Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  In the aftermath of his cure, Sean was a village curiosity, but soon grew weary of answering how he had felt, and spent the days lying about the house or taking long walks to the far side of the island. Although he did not yet know it, he was on the point of deciding to leave the island and go to England, following a destiny that was as unclear and haphazard as the patterns of flies and that would soon have to face the extra difficulty of a half-heard, half-dreamt vocation to the priesthood. For now, vaguely aware of the precipice ahead, he wore a thick coat of brooding even in the blue air glistening with high gulls. He had, for the time being, abandoned music, and when he sat in with Nicholas in the sickroom he was neither company nor solace.

  So the days ran on like a ragged wool, neither loosening nor gathering. They became nothing; they were waiting days between the hitch and stitch of the plot. Nicholas remained abstracted and ill, and Margaret covered for him as best she could. When the high sound of soprano singing emanated from the bedroom and flowed throughout the house, she turned up the radio full volume and drowned out the love madness with the one o’clock news. When Nicholas called Isabel in the night and risked waking the house, it was she who slipped from her room and opened the door to quiet him as he stood naked and holding a huge erection in the half-moon, his eyes closed and his mouth kissing and biting the nipples of the soft Isabels of the air.

  There was nothing could be done, but to wait it out. Margaret Gore knew what love was. She knew the enemy of love was time, that the world wrinkles dreams quicker than skin, and that when nothing happens, when no letter comes and no touch happens the passion collapses. There was a time, she knew, when the absence of kisses was stronger potion than kisses themselves. But just so, after that was a time too when absence of kisses was a grim and hollow feeling that drew out until it filled every inch of the soul’s million miles. An emptiness you were full of. She waited each day and watched for it to begin filling in Nicholas Coughlan. When she sat him in the armchair in the kitchen and changed the bedsheets she thought she could detect in their scent the first faint aroma of Juniper berries that was always the smell of loss after the death of a loved one. (In her cottage across the way the Widow Liathain almost fell from her chair when she smelled it too. She moved to the window and put the old prune of her face into the air. When she knew the scent came from the Master’s house she began at once spreading the news of his imminent demise and preparing for his funeral.)

  Four days after the second letter Nicholas wrote a third. He wrote it without hiding in the middle of the afternoon. He had run out of paper and asked Margaret for a page and an envelope.

  ‘I want to write to Isabel,’ he said.

  She was taken aback momentarily, and did not dare to meet his eyes.

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said to the curtain, finding that the hem of it suddenly needed studying, and waiting there until she was sure her face showed nothing once again. ‘I’ll bring you a piece of paper.’ She paused and chanced to look at him: this hopeless long pale figure with his high forehead and his intense eyes, his lips bruised from biting and the rubbing of the back of his hand backwards and forewards across them. ‘I’m sending a letter myself. I’ll post the two of them,’ she told him, stepping out of the room, stunned at how easily the plot had conspired with her. It was a kind of blessing, really. It was an encouragement, a proof that she had not been wrong in what she had done, and was going to do. How many more letters after all could he write and not get reply? Surely he was nearly burned out?

  She brought him the paper and sat in the kitchen listening for the tell-tale signs of the writing of a love letter, the sighs and groans, the frustrations, the accompaniment of violins you could just make out beyond the screaming of the gulls outside. But this time there was nothing. He was quiet. The room was stilled and only the clock was loud, punishing the arrival of four o’clock with a particularly fierce striking.

  Perhaps he had fallen asleep? Perhaps the moment had come when the passion had at last slipped from him like a too-warm blanket and he was free? Margaret rose in the kitchen and walked down the flag floor until she was outside the room. She had become accustomed to the whole range of excesses that Nicholas was now prone to and expected anything: he might have been crawling on the floor and sniffing for the ancient clippings of Isabel’s toenails and it would not have surprised Margaret. He might have been naked on the bed with the sheet of the letter pressed against his sex and the fumes of the roses maddening in ecstasy his delirious brain. It might have been anything and not shocked her. But still, when her brown eye reached the crack of the door and she leaned forward and peered into the room the vision she saw there stopped her heart.

