Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  There was nothing to be done. Yet even as he led his daughter up the aisle the Master was awaiting something, some spectacular interference, the church to burst into flame or the roof to blow off. He kept his eyes straight forward on the tabernacle and beyond Father Noel’s completed smile. He heard the noise of the wedding dress rustling on the floor like a low fire and the small squeaking of the new shoes on the shone floor.

  Now.

  Now. Anything? Something?

  But there was nothing. In a moment the bouquet slipped off his arm and the wedding began.

  2

  On the morning after the newlyweds sailed to Galway to begin their honeymoon in Connemara, the island slept in the bittersweet dream of their most beautiful woman gone. The dreams were thick as twisted blankets and tripped even the donkeys moving on the beach. No one was awake but Nora Liathain. She had not gone to the wedding and had passed the evening visiting in and out of the Master’s cottage seeing to Sean. At any minute she had expected the wedding ceremony to collapse and violence to erupt; when it hadn’t she bore the disappointment like a secret blister she consoled herself would burst later.

  Of course it would.

  She was cleaning the inside of her kitchen window when she saw a stranger coming up from the ferry. She rubbed a circle on the glass. Saw him, and felt the blister tingle. She was at the door in a flash. He was a tall young man with a high forehead and his shoulders stooped forward. As he came up to the houses the widow called out a greeting to him in Irish, then swiftly added: ‘Hello.’ She watched him coming towards her. ‘Rain coming.’ She called the cheerless news cheerfully across the little scrub of her garden, her hands going into her housecoat pockets.

  He stopped on the rough road.

  ‘Are you looking for somebody?’

  ‘I am. Yes, the Master . . .’

  ‘Is it his daughter?’ she shot the question before he had finished; here it was, the tingle on the blister beginning to rage already. She knew.

  ‘What? No, em . . .’

  ‘Is is Isabel?’ she said, a narrow smile darting to her eyes. ‘Only she’s married. Yesterday. You’re too late.’ She paused to allow the shock to register; she waited to see his heart break there in front of her and his doleful recruitment into the ranks of the grieving alongside her. But there was no sign.

  ‘Isabel?’ he said.

  ‘Not that she loves him. I knew that. We all knew that. Probably did it to spite you. That’s the way with her of course. Wild as that.’ She nodded towards the sea and the man turned to look at it. The ferry was making its way back to the mainland and was already small in the grey mid-distance.

  ‘Which house is Gore’s?’

  ‘They’re asleep. They’re all asleep. I’m the only one awake. My husband’s dead, why should I be sleeping?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re in love with her and she’s gone. But she’s not dead. That’s something,’ said the widow, throwing him the consolation like a breadcrumb and watching his puzzled lost expression with a little comfort.

  ‘Which house did you . . . ?’

  ‘There. That’s them. But she’s gone, I tell you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He stepped away from her to cross the narrow way to the Master’s house.

  ‘You’re too late,’ she called after him, but he did not turn back. ‘Everything’s always too late!’ she shouted in case there was still any hope left in him as he went in the little gate and up the garden path to knock firmly three times on the front door.

  3

  Isabel was locked in and trying to get out. The walls of the long corridor were timber and were leaking water and Muiris was hurrying along them trying to find the door. But there was no door, only the hammering of her fists on the wood as she tried to call to him to save her. He scrambled on, his hands running along the rough timber and feeling the splinters needle into his fingertips. Still she was calling to him. He was frantic to find her and cried out her name to let her know he was near. But where was she? Where was the door? It was dim and tilting, a grey murk was on everything. When he turned to look behind him it was the same as the way ahead.

  ‘Isabel? Issy? Issy?’

  Still the hammering of her hands on the wood: one, two, three.

  And then everything shaking, the wood dissolving, the corridor crashing into bright light that hurt like sharp pins in the irises of his eyes as Margaret shook him awake with:

  ‘The door. The door. There’s somebody, Muiris.’

