Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  Galway boiled pink in the sun. The June mornings rose dazzling and blue over the stone city, and down by the seafront boats sailed on the rippleless mirror of the stilled Atlantic. It was a time to be in love. The summer air itself seemed to conspire in it, and once the examinations had finished Isabel wrote to her parents telling them she had taken a job in the city in one of the best wool and tweed shops, a place called O’Luing’s.

  (When the letter arrived on the island, it was again Margaret who opened and read it. Her husband had gone out with fishermen on an early boat and she sat alone inside the open door of the kitchen holding the single page in her hand long after she had finished reading it. Now she knew who the boy was. She had simply to go shopping on the mainland to see him for herself. But what would she tell Muiris, she wondered. She folded the letter into the pocket of her apron and stood out in the doorway of the cottage, looking across the shoulder-high wall of stones to another door where Maire Conaire, whose daughter had just come home from the convent, was looking directly across at her.)

  It had been Isabel’s idea more than Peader’s. With each day’s examinations she had felt the sense of an ending. A part of her life had finished and for the first time she did not want to return to the island, to see the summer students arrive in their ferryloads and hear the flat and broken accents of their childish Irish floating across the strand. She wanted a new life to begin, and clung suddenly to the unlikely saviour of Peader O’Luing. (Love, her mother might have told her, was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark, lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together. It would not have weakened love if Isabel had come home, but perhaps the opposite. But Margaret did not write this to her daughter. She sat with pen poised over paper for two hours, thought a dozen different letters, and then wrote only that they would miss her and that she hoped Isabel would continue to write often.)

  They were parked in the car on the road above Oughterard when she asked him. Peader, she said, I’m not going back for the summer. I want to stay in Galway. He knew of course what was coming, and found himself for the first time feeling truly superior to her. She was only just beyond a schoolgirl after all. He felt her move close against him in the car and a shiver ran down his neck. A month earlier he had worried about the summer; if the ten days of Easter had been so brutal for him what would the summer hold? But now, with Isabel here beside him, kissing the side of his face and asking for a job in his father’s shop, Peader was suddenly stricken with unease. Even as he listened to her telling him how they might need an extra hand during the busy tourist season, and even as he agreed to give her a job, knowing there would be no need and less than ten tourists stepping shyly into the dim shop to order suits or buy wool, he felt torn between feelings he didn’t understand. Something in him had changed the evening Isabel arrived in the bar. Yes, he still thought her the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, she was a flame inside him and he could not be ten minutes in the car beside her without longing to touch her face. But still, it was as if, he told his greyhounds later, lying beside them on a blanket in their shed and realising with a shock the sickening mystery of his own heart, the moment Isabel had fallen in love with him he had fallen out of love with her.

  13

  Peader O’Luing gave Isabel Gore a job and woke the next morning with the task of telling his mother. Almost at once she hit the roof, or rather the low ceiling above the narrow stairs upon which he told her and where she forgot to duck, yelling Christ! and springing three inches of amazement off the step and into the air, falling upwards to crash her head on the roof before rolling down the entire stairwell and bowling over her son, to arrive in a whimpering tangle on the shop floor. She had broken her leg. She would be unable to work in the shop for eight weeks, the aged and deaf Dr Hegarty told her, roaring in her face.

  So it was that when Isabel arrived in the shop downstairs Maire Mor was bedridden in the fetid atmosphere of the room above, lying on each side half-hours at a time and sucking dates. (Once, when she was a girl, a visiting sailor had let her eat a date from his lips. It was the forbidden fruit, he had told her, pursuing it around her mouth with his tongue and knocking them both to the floor in a fit of squirming and giggles. Dates were the taste of sex for her after that. There was something about them, and yet for all the time she had been married to Peader’s father she had only ever eaten them on a few occasions; they were dates with dates: the times she ate the fruit and their nine-month anniversaries later when each of her children had been born.)

