Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  He had lost his key. I unclenched the fist that held mine so tightly and he took it.

  ‘Good lad,’ he said, smiling briefly down at me and in a single easy movement letting himself back into our lives. The feel, the smell, the sense of him was back. Even the hall as he stood in it seemed to fill with his presence and air; there was the stiff strong tang of the oils on his clothes, his fingers with their tapering reach into the emptiness around him seemed ready to touch and take up everything. A sea and mountains swept from him and settled in the hall, airs and winds of bogs and hillsides, blackthorn hedges, the prickle of furze, the breezes of early morning over uncut meadows of high hay were all about him. For a moment he looked at me. He actually looked, and for the first time in my life, shaking under his scrutiny without the slightest idea of what he might say or do, I glanced up and saw something like pride burning in his eyes.

  ‘Nicholas,’ he said again, as if testing my name like an old key, and seeing if he could re-enter the world of his family. ‘How are you?’

  The anger had flown out of me and was replaced by the feeling of wanting desperately to be touched, to be held by my father.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, and looked at the edge of his coat, studying a frayed place where wire or briars had cut into it.

  ‘Of course you are.’ His hand was upon my head, and I was pressed close to his chest. Whether he held me there or I myself was the one who could not step away, it was a long moment. I closed my eyes and held on to him, too close to see the tears I imagined filled his eyes or the grief and regret that crashed over him, tumbling him about in the hopelessness of loss that each return home must have signalled to his mind. God had taken him away, and each time he returned there was a little less of us left. It was an age before he spoke, and when he did I felt he had already decided something; he was sorry and was going to try to put things right.

  ‘Is your mother upstairs?’ he said. And then, a hand disappearing in the ancient coat, and five pounds suddenly showing. ‘Here, go down the road and get us a cake.’

  I went outside, he went upstairs. I had five pounds in my hand, we were rich. I ran as fast as I could through the streaming archways of falling leaves, the coming-down kingdom of banished summer that I kicked and leapt through, footballing clumps as I went, giddy again with the child’s dream of the perfect world, the endless light, and God come home once more.

  16

  I imagined my father had come back to love my mother. God, I imagined, had briefly freed him from his vocation and decreed instead that this was the time to save our family. Perhaps He had gone to live with someone else, wreaking havoc on their life even as He was about to restore ours. Where exactly I got this notion I am not sure. In the five pounds in my fist perhaps I had dreamed or hoped into happening a fresh start, in the look of my father’s eyes perhaps I gleaned a flash of that man under the trees and the streetlight asking his girl to marry him. Coming back along the still suburban streets with the cake in my hands, I thought I was hurrying back into the settled and cosy nest of ordinary life. I remember everything of that short evening journey, the cool smells of leaf-embedded grass rising into the pink and grey air, the shut houses behind their gardens, rose-scents, the feel of a stone wall I let my fingers rub along as I went, warming to burn, the evening bus from the city pulling in, Mr Dawson, with his Evening Herald rolled, stepping into my running and giving a little quick playful swipe at my head. It was one of those moments that seem held in sharpest focus, as if the world had quietly slipped into a brighter intensity and everything was lifted up, clear, radiant, remarkably there. The clouds were majestic, the people on the far side of the street clothed in a dazzling luminousness. Even Mrs Heffernan, bending down into her chins to examine and unfold the five pound note, looking at it on the counter, pressing it out as if it might turn unreal before her eyes, had the air of an angel. As she handed me the cake I knew the world was starting over. In the crinkle of the cellophane I felt it. I wanted to laugh out loud. Everything in our lives was going to be all right now. I was going home from the shops to my mother and father. I was going to step inside the hall door to the miracle of ordinariness, the kettle on the boil, the tea leaves being spooned from the caddy and the table set for chocolate cake.

  But nothing was that simple.

