Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  There were many things I wanted to say to him. Already I had felt for his great quietness the same irresistible attraction that had so drawn my mother to him in the end. It was as if his wordlessness held within it a boundless wisdom or grief; it was his silence that so made you want to tell him things, the silence that made you want to break it and return him to the ordinary world. But I said nothing. I didn’t tell him how school was going, how Mr Curtin’s eyebrows and butterflying hands still pursued me through the corridors, how he showed up in the yard, pacing with a fury, fluttering his hands behind him while we took turns to dare to mimic at his back, how it seemed certain I would fail the summer exams.

  No, I told my father nothing. I walked with him on weekends, I took the breakfast he made for my mother up the stairs in winter. And that was it. Still, as we turned the last corner to home and his hand sometimes reached out to touch the back of my coat, ever so slightly guiding me on to the road, or down a kerb, or in the gate home, I shuddered from head to toe, flushed and giddy with a boy’s warmest feeling of all his father’s love.

  12

  It was three months before Isabel returned to the island. Then it was Christmas and the crossing barely manageable. The sea churned. The passengers, all old women and young children, sat huddled in the three-sided cabin with the life jackets fallen out on the floor. The mainland vanished in a wash of grey behind them as they rose and fell sideways into the Atlantic, coming home. At the pier it took half an hour to moor the ferry, and even then the climb from the deck on to the rough, worn steps of stone was treacherous. The boat rocked away from the wall and a deep drop opened into the water. The children jumped the distance lightly, hurrying up into the squall of rain where their parents were standing in soaking raincoats to welcome them. Irish fluttered on the wind. Second coats were spread over wet shoulders and the groups dispersed up the rough path into the island in black-coated clumps like half-curraghs, heading off to the small white houses where the fires of Christmas were already burning.

  Isabel’s father was waiting for her. He had whiskey inside him and paid no attention to the bitter and hard rain that had needled through his coat and numbed the redness of his face. He had watched the ferry coming from the window of the pub, and with his third glass of warmth beginning to fill inside him, felt like a wounded general watching in pride the return of his victorious army. He had taught every one of the children now sailing back to the island. They were his emissaries in the greater island and he left the pub, coming out in the fierce weather and down to the pier to meet them with a perfect smile of welcome. He shook their hands and called their names, smiling at how they had grown and were no longer the scrawny white-faced children in short pants and knee stockings to whom he had given their first lessons in the world.

  When at last she came along the pier, Muiris threw his arms around his daughter and pressed her to him. She hugged into his chest, and in the familiar smells of him, smoke and chalk, whiskey and onions, she suddenly realised how unhappy she had been and felt the spring of tears. She held on to her father a long time, as he in turn held on to her.

  As the ferry pulled out they made their way home. It was Isabel’s first return, and as she felt the rough gravel of the path under her feet, the cool cleanness of the sea air thrashing across the treeless island, she told herself through her tears that she never wanted to be away from it again. She would marry an islandman, she told her mother that night. Galway was not the great place people thought it was, she said, knowingly delighting her father in his listening place across the hearth from her and making herself a little giddy with the homeliness and comfort in speaking Irish words again. The nuns were hard, they scolded them for everything. They hated island girls the most, she told them, they didn’t like the way she talked, they wanted her to cut her hair. They said she looked untidy if over her uniform she wore the long wine-coloured cardigan her mother had knit for her. The Irish teacher was hopeless, the food was a sloppy bubbling brown stuff in great black pots with stringy meat and mush potatoes. Isabel poured it all out to them, translating her delight in being home into a tirade against her life on the mainland.

  Later that evening, she sat in the chair by Sean’s bed and told a different story. It wasn’t what she had imagined it to be. The city was not friendly, it was dirty and noisy to her. People were always bustling through it. But still, Sean, she told him, whispering in his ear and watching the little lights of his eyes, there was something about it that was exciting. She had slipped from the convent many times and wandered into Galway, walking up and down and watching all those people trundling past. She loved the excitement she got in going out the small gate in the eastern side of the wall during the last two classes of gym on Wednesdays. She loved the feel of being outside the walled prison of the school with its watching magpie nuns and dull routine. Outside the school she felt the immensity of the world, the huge dizzying variety of it.

  ‘Once,’ she whispered, ‘I even took the train to Dublin. You’d love the trains, Sean. I’ll take you on trains when you’re better. You’ll see.’

  She had sat by the window and watched the country unrolling before her in the morning light like a canvas of mountains, lakes, rivers and fields. Everything delighted her, the little stations with single lines of men and women on the platforms, the suitcases bumped on to the narrow rack overhead, the men with their newspapers, the women who talked over knitting, the boy in black pants and white shirt who pushed a trolley down the aisle of the carriage and asked did she want tea or coffee. It seemed a never-ending journey; how long the rails were, how they stretched and curved and how the train beat in that soft musical rhythm across the magical country. She wanted never to arrive. She wanted it to go on and on, clickening clackening, whooshing into tunnels and out again, racing on past the fields where men stopped to look and sometimes wave. She waved back against the glass.