  ‘My son’s in love,’ she hissed to the dead air, sneering at the ridiculous notion, spitting a fragment of the dates at invisible harpies. She could hear them talking downstairs, woke when they laughed, gummed off another corner of the dates when her mind ran lewdly away from her down the stairs and in the door where she imagined she saw them making love on the floor. Maire Mor mashed the dates around in her mouth, swallowing back the sweetness like wine; day by day her leg healing as the secret cancer in her colon grew.

  14

  After the first day Isabel did not again visit Peader’s mother in her room. She tidied and dusted, took a half-warm kiss from Peader as he hurried through the shop, grabbed a bolt of tweed, and disappeared. In the silence and dust of the stilled shop, Isabel waited for the bell above the door to jangle and shook herself into work whenever she found herself staring listlessly at the people passing outside. The light of the fine morning faded and vanished. Peader did not return and Isabel did not know whether to close the shop for lunch or stay and leave it open. She imagined Peader coming back at any moment and ran a cloth up and down the clean counter, trying in vain to rub away the dust of disappointment that had already settled in her heart.

  That first day Peader did not return by six o’clock, and when Isabel left the shop and locked the door behind her, going up the street light with hunger and turning down by the cathedral to the house where she was staying, she was no longer the girl in the yellow dress passing like a perfume with first love. In eight hours in the shop she had sold nothing and spoken to no one. She had hardly seen the man she had stayed in Galway to be near. That evening, while she waited for him to call, she wrote a letter home: she had just finished her first day’s work, it was exciting and exhausting, serving the customers, choosing wool, measuring cloth . . . Her imagination failed her halfway through, and she filled the remainder of the letter with a detailed description of her room. Isabel read the letter back and added a footnoted special hello for Sean, then she slipped it in the envelope which her mother would open two days later, reading the words aloud for her husband and son but seeing in the space between them the shadows of the truth.

  For Isabel it was to be the first summer after childhood, the summer whose long empty blue days passed by the shop window as on a screen, the summer in which she first realised the complex dimensions of her heart. Peader came and went through her days and nights like sudden sun or moonlight. The requiting of love had sent a deep shock through him, stirring sudden moods of restlessness and rage he didn’t understand. When Isabel said she loved him he didn’t want to believe her, when she crossed the room smiling he wanted to escape. And yet still, he loved her. He did, he told his mother, arguing at the doorway into her room before thundering down the stairs in a mute rage, unable to speak, his fingers clenching and freeing as he stood in the middle of the shop floor staring at the girl whose eyes lit for him like no one’s ever had. He looked at Isabel as if she were a mystery, and she crossed the floor to him, smiling, reaching out a hand that made him shiver when it touched. What was it? What had happened? He couldn’t bear her wrapping herself onto him and moved impatiently away, hurrying out of the shop with a sudden goodbye and leaving Isabel lost for hours in the hopeless conundrum of love.

  Day after day Peader O’Luing drove the car out of Galway as if it were a posse and sped into the airy emptiness of northern Connacht to wrestle with the monsters of his feelings. Did he not love her after all? It was too impossi
ble to believe. Upstairs in his mother’s room, he argued like a man who would lose his life if he lost Isabel. And yet, the moment he came down and saw her there in the dull light of the shop, something in the intricate machinery clicked and wheeled inside him and he was repulsed. He didn’t understand yet that it was in fact her loving him he hated, that the moment Isabel gave herself to him she fell from the high place in the stars where Peader had first put her, that somewhere inside him was a mocking voice out of his childhood instilling the unshakeable creed that he was an idiot and useless and that loving him was a useless idiotic thing to do. Peader understood none of that yet. It would be three years and sixty-eight days later before that thought would fully strike him and he would realise on a rush of Power’s whiskey the inescapable misery of the rest of his life. That day he thought it was something else, he didn’t blame his father, but looked at Isabel, his wild island beauty, and saw only a shopgirl: she was plain, she was ordinary, she was a girl like his mother must have been, and immediately, even as Isabel’s face brightened at the vaguely comic air in which he stood there, Peader felt the need to hurry from her, get away, and breathe by himself. He parked the car and idled the day, staring out the opened window at the purple shapes of the mountains while Isabel stood amidst the sunstruck beams of dust, shining the frown of her face into the counter and waiting, waiting for him to come back.

