Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  So, she thought, that’s the end of that.

  It had begun to rain for the first time that week, falling as it always fell at half past three on Sunday afternoons and wrapping the island in a dark shawl. From the mainland it would look now as if the heavens had descended on the small hump of sea-lashed rock, softly releasing behind grey veils whatever secrets and mysteries only islanders learned. The wind kept the rain at the front of the house. Margaret finished washing the dinner dishes and crossed the small kitchen to wring out the soaked towel that was wedged in at the back of the front door. Then, seeing her husband slip into the deep warm contentment of his Sunday nap, she went to knock on Isabel’s door.

  ‘Isabel?’

  She stepped inside the room and saw at once, with a sharp blow of dismay, the packed suitcase and the plastic bags.

  ‘Are you all right? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going back tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I put a lot of old things in those bags, you can give the clothes away and the other one is just stuff for burning.’

  Margaret looked across at the two bags and nodded her agreement, even as she knew that within two days of Isabel’s leaving she would be unpacking them again, turning over the memories of her girl, and then hiding the stuff away in the garret room that served as the attic. She sat down on the end of the bed.

  ‘Did you tell Dad?’

  ‘I did. I thought it was only right. And he’s delighted for you.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything.’

  ‘You know him. I mean he’ll need time. That’s all. It was a bit of a surprise, I suppose, and anyway I told him that you weren’t sure.’ Margaret looked at the sprawled figure of her daughter on the bed she had outgrown. ‘Are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I miss seeing him,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Isabel did not say that it seemed inevitable now, that there was no way to turn back and that a long fateful road seemed to have led her from the cliffside years earlier to the moment she was deciding to give her life to Peader O’Luing.

  The light in the room was dim and growing dimmer still between them, with all Margaret’s unsayable warnings and wisdoms lying heavily in the air and Isabel’s mind sluggish with the weight of the week’s failed expectations. There was nothing more to say. No miracle had come, no answers. They left the room together to make tea and see to Sean, passing the remainder of the rained-in evening moving carefully around the possibility of arguments.

  Isabel went to bed that night before her parents and silently asked one last time for a sign before she took the boat back in the morning. It had seemed to her more likely that answers and signs might come to her there on the island rather than in the moil of the city; she wanted to feel more clearly what to do and so lay in the bed awake, hearing the slippered movement of her mother going to her room and the latch’s click on the door an hour later when her father returned from the pub. The house fell silent, and then fluttered with snores and sleepsounds and the softest muffle of the sighing sea. She lay still. The plastic bags had been left by the door and her own ghost had slipped from them to sit waiting at the end of her feet. In the morning it would reoccupy the room, keeping her girlhood strangely imprisoned in the tidy, empty space, like a sea-whisper within a stone-walled island field.

  The night was like an ache, and in the morning when the light broke Isabel rose feeling battered. She moved with an automatic numbness and kissed her father goodbye as he left for the school house, neither of them mentioning what was uppermost in their minds. She went to Sean in his room and spoke to him for a last time, telling him that she would be back in a few weeks and they would go again to the cliffs together. She looked at the side of his face and felt as she always did the sharp pang of her grief for him. Why? Why did it have to happen? Why wasn’t it her? He made no movement in response, but lay, drowsily gazing past her at the unspooling of his mind.

  ‘Well,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Yes, I’d better go.’

  ‘You’ll be all right?’

  ‘I will, yes.’

  They were standing at the front door letting in the wind. Margaret spoke hurriedly: ‘If there’s anything you want to talk to me about and not tell your father, send it in a letter.’ She looked at her daughter and waited an instant to see the message alight there, then hugged her to her breast. ‘Put a little star on the back of the envelope,’ she said. ‘I’ll know then.’

  And then Isabel was back on the boat sailing to Galway, eight days after asking for the first time for a sign from the heavens. She sat out on the deck in the constant spray, travelling in the slap and sway of the water and turning over in her mind questions about marriage. She had reached a dull hopelessness by the time the boat was docking and had stood up with her case to re-enter the uncertain maze of her life when she saw Peader O’Luing standing waiting for her. He had a clutch of flowers in his left hand, holding them so tightly that their sweetness was almost running down his fingers.

  Isabel could hardly move. How was he there? How of all the days had he chosen this one, this boat to meet? The thought that her mother had phoned him flapped across her mind and was dismissed. No, it had to be something else. She took a step onto the mainland and felt rising out of her on wings the dark birds of gloom. She was smiling. The smiles breaking on her lips with the knowledge that here at last was the sign she had been waiting for, here he was, thrusting the flowers toward her and grinning the broken grin of embarrassment and relief. She did not think then that he was a desperate man, that since the day she had left him he had floundered amidst the echoes of his father’s taunts, and that nothing could hush the inner voices of mockery but the return of this girl. She did not think he could be so desperate as to have gone daily to the docks to await the incoming ferry with his flowers and see if she had come back. Isabel thought only that here was a man who had been guided into her life like a fall of light every bit as sudden and dazzling as the one which had landed in her brother’s mind on the day they had played at the cliffs. She thought this flawed love was something she could not deny, was what was meant for her, and knew before he spoke that yes, by that evening as they lay naked together in the room above the shop, their bodies hungering for each other and their mouths escaping in kisses from the need for words, she would already have answered his week-old proposal and said, Yes, Peader, yes, I will marry you.

