Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  6

  Isabel was born on an island in the west.

  When I thought of it later, adding the fragments she told to the ones I imagined, I would see her childhood like some fine cloth spun of sealight and sand, frayed and ribboned with beauty and grief. Hers was the place my boyhood eyes had pictured my father painting, hers the great expansive skies, the little stonewalled fields trapping the runaround summer breeze, the endlessly felt presence of the hushed or crashing sea. Looking up from running or skipping or chasing on the little white hoop of sand that was the eastern shore, Isabel would see the grey hulk of the edge of the country and wonder at the world that awaited her.

  The island was small and quiet; it had no cars. From a little rough pier in the early mornings, fishing boats sailed on the slapping waters, dancing round the island and off into the sea of loneliness and rain, disappearing to the west toward the unseeable horizon of America where in the rising, falling waves the fish were netted and brought home.

  With her brother she would cross the island sometimes after school. Their father was the Master and, while he tidied the schoolroom or stopped in at Coman’s for two short glasses of Irish whiskey, they would leave their schoolbags over a low place in a wall and walk off over the hill at the back of the houses. She was eleven, he was ten. Down the labyrinth of rough gravelled pathways where even bicycles would hardly travel, they made their way, across the cragged stretch of grey limestone to the western shore of rock and foaming sea. They walked to the island’s edge, a sharp jut of high stone with a sudden drop to shiny black rocks the tide made vanish under the tumbling waters. The shoreline itself appeared and disappeared like magic below them as the waves crashed. There, they had a favourite place to play, a little sea-gallery of stone steps, levels, platforms. They were the King and Queen there. In the majestic hush and beauty of the land’s end they could imagine themselves ruling a fabled kingdom of fiddlers and poets. Men like their father, women like their mother. They spoke in Irish, and in the spoken phrases of their game a little Gaelic world took life. Playing numerous parts for each other, they were now chieftans, now bards, now blacksmiths and bakers. Isabel danced on the high slab of rock to Sean’s imaginary fiddle. They issued commands, and turned around to obey them. Sometimes, in the afternoons of early spring when sudden bounds of new life seemed to come at them across the surface of the sea, they would pretend they were invader and defender of their island, one grappling the other in mock fight, crying out to unseen armies of men and plundering the riches of the kingdom. Seabirds screamed in choruses overhead, and the fabulous light of the spring skies made a tapestry above them. Clouds white and fast were the sails of ships come to visit.

  When Isabel danced on the rock’s edge she felt the wind dance with her; she felt it touch her legs and run the danger through her. Her cheeks burned, her eyes fixed on the far sea and her hands down by her sides. In his squat position behind her, Sean sawed the pretend fiddle in perfect jigtime. He knew the tune well, had played it and dozens of others for gathered crowds in Coman’s pub on Saturday nights. For he was one of those children, an ordinary-looking, freckled, round-nosed boy with ears like cup handles stuck to the sides of his head, by whose hands God seemed to play music. He played whatever he picked up, fiddle, whistle, flute, bodhran, banjo, spoons, and played each effortlessly well as he released the notes in the dead instrument and looked around him in mild bemusement at the dancing or gaping adults ringed around. For his sister, Isabel, he was happy to pretend and made himself giddy by changing the instruments he played as she was dancing. Now he was fiddling, next whistling, and so on through all the instruments without his losing the tune or Isabel the steps.

  ‘Sean!’ she shouted in mock annoyance, crossing the rock in her jig steps without looking at him. How she loved to dance, she thought, leaping on the grey edge of the Atlantic.

  They played the game for an hour or so on those rocks above the sea. For a time Sean teased her. She was dancing farther back from the edge, he said.

  ‘Is meatachan tusa,’ he said, calling her a coward. The next tune he jigged he hurried the music out of time, going faster and faster, letting a little laugh break into the notes, shaking his head.