  He took in the world in a daze. Was it really there? For an instant he imagined it was still the morning of the wedding and not the one after. Then he moved his head and felt the kicking of hoofs against his temples.

  ‘Muiris! Go on.’

  Another three knocks; he held his hand across his eyes as if shielding a blow and sat up out of the heat of his dream. Who could rise with any hope into the world this morning? Why was there such light? As Muiris moved his toes to the cold floor he felt he needed to steady the earth or he would get up and fall down. The light was relentless and unreal, the gap in the curtains a straight rip of sheet white he turned away from. No, better not to look out. He moved out of the bedroom in his pajamas, expecting calamity. For who on the island would be awake that morning? Who would not know to avoid disturbing him?

  Or perhaps. The thought that his daughter’s married life had lasted only a single night flashed through his mind; it was not beyond her. He reached and opened the door expecting Isabel but found Nicholas Coughlan.

  ‘Mr Gore?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m here about a painting.’

  The Master was lost, the morning air was slapping his face from sleep but the world was still senseless and badly made. That blue sky with the grey clouds, the island herd of donkeys that had followed the stranger up from the beach and were standing now like a chorus at the garden gate, Nora’s eye at the window of the cottage across the way. And the painting, what painting? He stood and said nothing and looked at the young man in front of him.

  ‘I’m Nicholas Coughlan,’ he said. ‘My father did a painting . . .’

  The widow was trying to listen with her grey eyes so Muiris reached abruptly to the visitor’s shoulder and drew him forward. ‘Come in. Come in.’ The cold was rising up his legs. ‘Here, sit down in here, I’ll get something, I’ll be back.’

  Nicholas sat in the kitchen that was still scattered with the remnants of the wedding preparations, ribbons, needle and thread, scissors, the cut-off stems of carnations and water-speckled cellophane, the left-over quarter of the wedding cake that had been carried home by Margaret in the tipsy moonlight and then crashed to the kitchen floor when she put it down too close to the table’s edge. What had been rescued had a battered look.

  ‘Now.’ Muiris was back in trousers and socks, his pajama shirt loose and lending him an air of vague dissolution. He reached for the kettle. ‘We’re in a terrible mess here, but, we can make tea anyway.’ He waited until the water ran then said it for the first time in his life: ‘My daughter got married yesterday.’

  ‘I see. Congratulations.’

  The Master held the kettle in the air, paused between the continuance of his life and the surging memories of the vanished daughter. Congratulations; it flooded his ears like mockeries. He blinked his eyes briefly to escape falling down and said: ‘It was nothing to congratulate me for.’

  ‘Muiris!’ Margaret Gore stepped into her kitchen as if she were coming to rescue her life from ruin. She walked forward in her dressing-gown and took the paused kettle from her husband’s fingers without a glance at the stranger. First things first; firstly she had to keep the world turning, to prop up her husband and usher away the winged shadows of despair she saw beating about his shoulders. He had to carry on; they had not come this far, through the unending struggle of light in the island dark, only to surrender to gloom now. She was resolved on it; his heart was broken, so what? Carry on.

  ‘Morning
to you.’ She nodded to Nicholas. ‘Muiris, will you wake up Sean for his breakfast?’

  The Master went out and his wife knifed the bread. ‘It’s yesterday’s loaf, I’ve none made this morning yet.’

  ‘I’m fine. I don’t need . . .’

  ‘You’ll have tea and something anyway.’

  She didn’t look at him while she spoke. She swept her arms along the counter top and gathered up the debris of flowers and cellophane and threw them all in the bin. Mustn’t pause, keep going. She rubbed the place down and held her lower lip in her teeth when her hand stopped at the photograph of Mother and daughter on the windowsill. ‘You don’t know Isabel?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘This is her,’ she picked up the picture and gave it to him. ‘My daughter.’

  It was nothing; it was a natural gesture, but one that she would remember later when everything had changed and she would wonder what might have happened, how the world would have spun on differently, if she had never shown him the picture.

