The paintings, the paintings.
I couldn’t keep up with him. He was two then three yards ahead of me, plashing down the puddled boreen like a wild animal, his arms flying out now and his elbows pumping furiously. We were still a hundred yards away when he started shouting. It was a yell, a long panting running roar that went ahead of us down the empty road in the rain, a crying out against fear and doubt and God Himself as we rounded the last part of the bend, past the ruined cottage and up to the edge of the haybarn itself. My father stopped as if struck. He froze there in the rain, tall and white, staring at the six cattle that had broken out of the field, that had rucked the hay, pulled and nosed at the plastic coverings on the paintings until at last in brute chance they had sunk hoofs through the stack of them, ruining beyond recovery all but the two pictures I had carried in the drawstring bag.
My father stopped when he saw them. He stood there until I caught up and was alongside him, stood there without moving even as I herded the cattle off back up through the gap in the wire they had come down. He stood in the rain in the same spot, like a man waiting to be struck down. When he wasn’t he crossed in under the shelter of the haybarn. He was sitting down on the hay, holding the broken pieces of the holed pictures when I returned. My tears were streaming into the rain.
‘Sit down, Nicholas,’ he said, so softly that the words were almost lost under the hammering on the roof. ‘Sit down,’ he said. There was a pause; it was less a pause than a great hole in the belly of our life. It bled everywhere into the wordless falling of the rain. Then my father muttered under his breath. ‘It’s a test,’ he said, ‘it’s a test.’ And then, letting go the paintings and lying back into the hay, closing his eyes against the unbelievable and outrageous ways of God in his life, he whispered: ‘Say the Latin, Nicholas, say the Latin.’
The rain fell. I spoke the words I did not think he understood, and let their sounds blow away about the barn, mysterious and secret and somehow soothing, expressing as they did through the quivering of my voice, something of the unknowable puzzle of love. My father closed his eyes, but could not keep back the tears.
10
Margaret Looney knew what love was. She had discovered it by chance on a bright-lit spring day in Killybegs many years earlier. Muiris had been in the town only a week, substituting for the ill Master McGinley. On a sun-lifted Tuesday he came along the harbour and into Doherty’s for a newspaper. Margaret was the girl at the counter holding three apples and falling headlong into his life. They exchanged a few words, nothing more, but in the moment each of them walked away they already carried with them like a spore the beginnings of their life together. Each time Margaret saw him after that her heart filled like a pool. She imagined when she closed her eyes that her insides were overflowing with happiness and that it wasn’t possible to feel still more. When she did, when he took her arm a week later and walked her past the harbour where the high hulls of blue and red boats spilled the heady perfume of fish into the air, she thought she would simply burst. She was a Donegal girl, he was a schoolteacher and poet, he was from an island. He told her the lines of poems as they walked by the sea’s side. For a low-sized man he moved with an unusual sense of purpose and a kind of feckless gallantry that made him seem to her lovesick eyes a part of poetry itself. She loved him more each day, she told the mirror in her bedroom, coming in late and sitting in starlight to stare in amazement at what was happening to her life. The sea stirred outside the window, the curtain blew in like a bridal veil. Margaret hugged her arms about herself in the half-darkness and went into dreamy sleeps in which Muiris appeared and disappeared like moonlight under cloud. In the mornings when she opened her eyes her heart was in her mouth. Her fingers trembled doing up the buttons of her dress. God, what was she going to do?
The very ordinariness of a simple day was beyond her. She touched her fingers against her arm imagining for a moment they were his. O God. Sitting inside the upstairs window of the seaward house where she had grown up she picked up a pen to try and say something to him. All his words, his sayings were so interesting and colourful and wonderful, and she was so plain, so ordinary to herself. What could she say to a man like him? She drew circles and spirals on the corners of the page. The wind gusted and she held down the paper as if about to compose. What was it she wanted to say? Suddenly the wind dropped and in a moment that she would remember with a giggle and blush for the rest of her days, she wrote Muiris Gore the only love-letter of her life:
Dear Muiris dear, dear, dear,
Take me away with you.
Your love,
Margaret
Taking a basket that lay by the kitchen table she swept out of the house and down the morning town, wearing the deep flush of her feeling and the smiles that kept breaking around her lips. The sea of that spring day was to stay with her always, its constant sighing day and night like a passionate accompaniment, and even the thick scents of the gleaming and flapping fish basins, the silver life of the ocean caught, exposed, and thrown out on the briney pier, was to inform the memory of courtship. Love was to change everything. It moved through the town where she had grown up and made it seem remarkable, charged with life. She left the note in an envelope at the house where he was staying and hurried home to await his call.
He arrived an hour after the afternoon school bell. Muiris held her hand and walked her past the schooners and trawlers in the Donegal harbour as if their sides of rusting and creaking iron were the red and black timbers of Venetian gondolas bobbing in the sunset.
