Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  ‘No.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘No, I mean I don’t think I should take it.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘It’s not that, it’s . . .’ He turned and looked at the older man. ‘How do you know what to do? How do you ever know?’

  ‘You don’t. I don’t,’ said Muiris, coming forward. ‘You ask for prompts, I suppose, don’t get any and then just pick one thing or the other. Anything can happen. It’s all chance.’

  There was a loud thump, the front door flew open, and with an expression of dumb curiosity a donkey’s head appeared.

  5

  When the two men walked back to the cottage they noticed the mainland had disappeared. The island, it seemed, had floated free in the wind and was screened about now with a moving rain-mist. It veiled them as they came up the stone path. The donkeys were no longer trailing them but had huddled on the southern side of the school house, their great heads lowered as if listening to ghost stories in the grass. Nora was in the kitchen when they got there. She was saying a prayer over Sean even as he was humming a light-hearted tune called Donnellan’s Favourite. Margaret was standing back by the kettle. She met her husband’s eye as he walked in and stood there.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ said Nora as she finished the prayer. ‘He’s coming back to you.’ She stepped away to watch the effect of the prayer, but Sean simply hummed on, going directly into The Widow and the Sparrow.

  ‘He hasn’t stopped since you left,’ said Margaret, not quite knowing how to speak in front of Nicholas and feeling a strange tingling in the small of her back standing beside him. ‘I think it’s something you did,’ she said to him.

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘He just sits usually. He never lilts. He never does anything like this.’

  Muiris put his hand on his son’s shoulder and sat beside him. He tried to catch his eyes but it was impossible for they flew high along the ceiling with the notes. He gestured to Nicholas to sit down and Margaret turned to the kettle, singing.

  ‘Father Noel should be here,’ said the widow, ‘to say a few . . .’

  ‘Stop.’ It was the Master. ‘We don’t want anything like that. We don’t want everyone coming in peering over us.’

  ‘But it could be God’s own . . .’

  ‘Nothing. God’s own nothing, same as He done for years. Now go home, Nora.’

  ‘But it . . .’

  ‘Go home. Thank you, goodbye.’

  His voice turned her around and out the door. It was bad luck, the way he was treating her, she knew that; very bad luck. Not proper at all, and she crossed the little way to her house in the rain comforted only by the knowledge that the Lord would see her rewarded in another’s punishment.

  ‘Will you talk to him? He seems to respond to you.’

  ‘Me?’ said Nicholas.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Muiris. ‘I know nothing about anything. I’m the most ignorant man in the world to understand what anything means, but I have never seen my son like this in years and you came in here this morning and . . .’ He waved a hand at the music that had already filled up the kitchen air. ‘So, will you talk to him?’

  ‘What will I say?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. I don’t know.’

  Nicholas looked from the Master to his wife and took the mug of strong tea that was put before him. He felt the weight of their expectations like leaden hands pressing on his chest and had no idea what to do. What did it mean? He had done nothing to their son. He had no gift. He was only there because of his father, because of the brief chance that had brought the painting that was his father’s last handmark in the world to this house. It was for that he had come, and yet moments after seeing it he had lost all certainty that he was to bring it away with him. And now this. The tall thinness of himself shook under the burden of the moment; he was shaking beneath the table; trickles of sweat ran from his armpits with the sensation of a cold blade passing down his skin. What was he to do? He put the mug down on the pine table and turned into the music.

  ‘Sean,’ he said.

  And at once the notes stopped.

  That night Nicholas slept next door to Sean in Isabel’s emptied room at the end of the cottage. Muiris and Margaret lay awake beneath their opened window and turned to the starless sky their utter amazement at what the day had brought them. Their son was coming back; he had spoken to Nicholas and seemed to have discovered in the visitor an invisible connection back to the real world. The Master and his wife were cracked with hope; it split them open to their very heart and lay vulnerable and bare all the private dreams and aspirations of father and mother for the only son. Their night bedroom was peopled with images and an unheard music made them dance. They moved closer together in their pajamas and gazed out the window for the signs of tomorrow, wishing it would hurry, lest whatever spell or miracle had visited the cottage be gone by morning.

