Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  When he appeared in the kitchen doorway Margaret’s heart nearly stopped. He had the sheaf of the pages in his hand and she could tell from the clear rose prints on his cheeks that he was still thinking of Isabel. This was worse than before; this was not madness and infatuation, this was not dreams and fantasies, the tossed bed of desire and the sleepless yearning for touch. This was more confirmed and resolute, and Margaret had to swallow hard to overcome the knowledge the Nicholas now had the look of a saint. He was going to the Post Office, he told her. Had she anything she wanted to include?

  ‘I’ll do it for you,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘No, I want the air.’

  ‘But there’s flies. . .’

  ‘Really?’

  She went to get up but found a tall white man sitting on her lap. He smelled so sweetly of eucalyptus that at first she forgot the world and took the heavenly scent of him like a rapture. He sat across her with his long legs out in front, and although he held her there from moving he weighed nothing at all. Margaret tried to release her hands from the armrests but was unable to, she just squirmed a little in place. She opened her mouth to tell Nicholas not to send anything to Isabel, to tell him she knew of his passion and that it could bring nothing but ruin and grief, but when her lips were open a dozen white birds flew inside her and no words came out. She could neither rise nor speak and simply sat there in her kitchen looking up at the tall and balding figure with the light beaming from him.

  Only when Nicholas had closed the door after him and headed down the path was the old man gone too and Margaret suddenly free to get up and look out after them. She moved the curtain at the front window and saw with further conviction that the natural and supernatural conspired, for the island air was free of flies.

  11

  Nicholas carried his bundle of pages down to the Post Office. He bought an envelope from the lower counter and then moved along to wait for Aine Hurley to take her time and come up and join him at the post office one.

  ‘That’ll cost a lot,’ she said, taking the package and reading the address without further comment. She weighed the largest of the love letters and told Nicholas Coughlan four pounds would bring it to Galway.

  ‘When will it get there?’ he asked her.

  She took this as some judgement on herself, some slight on her performance, and pursed her lips before answering: ‘Tuesday,’ and then adding with only the lightest of her entire armoury of ironies, ‘God willing.’

  ‘But it’s Friday,’ Nicholas told her.

  ‘Is it? Thank you,’ said Mrs Hurley, feeling the small bristles of her moustache standing.

  ‘Couldn’t it get there tomorrow?’

  She looked at him as if he were the newest species of Martian to arrive on the island and shook her head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s only . . .’

  ‘No.’

  The bell above the door jingled and Nicholas turned to see Margaret Gore arriving. It was the briefest moment, the slightest particle of time in which no thought happens and the plot of life leaps forward into the vacuum; or perhaps it was the invisible prompting of the tall man standing beside Nicholas, perhaps he pushed his son’s arm, for in a flash Nicholas reached to the counter and drew to him the already stamped and paid-for envelope for Isabel. He took it and turned, held it to his chest and walked out the door.

  He himself wasn’t sure why. He had no sense of threat or danger but was guided by that steady nudge that walked him quickly from the Post Office and past the amazement and dismay of the two women. He was walking toward the shoreline before he knew it, before he had had time to marshall reason and select his next action amidst the galaxies of the improbable that were now his life. He felt his shoes sliding on the white sand; it was as if the world was giving away beneath him and he was not sure why, but he walked on toward the water. From the Post Office door Margaret Looney was watching him and held her breath in a gasp as she realised he was so far lost in the dementia of loving that he was about to walk across the sea to Galway.

  His shoes drank the edge of the cold sea with a million mouths, and Nicholas looked down to feel with surprise that the froth did not pillow him. His ankles stung even though he had only stepped three feet into the water and now walked along just off the island shore, the envelope of the love letter clutched against his chest. He looked out to the mainland and felt his heart release a half-dozen butterflies at the sight of sunlight piercing down through mottled cloud. Was the world conspiring with him or against him? Who was walking him now? And where? The sickness was rolling in his stomach. The salt in the air burnt his eyelids and it was a moment before he realised the gulls were gathering behind him, rising and landing again and again as the waves came in and sucked back, signifying something so deeply misunderstood. He walked on along the edge of the island, neither quite on the land nor in the water.

  Leaving the Post Office and coming down to the shore Margaret Looney shepherded him at a small distance fearing at any moment she was to witness his drowning.

  Where was he going? What was he doing with the fourth letter? Did he know she had burnt the other? She felt certain he did and had a sudden longing to cry out to him. But from up the Lond road she saw out of the corner of her eye Nora Liathain leaving her cottage and coming down to see what was happening, and the moment passed.