Margaret Looney knew what love was. Right away she knew her heart was balanced like a wafer on her tongue. And when she kissed the schoolteacher by the back wall of O’Donnell’s in the drizzling rain, she knew he had all but taken her life. At the end of that evening when he asked her to marry him, she knew there was no other possible answer but yes, and when, three weeks later, he began to talk excitedly about teaching on an island she heard the words with a mixture of familiarity and bemusement, as if they were being read to her like the back chapters of the story of her own life.
When they sailed for the island to take up his job, Margaret had not yet set foot there, had never seen its million stones, nor felt press down on top of her head the absolute grey hush of its wet winter stillness. It was the quiet not the storms that was frightening, the sense that the island had slipped its moorings and was slowly adrift on a tide of forgetfulness. At that time Muiris hadn’t started drinking yet, or at least not in the way he did later, after Isabel and Sean were born and he woke one morning to realise that poetry was behind him. In the book of her marriage Margaret would have many pages of remembering, there would be the before and after, the Donegal and then the island days. She would remember and wonder, think how at first her husband had dreamed into the Atlantic island air a kind of Greek life of art and culture, had founded a writing group in the school, brought out on gusting wintry Thursday evenings almost the entire walking population of the island, sitting with their pens in hand over free copybooks, waiting to compose while the gales unroofed their houses. When, two years later, the first slim paperback of their work was published in Galway, there was nothing included by Muiris Gore but a short foreword in Irish which seemed to the few reviewers who read or understood it an outright vitriolic against the mainland government and its meagre support of the islanders. When Margaret read it, sitting up in bed under a thick layering of quilts and blankets, it was more than that, for in its anger she read the story of her life, and wondered how the loving and courtship of the Donegal town had transformed into the chapters of this. Now, she knew, they would never be leaving, that the island was to stay their home and that to her husband, in his disappointment over the swift and terrible death of the poetry inside him, its very bleakness was apt, the rock in the sea part paradise and part jail.
It was then, lying there in the bed beside her sleeping husband, that Margaret Looney realised there was to be an emptying as much as a filling of her heart with love, and that
as much as her heart had expanded and grown in the first girlish weeks of love in Donegal, filling her until bursting, now, in the years left, there was to be the slow drop by drop bleeding back of it all. It would all have to be given back, and day after day as the hardship of their life dulled into routine – window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness – Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.
11
When Isabel returned home on the Easter ferry her father brought her from the pier to the house on his arm, squeezing her hand in relief that she had returned safely and that his grim unease and foreboding of months earlier had proved to be nothing. His lunchtime whiskeys were holding at bay the world, and he brought his daughter up across the sunken stones of the path as if she were the trophy of some fabulous victory. But when the front door opened and Margaret Gore saw Isabel, she knew at once what had happened. With a flick of her hand she swept away the tears that shot into her eyes and hurried across the kitchen to wrap the girl in her arms.
That evening, every man, woman and child on the island gathered in the small stone church that sat in off the sea under the shadow of a grey hill. It was Holy Week, and under the glowering of clouds and the coming and going rain the church hummed with prayer. Isabel sat with Sean beside her mother and father. She said the prayers and stared at the stations, but she thought only of Peader and the warm rushing feeling that rose from her toes when she remembered his touch. If she stared at the candles too long they danced and made her sick. Suddenly she felt hot and unwell. The pews were too packed, the heat had been turned up too high. The air was pale and grey with prayers and the smells of people’s bodies. Swiftly the colour drained out of Isabel’s face and she felt herself toppling forward. She sat up out of the prayers and caught her mother’s quick and concerned glance, a moment in which there pierced Isabel’s soul like an arrow the sudden insight that already Margaret knew. The daughter flushed, and then in a slow fading way fell forward until her mother caught the shoulder of her coat and saved her.
Through Easter Sunday and Monday, Isabel stayed in bed. Sean sat in at the edge of her bed and dozed in his chair next to her. Her father came and went, enquiring how she was feeling. Was it something that was going around in Galway? Margaret Gore didn’t ask. She boiled soup and made stews, and then, daring the secret language of her own love, fed her daughter every kind of fish. For four days Isabel couldn’t get out of the bed. Fear was like a palm pressed on the clammy slab of her forehead holding her down. She imagined she was pregnant, that there was a certain look or expression to her face that mothers could read in their daughter’s features. She turned over and pressed her face into the pillow. Then, the faith and fever of love boiling up in her again, she saw Peader’s face and remade her future until it all came out right: how she would leave the convent and get married, how the child would be a girl and grow up a dancer in the house over the shop in Galway. All this at last she told to Sean. She told him in breathless whispers in the bedroom when the rain was beating outside and her mother was flying fish. She told him so urgently and passionately that the very whitewashed walls of the little room shimmered and her heart seemed laid out quivering with life on the blankets of the bed. Whenever she stopped telling she wanted to start again. She couldn’t keep herself from going back into it, retracing time and again in the exact same way as did her mother in the kitchen the steps along the way, the day by day mystery of how she had fallen in love.
Sean sat and listened, and when Isabel took his hand and squeezed it he squeezed back. When she lay back on the pillows in the dark wave of her hair, sighing and sleeping, tossing and turning in memories and dreams, he sat in his chair by the window on the sea and sometimes, without a sound, wept for the loss of his sister.