  ‘Sean!’ Isabel called as the music sped on and she tried to dance with it, crossing the edge of the bare rock back and forth like a tormented puppet, dancing as fast as he could play, on and on, back and forth, faster and faster until suddenly he stopped. She sighed, exhausted. What wonderful dancing! God, how she loved it. The silence swept up the cliffs over them and when she turned around she saw that he had taken a fit. His face was a sticky white, his eyes were gone back into his head and his whole body shook stiffly on the stone. At first she thought he was pretending, that it was some further facility he had developed, this wild horror, the stuff that was drooling from him. But when she reached her hand to touch his forehead her fingers knew; the illness came off on them, the filmy sweat of his disorder that she brought to her lips, then cried out.

  It seemed for ever, but was over in minutes. In minutes Sean’s body had slumped back on the rock, limp and slimy as fish. His eyes had come back, returned from another world with a glassy expression. He gasped. He tried to talk and couldn’t, and when at last he managed her name, it was a thick mumble, as if stuffed in his mouth was the useless lump of someone else’s tongue.

  Isabel lifted him. He was light and weak, the wind might have carried him into the sea. Gulls had landed on the platform above them, watching, waiting for the rain that was about to fall. Now, as she ringed her arm around her brother and helped him make stumbling progress over the broken gravel track that led back across the island, the heavens opened. The rain came as it always came, travelling across the horizon in swift soft veils of water, joining the sea and sky in a seamless grey and curtaining the island from the world. It poured down on them. Sean walked shakily at his sister’s side, making slow steps as if each was a separate new creation. They made their way home across the quiet of the island. They left their schoolbags in the puddled place by the wall and carried on to the house where their mother and father had begun to worry for them.

  Off Isabel’s arm, Sean flopped onto the flags of the kitchen floor. Margaret Gore cried out. She bent to help but her husband was there before her, picking up the boy and carrying him quickly from the kitchen to the bed. For a moment Isabel sat there, slumped and wet on the floor, the long mass of her dark hair tangling down across her face as her mother rushed over. What had happened? What in God’s name had happened?

  She was out of her clothes, wrapped in towels shivering before the fire. Her father had gone out into the rain to the post office to telephone the next island for the doctor. Her mother was sitting across from her at the fire, getting up and sitting down, going in and out of the boy’s room where he lay lifeless in a stupor beneath the blankets. The rain lashed down. What had happened? What had happened? At eleven years of age, Isabel Gore had no idea. She stared into the fire as the boat bearing the doctor thrashed across the angry sea. She kept her face close to the flames until the heat began to burn her and she felt the pain, saying nothing at all, staring into the orange glow of the turf and thinking: I caused this. I’ve hurt my brother.

  7

  That winter, while my father stayed at home, my mother stayed in bed. There was no money for central heating and our now three beds were piled high with blankets, coats, spare towels and anything else that could be found. In the mornings the cold on my face woke me, I shivered into chill damp clothes and walked downstairs thinking I felt a breeze blowing around my ears. My father sat across the breakfast table in his coat and sometimes his hat. Usually he said nothing more than my name, or ‘Here’, or ‘This is for your mother’, or ‘Take this up’. It was not that he was morose or unloving. He had entered a winter phase of his inspiration, the cold season after returning which we would all three come to know so well. Novembering, Decembering, that period of cold weather in him, the days and nights he would go and
sit in his studio and look at the summer’s paintings and begin to doubt: had God been with him at all?

  A clear white frost came inside him, his thinness made him seem brittle and he walked from room to room with infinite delicacy, slow and careful and quiet, as if he might crack, flake with the pressure on his soul.

  In the absence of conversation the radio had become my mother’s only luxury. She preferred radio, she told me confidentially, to two cups of coffee, and propped herself up in the bed in the mornings as I left for school, craning her ear to the fading sounds of the world coming through the sticky crackle of the transistor’s weakening batteries. There was a chat show on in the mornings. The host was a genial man with a soft voice and among his mannerisms was a whole series of rhetorical questions, a plethora of well-you-know-yourself-don’t-you’s and well-I-never-heard-the-likes-of-it-did-you’s and so on. To these now my mother had taken the habit of giving answers, leaning sideways on the hump of pillows and speaking carefully into the radio as if it were the dark semi-deaf earpiece of her closest friend.

