‘Did you bring any cake?’ Nan calls from her seat by the fire. Nan is Mam’s mam, she’s a Talty, ninety-seven or ninety-nine, is shrunk to a doll-sized grandmother with large hands and feet. She has what Margaret Crowe calls the All-Simons, which is basically a refutation of the invention of time; all time is the same to Nan, she has that most remarkable of skills, the habit of living, and has it so perfected now that death has given up and gone away. In her Foxford blanket and ancient pampooties Nan is part-Cherokee, 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 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.’