On the Tuesday ferry a letter came from the convent. When it arrived Margaret Gore realised she had been expecting it and took it from the kitchen door into the privacy of the damp bathroom while her husband was still asleep. Her hands shook while she read it: Isabel’s concentration poor, very weak results in the mock examinations, the visits on weekends by her cousin, the certainty that she would not get to university with such results in the June exams.
She folded the letter carefully back into the envelope. It was the proof where none was needed that her own intuition had been right, that it was love after all. Margaret stood there. Out the open window seagulls arced and screamed in the grey view of stone and sea. One of them flew past, carrying in its beak some rubbish from the back door of a neighbouring house. With her eyes on the window, the sea air and the harsh sounds of the seabirds filling the room with her Donegal memories, Isabel’s mother tore the letter slowly in two, then in four and in eight, posting the fragments out into the wind so that truth might perish and love survive.
Margaret Gore said nothing to her daughter nor her husband, and Isabel returned to the convent after the Easter holidays on the smooth sea of relief. She was not pregnant. Her mother embraced her with tears at the doorway, Sean stayed in his bed and took her goodbye kiss with a shiver and pleading eyes, and the Master marched her down to the ferry once more. He thought she had been ill and was now better, perhaps it was nerves before the big exams. At the pier he pressed the white stubble of his cheek hard against her and said, with the fierce gleaming of his islander’s pride, that the next time they’d see her she’d be bound for the university.
He waved from the pier as Isabel sailed back into the port of love once more. When she got off in Galway, Peader was waiting for her. He took her bag and swung open the car door. The engine was running and as Isabel sat into the passenger seat the smells of old tweed and greyhounds struck her memory like a blow, overcoming in a single instant her anxiety and fear. She was back. Nothing had changed. Her heart still sprung into her mouth when she saw him and she had to raise a hand to her lips to hold in the smile. Peader swung down into the seat next to her, clanking the gears, smiling too, neither he nor Isabel yet able even to ask how the other had been, nor offer the slightest compliment or joke so beside themselves were they with what they thought was the charge of their attraction.
But something had changed. If Margaret Gore had spoken to her daughter she could have told her. In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.
The moment Isabel saw Peader she felt nothing had changed. She wanted to touch him to be sure, but folded her hands in the lap of her green dress and threw back her hair, smiling out the side window of the car and breathing softly the strange breath of this love into which she had so deeply fallen.
Peader took her past the convent and out of the city. He pulled the car sharply over on a side road and switched off the engine. He could bear it no longer. For ten days he had turned on the spit of desire, hot, sleepless, taunted with the taste of her kisses and the memory of her skin. If before he had longed only to be near her, to be walking by her side down those long silent desolate roads of the western rain, now the feeling had changed to something more urgent and demanding. For the ten days of Easter he had blundered about the shop and the city, humping great rolls of cloth around, banging into things, thumping up the stairs as his mother entered the shop, suffocating in the smell of her powders and creams and opening the rooftop windows on the streaming rain. He ate nothing and drank everything. There hadn’t been a night that he had not returned from walking the hounds to sit up to the counter of the pub and begin the downing of the black pints of forgetfulness and peace. Not that he could sleep. His skin was still alive with her. He couldn
’t escape the memory of feelings, which already he was discovering were stronger than feelings themselves. For the ten days of Easter Peader’s life had been a hell called Isabel. Now, pulling over the car at a place where the great rocks that lay strewn around the grass made Isabel think of the broken pieces of ancient hearts, he turned to the girl who had taken his life and, with one hand tangling around the back of her hair, drew her to him with the force of anger.
His love was rougher this time. This time there was more need than tenderness, and when Isabel was sitting later in her room in the convent she felt as if she had crossed another threshold, broken into a new place of danger and excitement from which she would not find it easy to leave. When the lights went out she lay in bed under the starless sky, she closed her eyes and felt the first bruises of his mouth coming on her breasts.
12
It was to be a hot summer. In June Isabel sat her exams, walking out of the examination hall as if it were the shell of a life she had already discarded. How could they matter now, all those questions and answers? She was in love. She walked boldly on Peader’s arm, drove away into the summer evenings in the small red car, maddening the nuns into silent furies of spite and anger as they watched the last schooldays run by and felt their power fading. Still, they had warned her. She was told she would not be allowed to finish sitting the exams if she didn’t stay in her seat writing until the bell. But she couldn’t, she told Sister Magdalen, standing before her in the front hall and letting the sweet breath of a new perfume blow in on the draught from the hall door. It was so beautiful outside, wasn’t it, Sister? Didn’t God want us all to be outside in the glory of His creation? The nun turned on her heel at the girl’s insolence. At the top of the stairs there was a rushing clatter and whispering as listening girls vanished to their rooms. Sister Magdalen would have liked to strike her, but paced down the shining corridor with the blows all unstruck and the rage boiling. She marched out of Isabel’s sight through the heavy door that led to the chapel, there to kneel and pray, offering it up and finding relief at last in the serene faith that He Himself would take care to punish this girl over whom they had now so completely lost control.
Four Letters of Love Page 12