  Nicholas walked four hundred yards along the edge of the island, his trouserlegs drenched with the sea slapping across them, and the letter held high against the spray. He seemed to Margaret to be walking aimlessly now, but she knew enough of the deviousness of love to keep following; she wouldn’t put it past this loving to have gifted him with sudden omniscience and insight just to keep itself alive. It would hardly surprise her if it had even allowed him bi-location and the Nicholas she followed was not the Nicholas who wrote the letter at all. She was burdened with possibilities and as the wet sand took her footprints she let rush ahead of her the bare-toothed dogs of her maternal drive to save Isabel. But when she saw Nicholas walking in the water up to the mustard-coloured boat of Seamus Beg, At Blaca, she felt defeated at last. The sand held her and she could walk but not move, the way tragic lovers travel in dreams. She saw Nicholas hail the boat as it was pulling out to sea and then standing to his middle in the water and speaking with Seamus Beg for a moment before handing him over the envelope. The boat sailed away, Margaret walked in the empty space, and Nicholas let himself fall at last like a long sigh into the waist-high sea.

  12

  And there was the ending.

  If only there were endings. If only the moment arrived when there was no more longing, and the story froze and was stilled beyond grief and disappointment and age and death. But it was the plotting not the ending that mattered. For the world, after all, was quite simple. Even the most convoluted plotting, the wildest chance and outrageous coincidence fit like measured cogs into the vast wheel of everything.

  There is a meaning; there is sense to everything, Nicholas thought, as he drew himself up on the shore and lay down soaking on the white sand. It all fits together perfectly, he said out loud and burst out laughing, not at all surprised when he saw it fly like ribbons of white satin from his mouth.

  He looked out and saw the boat now small in the distance taking the letter to Isabel. It was the fourth letter of love. ‘Amor,’ he said, sounding the air with it, thinking of the journey of that love letter and not knowing that the other three had burned, and laughing out loud as he watched it go, but not quite hearing the boom laugh of his father lying next to him. If she does not come with this letter I am wrong, Nicholas thought. But she will.

  ‘She will because she will,’ his father said, beyond Nicholas’s hearing but clear enough for Margaret Looney to hear it with a hopeless dread as she stood in the sand a hundred yards away.

  ‘She will come,’ Nicholas said aloud, ‘she will,’ and was suddenly aware that the reason was quite simple, that it was because that was how the world fitted together, not
how we plan it, nor with a shape we conceive, but with a crazy pattern of its own that runs through all the twists and griefs of every day unto the point of me lying here knowing I am to love her and the plots of love and God are one and the same thing. She will come.

  He lay on the beach beside his father and watched the western sky moving slowly above him, the planes of blue air ceaselessly and easily fitting together and so softly coming apart. Until the moment his mother arrived and sat with them. The three of them sat there then in a place not exactly chosen, but for whatever reason was a place where Muiris Gore could see them as he stood on a child’s seat and turned with a screwdriver the left hand of the two screws that held William Coughlan’s painting to the wall. The screw turned but did not loosen, and for fifteen minutes Muiris kept turning and turning it in vain, unable to understand until his legs grew tired that there was a reason and a way beyond the laws of science. It was only when he abandoned the effort and stood down to rest against the front desk that he noticed for the first time the picture of the painting was in fact a huge image of a very old man. He blinked to make it vanish and had to sit down when it did not. Then he laughed. And laughed. It was laughing Margaret Gore heard as she turned home and was startled when she looked over at the school on the little rise of rock and noticed it shining. When her husband came out of the doorway he had lost twenty years and she saw him across the distance with a quality like a fall of light coming towards her. Everything was lit. Golden birds flew and as the islanders came to their opened doors they caught the white smell of eucalyptus wafting in from some Africa of the mind. Even the fishing boats would arrive with the scent of it in the evening. There was eucalyptus in the pillows of the whole island, the unmistakeable scent of world’s loving.

  It did not matter then that none knew that a storm would take Seamus Beg in its hand and toss the last letter of love into the Atlantic, that Isabel would never receive it as she had none of the others, that the wait for a reply would last three more weeks and two days. There was in the air that moment that rare feeling of healing, of things lifting and coming together, of the story being carried suddenly forward, the great whoosh on which everything suddenly rises and flows, and you know a great spirit somewhere is watching down.

  It was in the air at that moment, and at that moment, at the beginning of the discovery of new love for Muiris Gore, Margaret Looney felt the tears streaming from her eyes with sudden foreknowledge, knowing now that at last Isabel would arrive home on the island to tell Nicholas that she had fallen in love with him, that she was pregnant with Peader’s child but that she never intended to see him for the rest of her life, that she had not for a single moment since Nicholas had left the island been able to breathe without thought of him, that the way ahead was no more clear than the way behind, but that it was the way for them for all that, that the plots of God and Love came together and were the same thing and that loving Isabel Gore was what Nicholas Coughlan was born to do.

