Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  When I was offered a job one month later, I did not believe there had been any room for doubt. It was what I was going to do. I was going to work in the civil service and make some money and fix up the house and pay the bills and keep my father and me warm and fed while he finished the paintings that were the paintings he had been born to do. It all fit together neatly, and only the business of telling my father posed any difficulty at all.

  I decided it was best to break the news over tea. Each evening around what I guessed was six o’clock my father stopped working or not working when I knocked on the studio door. He came out slowly into the kitchen, raising his head on his long neck and screwing up his eyes. I met him there as if by pre-arrangement, and we sat to our bread and butter and jam sighing like workmen, buttering through the silence and looking out through the curtainless kitchen window at the house across the back garden. My father dipped his bread in his tea, a habit he had taken up since finding two teeth on his toast earlier in the summer. He looked across the way and chewed the mush slowly. First I had to tell him I had applied.

  ‘I have news,’ I said.

  ‘You been offered a job, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Take it if you think you should. Do what you think best.’

  And that was that. His tone was so quiet and matter-of-fact, so full of a calm and gentle understanding that I took it to be wisdom itself. I didn’t question how he knew. My father was not a man to question, and that evening when I wrote accepting the job I realised his hand might have been on my shoulder all the way.

  I began work on a Monday. I had one side of a large mahogany desk, MacMahon had the other. We were junior executives, wore cheap navy suits, stiff-collared white shirts with one of three ties, butter-stained by Tuesday with canteen crumbs. In a great long rectangle of a room sixteen of us sat at opposite ends of the same mahogany tables. Our aftershaves mingled. We opened files in green cardboard covers and read for hours the unreadable tedium of government. The clock ticked. Beyond the high windows at the end of the room the light came and went. Coughs and cough drops began the autumn. Every morning it rained. I cycled, and arrived in the centre of the city streaked with black splashes and water running down my face. From the large mat inside the hall door a slickering black trail of the stamp of wet galoshes led to the stairs. The morning’s weather dried off halfway up, and when you slipped through the heavy door into the long pale-green office nothing was left of it, no trace of wind or rain and only the quiet two-minute jump of the clock and the opening of the first file to move you forward through the passing of time itself. Tea break, lunch hour, three o’clock walk down to the file room, cigarette butts floating on unflushed urine in the men’s toilet, back upstairs, carrying the file you didn’t need, sitting into the pain in your bottom again, until the first daring one rose to put on his coat at a minute to five o’clock.

  Autumn passed in that long room like a single moment out of my life. It was wet, damp feet smelled. Meagre highlights were Friday noons and liquid lunches of stout, sending the sixteen of us back late into the dozy, dull rectangle of the afternoon to hold up files before our reddened faces and wait for the end of the day.

  McCarthy was our supervisor. He did not share a desk but sat at his own at the top of the room. His suit, it was said, came from Italy. He called us mister, and sometimes looked down upon us with such frozen beatitude carved on his face that it seemed the scribbling and blotting of our pens beneath his gaze was to him the secret inner workings of the State itself. He could watch us forever, and while he did we moved our pens ever faster, miming intricate penmanship of the highest order and turning sheets of nothing over and back as if searching their blankness for the runes of time. On no particular schedule, McCarthy rose and swept from the office, moving behind the largeness of his lapels with borrowed importance and heading out the door on the business of State. It was six months or so before we understood he was most frequently going nowhere but the toilet, and that his coming and going from the room was his own invented activity to keep the dust from settling on his suit. As it was, the moment he left us we pushed back our chairs, loosened the grip of Life on the crossbeams of our shoulders and waited, watching the door with pens ready for his return.

  All autumns were damp or wet. Leaves clogged in the gutters or danced with ghostly footsteps at the back door while my father and I sat to our tea. The winters came up quickly. They iced the roads under my bicycle, and I pedalled so slowly into the city on January mornings that each turn of the wheel under me seemed to trim another unmeasurable shaving off my life and bring me to the office weeks older and more tired than the bright gelid hour when I had set out. The days vanished, the dark evenings were thick with coalsmoke, brumous clouds that swirled beneath the yellow of the streetlights and screened the stars. When spring came I hardly noticed. There was no dripping trail on the office stairs, the sky that scudded past the high unopened windows above McCarthy’s head moved like brush strokes with the racing colours of the days. For a moment the blue was deep and still and cloudless, and it was summer. We stared up at it, that patch of perfect promise poised in the window, then we lowered our heads, dipped our pens, and it was autumn once more.

  One morning McCarthy summoned me to him. He was a meticulous man. To stand next to him was to be aware of the cleanness of his shave, the neatness of his hair, the smoothness of his suit. He sat without sitting on the creases of his pants, leaving only the merest inch of his bottom resting on the seat and angling himself forward to his desk, as if all the more ready to get at the work or spring to his feet and take off on one of his sudden marches down the room and out the door, unwrinkled, creased just right. He was a man who had found his place, and had ironed everything of the jumbled and frenzied chaos that life had thrown at him into the one, perfect crease of his work. He looked at me and lowered his voice to a whisper.