  He looked at it and gave it back, not yet aware of whatever spore or dream had blown from it and that his life was changed already. She was a beautiful woman in the picture, that was all.

  ‘This is a visitor. This is Sean, my son.’ Muiris wheeled in Sean in his chair and Nicholas held out his hand. Sean didn’t move and Nicholas touched his limp fingers only briefly. The wheelchair was pushed in by the table alongside him.

  ‘I’ll make the tea.’

  ‘Sit down, you,’ Margaret commanded him, and buttered the wedges of brown bread while the kettle started singing. The three men sat mute a moment under the force of her personality, then Nicholas told them why he had come.

  ‘My father is dead,’ he began, bringing to their own grief his personal portion and telling them the horror of the Dublin afternoon as if it were a grim fable or folklore, something of the ancient days, and not part of the dull and tawdry dramas of every day. The Gores said nothing. They sat amazed about him, ignoring the tea and the bread before them, spellbound within the story. There was something in the telling of it that struck each of them at once with the same dread familiarity; that moment William Coughlan began painting, the day the boy’s mother died, or the manner of the father’s death, all echoed in their stilled minds when the calamitous moment when Sean’s illness first struck; how lives shattered with the fall of one day’s light.

  Nicholas told the story and the tea cooled. (Outside in her garden, gardening nothings, Nora Liathain leaned to the west listening for an explosion. Here surely was the girl’s lover; at any moment would tragedy not engulf the house? Perhaps there would be lamentations, shrieks and tears; she knew these. These were familiar company. Perhaps she’d understand the nature of loss even more if all she came in touch with fell weeping beneath it. She waited in the salt breeze on the low shore, saw Father Noel walking his sins in a whiskeyed S to the church.)

  When Nicholas reached the part of the story that was most recent he did not hesitate but told the assembled family that he had met his father on a snowy road in Wicklow shortly after his death. He said it without exaggeration or comment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and perhaps for this reason it struck Muiris and Margaret as just that. His father had not told him to get the painting, Nicholas said. But when he awoke the next day it was clear to him that that was what he was to do. ‘There is a plan,’ he said, ‘in everything. According to my father. We only have to figure out what it is. Read the signs.’

  Read the signs. Margaret held up the bread plate and passed it to the visitor. Muiris kept his eyes fixed upon him. Read the signs. Even Sean seemed to be listening; to each of them it was as if Nicholas Coughlan’s arrival at their door on the morning after the family had shattered was already a sign of something. He was like no one else they had ever met, and might briefly have been part of some strange shared family dreaming. Sean nodded in the wheelchair, and, when Nicholas caught his eye, he grinned at him.

  ‘My husband won the painting for a poem,’ said Margaret, ‘didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ and then to Nicholas, ‘I didn’t know what the prize would be.’

  ‘He didn’t even enter. I had to enter him.’

  Nicholas said nothing. John Flannery had told him about the competition and how the painting had been given to the schoolmaster. What he wanted to know now was whether he could buy the painting back. He sat there in the island kitchen having filled the air with tragedy and gloom and took another hot cup from the second pot of tea.

  ‘We’ll go see it,’ said Muiris, and rose. ‘I’ll just dress myself.’ In an instant Margaret was after him to bring something back from the shop if he was going up to the school. She left Sean in the kitchen with Nicholas and carried an unfolded bundle of premonitions down to her bedroom.

  ‘Do you want more tea?’ Nicholas asked.

  The invalid shook his head slightly, and the two of them sat there in a silence that was not heavy but hopeful; on the cusp of something that was greater than both of them. Nicholas picked up the dishes and put them in the sink and, as if it were the easiest thing in creation, Sean began to hum a reel very quietly to himself. It was as if a small bird had appeared in the room, though the doors and windows were closed. Without turning from the sink, Nicholas knew at once it was one of the birds from the burnt ruins of his father’s house and as he rubbed the dishes he heard the melody with the fondness of refinding an old friend. Read the signs.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done those.’ It was Muiris, buttoning his shirt and reaching for his jacket on the back of the door. ‘She’ll kill me for letting you,’ he said, and paused, suddenly imagining he heard the thrumming wings, only to turn and witness the tune Sean was humming. It was too soft for real music, too thin and fine to embroider the air, but touched the father so deeply that he had to turn away his eyes lest the tears run from them.