  10

  It was a Friday afternoon late in August when God spoke to my father for the second time. He came in a fiery chariot with trumpeting angels down the streets of Dublin. His winged steeds beat the golden air with silvered hoofs, and hosannas rang thunderous with rapture into the cloudless sky. The majesty of His mantle stilled the motion of the earth itself as He swept forward to enter our house and tell my father that his life’s work was done. The ordinariness of the day was transformed. There was singing in the air, and invisible choirs poured forth Gloria in excelsis like the emanations of God’s own soul. The hallway inside our front door was a burnished gold as He passed it. There were flights of doves, conjured like white blessings in the air and alighting on my father’s astonished shoulders as he sat unsuspecting and immensely weary in the room where he had found himself no longer able to paint any pictures. The door opened the way light falls into a dark place and my father stood up and let it touch him. He didn’t speak; the tall white thinness of him like a sheet of paper waiting for The Word, as the room thronged with angels and the heraldic music of their trumpeting rose in crescendoes to deafen his ears. The house itself was illuminated and seemed to rise in the air, its glowing radiance visible from as far as the Dublin mountains and the choiring spirits making the afternoon air ambrosial even in the shopping streets and malls where people paused in the majesty of the moment, sweetly unaware of what was happening.

  From the moment God entered our house my father recognised Him like his own father, and as he stood up in the dazzling moment he realised he had been expectin
g this all along. He had been waiting in fact from the moment months earlier when he had sat in the room unable to paint any more. Daily he had gone about the business of waiting and preparing for his inspiration. He had been attendant every day for hours without the slightest lift to his spirit and the draining away of every fluid ounce of certitude that had once coursed so powerfully in his veins. He had, in his eight-hour silences in the studio room, maddened himself with thinking that perhaps there had never been a voice from God and that the ruins of the life in which he found himself had all been caused by his own folly. Only the barest light flickered in that place inside him that had once gleamed bright. Yet still he sat on, going in and taking his place by the single-bar heater and letting each day’s light fail in a reflection of his own diminishing.

  And then, that afternoon.

  He was burned to the very rim of his soul, his fingers tingled, his hair stood on end and he moved from the studio that was already alight with the beckoning of God. At last, there He was again. God had come to him. The immensity of the rapture and vision beggared everything, and momentarily my father flew through the air. He cruised on the immaterial lightness of the spirit world like a moth and arced easily across the hallway, the thinness of himself now see-through and clear but for the doves winging about his white hair. He flew in the stairway and rose like laughter above the waves of the hosannas. My mother met him at the landing, wings beating and the edges of her hair fringed with light as he flew by and took her in his arms like a suit of white clothes, both of them hosts of the air with God Himself pursuing with the choiring angels, in and out of each room, the pale fiery visions chasing my parents like children as they swept through the air and touched each inch of the house with their presence. The heavenly chariot was stalled outside in mid-air above the garden, the steeds breathing the August air, their flanks rising and falling in recovery from the speed of the long journey and their sweat falling in the form of apple blossoms into the long grass.

  My father’s work was over. He had pleased Him, he had lived with a purpose that had reflected the meaning of the world which was nothing but the grandeur of His Creation. Glorias were being sung, the light had become more and more golden until, as God Himself approached my father and they met in mid-air above the window at the top of the stairs, it reached such an intensity that it became liquid and filled my father’s mouth. and his eyes and his ears with the sweetness of an all-consuming embrace that was sweeter and brighter and more golden than anything in this world could ever be.

  11

  That day only I knew what had really happened. I put aside the brutal fable I was told by the Guards and blinded out the image of the man they said had sat in front of a single-bar heater and fed into it his canvases until the house burnt down around him. It was an impossible nightmare, the kind that Guards tell in white rooms on the edge of the city, bright lights over mugs of milky tea. I heard it and forgot it. That night I had a rented bed in a widow’s bungalow down the road. But even as I lay there staring at the split in the curtains where the streetlight bled in, I knew my father was laughing at last amidst the angels above me.

  I slipped out of the house at two o’clock in the morning and walked home. I couldn’t feel any sadness. I could smell the house before I saw it, and wondered at the enormity and omnipotence of the force that had passed like a charge down the street that afternoon. The night air was choked with fumes; they entered your clothes and then your eyes and you felt the tears running. The house was a black shell against the dark blue sky. There were yellow and white strands of tape flickering in the little breeze as a warning to keep away and as I crouched beneath them, coming in that gateway through which I remembered my father leaving us for the first time, I was already in the company of ghosts. The hall door was in the front grass; it was one side battered, one side burnt, thrown aside in a way that looked almost casual and made the opening into the house itself seem vulnerable and bare. When I stepped inside I felt I should draw something across behind me. But there was nothing, and above my head the huge gap that was once the ceiling and then the floor of the upstairs my mother swept clean, was naked heaven now. There were stars for dust. The windows had, like a family, fallen apart under the pressure and heat within the house and my feet crunched smithereens as I made my way into the studio.