  With my mother speaking to the radio, and my father silent and frozen in the aftermath of his inspiration, I left the house each morning and joined the ragged line of other schoolboys cycling into the day. I did not mention my parents to anybody, or raise an eyebrow when during Religion Brother Maguire stood at the head of the class and asked every boy to close his eyes and think, think, of Holy God coming into our daily lives.

  8

  On the island of quietness, Isabel began to feel a prisoner of what she had done. Somehow, she felt, her dancing had been the cause of her brother’s illness, and after each day’s school she came home to his bedside. In the small damp bedroom Sean lay motionless beneath a great layering of woollen blankets, looking up into the clear white aftermath of his fit as if the world had suddenly been laid bare for him. The music was gone and he was as stilled and useless as an instrument laid aside, God gone to play on someone else. He took food with difficulty, dribbled watery mashed-up meals on to a baby’s linen nappy about his chest, then lay back again into his deep drift of quiet, not noticing the little clusters of sorrow-faced men and women in wet coats and headscarves who leaned in the bedroom door to look. Rumblings of rosaries and other prayers hovered over him.

  Alone next to his bed, Isabel whispered in his ear. At first it was only: get well, Sean, feel better, or the words of her sorrow, ‘Sean, ta aifeala orm.’ But as the first weeks stretched into months, and it began to seem as if he would never recover himself again, she tried to offer him as recompense the whispered words of her secrets.

  On a still blue September day, Muiris Gore took her by boat to the mainland to enrol in a boarding secondary school in Galway. Isabel had always known she would be leaving, and yet as the little ferry bounced across the water and the small walled fields of the island became a featureless grey hump in the distance, she felt banished. She sat on the bench at the side of the boat beside her father with the soft spray washing over them and a flock of gulls screaming in a trail behind. She clutched the handle of her bag, and wondered if she fell overboard would it float? After three sips from the flask in his coat pocket, her father warned her about the nuns. He spoke in English and told her to do the same.

  ‘Issy,’ he said, ‘you’ll be good, won’t you? You’ll show them up, you’ll show them we know a thing or two. There’ll be girls from the city there, and all over, but you’ll be smarter and better than all of them.’ He looked to the sea behind them. ‘We’re not ignorant or backward or stupid, Issy, remember. You’ll be better than all of them.’

  She couldn’t look at him. She knew the patterns and rhythms of this speed already, had with all her classmates heard a hundred versions of it in the small green schoolroom where the map of Ireland hung on the wall. It was her father’s main theme, the pride of their place and the unsurrenderable conviction of who they were when they ventured forth from the small intimacy of their world. She knew, and knew too that the whiskey and the journey were adding new emphasis. In a moment he might have stood up and stammered it out for the handful of other passengers, speaking with a kind of self-conscious careful deliberation until the swaying of the boat would topple him against the railing and over, stammering on into the sea.

  When he looked at her she nodded. He did not say anything about Sean. From the day of the accident he had never quite known what to think. What had happened on that shelf of rock by the sea to rob his only son of speech and movement was still one of God’s mysteries to him. In the first days afterward he had sat in the kitchen and heard Isabel tell it over and over, how she had danced as she always danced, how Sean had sped the music in fun and she had kept with it, crossing the rock in front of him, leaping into the wind until the music suddenly stopped. For Muiris some clue was absent, and in his weaker moments in Coman’s he had wept openly at his grief and frustration in being unable to understand it. For a time he thought it was a judgement on his vanity, his pride in his son, the gifted musician, the prodigy now lying gaggling and drooling in the songless bedroom where the window let in the low sounds of the sea. Was there not something more, something Isabel was not saying? he wondered sometimes. He looked down the classroom at her, he watched her walking home. How different she seemed from other girls. She had something wildly beautiful about her, a quality he took for pride and independence. She would be stubborn, he thought, like her mother, a woman who combined hasty fire and brutal common sense in such proportions that he had long abandoned debate with her. He was the Master. He was a man of substance on the island. To him, he imagined, fell the awesome responsibility of kneading, rolling and moulding the raw rough stuff of the island mind. He had read more books than anyone, including the priest. He could recite poems in Irish of a hundred lines and more, and often at weddings or wakes was called upon to deliver those late-night age-old verses that would still the house and make women cry. He loved himself for it. He had tried to give his children his love of poetry and song; their game at the island’s edge he had all but showed them himself. Now, sitting on the boat crossing to Galway under the September sky, he looked at his daughter and flushed with terror and pride at what he might have created. She would be beautiful, he knew. Her eyes were already extraordinary, her hair was thick and dark, and she walked, even as a young girl, with her head upright and a certain aloneness in her stride. She was polite with him. She answered him in few words. But something in her face filled him with the feeling that she was full of secrets he would never penetrate.

