Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

A chain of Sundays, through the last months of that frozen winter and the final awakening of springtime once more. Saturday evenings Peader cleaned out the interior of the small red car and got it ready for Sunday morning. He told his mother he was going to meet friends, but from the changing habits of his dress and hygiene Marie Mor interpreted the truth, piecing together a girl of sufficient unsuitability for her son for him to want to shield her from his mother’s gaze. After morning Masses she pursued and detained the mothers of his friends. Over the course of a month she stood stoutly before each of them in turn with the same delicately oblique line of questioning. She had a mortal horror of admitting that her son kept the girl a secret, and so let drop into the conversations instead a series of semi-references, hints and innuendos whose responses in the eyes and words of her companions she watched like a hawk.

  Within a month she had Isabel in her mind’s eye. She was a schoolgirl, no less, a thing of seventeen that for weeks now had turned her son into a morose lump of silence and brooding.

  He said nothing any more, took his meals, came and went from the shop within the bittersweet vapours of remembering or anticipating the girl. Monday to Saturday he took the hounds or drove alone back to the places where he and Isabel had walked the Sunday before. When he walked the hounds back over the route of their lovewalks he imagined he noticed in their stride and bearing a sudden quickening and sharpness; he told them her name and they raised their eyes at once to its sound in direct mimic of the response of his own heart. They were the closest things to him now, these slender animals of speed and grace with all their racing coiled and unsprung within them. They knew, he told himself, in the deliberated agony of each walk, the terrible longing to run.

  In five weeks of Sunday outings, five seven-hour Sundays with long kisses and cool cousinly goodbyes before the convent doors at their ending, Peader was still unsure of what, if anything, Isabel felt for him. He had not said he loved her, but was certain she knew, a certainty all the more painful for the uncertainty of her response. She came with that same mixture of pride and rebellion down the corridor and past the pursed mouth to meet him at the convent door every Sunday, every Sunday sitting into the cleaned-up car to go off with him into the more remote corners of the west. For politeness he asked her how her studying was going and she replied: dreadful. ‘I’m doing nothing,’ she said, and in that Peader took his greatest encouragement, briefly letting himself imagine she thought as much of him as he of her. He thought of tender things to tell Isabel about himself, but even as he was about to, the ghost of his father sat into the car between them and it all seemed ridiculous and foolish. In the whirlwind of fear and longing that is the first weeks of love, Peader O’Luing questioned, found and lost faith in everything. When they got out of the car to walk, if he didn’t reach for Isabel’s hand, she wouldn’t reach for his.

  The bleakness of that winter at last let up, and first two then three days came without rain. It was the end of March. From within the grey stone the population of the city re-emerged on its streets with the dazed look and cautionary steps of people unused to walking in the light. All skies were watched for thunder, but the clouds that sailed in over the islands from the west were the pale white tossed linen sheets of springtime. They fluttered overhead benignly, travelling the blue air above the city rooftops like God’s dreams, glimmering with sunlight. Birds returned from the invisible nowhere of their wintering, darting, flash-flying, alighting in choruses on the ancient stone ledges of the rooms above the shops on Shop Street. Grainne Halloran reopened the florist’s. The first daffodils of the year she placed in a bucket at the front door and the unreal brilliance of their gleaming brought Peader to her counter within half an hour, handing over ten pounds for a great fistful of the blossoms which he half-hid within his coat going down the street to slip them into the car. It was the first real Saturday of that spring, and buoyed by the flowers and the light he decided in a single stride down Shop Street that he must advance his courtship to the next stage or go mad. When he thought of it, it was as simple and obvious as a move in draughts: on Spy Wednesday they could tell the nuns the widower uncle was taken ill, Isabel was needed to help out. She could leave the convent that evening and not return until Easter Sunday night. Peader could tell his mother his friends were going away together for a few days until Easter Sunday or even Monday night. He could take Isabel in the car as far as Donegal. By the time they returned a threshold would have been crossed, he would have made love to her and banished for ever the uncertainty of her feelings for him.