  Between my leaving and returning the world turned. My father ascended the stairs two at a time, rustling in his raincoat past the place where I had sat on the evening of his decision. On the upstairs landing his great boots thumped on the bare floorboards the centres of which were already vaguely embrowned with the footsteps of our days. Dirt fell out of the lift of his heels. The thick smells of him rose ahead into the upstairs of the house and he crossed the space to my mother’s closed door. His eyes, I think, were brimming at last with the warm recognition of who she was in his life. He had come back this time for her, to that white bosom on the bed, that blissful forgiving feeling there was, the sheer surrendering peace in holding her, in laying his head down and saying I’m sorry and feeling her hand on the back of his head absolving him even as she witnessed the dirt of ruined dreams all around her. It was for her that he came back. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? For the woman who had seen him crash out through the wallpaper-world of pastel shades and pressed shirts that was her way of loving, for the woman whose eyes no longer shone and whose back curved with the weight of failed hope and lost love, measuring her day in sleeping tablets?

  Wasn’t it for my mother that he had at last come back? To explain the brutal selfishness of God, taking him away into the private agonies of his yet unknowable talent, leaving her, alone, with me? Wasn’t that it? Wasn’t that what shook in the hand that reached for the handle of the bedroom door, that brought him shaking and weeping hot tears for the first time in his married life as he stood there at the shut doorway, feeling momentarily that he was doing the will of man not God, that his decision to paint and go away had all been a monstrous error, that he had never heard the Voice and for two years had blundered in a waste of spirit and love?

  My father’s hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.

  Two

  1

  When Isabel Gore returned to Galway after Christmas in her final school year, she did not know that she was going to fall in love. Her father had walked with her to the ferry, and, standing a moment in soft rain, he held on to her arm and did the hesitant cough and mumble that preceded a major announcement. Feeling his fingers clutch the elbow of her damp gaberdine, Isabel knew a warning was coming. But just what the Master Gore was hoping to warn his daughter against, neither of them knew. When she looked at him his face was full of rain. He blinked at her. Quick nervous smiles crossed his eyes. The ferry was banging against the tyres along the pier and the engine roaring. The few passengers were aboard and lined up behind the clouded windows of the small open cabin. A boy in a yellow coat waited to throw the heavy rope off its mooring.

  It was something to do with the sea, the Master thought, with waves crashing. Yes, and a quality he had noticed in her over the Christmas, that now seemed to make the sea so unbearably vast and great. The waters were churned up. How cold and grey, unforgiving, changed. He gripped his daughter’s arm and heard her say What is it? loudly over the engine. Words rushed around in him, swimming on quick coming-going tides of the three whiskeys that had started his morning. He cursed himself for taking them, wished he had another, and all the time stared at his beautiful daughter’s face. Had she been a little colder at home that Christmas? As he stood there he felt his eyes tearing up.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back again in the summer. Go home, Daddy.’

  She hugged against him and then was gone, jumping from the last step to the outreached hand of the ferry’s captain. Her hair was around
her face as she waved goodbye and the boat sped off, bumping away into the weather and fading into itself like a photograph in reverse development. When it was gone, it was hard to imagine it had been there at all, and the Master turned and walked up from the pier toward the village in the same knot of gloom that had tied itself up inside him since early morning. He still did not know what it was. There was no school, and so he crossed the little arc of white sand and shooed the five donkeys gathered there before going to sit in Coman’s and take tea, pulling out a small paperbound copy of Yeats and trying to concentrate on reading until lunchtime. It did no good, doom travelled him like an itch. The poems and three pots of tea fuddled him more.

  For the rest of that day and most of the next week he couldn’t escape the sense of having been given a warning to pass on to his daughter, and each morning as he came from the house down along the little narrow road that led to the school his eyes rested on the winter sea and then puzzled and squinted at the watery message of his daughter’s future that he could not read.

  2

  Galway city in the winter of Isabel’s eighteenth year was racked with the worst Atlantic weather in memory. Storms sailed in the bay and the sea walks were washed with spray. Whistling gales swept round corners of the narrow streets and the people hurried between pub, shop and home in thick coats, hats and headscarves. Eyes down, and a hand holding the coat tight over their chests, women tilted at an angle into the gusts, bags blown backwards on a trailing arm. The skin of faces was polished clean, ears were bitten off, and Galway eyes watered and blinked at the unbelievable weather that gripped the city for three months. Each day seemed worse than the one before, until a gradual acceptance grew, and every man and woman walking through the city in the January, February and March of that year knew like a sour neighbour the hurtling chill and wet gales that came with hail and rain off the Atlantic.

