Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  Now our days and nights took on a new pattern. I went back to school. I sat in the high-ceilinged warm rooms where the rain beat all day outside in another world and I could forget everything but history and geography, Caesar’s Gallic wars and the puzzling poetry of Yeats. My bicycle had collapsed on the brutal hill of Trees Road, and having jammed the mudguards in place, banged the buckling wheel and hung the brake blocks tentatively in position, I managed to sell it for ten pounds. I saved this and any other money I came across, pocketing it against the prospect of some calamity I felt certain would befall us next. I walked to school, leaving the house in the lightening blue and coming home in the swift falling dark past all the happy homes of the city’s southern suburbs. I loved the chill of that winter, the dampness drying off the wrinkled back knees of my trousers all day, the hood of my duffel coat blown back going home and the plastering of hair to my head. I felt I had escaped everything walking in wind and rain. That winter I left the house every morning expecting to return and find it empty. But somewhere, rumbling through the emptiness, my father was always there.

  Months passed. We moved into a trembling spring, as if against our will. My studies had improved dramatically, and as Masters and Brothers alike changed their tone, moving like whispering statues around the knowledge of my tragedy, the schooldays passed more easily. The thrilling promise of the season, all the light flickering noons and afternoons of April and May gave way to an uncertain summer. The wildflower meadow sprung up again in front of our house. Each morning, lying late in bed awake, I listened into the silence for the slightest muffled sounds of bare feet that meant my father was still there. Some days I could feel the restlessness in him filling the house. He came up and down the stairs five times in an hour, settling nowhere, going and returning from his studio like some demented creature trapped within his longing to be away. His hair was long and thinning and wispy, a white veil that fell back off the shining dome of his forehead and made him look like some grave figure of the old testament waiting for a sign. If he was, that summer it never came. I began to imagine he was searching through the house for something, or trying to enter one of the bare rooms quickly enough to catch the fading presence of someone he had heard from below. As June and July swept past on a misted screen of light rain and broken cloud, my father struggled against going. I knew it. And by August realised I was witnessing a man in mortal combat with himself. The same Voice that had prompted him to leave his job and family and go away to paint was absolutely silent now. Was he supposed to give up now, paint no more, surrender himself to the truth that he was a less than brilliant artist, or had mishandled the inspiration given him from God?

  At the beginning of the summer he blundered about the empty house in search of the answer. The kitchen had long since become the main living room and by summer had taken on the look and smell of a dump. All dishes had been used, first filling the sink and then piling over along the counter in a sprawling souvenir of our months of boiled or burned dinners. Pots were universally blackened, their inside bottoms developing a thick rind of burn that soapless cold water failed to remove and which in turn thickened into the soup or sauce of the next day’s dinner, building up like sins on the bottom of a soul. You dove your hand in for cutlery, fishing it up out of the cold odoriferous mess of the sink and rinsing what could be rinsed. The drip stains of tomato and other vaguer things had hardened into the paintwork. Without decree or any conversation, it seemed that after my mother’s death the notion of cleaning died with her. We took out of the mess what we needed and put it back afterwards. The crumbs collected on my father’s bare feet, the broom grew cobwebs.

  But then, by late summer, as the windless humid mist of weather settled over the countryside, the smells of the kitchen climbed the stairs, and one morning at eight o’clock my mother woke both of us from sleep. She rapped on our doors with a kind of urgent knuckling and brought my father and me out of our beds to the upstairs landing as surely as if she had called our names. We looked across the empty space at one another. Sleep on my father turned him into a grandfather. His eyes were small, lost in beds of wrinkles, his hair ridiculous and wild. He looked at me, I looked at him. He didn’t have to ask if I had knocked on his door. We knew it was she and stood transfixed in amazement, breathing softly on the emptiness until at the same moment we heard the small clattering of two dishes against one another in the sink downstairs.

  Very slowly, his long stride somewhat uncertain and his toes cocked up carefully off the floorboards, my father walked past me to the top of the stairs. There it was again, the same noise of the dishes.

  By the time we reached the kitchen that morning my mother had gone. But some trace of her was left behind. Standing there in the curtainless kitchen with the summer morning streaming in the big window, my father turned to me and smiled the way he hadn’t smiled since before she died.

  ‘Go and buy some washing-up liquid,’ he said, ‘will you?’ digging out a ragged pound note from the secrecy of his trouser pocket and pressing it into my hand.

  I flew to the shops, racing through the warm beginnings of the day until I had outdistanced sleep and weariness and even fear itself, rushing past the nightmare that maybe, just maybe he would be dead or gone when I got back. He was not. He was standing in the same place where I had left him, the sunlight striking the whitened chest hairs that spiralled up out of the hoop of his vest and the traces of smiles still circling about his mouth. His eyes were sparkling, his back was straight and his hair was combed in a way that to his son made him look like a king come out of exile. I held up the plastic bottle of the washing-up liquid and we started.