  ‘I have had a word about you,’ he said, and edged even farther forward on his seat until his knees were touching mine. ‘From above.’

  In the steady beaming of his brown eyes I could see him taking my life and folding it, pressing it into shape and giving it back to me.

  ‘An enquiry,’ he whispered, putting his hands together between his legs and holding them there, nodding, just nodding and looking into the heart of the boy who was about to rise like a star into the ordered and perfect constellations of government.

  ‘An encouraging enquiry, Mr Coughlan,’ he whispered, suddenly looking down to supervise the bowed heads at their penmanship. ‘Very encouraging,’ he said, out of the crease of his mouth while his eyes freewheeled around the room.

  Afterwards, I sat down at my desk, looked up at the clock, lifted my pen, and held it there. The light faded at the window, I looked at the file in front of me, and when I looked up again suddenly realised that three years of my life seemed to have passed.

  4

  At the beginning of the week in which Isabel was to receive Peader O’Luing’s proposal of marriage, she found herself standing with a sweeping brush in the centre of the shop floor listening not for the first time to the voice of doubt. Three years had passed. Maire Mor was dead and the running of the shop had fallen more or less entirely into Isabel’s hands. She had cleaned and smartened it, changed the shelving, aired the stock and thrown out into the backyard the older bolts of tweed which fell with a powdery pffump releasing the moths of time. But still, from Monday through Saturday, the O’Luing Wool and Tweed shop was empty of customers, whatever business it had was largely carried out by Peader from the back seat of the red Ford, and the premises remained the brown and voiceless limbo of the O’Luing family ghosts.

  In three years Isabel had grown used to it. Love, she discovered, was like anything else. It was a habit of the heart. You gave yourself to it, and then followed on day after day, tracing ever deeper the unchangeable track of emotions. Every morning she rose in the flat and walked through Galway, letting herself into the shop with the expectation of only the briefest kiss as Peader came down the st
airs and mildly embraced her before going out the door. It was the way of this love. It was what she deserved. There was a pattern their feelings had shaped for them, the early-morning coolness, then the evening and nighttime loving that brought both of them like strangers together and left them hours later in the back seat of the car breathing each other beneath the exhausted moon of early morning. Peader did not want her to move in with him. When his mother died, Isabel had watched the guilt ooze like an oil over him. For a month he was beside himself with rage. He blamed his mother for dying, as if it was a last ditch effort to force her will on him, to push herself into the place of the girl. The night of the wake he drank eleven pints of stout, seven Jamesons and two tumblers of vodka, leading a jigging party in from the pub only to fall in a spewing faint on the shop floor. Isabel washed his face in the morning. She saw him as a broken-winged and wounded bird she might restore to flight, and imagined that without his mother they could at last rise into the clouds of a more settled happiness. For a week after the funeral, Peader seemed lighter and happier than she had ever known him. He pressed her hand in his before he left in the morning. He took her dancing under the first blue evening canopies of the June sky.

  Then, in the middle of the summer, the guilt burst through. She asked him a question in the morning and he shouted back at her. She said he wasn’t being fair and he hit her with his open palm across the side of her face.

  The red blaze of the pain stayed with her all day. She sat behind the counter and cried, rubbing her fingers on the spreading heat of the blow and trying to find hate. No, she could not truly hate him, her anger kept bursting too soon and over the course of the six hours of silence in which she moved back and forth in the trap of love, she understood only that it was beyond understanding. That she had fallen into it, and now could not get out. As reckless as it had been for the schoolgirl to slip through the door into his life, it was as reckless now for her not to slip out. But she had to stay, she told herself; then abruptly decided to leave him. She turned over the weather-faded cardboard sign in the front door and stood for a moment looking out over the CLOSED with a dismal, ephemeral triumph as no one noticed. She turned and looked around at the bolts of cloth, their buff and dun tones suddenly suffocating. At first she only meant to pull one of them down, to release her anger on something. But within a moment she had dragged down a half-dozen and was unrolling the great tweeds across the counter, down around the shop: she took the cash register and shoved it freefalling with a pathetic clinking of small change and broken bell onto the floor. Still there was no triumph. No release. The place was simply topsy-turvy now, not so dissimilar or wrecked that it yet mirrored the distraught shape of Isabel’s heart. It wasn’t enough; taking her coat she went out into the street. What could she do? What could she do to show him? To tear down the terrible jail that her heart had built for her? He was not what she wanted. He was not so many things, and yet. She walked down Shop Street, unsure of where she was going or if she intended ever to return. She reached the bridge and felt the freshening of the sea. She walked on out the sea road feeling how hopelessly far she had come from all the sea walks on the childhood island. What could she do? A car pulled over and a man with a German accent asked her for the road to Spiddal. She sat in beside him. There was whistle-music playing on the radio.

  It was playing two days later when he drove her back again into Galway, his body still warm and charged from her, as he asked one last time would she not come with him to Donegal.

  *

  Isabel walked back to the shop knowing that she was unable to free herself from Peader O’Luing; that her loving him was a thick knot of contradictions and guilt, but that she would never let him strike her again.

