Mam drove the same way she walked, freestyle, also known as bumpily. She didn’t really go in for right- and left-hand lanes, which was fine this side of Faha where the road is cart-wide and Mohawked with a raised rib of grass and when two cars meet there is no hope of passing, someone has to throw back a left arm and reverse to the nearest gap or gate, which Faha folks do brilliantly, flooring the accelerator and racing in soft zigzag to where they have just been, defeating time and space both and making a nonsense of past and present, here and there. As any student of Irish history ancient and recent will know, we are a nation of magnificent reversers.
In the lower cabin which was once the Original House of the MacCarrolls and then became the Cowhouse and then the Carhouse there was a pale blue Ford Cortina. In the early evenings after the farming and before the light died Mam took the key and drove them west along the rim of Clare. Both of them favoured edges. They liked to follow the Shannon seaward, see the end of land on their left, and where current and tide met in choppy brown confluence. Their destination was, like Ken Kesey’s bus, Further. They went like escapees, Mam employing that driving style that was basically blind faith, speed and innocence, hurtling the car around bends, ignoring cracked wing mirrors, whipping of fuschia and sally, birds that shot up clamouring in their wake, hitting the brakes hard when they came around a corner into cows walking home.
I like to picture them, the blue Cortina coming along the green edge on Ordnance Survey Map 17, Shannon Estuary, one of many dog-eared and crinkled maps that for reasons obscure are all pressed between Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Book 1,958, Penguin Classics, London), David Henry Thoreau’s Walden (Book 746, Oxford World Classics, Oxford) and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (Book 1,304, Grove Press, New York). On the map there are four different tones of blue for the river, High Water Mark, Low Water Mark, and 5 and 10 Fathoms. I’ve looked at it a long time, the way the green of the land seems to reach out, even off the edge of the page, so that the most western point, Loop Head, doesn’t fit, and is in its own little box on the top. They go everywhere along the southern shore, different evenings to Labasheeda, Knock, Killimer, Cappa, into Kilrush and out again, to Moyasta and down left around Poulnasherry Bay, to Querrin and Doonaha, taking roads that end at a gate on the river, reversing, into Liscrona and Carrigaholt, down to Kilcreadaun Point where Virgil wants to go but the road won’t let him, on again, summer evenings all the way down to Kilcloher for the view there, back up again, into Kilbaha, and finally, racing the sunset to get to the white lighthouse at the Head itself where the river is become the foaming sea. There is no further.
On those drives Virgil felt light, felt illumined. He’d look at Mary and his heart would float. That was the kind of love it was, the kind that radiates, that begins in the eyes of another but soon has got into everything, the kind that makes the world seem better, everything become just that bit more marvellous. Maybe it was because he’d been at sea so long; maybe it was because he was realising how lost he had been and that now here real life was beginning; maybe it was because he was feeling rescued.
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