History of the Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he’s all the time expecting that he’s done, that if the pain would lessen he could just close his eyes and wake up in Thomas Traherneland. Because he does believe in a next life, his version is one of those blue-sky kinds with the light coming from behind huge white-puff clouds and saints kind of standing on them like very serene superheroes who’ve decided long wavy hair in the seventies was the look and a peach or apricot robe was quite comfortable in the weather up there. That kind of afterlife. Anyway, what with all the Latin and kneeling and candles Abraham’s pretty much got the passport. So there he is, blood crisping, eyelids kind of butterfly-fluttering, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison on his lips, and here are the hands of the angels coming to lift him up.
    Only they’re a little rough.
    That’s because they belong not to an angel but to a young medic called Oliver Cissley. Oliver’s so ardent it’s given him glossy eyes and fierce neck acne but he has come to war to save lives.
    Grandfather is delivered to Cissley right there on a plate and so bingo! Young Oliver gets to work just as Grandfather is in that place between Living and Dying, between Fish and Fisherman, my father says, and Oliver thinks this is what he came for and starts whipping the bullets out – one, two, and actually yes, there, three – and hauling Abraham back from the Hereafter.
    Grandfather is a Near Thing.
    Which is no fun. Believe me.
    Because for Grandfather then there was only Falling Back Down to Earth, which is not great and just plain awful for a pole-vaulting salmon.

Chapter 5
    Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
    That’s pure MacCarroll. We have mixed metaphors and outlandish similes for breakfast.
    When you transplant a little English language into a Clare Bog this is what happens, Miss Quinty.
    Ruth Ruth Ruth.
    It’s just so fecund.
    Ruth Swain!
     
    Grandfather survives. The War moves away and he stays behind. They give him a little time to recover and see if he can Take up Arms again but he can’t even Take up Hands. The holes in his chest and the soul-thick air of the battlefields of Boulogne join forces to give him pneumonia and next thing he’s on his way back to England without Messrs. Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul, all of whom are growing poppies in France, and he’s moved into a Home called Wheaton in Wolverhampton.
    Years later my father tried to find him there, first by reading everything he could of World War One, then by leaving us one October and going by train, ferry and bus to Wolverhampton long after Abraham was dead and Wheaton Home had been turned into fifty-six apartments for people who didn’t see ghosts. I don’t think he found him, but when he came back Mam said he smelled of smoke.
    Great-Grandmother Agnes is dead when Abraham returns. In those days you could die beautifully of Failure of the Heart, and that’s what she did, prayers said, palms together, close your eyes and bumps-a-daisy, another one for Greener Pastures, My Lord.
    When the authorities ask Abraham of any living relatives he says he has none. A caustic shame is the natural by-product of the Impossible Standard.
    So, at this stage in Our Narrative it doesn’t look great for my chances. (See Book 777, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , Gentleman , Laurence Sterne, Penguin Classics, London.)
    (Has its advantages I suppose. For one thing, I won’t die at the end.)
    Abraham has had his soul burned. That’s what I’ve decided. He’s had an Icarus moment, only English Protestant-style. Like all of England he has fallen the long distance from Rudyard Kipling to T. S. Eliot, which is a long way, and it left him with ashes on his soul. He was not worthy. He’s a Veteran at age twenty. So he sits in a fusty room with a narrow bed and a small window that gives a view of the fumy skies of Wolverhampton and starts smoking himself to death. He can’t believe he’s still alive. He’s God’s Oversight. He should have been the