  Nicholas was sitting on the edge of the bed and wearing a kind of whiteness that shone so that Margaret could not be sure if it was his clothing or his skin. He looked like a light and not a person, so intensely was he burning with the electricity of desire. The air of the room was the quality of white satin; it seemed to have fabricated itself and hung in huge loose drapes from the ceiling, billowing slightly all the time as the hundred doves passed by it, their wings thrumming softly and moving the air as if with the finest of lace fans. Nicholas shone, but next to him was the figure of a taller version of himself. At first Margaret thought it was done with mirrors; it was a trick of reflection, or a doubling of vision due to the desert-spoon measure of cough medicine Muiris had had her take that morning. She tried her other eye to the door but the picture remained the same; there they were, two men bathed in a fabulous whiteness, one sitting in the chair, the other on the bed and neither of them saying anything to each other. They were simply gazing. When she pressed her face closer and tried to focus against all the shining and light Margaret could see the second man was older and he was smiling.

  But saying nothing. When at last he rose and moved toward Nicholas the whiteness of the room grew even brighter. Margaret felt heat rushing up at her from the floor; it was as if the light was fluid and filling upwards within her. When it reached her head she felt her feet rising off the floor, then she saw the white birds flying out of her mouth and then she fainted.

  8

  She had a touch of what Nicholas had. That’s what the Master decided and consigned his wife to bed where she lay like a woman who had seen a vision. She didn’t dare enquire if her husband had noticed anything about Nicholas and so lay in bed for the rest of the day in mortal terror of what might be in Isabel’s bedroom. She gave free rein to her imagination and over the course of the hours she lay there it took her through a full compendium of spirits and ghosts, angels and devils. But when Nicholas finally appeared at eight o’clock, knocking on her door and coming in to see if she was well, Margaret noticed no change in him, except for the alarming disappearance of his hair. He was greatly improved, he told her. He felt lighter, and his eyes were steady and clear for the first time since returning from Galway. He was weak, of course, but in a couple of days, he said, he was sure he’d be all right.

  ‘I did write the letter,’ he said.

  ‘The letter?’

  ‘To Isabel.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Will I ask Sean to post it for me now, as you’re sick? You could give me yours and I’ll put them together for him.’

  Oh no. No, no, no. Margaret raised herself against the pillow and made a show of strength. She’d be fine tomorrow, she assured him. It had been an overmeasure of cough medicine, that was all. She was sorry she had alarmed him just outside his room. No, no, she’d take the letter all right. She’d post the two of them to Isabel tomorrow.

  And so Nicholas Coughlan handed over the third letter of love for Isabel; and for the third time Margaret Gore fed it to the fire when her son and her husband were out in the night.

  But this time was different. It took a greater effort. When she lay in her bed and held the letter in its envelope there swept over her a sudden chill. She felt the goosebumps about her calves and chafed her ankles together as another round of debate ope
ned in her mind: her daughter was capable of anything; she had married a fool who was entirely unsuitable for her and now had this man burning like a roman candle and losing all his hair for her. She had married the wrong man, but she had married him, and that was that. There was no going back, the world was not reversible, and although Margaret imagined the certain dullness and disappointment of the life ahead for Isabel with Peader, she was right to believe there was no other option. Of course she was. These letters were nothing but disaster. What could come of them?

  She flapped the envelope softly against her lower lip, waiting for the argument to come out strongly in her favour. When it did and she was happy she was doing the right thing she took it in her dressing-gown and went down the hallway into the kitchen, pausing only for a moment when she thought she heard the sound of writing coming from Isabel’s room.