  Nicholas too could not sleep. In the air that was still sweet and heavy with Isabel’s beauty, he floated questions on the night like moths. What had happened? He had done nothing; it was true. All he had done was ask the man questions, was to look at him, and yet, there it was, the transformation in Sean so clear and evident that it may as well have been another man sitting in the chair before. Still, it kept coming back to him: he had done nothing. It was a chance, a coincidence. His reason for being there at all was chance; it could have been another house, another poet winning the prize. It could mean nothing. How could he make sense of something so random? He turned in the covers and stirred up the perfume of the young girl’s dreams. He thumped the pillow and let out without realising the tortured half-sleep of all the nights she had lain there blaming herself for what had happened to her brother. Her guilt swirled in the air like a fine dust; it caught in his throat and he began a coughing fit that lasted minutes. Tears streamed from his eyes and were soon flowing so steadily that he understood with shock they were whole rivers of grief. He turned his face into the pillow and wept it wet, weeping out of some deep and uncharged abyss within himself, some place that had needed no prompting but like a fingertouch on a magic rock opened flowingly on the night. He hushed himself and tried to swallow the gasps in case the others heard him, not yet knowing that they had already awakened Nora Liathain in her back bedroom and that all the island air was glassy and sharp with sorrow. Men coming home from Coman’s bowed and were struck by flying shards of it.

  Nicholas felt the loneliness of the island immensely in the night. Perhaps because the mainland was screened off and the island seemed to sail miles into the black nothingness of the Atlantic, he felt more keenly a sense of cut-off and abandoned desolation. It was a mirror of his life; this nowhere in the sea. What had he done? Why had he come here? What lives were these out here on the rock and what part had he among them? The more he thought on it the more it seemed a reckless and stupid will that had driven him to come there, when all he was feeling was the loss of his father. Loss, loss, loss. The word passed across his chest like a knife opening his flesh and spilling his organs. How much easier it would have been to have been wounded, to have lost a limb, to stumble through the day one-legged, flap one-armed and show: this much of me is loss, this much hacked away by grief and despair.

  But he lay in the bed, weeping and whole and missed his father. His entire life, it seemed, was that tall man and his high forehead. His growing up and adolescence had been in terror and admiration of him. He had thought nothing for himself until he thought of his father; had no real friends because of him, had loved no one because of him; was here now because of him. It had all been so wrong, so forced and unfree; where was his own life? Where was the meaning if it was not in what the old man had done? His eyes tightened, across the boards of the ceiling he let a flash of anger: Jesus, what am I doing? Why did you burn everything up? Why didn’t you think of me? Why? Why?

  Nicholas called the question out loud as if it might summon his father, and Margaret Gore appeared
in his doorway.

  ‘Are you all right?’ His tears had dampened the room.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s no crime.’

  She stood there in her nightgown a moment, saying nothing, looking at him, the young man from Dublin weeping in Isabel’s bed. She waited. He lay there and looked at the ceiling and said nothing. She opened her hands slightly as if trapping or releasing a small bird and said simply:

  ‘It’ll pass.’

  And then she had left him. The tears dried up as quickly as they had come and Nicholas fell into dreams of birds and flying islands that smelled like girls. He moved through rapturous cloudy skies where dolphins leapt and the colours kept changing through all the hues of his father’s painting, he was lucent and lambent, and touched with flowers that looked like fire. He smelled the smoke, and then awoke to feel the cottage take shape around in the girl’s bedroom, and the toast burning on the top of the range.

  6

  Nothing in the natural world is random, was the principal tenet in William Coughlan’s philosophy. Witness the salmon swimming out into the vastness of the seas, the unmappable and unmarked immensity of water that was almost beyond dimension to the solitary fish; and then his return, the staggering leap upriver and the glittering homewardness that brought the salmon back again. Why? Because just so it was meant to be. It was the scheme of things. Once you understood the scheme of things, he said, you had no worries. What was right was right. It was undeniable, there was a place for everything; everything God made fit somewhere.