  When he did, driving out of the winding roads of the mountains, he outraced the monsters in himself and roared back into the summer evening city with rekindled dreams of the girl’s beauty. He came from the car then, storming down the streets of Galway with the old rage to be near her, to kiss the lips, to touch the face that he did not notice was already turning pale. He opened the door and the bell jangled. Isabel did not look up. She was too proud and hurt, but her fingers shook as she folded for the fifteenth time the same length of brown tweed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Christ, Isabel, I’m sorry.’

  They stood across the shop floor from each other in the stilled moment that was to become a familiar episode of their relationship, the moment between pain and forgiveness, the ticked seconds of the stopped heart before Isabel surrendered pride and looked across at him.

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ he said, and grinned, holding out his hands on the line that brought Isabel to him, smiling and forgiving in the sudden relief that her heart had not yet been broken. They went out the door and let it lock behind them, their hands clasped and their footsteps skipping quickly along the emptied streets. The sun was still shining over Galway. The air had the lift and spring of the sea. There was fiddle music coming from a stone alley and to its lively reel Isabel and Peader danced a few steps, breaking apart and coming together again, hurrying on past the musician, down the alleyway and further still from the gloom of the day.

  ‘I should have bought flowers.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘I will, then, I’ll get you flowers.’

  ‘And where will you get them now, at this time?’

  ‘Here, sit down, wait here.’

  He was gone ten minutes, no more. Leaving Isabel by the Long Walk, looking out across the stilled waters of the Claddagh where a blue boat lay on the mirror of its own hull and made her imagine a sea so calm she might have walked home across the water, Peader turned back into the city. He needed to do something to win her back, he had thought. It was a feeling in which he was comfortable, the feeling of needing to impress himself back into her heart, and he hurried back through the streets plundering fistfuls of late marigolds, lobelias and petunias from shop windowboxes and the street-end half-barrels of Galway City Council. In ten minutes he was back with a wilting display. He gave it to Isabel and she laughed, smelling the flowers once and then throwing them onto the gold and silver rippling of the water.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  Isabel bit her bottom lip, and then turned her eyes up to where he stood over her. She was the girl from the island again now, the girl who would come and go through Peader’s heart with the flash and brilliance of a knife, the girl who was not in love with him, but with whom he was madly, desperately in love, the girl with the streak of wildness running through her as she answered him: ‘To see if you’d get them if I asked.’

  When Peader dove, minutes later, the golden road of sunlight to the island shattered on the surface of the water. The flowers bobbed on his waves and Isabel stood and clapped and laughed, forgetting for a while, blushing deeply down the length of her neck as one by one she saw gathered in a bouquet the watery blossoms of proof that they were, after all, in love.

  15

  It was August when the letter came. Margaret Gore was watching for it, and took its brown envelope from the pier like a bitter medicine she knew was needed. She did not walk home, but carried the letter unopened around the northern shore, making her way out onto the black crags of rock that jutted into the softest foam of the blue sea. The spray skirted her bare legs where she stood and read that Isabel had failed two subjects in her examinations. She read down through the marks, threw into the tide the nuns’ note of explanation that Isabel had not worked since Christmas, and wondered how to tell her husband.