  She opened the door of the range so the turf glowed orange against the bars of the grate and then, as a clatter of heavy rain spilled loudly onto the corrugated roof of the back kitchen, she opened the envelope. At first she thought she was mistaken; it was a blank page. But no, there in the lower half of the white sheet was the full message of the third letter, one word:

  Love

  And nothing else. Not I love you, not her name, and not his. Neither the slightest blemish or spot of ink anywhere on the page. At first Margaret thought there must be something traced, some secret message held up to the light or the mirror, something beyond this. But if there was she could not find it. Just the one word. Just Love, and nothing else. She sat and held the page in her lap, laid back her head against the rest and felt the surprise of tears running into her ears. It was too pathetic, sending this to her, a page with one word. The hopeless yearning was flowing off the page and filling her mouth with the taste of lemon juice, it made everything smart as if the world was suddenly stung in every wound and no balm came. This single word on the page, this despairing and inaudible cry that was both a question and a statement, an expression of fact and of aspiration, of present and future melted together in the one note, the four letters of Love. It was too much for her; what was he thinking? Had he fallen beyond language now, abandoned himself to the grim silence, the vast wordlessness that eats all love and leaves only the empty hungering sound echoing off the stars? Margaret held the page away from her and looked at the fire. God, she thought, what am I supposed to do?

  And not expecting an answer, she blinked the tears, lifted the page with the word Love, and fed it into the fire.

  9

  Everything, said Muiris, would soon be right as rain. It was two days afterwards and Margaret Gore was back on her feet. Nicholas had emerged from his fever and walked out on the island for the first time. Sean went with him, and Margaret watched them from inside the net curtain on the front window as they ambled toward the foreshore and met the herd of donkeys coming to greet them.

  ‘He seems well,’ said Muiris. It was Saturday and he was sitting in the armchair he preferred over most other pleasures in the world. ‘He’s over the lovesickness anyway,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me you didn’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t know what?’

  ‘What I’m talking about. Of course you know.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Then you’re not my wife. My wife knows.’

  ‘And how do you know?’

  ‘You have to ask that? Isn’t it plain enough? Couldn’t you tell the moment he got off the boat coming back from her?’ He paused and let register the comfort of the chair: how does one chair become so comfortable? ‘Of course you could.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘Say what? There was nothing for us to do. It was in the hands of the gods. Think like that you can’t, you have to let them be what they are.’

  ‘You’re a fool, do you know that?’ Her voice broke in small glassy pieces and when she turned her eyes on him Muiris could see the pain he had put there. ‘Gods! Is that what you think? Is that what you really think?’ She fired the question and left the room before he had even begun picking the shards of it from his face. Well, he thought. she is even more hurt than I imagined she would be. And then, settling himself further into the chair, he let his eyes dream and wondered how many years ago it had been and just who it was his wife had secretly loved and not left him for.

  10

  Love does not pass; it simply changes shape. It takes a different form when it meets an obstacle that will not move. The obstacle Nicholas met was the silence from Isabel, the absence of any reply and not the slightest sign that she was for one moment thinking of him, never mind returning his feelings. It was not a rock, it was a mountain in the middle of the road; it was the overwhelming and audible prompting that he should at once forget all possibility of seeing her and leave the island to return across the country in the hope that distance would dupe memory and desire die with time. The nothing he woke to each morning, the no-news, the constant and firm rejection that was awaiting him when he opened his eyes in her bedroom and knew instinctively there was no letter from her would have been the vanquishing of another emotion. But not this love.

  It was too foolish to give up.

  Three weeks after he had returned to the island and one week after the third letter, Nicholas Coughlan began writing about his father. He began it as an explanation, and under his father’s prompting. He sat at a small table he had carried into the bedroom and when he raised his hand and ran it across his head he felt the gleaming pate of old William. At first Margaret supposed he was at another letter, but when a week went by and her vigilance in watching any movement toward the Post Office was not repaid, she began to realise this was something else. She dared not go to the door and peep in for fear of seeing an outlandish vision, and instead steadied herself with the thought that the love was dying. She had not spoken to Muiris about the lovesickness again because she feared he might be gifted with omniscience in her company and that he would know at once about the burning of the letters. Instead she waited out a new course of action, and put aside her fears that the spots appearing on the back of her hands were the rising to the surface of her sins.