  It was as simple as a move in draughts, or appeared so to Peader O’Luing going down Shop Street in the light-headed and airy excitement of the first sunshine of spring. The following Sunday morning he drove the wilting bundle of the daffodils in the passenger seat to the convent. It was a fine day. The gravel of the long, arcing driveway crunched beneath the car like children’s sweets. The tall trees that ringed the playing fields were coming into bud, and what had seemed the grey prison of winter was now a tranquil spreading parkland turning green in the spring. He left the flowers in the front seat and hurried up the steps to the front door. When the pursed mouth and small eyes opened it the dead air of all the girls’ lost time escaped down and out the corridor like a sigh, rushing for the tremoring freedom of the wind and trees. He hadn’t to ask for Isabel any more. He was let into the waiting room in small-eyed silence, standing by the window, idly moving with his fingertips the copies of The Messenger on the table. It was only when he heard the footsteps approaching that the momentousness of his plan made itself plain to him and his fingers screwed up with fright.

  8

  As it happened there was never a hope of Isabel spending the weekend with him. She came into the waiting room with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her cardigan and a distant look in her eyes. She was not able to go out with him.

  ‘They’re keeping me in.’

  ‘Fuck. Why?’

  ‘I failed three of my exams. They found out I’ve no uncle in Galway. I’m to go home on the ferry on Thursday.’

  ‘Shit. They can’t tell you what to do,’ he said angrily, louder than he wanted, speaking out of the immediate shock of seeing collapse even the Sunday drives and their central kisses, the stepping stones upon which he thought the sanity of his life had come to rely. ‘Fuck’s sake. Come with me now. What are they going to do anyway, expel you? They won’t, come on . . .’ He had taken hold of her arm and had already pulled her a few steps toward the door before he realised he had heard her say No and Stop it and Let go of my arm, you’re hurting me.

  The sleeve of Isabel’s cardigan had been pulled down over her hand. She stood across from him rubbing a place on her arm. In a flush of hurt and disappointment and regret, disbelieving he had been so rough with her, Peader blurted out: ‘I wanted you to come away with me next weekend, I wanted us to go to Donegal . . .’

  Isabel looked directly at him, the small thick man with the pained round eyes and crooked nose. It was the first outright expression of his love. She was amazed, not by what he felt, but that there in the waiting room he had brought himself to declare it.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, and heard the small quick rap that preceeded by a moment the opening of the door and the appearance in the entrance of the small-eyed nun. ‘Excuse me, Isabel, I think Sister Magdalen is waiting on you.’ The nun stood there behind a smile and waited, waited until the silent weight of the awkwardness pressed so forcibly on Peader’s shoulders that he feared he was stooping, face-down, as he hurried past both of them and out the doorway into the spring-light air of that ruined Sunday.