  It was the bluest day, clear and cloudless. Beyond the curve of white sand the sea was dotted with children swimming, and against the black bottom of an upturned currach, Muiris Gore was watching them. When his wife saw him she still had not decided how to tell him. She came slowly along by the pier and down onto the sand. It spilled inside her shoes and she took them off, walking barefoot across the cool dampness of that shoreline which had become her prison. It was going to be a blow, she thought. He is going to hear me tell him and feel in one instant the final collapse of his last dream, the end of his hope and belief that somehow in Isabel he had managed the thing his life had missed. I’m going to knock the last love out of him, she thought, holding the letter by her side and coming nearer to him, although he still did not see her. His eyes were fixed on the children in the sea. He was wearing the old tweed jacket she had already repaired a dozen times, a coat he preferred over better ones and whose feel and fabric his wife had come to imagine part of himself. As Margaret Gore stepped the last yards through the sand, she felt a sudden wish to cry out, to have him turn in surprise and find her there by his side with no other reason for her coming than to sit down into the brown and whiskeyed smell of the jacket and wait for his arm to come around her. She wished away the letter in the last steps, walked through the simpler world where the children swam forever in summer seas under blue skies and she and Muiris Gore were the parents only of dreams.

  Her husband turned when he stopped hearing her. She was a yard from him, standing motionless on the sand. She could not move. I won’t tell him, she thought, no I won’t tell him.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  Three weeks later, Margaret went to Galway to see for herself the face of the man who had stolen her daughter’s heart and sealed her husband’s soul inside the pale and shallow gold of a bottle. She had received no letter from Isabel since the examinations, no reply to any of three requests for her to come home, and as she stepped off the ferry in the high-buttoned coat that raised her chin like pride, she strode into the bustle and noise of the city intending nothing less than to tell her daughter she had broken her father’s heart.

  She was not used to the excitements of the city. Its constant traffic unsettled her, she felt the cars nudge her side if she walked along the outside of the narrow path and so she kept instead in by the shop windows, hardly allowing herself the luxury of looking at the things of which love had so ruthlessly deprived her and marching on with her head at a side angle searching out above her the name of the O’Luing shop. She was a woman torn in two. Her daughter was in love, and on the memory and understanding of her own Donegal courtship she knew Isabel was aswim perhaps in the most important and passionate moments of her life. These were what mattered, these days of summ
er in Galway when the mother knew her daughter’s heart was thrumming fast and that the grey stone of the island was already sinking like childhood into the far-off parts of her mind, there to wait and shimmer until Isabel was an old woman and her memory longer than her life. The girl was in love, she had thoughts for nothing else, said the mother to herself. And yet.

  Margaret Gore crossed Shop Street. Wasn’t it somewhere down here?

  And yet for three weeks she had daily witnessed the slow and agonising crumble of her husband’s heart. On the day of the results, she had taken a wife’s gamble on the seashore and told Muiris Isabel was in love. If the memories so stirred her, Margaret had imagined that by necessity the same snatched fragments of the sweetness of the past must move and lodge, shift, fly and land too in the great empty spaces of her husband’s soul. Against them, what mattered, she had asked herself, and answered: nothing. What if Isabel was no longer bound for the university, what if she was in love and was going to marry a Galway shopkeeper? If she is happy, Muiris, if she’s happy? The gamble had failed. Margaret had underestimated the weight of hope that for seventeen years on the island her husband had placed on his daughter’s shoulders, doubling that when Sean had his first fit and was thought beyond ever moving out of the house.

  (Muiris did not remember love the way his wife did. Until the moment on the shore he had not surrendered vanity or ambition, had not stopped looking forward across the oncoming waves of his life. But then, out of the memorable brilliance of that blue sky, came the blow. Pieces of him fell off. He had been a complete fool. His wife fingered the mended hem of his jacket, she spoke so softly he thought of the image of her voice as the sound of the sea. It was the sea telling him, and the sea he went to that August evening, already fired with whiskey, stumbling over the rocks to the place Isabel had danced for Sean and the world had first started to go wrong. He had missed the message then, he realised, holding the neck of a bottle flashing with moonlight. He was a vain and bloody fool, and was found there, in the morning, sleeping on the rocks by a child of the Hallorans’. For a week he could not face the islanders. The other island girls at the convent had passed their examinations, three of them looked likely to be accepted at university. But the Master’s girl had failed. He stayed in the house where his wife could see him and feel as much as he the swing and thump of the sledge of life on the falling-down walls of his foolish heart.)