History of the Rain Read Free Page A

answered that Emily Dickinson capitalised, Mrs Quinty told me Emily Dickinson was not A Good Example, that she was a Peculiar Case, and the way she said it you knew she regretted it right away because there was a little flinching around her mouth and you could tell she had already joined the dots and remembered Swains are pretty much the definition of peculiar. And so I never did ask her about what it meant to write like a man.
    Two-handed, Mrs Quinty lifts the glasses free of the minor parsnip of her nose, holds them just in front of her and scrutinises the dust gathered there. Rain makes bars of light and dark down her face and mine, as if we’re inside the jail of it.
    Mrs Quinty draws out her handkerchief, polishes, scrutinises again, finds more of the dust or smears school-life produces and cleans further. ‘What have you been reading, Ruth?’
    I have already eaten all of Dickens – Pickwick to Drood. I can tell you why Charles Dickens is the greatest novelist there ever was or will be and why all great novelists since are in debt to Great Expectations . I can remember things you’ve forgotten, like when Pip drank so much tar-water he went around smelling of new fence , or when Mr Pumblechook was proud to be in the company of the chicken that had the honour of being eaten by the new gentleman Pip. I read that book first in the class of Miss Brady over in Faha N.S. where there was this wire-rack library with rag-eared paperbacks donated by parents, along with a full set of Guinness Book of Records 1970–80. But it wasn’t until Mr Mason when I was fourteen that I understood it was the Best Book Ever.
    I’ve read all the usuals, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, but Dickens is like this different country where the people are brighter, more vivid, more comic, more tragic, and in their company you feel the world is richer, more fantastic than you imagined.
    But right now I’m reading RLS. He’s my new favourite. I like writers who were sick. I like it that my father’s first book was Treasure Island , a small red hardcover Regent Classics (Book 1, Purnell & Sons Ltd, Paulton, Somerset) with the stamp on the inside page: Highfield School, First Prize .
    I like it that Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy, that his imagination sailed him away into adventures while his body was lying in his bed with the first stages of consumption. I like it that he called himself an inland castaway, and that as a young man he decided he wanted to go walking around some of France, sleep out à la belle étoile with a donkey he christened Modestine and who, he wrote, ‘had a faint semblance to a lady of my acquaintance’ (Book 846, Travels with a Donkey , Wadsworth Classics). I know that lady too.
    I myself am going to write Travels with a Salmon when I get further downriver.
    I want to tell Mrs Quinty all this, but just say: ‘Robert Louis Stevenson.’ And then, by way of passing comment, add, ‘I want to read all these books.’
    ‘ All? ’ She looks around at them, in proper terms my father’s library, but really just the enormous collection of books he accumulated which has now been brought up to my room and stacked from the floor to where the angle of the skylight cuts them off.
    ‘They were my father’s. I’m going to read them all before I die.’
    Mrs Quinty doesn’t approve of any mention of dying. From her sleeve she takes the handkerchief and applies it with a light brushing to beneath her nose where the deadly word may be lingering. She catches what must once have been her lower lip in her top teeth. There is a little pinking, a flush of feeling that the powder on her cheeks cannot camouflage. She looks at the wild stacks, the ones that rise behind the others, so it seems we are in a sea and there are waves of books coming towards the boat-bed and somewhere in there my father has gone.
    She doesn’t quite know what to say.
    ‘I don’t quite know what to say,’ she says.
    ‘That’s