  Just so, that morning, despite his own doubts and the moister of his tears still drying off the air, Nicholas Coughlan found himself fitting into the life of the Gore family in their cottage on the island off the western coast of Ireland. Although it had no apparent logic, no clear reasoning in the scheme, when he turned in his bed and looked about him Nicholas felt less a stranger than he had done the night before. His feet, when he swung them onto the flag floor, found their place as if it were already familiar. He stood by the bedroom window and looked out to see the mainland had returned. The sea was brimming and full, slapping at the coastline and stirring up the gulls to a raucous hovering dance only inches above the water. The air was full of home fires and the three chimneys he could see from Isabel’s bedroom all painted an alarmingly slanted eastward plume of smoke across the breeze.

  He went into the kitchen and was welcomed to his breakfast. Sausages rolled in a sizzling pan, eggs slid and landed with a soft slap on his plate, and the Master threw him down three slices of bread as he buttered them.

  ‘Muiris!’

  ‘Well, he needs it. Look at him. Thin as a greyhound. Give him another sausage.’

  Sean sat next to him in his wheelchair. That morning he had awoken with music in him and greeted his mother for the first time in years with Ryan’s Favourite as she came in to dress him. Now, he took the egg that was fed to him and looked across at Nicholas with a grin that kept appearing, as if the same joke was going back and forth across the networks of his mind.

  In a little while Muiris had risen from the table, given his wife the first look of happiness he had found within himself in years, and gone out the front door to open the school. He told Nicholas he would see him at three o’clock and stepped out on to the garden path as if it were the first page in a wonderful and surprising novel. He carried the tune his son had been humming as he went across to the school, and even when he opened the door and the children rushed in the tune somehow slipped in with them and he heard it faintly flying about the schoolroom as he sat up to his desk.

  ‘Well,’ said Margaret, when he was gone, and the happiness he had given her was still warm as dough in her fingers. ‘What do you plan for today?’

  *

  It was the middle of a bright and polished morning by the time Nicholas wheeled Sean down the bumpy path and out the garden gate for a little tour of the eastern shore. It was not exactly what he had planned; it was like everything else now, falling into place. He had gotten up from the kitchen table with no real idea of what to do, looked out the window at the swollen sea and realised he had seen nothing of the island. Then as he turned he found Sean’s eyes and a slanted smile upon him.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, yes.’ It was the woman’s warmth flowing over him when he asked to take Sean that was so surprising. It was as if he were a paddle boat being whooshed forward on a great wave of her good feeling and hope. He felt it buoy him up and was flushed and amazed, seeing himself briefly through her eyes as a figure of fate and pulling on his coat like a storied character cloaking to face the enemy.

  ‘Well,’ he said, moving out of the mother’s gaze at the door and then closing the angle through which Nora Liathain peered so intently, ‘you’ll have to tell me where to go.’ Sean swung his weight a little to the left and the chair followed it. Once they found the right path, bumping along the windy way, Sean began to hum again and a lively music accompanied them, along with a cluster of donkeys.

  ‘You’re not really sick, sure you’re not? I know you’re not. You hear everything I say and you could answer me if you wanted. But you just don’t want to. That’s what it is.’

  They were at the cliff edge and the sea roiled like an illness below. Nicholas talked while the wind blew off bits of his hair. He had no indication whatsoever that Sean was listening to him, but he talked on as if to an attentive audience who must hear what he had to say.

  ‘I thought about that. After my father died. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just sitting there, or lying in a bed. I had a man take care of me too. Same as you. Could listen to Mozart all morning if I wanted, lying in bed. Put on enough music on the player to go all day. Imagine. Didn’t have to hum it, either. It was just there. Like angels, my father would have said. That was the kind of thing he said. Music there, like angels. Or Latin. Do you know Latin?’

  He waited a moment but Sean said nothing, was still and gazing out into the moody blundering of the water on the dark rock.