  To his wife this was nonsense. The girl was quiet, that’s all. She had had a bad fright, she would be back to herself in a short while. Besides, Galway would change her, she had told her husband. The mainland changed all the island girls. They left as children and never came back quite the same. Their childhood was left on the island, and coming back they could only visit it anymore, she said, thumping the iron to her words while he sat saying nothing by the fire. Perhaps she should stay back another year in his school, he thought, but didn’t say it. He knew what his wife’s response would be. Besides, Isabel was quick and clever, and, even quiet and apart in her seat, she had been among the best in the class.

  The brown suitcase had been taken down and packed while she slept. In the morning before the two passengers left for the ferry, Mrs Gore gave each of them fresh scones in paper bags in their pockets. She held her daughter to her tightly, holding her there against her so that Isabel could not see her face, nor how the tears kept filling and how the mother tilted up her head so that they might drop back silently and unseen into the great grieving wells of her eyes. For a moment, the girl’s father stood beside them like a useless extra. His cap on his head, the suitcase in his hand, the lump of the scone bag in one coat pocket and the whiskey flask in the other, he seemed for a moment a figure entirely adrift, cut off from the massive closed circle of emotion that locked itself between mother and daughter’s arms. He swallowed thickly and stared. Neither Isabel nor her mother had spoken a hundred wo
rds together about her leaving; it was he who had sat her opposite him in the parlor to talk, he who had walked alongside her across the white arc of sand in the summertime, telling her to think of Galway. Yet now, in this locked embrace without word or sound, Muiris Gore saw with amazement the hopeless inadequacy of the human mind to fathom the miracle of love. When Isabel let go of her mother, she turned to him and seemed at once to have lived ten years in as many instants. Her face was not wet with tears, those dark and extravagant eyes were not swollen or red, but somewhere there she wore the grief of her going and it became her like a black stole. One last time she asked to see Sean, and ran in through the house to his room. She was no more than a minute. He lay on his bed and took her kiss and the squeeze of her hand with a broken little wail of sound and a sweeping roll of his eyes. Into the cup of his ear, as always, she hummed the few notes of a tune, and then hurried back to where her father was waiting.

  Out the door then, down the little stone path, and pulling open the small white iron gate that her father always said he must oil, out down the slope of the island to the pier. Three of their neighbours had seen them off. Two other girls were going to the nuns also. The Master would take them too. There was a flutter of Irish, the last sounds of the island and then the roar of the engine.

  As the ferry bumped in against the wall of the mainland Muiris Gore stirred himself out of his memories. His daughter was standing beside him watching as the man threw the knotted rope and tied it to its mooring. Gathering himself up and quickly summoning an air of authority and importance, Isabel’s father placed his hand on her shoulder, faltered back a step with the rushing realisation that the whiskey and nostalgia had unsteadied him, and stepped onto the mainland holding on to her as his buoy.

  They sat down on the pier. The two other girls were giddy and light-headed with freedom. They stood and bumped against each other and giggled. Isabel, as always with her father, said nothing. She waited for the air to bring him back; she had seen him like this before and knew it was nothing. And yet, even as at last he stood right and smiled and led them off into the city where Isabel was to spend the next six years of her life, she had fortified even stronger in herself an idea of men, pale rhapsodical creatures, figures touched by God, with weak sickening bodies and musical, immortal souls.