History of the Rain Read Free

part-Mrs Markleham in David Copperfield . Mrs Markleham was the one who was nicknamed The Old Soldier, a little sharp-eyed woman who always wore the one unchangeable hat. Mrs Markleham’s was ornamented with artificial flowers and two hovering butterflies; Nan has the same sharp eyes and hers is a man’s tweed cap. It’s flat and old and faded, but plays a part later on.
    ‘How is she doing today?’
    ‘No change, really,’ Mam says.
    As politeness dictates, the conversation goes on, but we have no time for it. Mrs Quinty tightens up and brings herself up the stairs. Thirteen steep steps, more a ladder than a stairs proper, rising from the up-slope of the flagstones across from the fire and up over the dresser. For a woman with so many illnesses she has a firm step, even carrying her cross. Here she comes.
    ‘Now,’ she says when she enters the room. She says it as though she’s bringing herself into focus, or as if to herself she’s announcing her own landing in this bedroom with the big rough handmade bed, the skylight and the three thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight books.
    It allows her to regain her breath, to consider the racing of her heart, some murmurous inner pulsing – gall bladder? – and to adjust her eyes to entering the sky.
    ‘Now.’
    There’s the pale gleam you have to get used to up here, especially because of the rain. The rain streams down the skylight so it looks like we’re under a river. In the sky.
    ‘Now, Ruth.’
    ‘Hello, Mrs Quinty.’
    And while she gets her breath, Dear Reader, get acquainted. See how compact she is. See her pinched face, tight to the chin, as if Life was a very narrow thing you had to get through. Pointed, sharp-looking knees, charcoal skirt to shins, grey tights, shoes size six, laced, polished but puddle-dulled by the weathers of west Clare and by crossing our yard, mouse-coloured blouse with top button concertinaing together some flaccid cords in her throat and lending her voice that tendency towards – Sorry, Mrs Quinty – squeak, black cardigan with general dusting of chalk, tiny linen handkerchief in the sleeve at the ready. Her hair is a bun – sad reminder of Tommy the Cake-man who took all her Sweetness – her lips, where are her lips? There’s the faintest remnant of them, a trace-line of not quite pink, her cheeks powdered, an all-over De Valera Comely Aged look that was very popular when it first appeared behind the yellow cellophane in the window of MacMahon’s Drapery in Faha. Glasses of round rims make huge her eyes and in them you see fear and goodness. People here are good . They’re so good it takes your breath away. It’s the kind of goodness that shows best when something goes wrong. That’s when they shine. They’re mad and odd as cats on bicycles but they’ve been shining around our family now since Aeney. And none more so than Mrs Quinty.
    Mrs Quinty, meet the Reader.
    Mrs Quinty needs reading glasses but has not brought them. Instead she takes off her regular glasses to look at you.
    While she does I sit pillow-propped and wonder about her surname. I wonder if they were Quincy not Quinty once, and some relation, say in 1776, say boarding a ship for the New World, hurried his handwriting, blotted his C to a T, or maybe he lost an eye, was nicknamed Squinty, and dropped the S on his return to Proper Life, Call me Quinty , or maybe was someone grand and founded Quincy Massachusetts but was later driven out in scandal, or maybe they were people called Quin and there was one signed himself  T who . . .
    Less, Ruth. Less.
    Mrs Quinty hands me back the most recent pages of my book. I only give her the ones in which she doesn’t feature. I write like a man and I’m a bit Extreme, she has told me previously. I am that anachronism, a book-reader, and from this my writing has developed Eccentric Superabundance of Style, Alarming Borrowings, Erratic Fluctuations, and I must Must lose my tendency to Capitalisation.
    Once when I