  ‘I do. I learned a good bit of it. No reason, really. Just like picking up stones on the strand or something. Latin. He loved the sound of it. At least I think that was it, I don’t think he understood it. One time we sat in a barn out of the rain and all his paintings ruined by cattle and he told me to say the Latin. I couldn’t get over it. Like it was a blessing or something. Can you picture it?’

  Nicholas paused but was not expecting an answer. He was speaking to the invisible world, to the Atlantic air and the broken water below. ‘Latin in the rain in a barn somewhere in Clare. “Cetera per terras omnes animalia somno laxabant curas et corda oblita laborum.” Virgil. All creatures throughout the lands easing their cares with sleep, their hearts forgetful. Something like that. He liked it. I thought it was the music maybe, just sounds. I did it other times too. When I came in from work one time and he was sitting by the table with nothing on it; as if he had sat down to his tea and there was nothing there, as if he’d only just discovered how alone he was – that’s the thing in my family, we’re like three alone people, and we forget it for a while and then it jumps up. It’s there. Well, anyway, there he was, when I came in, sitting there, stooped a little over the table where he took his tea. And I came in and he said – there were tears in him somewhere, he was all edgy and broken up – say some of it for me, will you? I don’t even know for sure what he meant, but that’s what it was anyway, the Latin, the music of it, like angels coming out of the ceiling, he said. And I started and came to a word and he stopped me suddenly. He looked up and tears were running down his eyes, and do you know what he said? He said amor. Just that. He sounded it out. Amor. And then said my mother’s name. Bette. Amor Bette.’

  Nicholas stopped and again the sea and the wind and the seabirds blew over them.

  There was a long windy nothingness, a rawness coming up the cliff that made the gulls hover and dare long slow arcs over the rocky promontory. The sky was moving white clouds before a shower and bringing them in like half-dried sheet
s about the island. High above the two men’s heads on the eastern cliff, in the unseen and white airiness that was all unmappable kingdom perhaps a door blew open or a curtain drew back, for in a moment, unbidden and clear, Sean spoke for the first time.

  ‘Help me stand up,’ he said.

  7

  In the Master’s classroom the tune was still playing. The more he kept looking down over the children’s heads the more Muiris seemed to hear it. It wasn’t long before he was seeing it too, thin ribboning veils of the music in blues and faded yellows moving through the air and back again like the falling cloths of passing spirits. The children seemed not to notice particularly, but were in very good form, he noted. Not even O’Shea was causing bother or flopping himself about in the desk like a landed dolphin. No, it was to do with the music in the air. At first he thought to ask them did they hear it, but the moment passed and he let their ordinary faces look up at him in the room waiting for their work. If they heard it, it was in some inner ear, he reasoned; it was playing some place just beyond everyday hearing, but there nonetheless. And as clearly as it was playing, it was also clear to him that it was his son.

  While the scholars did their Irish Who What Where and Hows, Muiris sat at the top of the room and listened and watched. The coloured veils of the music kept passing up and down the room, pale and fine and near-transparent. By twelve o’clock he got up from his high chair to walk down the classroom and see if it made a difference. He reached the door and turned and saw with amazement that the colours he was seeing were exact and soft emanations from William Coughlan’s painting on the back wall. His head spun, he put his hand down on Nuala Ni Ceailligh’s desk and thought he would fall over. He blinked and looked again and saw the same thing. There was a trembling, something was moving that should not have been. Like a clock, the children had stopped in a single moment; their faces were turned to him, as if to reset the world and get it going, for what they had just seen had astonished them out of the domain of words and writing. There it was, look! They turned as one and looked up the room even as Master Muiris was wandering forward between the desks, moving to the eastern window in a dumb and wavering amaze. The children’s voices were humming suddenly about him, there was noise where there should not have been, and a rising beat of excitement and confusion coming through the music that was growing louder and wilder in his brain until he at last reached the top window and pressed his fingers and his forehead against the cold pane to feel something solid and real as he looked out and saw there, there, the stranger and his son walking across the island towards him.