  A clutch of warm days came together and the island was suddenly infested with swarms of flies. They rose out of the rocks and moved like a dirty gauze in the tepid air. The fishing boats in the harbour were alive with them and the islanders took to walking about with caps or headscarfs in hand, batting at the insects and praying for the wind to clear them. But the sea stilled and the sun beat down, so the flies embroidered themselves against the blue backdrop and flew in endless random patterns in and out of the doors and windows of every cottage. Except the Master’s.

  It was Margaret, of course, who noticed it. She heard the talk of the flies in the shop and the Post Office, she saw them everywhere and flicked a child’s school copybook she brought with her as a fan. But when she entered the garden gate and stepped in home the flies did not follow. She alone did not have to keep her windows closed, but did so in the hope that no one else would notice the purity of love causing the absence of the flies. Perhaps, she tried to tell herself, it was the scent of dying love that kept them off. Perhaps it was the clicking noise of the keys in the old typewriter that Muiris had got for Nicholas, and that now clicked all day in the back bedroom though the sun shone brightly outside. It might have been many things, but secretly she knew.

  The evening she first noticed the absence of the plague of flies Margaret at last counselled Muiris that it was time for Nicholas to leave. She was no longer afraid that by releasing him from the island he would go directly to Isabel. It was fading away, she had decided. His lovesickness was passing off as all men’s passion does, and she comforted herself with that grim reality as if confirming stones in her shoes. It was unlucky to keep him any longer. Give him the painting and let him go back to Dublin, she told her husband in urgent whispers as he sat on their bed peeling off his sweated socks.

  ‘Why this, so sudde
nly?’ he asked her. ‘Can’t he stay as long as he wants?’

  ‘He should be going. What can he do here? There’s nothing for him here. Tell him in the morning.’ There was a quality of lead pellets in her voice. The Master felt them in the back of his neck and closed his eyes.

  ‘Do you hear me, Muiris?’

  He lay himself down on top of the bedclothes without replying and brought his hands together on his chest as if praying. When the whisper came again he was deciding if this was ground for taking a stand on, or more of the treacherous and giving bogland of marriage.

  ‘Muiris?’

  He faked sleep, even when her hand rocked his shoulder, retreating instead into the separate and private peace of the bed. And there they lay in the humid flyless darkness, each pretending to sleep while the constant and faintly muffled noise of the typewriter keys clicked away into the island night.

  In the morning Muiris was off to the school house before his wife could confront him. He raced off in his rolling gait and breathlessly batted the million flies that met him on the way. Behind him he left the strangeness of his life and blew sighs of relief that he could escape into the school and a world where everything made sense.

  Margaret decided to leave it to her husband to tell Nicholas. It could be done that evening; and with the sweet scent of this resolve filling her like a roomful of tulips, she dedicated the day to being as pleasant as possible to the visitor. She brought him in a tray of tea and buttered scones midway through the morning. And even when he paused only for a moment to acknowledge her she did not let the slight poison her mood; neither did she let the sigh of the scattered pages everywhere around the table worry her unduly. After all, he would soon be gone, and she had done her job well. It was only later in the afternoon, after she had brought him roast chicken and potatoes and the last of their own carrots and parsnips, when she paused in her magazine and felt like a palm pressed on her shoulder the sudden stillness in the house as the typing stopped, only then, that she felt the alarm ring. She listened the length she had grown accustomed to for the change of paper, but the time stretched on without any typing. He had stopped; everything was paused; it was as if the island itself had slipped through the crack of Time and no fly buzzed and no wave fell on the shore as Margaret sat in one end of the cottage holding her breath with a sudden premonition while Nicholas Coughlan gathered up the many pages for the final letter to Isabel.