  Thinking of it later, Isabel realised that by that Sunday afternoon in the week before Holy Week she had still not fallen in love. It was true that her studies had fallen away, shelves of her mind tottering into a mire of indolent daydreams. Her brain had become soft, she thought, stretching back her neck in the silent study room where two hours had passed without her learning anything. There was no sharpn
ess, no perception of all that moved in paragraphs past her fixed gaze. She knew the pen-marks, the grain and knots in her wooden desk more than the textbooks, could tell blindly by her fingertips the place where years of idling pens and rulers had scarred the timber. It was useless, the hours went by. Isabel herself could not understand it. Over the course of her school years she had not made any true friend in the convent, for although there were many girls who liked her, there was a difference about her that kept them from coming closer. Now, as she found herself regressing through the class and simply unable to study, she had no one to whom she could really speak. It wasn’t Peader, she told herself, marking a slow blue curve of ink on a page of the poetry book. She wasn’t madly in love, or anything like what she imagined madly in love would be. She liked him, and the pattern of their Sundays in the small red car. It was a kind of island, she thought, that car with the two of them moving with so few words through all the fabulous scenery of field, bog and mountain. There was something in Peader that was like herself, he too was a little adrift, cut off and separated from the ordinary. She liked his awkwardness as much as anything else. She smiled, arcing the slow blue line into a circle on the page and beginning to retrace it, moving the pen over and over along the same line and looking down at it as if for clues to an answer. No, she wasn’t madly in love, and that Sunday afternoon when she walked down the corridor towards Peader with her hands deep in the pockets of her cardigan knowing that she would no longer be able to slip out the convent door into the freedom of the car, it had been the drive more than the driver she regretted. But then, only minutes later, returning from the waiting room through the dead air, hearing the soft footsteps of Sister Assumpta coming behind her and then fading into the side room where she calculated the convent budget and waited to answer the front door, everything had changed. He had declared himself and in the after shocks of Peader’s anger Isabel could feel the measure of his longing for her. She was shaken. Her hand held the banister going up the stairs to the study room. Her head felt light and in the following hours of that Sunday afternoon her mind flew like a kite in the strong breeze of her going with him to Donegal. What would it have been like, full days and nights together in a place she had never been? She could think of nothing else and that night she was the one who didn’t sleep, turning to face the moon in the window with the wide eyes and pale excitement of a girl feeling loosen the string that held her.

  9

  Until Thursday she lived with the buffeting, the tugging, toing and froing, rising and falling emotions in the quick winds of her heart. He had wanted to take her to Donegal, and the romance of that idea as Isabel thought of it over and over again began to take on the dimensions of love. For four days there was room for nothing else in Isabel’s mind and on Holy Thursday afternoon when the minibus called at the convent doors to take her and three other island girls to the ferry she knew that she couldn’t leave the mainland without speaking to him. Once the bus was outside the convent gates she moved across and sat next to Eibhlin Ni Domhnaill, asking her in a half-whisper to meet the Master at the pier and tell him his daughter had taken sick on the bus and was going to wait and come home on the next day’s ferry.

  She had asked it without even knowing what she intended to do. When the bus pulled over and she stepped out with her bag into the sharp salt tang of the sea air, it struck her with the force of old memories and she almost wanted to go home at once. But she didn’t, and out of sight of the bus driver she slipped behind parked cars and a fish van and made her way back alone into the city centre.

  There was a familiar feeling to these moments now, the same thrumming quickening heartbeat that pulsed through her as she broke the rules and headed off in her own direction. This time, though, it was not her freedom she was seeking, and as she walked amidst the shopping streets of the old city, losing herself in the bright Easter Week crowds, she was ever more firmly closing the doors behind her into the prison of the relationship. She had to speak to him. The light breeze and buoyancy in the afternoon made blooms of her cheeks. Her eyes glittered in the falling ladders of sudden sunlight between streets. Everywhere there was a mood of holiday and the narrow paths trickled a constant file of women, children and a few men going about the business of getting ready. Twice Isabel passed the shop where Peader worked, twice she moved past its window without looking in, holding her breath the six paces while wondering if chance would have him look up and see her. As the ferry had already sailed and she was without the money to stay the night in a hotel, the size of the risk she had taken was a fat ball lodged in the base of her throat. She passed the shop a second time, walking by, every step loaded with waiting and longing for his voice at her back calling her to stop. No voice came and she passed by. She crossed down and up the street on the far side once more, this time turning in the green door to the old bookshop where he had first left her. A genteel elderly lady with half-moon glasses and silver hair smiled at her across the counter as she came in. ‘Nice today, isn’t it?’ she said. Isabel nodded and looked around. Peader wasn’t there. Why she had imagined he might be she didn’t know. She was waiting for help, a sign, something to reveal that it wouldn’t be all her doing and that love had its own volition and will outside and beyond her. She faced the walls of books and put her bag on the floor. From off the front room two archways led down a small slope in the floor into another room of books. They were stacked from floor to ceiling, old and new, the greens and blues and reds of their bindings keeping hushed and stilled the million voices of words, all the vocabulary of grief and love and wisdom just beyond hearing. In an hour there within the green door bookshop in the heart of the city Isabel looked at books and fell within a quietened spell of peace, for a time hearing each of the voices of the books she took down and opened. As the afternoon grew later and the light outside was swiftly withdrawn across the western sky, the lady with the half-moon glasses came from behind the counter and returned books to their shelves. She had watched the girl coming and going through the shop, climbing the creaking stairs to Irish Literature, returning and ending up in Poetry, and now standing beside her she drew out a new edition of the love poems of Yeats. ‘This is beautifully done, I think, don’t you?’ she said, handing Isabel the poems and looking into her face with eyes of such radiance and understanding that for a moment they might have been the eyes of Love itself.