  If you passed along the back of our row of houses and peered in over the low garden wall, you might have imagined it an ordinary scene of domestic life, a father and son washing and drying and putting away the dishes while their mother rested. There might have been another like it over another wall in another house farther down the road. But in our kitchen that summer’s morning, even as we passed the houseware to and from each other, unpiling pots, pans, cups and saucers and stacking them along the counter for slow washing in the warm soap of my mother’s memory, it was not dirt, grime or oil we were washing off, but grief. I swept it from the kitchen as my father dried. Together we rubbed the sun-warm windows over the sink where so often my mother had stood, peeling, paring or polishing while she stared the dream of her married life away down the little tangle of garden and across the wall to the back of another house’s dream. Tears fell from my father’s eyes into the sink and were lost in the suds. My mother had died into the deep sleep of a whole jarful of tablets, but as we stood in her kitchen now it seemed it had been grief itself that was sleeping and was only now waking. The more my father washed the more his tears flowed, and mine with them, both of us standing there, father and son, unable to speak and washing dishes like the loudest declarations of love.

  After the kitchen we moved into the hall. My father found a broom and paddled the dust toward the door in clouds. When I opened it the house sighed, birds flickered up out of the meadow. The sunlight lanced in. My father meanwhile had opened the door into his studio and for the first time in over six months I followed him in. He had let the broom fall to the floor just inside the door and was moving along the far wall gathering paintings. There were more of them than I had expected. Dozens of canvases. He bent down and looked at each of them, stacking some carefully while pushing others backwards into a heap in the centre of the room.

  ‘Take all those out, will you, Nicholas? Good man. Leave them in the hall.’

  I counted twenty-four great squares and rectangles of angry colour in which I could see no image or picture, nothing but the effort and the paint. The others, the ones he left in the room, were different. In two or three I thought I saw my mother, just a glimpse of figure moving on the edge of a canvas that was thickly covered in blues and greens and purples. There was something warm in them, something new for him. I could see skies and hills, and again that
figure of a woman, just there, a reminder, a shape to which the paintings seemed to come and try to leave at the same moment. Gently my father ushered me out. ‘Those are not finished,’ he said.

  ‘I like them,’ I said, quickly.

  ‘Well,’ he answered me over his shoulder, handing me a brush, ‘you can help.’ And then, with a half bemused laugh at the irony of his life, ‘They’re all shite.’

  We laid the twenty-four canvases on the hall floor, and in tones of grey and mauve spent the early noontime painting over each of them. We had large brushes, and as we bent over to do the work I could feel the desperation and hope of the paintings vanishing under the long slow strokes. They were the works of my father’s first trip away, that first calling which had come to seem so intentionally malevolent and black, God’s own little joke on our family, the foolish vanity of talent. By the time we had finished my father seemed less burdened. He took the canvases one by one, holding them carefully between the flat palms of his hands like great tablets and laying them around the walls of the studio in the very places they had been once before. My mother was watching from the last step of the swept stairs. She could see them through the doorway, the semicircle of erased paintings waiting to be begun once again, and she smiled. Or so it seemed, the momentary wave of her warmth floating through all the downstairs rooms of our house, the ineffable memory of her touch and kiss alighting on the sides of our faces, rustling the little hairs at the backs of our necks and turning us around, father and son, to look at each other helplessly in the cleaned-up everywhere of the house to which she had returned.

  2

  At six o’clock we went out for tea. It seemed a remarkable thing. I remember it as a great voyaging forth, my leg flying out at full stretch to try and keep up with my father and the summer evening full of yellow shimmering and birdsong. It might rain or drizzle all day, but summer returned for the evenings, suburban evenings of men and dogs out walking, football games on hard, beaten greens, girls at bus stops, boys with golfbags or tennis rackets stooping forward on bicycles as they pushed up the homeward hills or hung about on grass verges talking about nothing, kicking at daisies, and waiting, waiting for the unbelievable long-lasting light to lower and fade. It was the holidays, the air buzzed. My father led the way out of the estate and past the gaze of our neighbours out toward the upper roads and the countryside. ‘There was a small village up here once,’ he said, ‘now it’s a bloody town. Still . . .’ He talked straight ahead and walked past the moment of ill humour. ‘We’ll get our tea there, right?’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  It was a small café, a bright empty place with four plastic-topped tables with sugar bowls and milk jugs. The chairs were green plastic. At a counter at the back a girl with sprinkles of pimples served tea and pies.

  ‘Cottage pie, fish pie, shepherd’s pie or chicken pie,’ she said.

  The pies took five minutes. My father brought down the teas and set them on the table. His legs were too long; when he sat on the green chair his knees rose above the table top, so he sat back toward the middle of the room and held his teacup and saucer balanced on the centre of his chest. He took slow sips and smiled a lot. Smiles kept breaking out on him and without knowing why I kept smiling back. It just seemed right, as if a great enormous cloud had been shifted out of our life, and we were in the clean new beginning, although of what I had no idea.

  ‘You’re a good son, Nicholas,’ my father said.