  Although it was barely above a hush Margaret had heard it as she threw Isabel’s bedsheet in the air, then crossed her arms to fold it; that joyful music. She came down the hallway of the cottage with her lips pressed together. As she stood in the kitchen door and looked at her son humming the tune with the two men stilled on either side of him, she too saw a lone white bird flying in the kitchen air, and, as sudden laughter at last broke out from a trapped place inside her, she knew that healing was beginning.

  4

  Nicholas and the Master went out to meet the donkeys. The little herd had not moved from the front gate and Muiris waved his hands in the air and yahooed to little avail. The animals stood over to one side to let the men through and then followed along to the school in single file behind them. (Nora Liathain knew it was a bad sign. A very bad sign.) The late morning air was blustery and quick gusts flapped their trouser legs, drying Nicholas’s and making the Master uncertain in his step. He didn’t speak about Sean; he dared not, but already felt the providence of the young man and leaned on him when a loose cobble in the road almost toppled him.

  ‘Must put that right.’

  Still, Muiris walked shakily onward with his son’s half-tune in his ear. Something was happening, a key was turning in the world and he felt it with every step, opening his eyes extra-wide and yawning his mouth to be sure he was fully awake and it was not the brandy and whiskey playing God. The sea was in the air and his face was damp and freshened. His breath was taken away in quick gusts and blown like blossom over the cottages on the western road where no one was yet awake.

  ‘There’s the school, over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘It needed a bigger wall, the picture, to show it right, and the houses are small enough, you know.’ He paused. ‘I thought it would be better here where the boys and girls could . . . well, you’ll see.’

  With the donkeys still behind them they reached the school. Muiris unlocked the door and stood back for Nicholas to go in before him. It was a small building and needed repairs; the gutter hung loose along the eastern gable, the orange paint peeled annually as if the Atlantic w
ere each year trying to skin the fruit and devour it altogether, and yet Muiris was swollen with pride as the stranger entered. He closed the door behind them and the room grew quiet.

  ‘There it is.’

  He needn’t have said it. Nicholas was already before the picture, standing amidst the small desks, the taped-up water-colours of the Junior Infants, the laminated maps of Europe and the United States, the picture of the Sacred Heart, and the two blackboards. He was standing there, unable to move, drawing quick shallow breaths and looking up at the only evidence that his father had once been right. There it was, the picture painted that early summer down the coast of Clare when Nicholas had almost drowned and his father had pulled him from the waves. It was a picture of raging colour, a fable of greens and yellows and blues that to the schoolchildren was the raw material of the making of the world; it was Aesop and Grimm, it was Adam, it was the sea and Cuchulainn. Nicholas leaned back against one of the desks. Behind him the Master said nothing; he was remembering the poem Margaret had submitted and felt one of the sudden waves of emotion he was given to; the quality that made him seem soft to the islanders. His eyes were watery and he held his lips tightly together to stop his chin jumping with the feeling he had for her.

  An age passed. The light in the schoolroom dimmed and then brightened quickly, then dimmed again, as if time were fast-forwarded, leaving only the men still, waiting there in silence before the picture. Clouds flew by.

  In travelling across the country Nicholas had had a simple intention: to see the painting and then to pay the teacher for it and bring it back with him to Dublin. But now, leaning back on the desk in front of it, he lost that certainty. He didn’t want to move it. It looked so right against the schoolroom wall with the long windows showing the sea either side of it. He didn’t know what to do and was relieved when at last Muiris spoke.

  ‘You can have it, of course. But I’ll miss it.’