  The nuns of course were beside themselves. A flock of them set out into Galway to find her. Some of the other island girls were brought to the Mother Superior’s and asked if they knew where she had gone. With each hour her awaiting punishment grew greater. When Sister Agnes suggested aloud that the girl should be thrown out of the school, Sister Mary for a moment took the suggestion literally. She couldn’t understand the sheer boldness of the girl, how she intentionally did things to upset and annoy them. There was a bad streak in her, she believed, like rashers, and only kept quiet when the feeble slow steps of Mother Superior sounded in the corridor and the door opened with the enquiry as to had the girl been found. This has happened with this girl before, said the Mother Superior, addressing the nuns in a slow soft way and letting her words rise like birds off the greatly ridged field of her brow. The Sisters listed the girl’s failings, and then waited for the small humped woman in white to answer, looking across the golden mellowness of the autumnal light in that room only to see her nod, place her hands together in front of her and say: we must pray for her. Sisters, Hail Mary . . .

  Returning, Isabel got off the train in a dream. She walked out of the railway station into the polished cold of the Galway afternoon and made her way back out along the road to the convent. The journey was still with her when she reached the gates and felt the tight white fingers of Sister Concepta grab on to the top of her arm and walk her, one arm angled up high in the nun’s grasp, the other low like a broken doll, to the front door. At first, she told Sean, none of them knew what to say to her. They led her to a room and left her there, to wander over to the great window that looked out on the grounds, the chestnut trees unleafing with the high wall behind. Now, her imagination could take her beyond that wall whenever she wanted. And when, after almost an hour, Sister Agnes walked in, biting the inside of her right cheek and clutching her hands too tightly in front of her, as she listed the various punishments and suspensions that they had settled on, Isabel felt no anger or shame or remorse. What she felt was the exhilaration of freedom. ‘Like dancing,’ she whispered.

  She had only b
een gone from the island three months.

  13

  To Sean, Isabel told everything. He became a part of her, and in the following few years it was for Sean that Isabel most often wished to come home. He made a few sudden movements of his head or his fingers, and small choked sounds low in his throat. He was recovering, her mother had told her. One day he’d have everything back, she said, and for that Margaret Gore kept a spiralling stairway of prayers ascending to the heavens from her nightly place on her knees by the fire.

  One afternoon as she sat in the room in the week after Christmas, Isabel took up Sean’s old whistle and turned it in her hands. She held it out before him and watched his eyes. They flew beyond and back through it like hooks drawing it across the air. Up to his lopsided grin then, and the little reddened sore places at the corner of his mouth where saliva ran out, she placed the bright mouthpiece.

  ‘Blow, Sean,’ she said.

  She waited and felt the effort build in him, the incredible suspense of his whole being balanced there on the lip of the instrument, a moment beyond music. ‘Blow, Sean, blow,’ she said, and fell sideways off the chair as her brother’s arm swung round wildly in an attempt to find the fingering and crashed against her face. He moaned and slumped over in the bed.

  ‘It’s all right, Sean, I’m all right,’ she said, getting up and moving him back against the pillows. His head was on his chest, his eyes not rising. Isabel waited a moment, the wind picked up the rain and threw it against the window. The sister stood there in the small damp bedroom and then started again, taking her brother’s head in her two hands and holding it so she could meet his eyes and read the pleading there, placing the whistle in his mouth once more, and this time guiding and placing both hands as well. For an instant, Sean clutched on to the whistle like a railing or a rope, keeping his hands from falling. He was curved into it, falling forward and sideways, bent up and around, gripping so hard he was forcing the mouthpiece against his gum and bringing blood. He nearly toppled from the chair. Isabel held him. ‘Try and blow, Sean,’ she said. He tried to blow and the whistle fell.

  He tried ten or eleven times that afternoon. But once, when the early night darkness had shut in the island and the view beyond the bedroom window was nothing but a seamless sheet of deepest blue, he clutched the whistle and threw his breath forward and raised the index finger of his right hand to play a single wavering note that climbed the air with the majesty and wonderment of miraculous hosannas.

  So there is a God, thought Isabel Gore, as she sailed back into Galway after Christmas, feeling the glimmering of hope for her brother and the easing of the burden of guilt.

  14

  Wives create their husbands. They begin with that rough raw material, that blundering, well-meaning and handsome youthfulness they have fallen in love with, and then commence the forty years of unstinting labour it takes to make the man with whom they can live.

  The husband my mother made in the early years of her marriage was founded solidly on two principles: that a man should provide and a woman clean. While he kissed her cheek and went to work, she stayed in the little two-bedroomed house on Sycamore Road that for six months or so was to be in her later memory the single happiest place of her adult life. She wore a yellow apron and sang to songs on the radio, dusting and scrubbing the clean house for an hour or so before brushing back her hair and walking to the shops with such a simple and buoyant happiness that to her new neighbours she seemed a girl glowing with love. She acted, she thought, the proper way his wife should act, and when he returned in the evenings, travelling from the office in those days by bicycle and unclipping the flaps of his trouser legs before coming cold-cheeked to embrace her in the immaculate hall, she was dressed in a different frock and smelled of eucalyptus. She laid his meals on the small, formica-topped table in the kitchen and listened earnestly as he told her the few minor and trivial anecdotes of office life. She was suddenly serious for him now. She was a wife, and no longer a girl, and by the end of her first year of marriage had folded and put away the teasing, playful manner she had had when they first met.