  I smiled into my tea. The pies came. Small oval-shaped things under brown pastry. I cracked the top with my fork and watched the swirl of steam and smelled the smell of the stewed meat as my father bit into his. We were never more father and son, I thought, at any moment in our life. I was never more happy than in the brief instants of just sitting there in that small plain place with the smells of meat and the sounds of cars going by in the summer evening. I took a bite of my pie and it burned me. As I turned the food quickly around in the inside of my mouth, my father told me he had to go away again.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you, but you’ll be all right for a week, won’t you? I’ll only go for a week,’ he said. ‘In a week I’ll make enough progress to bring back a half dozen canvases and finish them here. Ten days maybe.’

  I said nothing. I rolled the meat around in my mouth, felt the burn travelling through the roof into my head. He was going away? He was going to leave me? I felt a headache starting.

  ‘It’s not going to rain for six days,’ he announced. ‘And you’re big enough now to mind yourself for a week, aren’t you?’

  I spat out the meat. ‘Why can’t I come?’ I couldn’t believe I had said it, I was staring at him.

  ‘I can’t afford nice places, Nicholas, I sleep out, I find barns. It could be cold and damp.’ He paused and met my eyes across the table. ‘Will I get somebody to mind you? Do you . . .?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Later,’ he said, ‘when you’re older, you can come.’ The girl with the pimples came down with the bill. She was closing soon, she said, and looked at us with our half-eaten pies and went away.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Why what?’ my father said.

  ‘Why do you have to go? Why can’t you stay at home, why can’t you be . . .’

  The summer evening stopped, drew in like a held breath. The silence swelled, thickened. My father dug at the pie crust. He looked down at the fork in his hand, showing me the shiny, sun-freckled dome of his forehead where suddenly the wrinkles seemed deeper than I had noticed. His head was cracked with them, the chiselled furrows of unfound answers to that same question. He laid down the fork and let his hand find them, his fingers moving back and forth feelingly.

  ‘Nicholas,’ he said.

  The room was exploding, the airlessness, the closeness, the burn in my mouth, the smell of the pies, the girl at the counter, all conspired into my headache. At once I knew what was coming. I had an instant flash, a forehearing of those calamitous words that had already destroyed our family once. I knew before he said anything that there was no other answer. I didn’t want him to answer. But he did. And sitting there in that small cramped restaurant in the built-up tremulous stillness of the summer evening, I heard my father say the same words I had heard him tell my mother in the kitchen.

  ‘I have to paint. I believe it’s what I’m supposed to do. I don’t expect you to understand. But it’s what God wants me to do.’ He said it and stopped. The girl at the counter had heard him. She stifled a gasp that might have been a giggle and when my father looked around at her she rubbed the clean counter busily. She had a maniac in her shop, she was thinking, a long, tall, baldy fellow with bits of wispy white hair. When she got him out she’d have to call her friend and tell her. ‘You won’t believe it, wait’ll I tell you, it’s what God wants me to do, he said. God, no less,’ she’d say again and giggle into the mouthpiece looking down at the vacated tables and the locked door where the madness had been let out safely on to the street.

  I wanted to hate him. I walked a foot behind his giraffe-like stride and watched the people watching us. Did they all know he was off again? Did the urgency of his vocation leave traces in the very air he loped through? What kind of father would leave his son like this? After all that had happened, how could he think that God still gave a damn? I wondered and walked on. We took a circle route home, rounding farther than we needed to pass along the hilltop roads that opened broad views down to the bay. The sea looked shallow and silver in sunlight, buildings glistened, and we seemed to be walking along a high rim of the summered city. Into my father’s step came a lightness and ease I had almost forgotten; he was away, or nearly. Belief was flooding back into him. Birds in hiding made leafsong overhead, and for all I wanted to I could not hate him. When we turned the final bend and came in home my mother was waiting. She was there in the cleaned-up house for no one to see but us, sitting on the swept stairway, smiling in the shine on the cups or moving lightly in the creak of the floorboards upstairs
. She had waited for us to come back, waited to see if he had told me.

  That night as I tidied my room she was standing in the doorway. She did not have to tell me anything. I knew her message without hearing it, knew the thing she had come back to say, sweeping her way across the limitless blue and gold horizons of heaven, past the cold glass windows of the million stars to stand in my doorway and tell me: that my father was right, that it was what God wanted him to do.

  3

  In the morning my father outlined his itinerary. He was going to Clare, to the sea. He would take the train as far as Ennis and make his way from there to the coastline. I had enough food in the house, and for milk or anything else I was to use the ten pound note that was rolled in the jam jar of bills on the kitchen windowsill. He had gotten ready before I woke and a bundle of canvases was tied together in the hall. There was a tang of oil and spirits, smells of adventure. The front-hall door was opened on the morning and the delicate balance of the day, caught between sunlight and showers, trembled like my faith. My father in his shirtsleeves was a sliver of energy, a thin quickness moving up and down the stairs and in and out of the studio in a bustle of preparation. When he looked at me I looked at his wrinkles. ‘You’ll be back in a week,’ I said, standing by my mother in the hallway.

  ‘Right,’ he said, reaching his hand to my shoulder and giving a short warm squeeze, letting the wrinkles unfurrow for a moment and his eyes smile.

  When it was time for him to go, he stood in the doorway, loaded with canvases, brushes and paint, and held out his hand. I held out mine and he grabbed it, sending a shock of love through my arm so forcefully that tears shot into my eyes.