  It was a time of predictions and long memories. It would clear on the second of February, or, when the sleet ripped through that day, on Valentine’s Day. In the convent school three nuns died in the same week. The heating was turned up high and the girls moved between the tropical climates of their French, Spanish and geography classes and the brutal cold of the mathematics room where Sister Magdalen had turned off the radiators in a particularly errant moment of vision, believing that Our Lord wanted the purity of the girls’ souls to warm them from the inside.

  And still the skies stayed broken and black. It came like a sickness off the sea, one storm after the next, clattering the loose sash windows where Isabel sat and read over again the last letter from home. Back on the island they were prisoners of the weather now. The school was closed for a couple of weeks. Her father stayed late in bed, rising in the early afternoon, standing in the kitchen and leaning on the deep stone ledge of the window to look out the thirty or so yards of the visible world. The mainland was lost to them, and the freedom there was on a summer’s day in seeing the limitless expanse of a blue sky over a blue sea was inversed now, and the stone walls of the houses and the little fields were the still jails of winter.

  All along the west of the country the winter raged. The storms, one man said, were from Iceland, taking off the soaking mat of his cap and standing into a doorway with a half-corona of hailstones melting greyly into his beard. From Hell more like it, said another, and when will it ever give up, will you tell me that? Pubs steamed and held their crowds in the loud warm complaining company of misery. Doors blew back on their hinges as the wind carried in another. Raking coughs and running noses, red ears and eyes, chilblains, sharp toothaches and cold toes became the character of the city. Everyone was wrapped into the dream of spring, as if the season of winter were a punishment for the untold sins of those who lived up and down all the remote beautiful places of that coastline. Over the midlands somewhere the storms weakened. In Dublin, said the radio, there were cold showers and some wind.

  The nuns, tackling the problem of the weather as if it were a sieging heathen army amassed at the convent doors, had drawn up a plan of campaign. Girls were to have double portions in the mornings, girls were to wear a second vest and school cardigan at all times, girls were to have an orange every day, girls were not permitted to leave the school grounds or go outside during breaktime or Saturdays while the inclement weather held. To divert the attentions of those under siege activities were arranged. Time had to be filled scrupulously; leagues of table tennis, netball, and other indoor games were announced.

  To Isabel the harshness of the weather was nothing compared to the frustration of being locked within the great white schoolrooms. She wanted to get out, to walk. She was supposed to be preparing for the last examinations of school and a place in university. But now, sitting in the convent behind the rattling panes of hailstoned windows and looking out into the pale colourlessness of the view, Isabel wanted to escape it all. School subjects seemed to the on her. In the rain-sealed rooms the wind outside was louder than learning. And so, using the changeover moment between classes on a particularly brutal February afternoon when the sky fell in sleet, she pulled on her gaberdine and slipped out of the school.

  The air was as sharp as glass. When the hail hit her face she almost laughed. Her fingers unclenched to feel it and she walked swiftly across the drenching grass of the playing fields. If she made it as far as the bushes she’d be fine, she told herself, not running or ducking, but striding out into the murderous hard rain, feeling it needle already through the damp hood and shoulders of the green gaberdine. She was soaked at once, but stepping onto the path outside the convent for the first time in a month, she was full of a shining exultation. Her hood had blown off and her hair was plastered thickly against her face. Her cheeks stung. The grey school stockings gathered like wet weights around her ankles. Small spouts of rain shot off the toes of her shoes. Such things she would remember later, those weathered moments of feeling the surge of freedom like some fabulous springtime already rising budding and flowering inside her as she walked down the path towards Galway City in the grip of the worst storm of that winter. The weather would always be part of the memory. The smell of rain, the stung pure cleanliness of her face beaten fine and shining with it, the droplets that ran into her eyes as the red car slowed and then pulled over beside her.