  It was hardly even a room any more, its window all air and the ceiling burnt clean away through the bedroom upstairs and on into the night. It was out through here his soul swept, I thought, and looked up into that August night that was star-flecked and clear and innocent of all the outrage of death and injustice. It was a perfect evening, so stilled and blue that it was impossible not to think of the hand that made it and to look upward for the first of so many times to seek my father amidst the stars. I sat on a black metal something in the black space where all his colours had once been and I said a line in Latin. I said it softly, but loud enough for the ear I imagined still listening. And as the night passed over me and the cold came inside my clothes I said in turn every phrase and line I knew in Latin, sounding the air with the slow deliberate formulae of a scarcely communicative language that seemed to match perfectly the complex and unfathomable idea of God Himself.

  I sat on there in the burnt-out house until the morning. The ghosts of that night-time passed in and out of the windows and greeted me as a curiosity in that halfway place between death and living where I found myself unable to stand up and walk on into the rest of my life. My soul, if I had one, was so deeply fractured that nothing I could think of made the slightest sense. The darkness became soupy with uncertainties. What had happened? What had it meant that my father had given his life and a good portion of my mother’s to the work, the paintings that he had been so fevered to create, and that now were a brown dust amidst the dust at my feet? I lifted my legs off the ground and clutched them about me. If God had truly come down the street and into the house, might he not arrive now again and take me? For I could not imagine getting up from my place ever again. What was I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do now?

  With the dawn there was the surprise of birds. They shot in the windows and flickered across the studio with giddying rapture. They perched and sang, hopelessly ungrieving and with such relentless cheeriness that I pitched a piece of the fallen ceiling. But they would not be chased away. I fired a lump of blackish plaster, got up from my seat and rushed at them waving my arms and roaring. But they merely flew past me to the far end of the room and would not leave through the window. There were thrushes and robins and the larger magpies, brown birds and yellow-speckled birds, birds arriving all the time in a gathering chorus, birds I did not recognise but which flew through the air so quickly that they seemed flashes of demented energy, not creatures at all but for their singing and the thrilling urgency with which they poured forth the untranslatable and ceaseless music of life. An hour after dawn the studio room was filled with birds and I gave up trying to frighten them away. Their singing made the air so sweet I began to gulp breaths and thought for a moment I had blossoms in my mouth. My ears were dripping honey. The birds landed on my shoulders, perched upon my knees, flew and returned on the endless song and still did not leave me. Now the black burnt shell of the studio room was coloured palely pink and yellow and green. The colours were a dizzying mix; I might have been painting with my eyes so true and clear did the colours become as the birds trilled on. The dark dust of the floor lightened and a gust of breeze mingled it into the air. Everything was colours and music with birds flitting through it. I stood up and felt my tears fall down, only then realising that I had been crying. I walked to the front doorway in a trance and stepped outside, half expecting to ascend on a flock of doves above all the redbrick homes of our dismayed road. I expected signals, interpretation, meaning, enlightenment and all but fainted when a hand reached out and grasped my shoulder.

  12

  Angels, my father once said, must pass us in the street every day. They must be ordinary as birds, he said, and rec
ognisable only in the brief moment of their connection to our lives. There was, according to this reasoning, a moment when you knew you were met by an angel and that whatever aid it gave you, however subtle and difficult to trace, your life was changed. When I stood outside the front doorway of our ruined house and felt the hand on my shoulder I expected at the very least an archangel, if not God Himself, and was surprised to see a small, fat, grey-haired man with a pained and apologetic expression. It was John Flannery. He put his hand on my shoulder and when I almost fainted it swept around my back and braced me against the small roundness of his body. He gave a few squeezes as a measure of condolence. His eyes were grey and fixed on me with a look that seemed to urge that we should not talk about things, that it was all understood in some subliminal way between us and the best thing was to go off in his car and have a cup of tea.

  The unlikeliest angel, he led the way out of the garden with his hand still firmly on my back. We sat into his car and he lit a cigarette before we moved off. A moment later he shocked himself with the realisation of how inconsiderate was the smoke that wafted through the air between us and as the car sped along he made a sorry fuss of waving it away, as if releasing out the window the terrible facts of the fire. I said nothing. I sat in the car and let it take me away. What was I to do? I watched the road beneath the car wheels and the facades of all the dull ordinary houses where mostly women were coming and going with children, doing the shopping and walking prams through the interminable cycles of every day. How plain and dreary it all seemed, the casualness of such comings and goings only down the road from our house where God was a visitor. For God’s sake.