  Afterword

  This book began on April Fool’s Day, 1985. That was the day Chris and I left our jobs in New York to fly back to Ireland, to live in the farmhouse in Kiltumper in County Clare that her grandfather had left to go to America eighty years earlier. We flew back into an Ireland deep in recession, flying into a country that everyone our age seemed to be leaving. Our reason for returning was not rational. It was more powerful than reason; we both wanted to write and Chris wanted to paint. Within a year we were penniless.

  The novel that I had dreamed of writing eluded me. Because, in a way, everything depended on it, the reckless choice to abandon jobs, the gamble on unknowable talent, the novel became impossibly daunting. I had only written a couple of stories while in college. What had I been thinking?

  In the aftermath of such a leap of faith then, this novel took shape. It took ten years. In those ten years Chris and I wrote four non-fiction books together about life in Kiltumper, serving a kind of apprenticeship, learning how to write, and scrambling a life here together. But always the unwritten novel was waiting. Always there was same battle between faith and doubt. Then one day in the summer of 1995 I was beside the ocean and a first sentence came into my head: When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. It arrived and I repeated it, and said it aloud and knew this was a beginning. When I got home I took out a white page and wrote it down. Who this ‘I’ was, and what God said to the father, I had no idea. I sat there for hours. I took a new page and wrote Chapter One and underlined it and then wrote the same first sentence again. The following day I put Chapter One on its own page so that the opening sentence was now on Page 2, as if that would prompt the rest to follow.

  It didn’t. Many mornings I sat at the desk and wrote the first sentence. And then nothing. But I kept showing up, which was harder than can be explained and may be the most significant part of all the arts. What did God say to the father? I had no idea. Then, one morning two months later, I wrote: When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. And added: God didn’t say much. And there it was; the whole book was in that drama of epiphany followed by silence. Vision and blindness.

  I wrote with no idea where the novel was going, and went forward more or less the way William Coughlan paints, where one day the work seems wonderful and the next your soul burns that you ever thought it was any good. Because I had read widely in contemporary fiction, and knew the work of the finest living Irish novelists, I knew this book was unlike anything then being published, and so I had that freeing gift of the first-time novelist: the likelihood of never being read. I did not think of readers or publishers but only of the story and staying true to it. I remember Nicholas writing the first love letter and thinking the book had at last turned towards home, only for Isabel’s mother, Margaret, to post the letter into the fire the next day.

  So it was, and remains on all subsequent books for me, a progress of leaps and falls.

  This novel taught me everything I know about a life given to art. About faith and doubt, about showing up, facing the white pages, and trying to find meaning. Ultimately, it also taught me about love. Love as a trial of faith, and the greatest human triumph.

  Nearly thirty years now since that April Fool’s Day, we are still in Kiltumper. Still trying. Chris’s first novel will be published next year. I am sitting looking at the white pages once again.

  NIALL WILLIAMS

  2015

  A Note on the Author

  NIALL WILLIAMS was born in 1958 and lives in Kiltumper, Ireland, with his wife Christine and their two children. He is the author of several novels, including Four Letters of Love, which was sold in over twenty countries and is an international bestseller, and History of the Rain, which was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

  www.niallwilliams.com

  ALSO BY NIALL WILLIAMS

  NOVELS

  As It Is in Heaven

  The Fall of Light

  Only Say The Word

  The Unrequited

  Boy in the World

  Boy and Man

  John

  History of the Rain

  PLAYS

  The Murphy Initiative

  A Little Like Paradise

  The Way You Look Tonight

  Praise for Four Letters of Love

  A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

  “Elegiac . . . A canvas to step back from and rejoice in.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “Wonderfully explores the mystery that is love.”

  —USA Today

  “A breathtaking affirmation of magic, miracles and the power of human love.”

  —The Times

  “Extraordinary . . . A stunning and luminous chronicle of love.”

  —Baltimore Sun-Times

  “Remarkable . . . While a wealth of impressions linger from this debut, two words come most often to mind in describing it: Spellbinding. Brilliant.”

 
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “I never thought I would find such an honorable and well-written book about love and truth, men and women, heart and despair—Four Letters of Love is a joy, an acutely evocative and sexual story—and my God, I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Marianne Faithfull

  “A lyrical and passionate novel shot through with the belief in divine order versus chaos; the belief in destiny and the demonic fight against it, and, in spite of all the evidence that life is cruel and arbitrary, the presence of the supernatural and the manifestation of miracles.”

  —The Observer

  “This book can rightly claim its place among the classics of Irish literature. A wonderfully affecting love story.”

  —Belfast Telegraph

  “Lyrical, dreamy . . . A meditation on the love, both sacred and profane, that shapes us . . . Thoughtful, wonderfully wrought passages that soar and soar. Highly recommended.”