  At first she thought it was the nuns, and kept walking. The car inched alongside her and the passenger window was rolled slightly down. Isabel thought: if I run now I’ll have five more minutes, five minutes before they catch up with me and I’m back in the room too dry and too warm and already forgetting how marvellous this is. Then she heard a man’s voice:

  ‘Do you want a lift in?’

  There was no reason for her to get in the car. She had wanted to be outside in the rain, to feel the freedom of the chill air hurtling against her. But her hand was already opening the door. It was one of those moments when the plot of life jolts forward and understanding and planning vanish in a rash action; she would get further away from the convent in the car, it was part of the escape, the risk and adventure near the edge.

  She was in the car in a moment, the rain pouring off her on to the torn tan leatherette of the seat and the thick scentless breath of the car fan blowing into her face. She didn’t look at him right away. She blinked the rainwater from her eyes, and peered forward through the slapping of the windscreen wipers. It was an old car and drove with a kind of loose bumping and rattling that made it seem as if various of its collected parts were detaching themselves on to the roadway behind. Upon its backseat were two large rolls of tweed pressed upright into the fabric of the roof; about them was scattered an assortment of odds and ends, pages of newspapers, brochures, a cap, wellingtons, a raincoat, some pliers, a length of chain, and pervading everything, a smell of dogs.

  ‘You’re mad to be out in it,’ said the man, giving a little he-he laugh and slowly shaking his head. ‘Do you know that?’

  She thought first of the car more than the weather, and then turned to look at him. He was fair-haired,
his eyes were green. He was short and thick-set, strong. She noticed his left hand on the gearstick, the swift almost angry action of how he threw the small red car into a little speed and hurtled them forward into the grey miasma of Galway city. He wore a kind of orange country and western shirt open at the neck and in the pocket a pack of cigarettes. When they slowed into traffic he thrummed his fingers on the top of the steering wheel to a tune she couldn’t quite make out.

  In ten minutes in the car with him she didn’t say a single word. And then, curving into the centre of the lashed, deserted streets he asked her where she was heading.

  ‘Anywhere’ll be fine,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus.’ He was laughing more than swearing. ‘Anywhere, fuck’s sake.’ He shook his head gently and Isabel looked at him for the first time. ‘Where are you going? I’ll take ya.’

  She had no idea where she was going but suddenly wanted to say the farthest place.

  ‘I’m not dangerous, ya know,’ he said, and chuckled to himself at the thought. ‘Of course maybe you’re out for the walk, were ya?’ He laughed and beat the palm of his hand down on the top of the steering wheel and turned and grinned a boyish unconfident grin at her, staring across the width of the car to lose himself completely in those unbelievable eyes that in that first real moment of their beginning first smiled, then laughed too.

  3

  His name, he said, was Peader O’Luing. His mother ran the wool and tweed shop on Cross Street that his father had started thirty years previously. Prionsias O’Luing had been a well-known tin whistle player in Galway. He had founded the shop as a way of surviving for his music in the city, and for years, while his three sons and three daughters were growing up, had established the place as a kind of ramshackle woolly centre for travelling musicians. The backdoor of the shop let in on the side door of Blake’s public house, and through the children’s school years the vision of assorted musicians sleeping stretched on the counter or on the wooden floor wrapped one beside the next in great bolts of tweed and other cloth was not an uncommon one. Maire Mor, Big Marie, the wife, was as gifted a musician as her husband and until the day he died, falling off the unsteady stepladder and smashing his head full of whiskey and music on the ancient mahogany counter, she would play in the evening seisiuns, fiddle under her various chins and with a pint of stout within reach of her massive right arm. But after the funeral her own health failed. She soured like milk and abandoned music. Two of her daughters were in England nursing, the third was married in Mayo. None of them wished to return to her, and so she drank the bitterness of her misfortune in continuous glasses of vodka, with only the vaguest realisation that she was becoming a monster.