  His car was in the street outside the shop. The CLOSED sign was still on the door. She was letting herself in with a key when Peader opened the door for her. The dull smell and dim air of the shop smote her like a blow. The cloths had not been tidied. He stood there with the hopeless regret of his character rolling in his eyes and mutely gestured to the dying clutch of tulips that he had bought her two days earlier. Trophies of his repentance, he offered them now like witnesses. Isabel took them from his hand and, looking straight into the expectation of his eyes, dropped them in a heap on the shop floor.

  ‘What do you think I am?’ she asked him very calmly.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘What do you think I am?’ she asked again.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You hit me.’

  ‘Jesus, Issy.’

  ‘You hit me because you hated me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, Issy. Jesus.’

  ‘What am I supposed to feel?’ she asked the side of his turned-away face. ‘Am I supposed to feel fabulous because of these?’ She picked up the dead flowers and held them to his face. ‘Am I supposed to feel that it’s all right? Peader, is that what I’m supposed to feel?’

  Peader waited a moment in a dazzle of pain. His father was standing behind him, laughing. Peader felt his face burn scarlet, then his hands shot up his eyes and he cried out with rage against the ghost and fell to his knees.

  ‘O, Jesus!’

  It was not what she expected; there was a click within the machine of love, a reverse whirring there in the ruined shop on the summer noon that sent Isabel back towards him at the very moment she might have been free to step away from this flawed love.

  ‘Do you hate me?’ he asked her.

  It was a moment that was to return again and again, play and replay in the chambers of her mind. Do you hate me?; the manner in which he stood there, his fractured and thick-lipped expression as far as Arabia from the prince of girls’ dreams; yet how, only moments later, she was holding him in her arms, renewing the world with a kind of terrible tenderness that depended on grief, and falling into desperate kisses that burned with an urgency to repair heaven.

  5

  Isabel let Peader’s marriage proposal hang in the air for a week. She wrote a letter to her mother, deciding to declare for the first time in writing some of her feelings for Peader. Wrongly, she did not think Margaret Gore would understand the contrariness of the relationship and wrote only of the loving side of it. It was a way to prepare the ground, she reasoned, to woo in the gradual idea of marriage that she already knew would shatter her father. Besides, it might be soon; she was afraid she might be pregnant.

  When Margaret received the letter she read its true meaning at once and knew that a wedding might be imminent. Muiris was in the room reading over the ninth draft of a new poem when she stood at the doorway to the sea pondering how she might tell him. She feared to snap the fine thread of happiness he had now found in his work and tucked the letter into her housecoat until she could decide what to do. Later that evening when her husband had gone out, she sat beside Sean in the room watching television. He had grown into a thin, pale man, his childhood lost like a bottle in the sea and with it his love for music. Nothing seemed to spark in him now, and he lived on mute as an island in the vast unmappable seas of his incomprehension. He would never leave home, and his mother cared for him without regret, seeing in the hopeless mystery of his condition some further evidence of the rocks in the road of love. She was unsure of whether Sean followed the television programmes or not, but they at least seemed to bring a kind of peace to him, and so nightly he lounged there, his head to one side staring at the images of other worlds. That evening, not quite sure why, Margaret opened the letter and told him it was from his sister. While Sean gazed ahead at the television she read him the letter.

  He didn’t react, and Margaret supposed it had meant nothing to him. But the following day, Dr Connell visited and said Sean had taken a turn for the worse. Muiris and Margaret stood in the kitchen and looked down at their son under the blanket in his chair, both of them seeing as if plainly visible the intricate and entangling web into which he was spinning himself. He wouldn’t take his food but lay curled in a ball with his eyes fixed on the fa
raway place of grief. Not for the first time his parents were advised to send him to the mainland for caring, and not for the first time did they refuse. It didn’t seem right, Margaret said, sending him away like a shame. He was their child and he would stay with them on the island for as long as they lived there. Muiris moved outside to the little front garden when the neighbours called to see the patient. He couldn’t easily tolerate the circle of sympathisers and the little hopeless audience of tea-drinkers and prayers, and he stood instead outside in the drizzle letting his despair fragment into the first words and phrases of a new poem. He watched the sea and the rain make the mainland disappear and threw out the line of his prayer that something might happen, that the world was not random and an infinite and divine majesty might respond.

  A week later Sean was no better. He seemed if anything to be vanishing further into an unseen world and his mother decided to write to Isabel and tell her. The letter arrived on the shop floor on the morning Isabel was to give her final answer to the proposal of marriage. She opened it, closed the shop and caught the ferry home.

  When her father met her, clasping her hand to help her onto the pier, he was moved to sudden tears that he coughed and choked away into hiding. She walked by his side, this beautiful and dazzling woman, her head high and her uncovered hair blowing every way. ‘How is he?’ she asked him, and when he told her he saw her face on the afternoon she had first brought Sean home from the cliffs. His mind strained, the lives of his children flapping like sheets on his line. And now this was to bring them together, he thought. It was something like a family secret, a strange bond, for although Muiris nor Margaret had ever again spoken with their daughter of the day of the accident, it was there every time the four of them sat together.