  She encouraged him in his career. When the first traces of his headaches and the alarming thinning of his hair began, she imagined them to be the necessary badge of any successful man in the country’s civil service. He looked like an executive, she told him, denying to herself the gathering evidence of his frustration and the growing yet silent rage that rumbled inside this thin man in the bed next to her. She made the world even tidier for him, one memorable day and afternoon changing every pair of curtains in the house and wallpapering by herself the tiny bathroom in a tone of pale pink that she thought more soothing than anything. He failed to notice, of course, entering the small neat living room with its matching brown sofa and armchairs with their lace head- and armrests sitting into the deep weariness of his life while his hair fell out in silver strands she would vacuum and brush up in the morning.

  They had no children. They spent money on the house, and for five years it went through an elaborate series of new looks, each one more ambitiously designed than the next, until to scratch the wall in the bathroom was to reveal a rainbow of pastel shades in which could be read my mother’s hopeless biannual efforts to sustain her domestic dream. She did not, naturally, think of it that way. She was making their home, and in the process grooming into being the imaginary husband she could live with. She bought his clothes, she threw out the worn Saturday trousers he felt most comfortable in, urged him to shave on weekends too, to abandon his habit of the bicycle and to buy instead their first car, an impossibly small black Volkswagan in whose front seat they journeyed into Wicklow on Sunday afternoons, my father hunched, craning forward with his knees bumping the steering wheel, my mother alongside him, regally erect and beautiful as a queen.

  By the time my father had been three times promoted, I imagine my mother believed her work with him was over. He no longer squeezed toothpaste from the middle, never came from the garden on to the cream-coloured carpet she had bought for the hall without removing his shoes, never attempted to wear the same socks or underpants two days running, bathe less than four times a week, nor leave the toilet seat up after urinating. He was successful in his career; he was clever and quick, and if now there seemed to Flannery no sign of that lanky lovesick boy who had whiled the week like a painful purgatory until Friday nights, it was a small loss for such success, he admitted.

  There was a summer holiday then, a packed new Ford leaving the new house on Mulberry Lane and racing off into the countryside. I was happy, yes, I was so happy, my mother would later tell the wallpaper and the curtains. How I was happy! My father did sketches of fields and mountains. They had all-afternoon picnics in sun-warm meadows; briefly my mother let go of the tight grasp she held on their lives and let the immensity of the blue sky and the chorus of the birdsong sweep down on her. Nine months later I was born.

  This story came to me, like all the rest, in fragments. By May once more my father was gone and my mother came downstairs. We cleaned the house of all traces of him, and a week after he had disappeared not even the faintest smell of him was left. My mother talked as she worked. At first it was a kind of clipped crossness, a thrown phrase at the grime that collected in the sink, the tea leaves that swirled and clogged in their haste around the plughole. I paid it no attention and carried on, brushing for her the ever-accumulating but unseeable dirt of life.

  While she talked I stayed with her, pretending to clean and following in her wake and listening. Only in the late afternoons would she stop. Then the house was set, poised for a moment on that precipice of perfect cleanliness, and my mother would be almost happy, standing there in that fragile instant of stillness before the next particle of dust arose and softly fell.

  15

  By the first week of September my father had still not returned. I couldn’t go to school and leave my mother until he did, and sat at the end of the season in the small front room watching the bend in the road for his gangl
ing figure. I would not forgive him so easily now, I told myself. The summer had been an agony of coming and going light; briefly the sun had shone. One day my mother seemed perfectly ordinary, pottering through the chores and cooking the half-tin meals she fed me, singing Gilbert and Sullivan, the next day she was arguing with the radio, shouting off her head at the gardening programme while the sudden showers lashed like dementia against the window.

  I had lived three months in the half-light of the house without my father, and each day after the next I had found myself gathering a few more of the stones of anger. How dared he do this to us? What gave him the right to walk from the house one late spring day and abandon us to this? I blew up in furies of silence, staring out the window. I forswore him; I promised myself to ignore him when he returned then decided to attack instead, to beat my fists against the thin selfishness of him. I went out the front door and stood in the September evening, anticipating him at any moment, my hopeless anger cocked and unholstered for some Wild West schoolboy showdown in the sunset. Had any boy ever such a father as this? With my mother’s face gazing blankly from the upstairs bedroom window I stood by the front gate watching the fathers and husbands of ordinary households turn their cars in their driveways and step out, clunking the door, shaking out a hall-door key and walking in their every-evening doors with a briefcase or newspaper in hand and a Hello, I’m home on their lips.

  ‘Hello, Nicholas.’

  His hand was on my shoulder even as I turned to see him and we were walking in home, this gaunt striding man in a long, open raincoat and I, his son, suddenly swallowing the inflated lumps of confusion and uncried tears.