  Ten minutes later, Isabel left the shop with the book in her bag and crossed up the street to O’Luing’s Wool and Tweed Shop. She opened the door to the jangle of a small bell above her head and stepped across the wooden floor of the empty shop, whose smell was already familiar to her. There was an instant, a moment of absolute emptiness, then Maire Mor swept through the door on a wave of alcohol. She saw the girl in the gaberdine, recognised her from the two times she had walked so slowly past the shop earlier in the afternoon and knew at once that it was she.

  ‘Hello. Is Peader here?’

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘Will he be coming back soon?’

  ‘He won’t. What do you want him for?’

  ‘He knows me, I’m a friend . . .’

  ‘Are you in trouble?’ The mother shot the question like an arrow. With plump hands on ample hips she aimed it directly into the girl’s face and let the four blunt words cover the multitude of myriad stupidities and mistakes of which she imagined her son capable. Isabel was taken aback, she glared at the small round woman.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’d just like to see him.’

  ‘Well, he’s not here. He’s above in Carmody’s,’ she said, and then hissed, ‘drinking himself sick over some . . .’, she paused, wet her lip, and spat,’. . . bitch.’

  10

  Later, Isabel was to realise that the walk to Carmody’s lounge was the shortest walk of her life, the distance between liking a man and loving him abbreviated into the few minutes it took her to go up the street and change her life for ever. Later, she was to understand the route better, to know that as she wandered up the nar
row path with her head full of defiance and the spring night sky dusted with stars, she was already within a spell. Already she had crossed the chasm of her hesitations. The night lent her its mood, and by the time she stepped inside the door of Carmody’s lounge to the low smoky light and dull thudding of music her eyes were shining with the shock of feeling for the first time that now she was at last in love.

  She moved through the lounge as if it were littered with the outrageous obstacles that lovers imagine are the world trying to thwart them. Then she saw him, sitting there, drowning slowly in the bittersweet seas of his unrequited feelings. She stopped, but only for an instant. For the defiance and daring and danger were all connected now, charging her past the bends of hesitation and doubt, and with a hopeless inevitability carrying her footsteps across the lounge until she sat down beside him to reach and take his hand. Peader laughed and cried in the same moment; he choked his words out.

  ‘How the—? O Jesus, Issy.’

  When they had walked outside in the Galway streets Isabel leaned her head against his arm. Her eyes shut with the charge of sweetness, the warmth of him, and she walked blindly, taking his kisses on her neck up the street, bumping against him and moving on, two figures beneath the starlight, handlocked, electric with desire.

  Three

  1

  After my mother died, thick grey drapes of silence were drawn inside our house. For the six months of winter my father stayed at home and in that time spoke barely ten words. He became a thinner version of himself, fine and flakelike, with only the incandescent brilliance of his eyes betraying the presence of any feeling at all. He paced the glaring, brightening, darkening fury of his feelings through the empty rooms of the house in such ways that I grew to interpret anger, bitterness, and failure from the sounds of his shoeless feet on the bare floors. He did not speak about my mother or the manner of her death. As far as I knew he did not paint. I began to think that that episode of our life had ended, that it had been some satanic prompting that had maddened him into going away often and long enough until at last, without kicking or screaming, love sank into madness and died.