Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams

  That day. The day on the road to Oughterard. Was that the moment I knew?

  The truth is I don’t know. I don’t know what you feel. I feel I can hardly breathe. Have I written that already? I don’t even know what I am to say; I love you. I have fallen in love with you. I cannot wait not knowing if and when I will see you. Will you write to me, please?

  Please?

  Nicholas

  4

  Even as the words were printing themselves for ever across the yellowed pages of her mind, Margaret Gore fed the letter into the fire. She scolded herself silently for the tears that kept coming in her eyes and chewed on her lower lip until it was raw as meat. It was the innocence and purity of the passion that had struck her like a spear and even when she got up and heated the iron and thumped the Master’s shirts it was still hanging at an alarming angle out of her chest. Nicholas had not returned, and she knew without enquiring that he was off alone, brooding among the rocks and sighing away the time until the return post tomorrow. Now it was not enough to simply ask Muiris to send him away. The passion was already too far gone; he would simply go to Galway, wait for her, and then; Peader was a violent man, it didn’t bear thinking of and as Margaret pressed the iron on the buttons she knew now that they must keep him there until the love had subsided or been broken.

  This was not the way the world should be. This was not the world she had begun with, not the one she had carried in her basket going past the fishing boats in Donegal on the first days after meeting the poet Muiris Gore. This was not the place of happiness hereafter; and even as she knew the grief she was causing in burning the letter, Margaret imagined she knew more intimately the grief she was saving. And this was the world she had found out she lived in; the world served better by the burning of the love than the living of it. She knew this was true and yet still the spear swung madly out of her and all day and afternoon she was on the point of wild and hysterical weeping. When Muiris came home from the school she stood in the kitchen, frozen, and waiting to see if he noticed anything unusual about her. When he said nothing, she pointed at the line of empty bottles near the sink.

  ‘What are these?’ she asked him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘They’re bottles.’

  ‘And where do they go? Where do we put them? We put them outside in the bag, we don’t put them here by the sink, do we? But why am I always the one to be carrying out your bottles that you leave here by the sink expecting God only knows why that I’ve nothing better to do but to come along after you and carry out to the bin that’s only ten feet away and still too far for you to bother. Answer me that. Why?’

  It was a question too difficult for the Master and he looked away out the window at nothing.

  ‘Maybe you could take your shirts into the room yourself,’ said Margaret and walked past him out of the kitchen, the spear in her chest smashing against the doorjamb as she passed and Muiris’s face lost in the hopelessness of understanding her and the half-dozen shirts with their wrinkles pressed into them and arms ironed across the chest as if shielding outrageous blows.

  That evening when Nicholas returned for his supper they could each feel the melancholy of the sea seeping off him. His hair was matted and his shoulders huddled with a heavy dampness. The stillness within which he had spent the day was as obvious as the weather and as he sat at the table even the moment of a hand reaching for the salt seemed an intrusion on his gloom. His mood was like a thick cloak of rain and from the paleness of his face Margaret could tell at once that illness was imminent. Since the night before he seemed to have lost some of his hair. His forehead gleamed under the bulb, he was whiter than paper and while Margaret was turned away from him cleaning the knife after the butter she realised he had sent all his colour to Isabel. She could hardly look at him and was glad when he got up from the table, thanked her for the food and said he needed to lie down.

  Sean and Muiris disappeared to the pub, but not before the Master had made a grand opera of washing the dishes and drying them too, of folding the dishcloth and wiping the table and demonstrating for Sean the importance of sweeping out under the table and not only around it. He finished and parked the brush and looked around the kitchen, but not at Margaret sitting in the chair with her magazine by the range. He left the cleaned room as his token of love and took his jacket with a flourish, as if something had been proven.

  Margaret looked up only when he had gone out. She saw the sparkle in the room around her and sighed loudly, knowing that another battle was over. She moved herself in the chair but got no relief from the spear in her chest, and then went and opened the door to hear and interpret the noises from Nicholas’s room. He was collapsed on the bed was her first conclusion. He was lying in that terrible silence of memories, hearing only the constant inner voices repeating over and over the scraps he could remember of what Isabel had said. He was listening to his memory talking, and trying to use the exact inflection of her voice. He was lying in the stale air of the room and trying to breathe through nostrils of recollection the scent of roses that came out of her hair. He was lying there with his mouth open and his lips touching each other and then opening on the air, trying with hopeless and bitter desperation to find that taste of her his lips could not remember. He stroked his chest with his hand and felt the heat of himself, trying to make the finger of his hand her hand, trying to be her there with him. In the silence at the other end of the house Margaret knew what was happening, knew that he was searching in the room for the tenth time for the scent of her, that he was lying down on the floor and pressing his face against the mat where he imagined her stepping out of bed morning after morning, that he was looking out her window and lying on her bed and smelling the tight mothballed air of her wardrobe for traces of her, not yet knowing that the effort of bringing Isabel to his mind, that the urgency of his dreaming, was making him ill.

  There was a knock at the door. A snake of fear leapt up Margaret Gore’s throat and it was a moment before she could swallow it again and go out into the hallway. She opened the door on the night and felt the sudden damp florescent of autumn brush past her. Father Noel allowed it to pass and then asked her if he could come in. Margaret closed the door behind him with dread; she felt she was shutting herself in with Judgement and the sin of destroying the love letter made her face burn scarlet all down the left side. When the priest had sat down in the kitchen Margaret angled herself so that he spoke only to her right profile.

  He had come, said Father Noel, to see how they were managing.

  ‘Grand, Father,’ said Margaret, hoping that the lie did not burn out of her other cheek.

  ‘And the visitor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he staying on?’

  ‘For the time being, Father.’

  ‘I see,’ said the priest, seeing nothing and detecting less. Certainly not the sudden murmuring that had begun in the far bedroom that Margaret heard and knew at once as her daughter’s name, sounding over and over into the feather pillow.

  ‘He’s happy so?’

  ‘He is, Father.’

  ‘We never spoke rightly about that . . .’

  ‘You’ll have a glass . . .’

  ‘What? No, no, I won’t thanks, Margaret.’

  She was standing behind her profile, leaning one hand to the back of the chair and wondering if she was going to start coughing to smother the calling and groans from the bedroom. The kitchen door was open a crack.

  ‘I thought maybe . . .’

  ‘. . . It’s best to forget about it, Father?’

  ‘Exactly. I mean as long as we both . . .’ He lost his words even as he approached the very thing he had come to say. ‘He’s not making any claims, and it’s not like he’s going to be going around laying hands and em . . . Well . . .’ He let a pause finish for him and looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘No,’ he said with some finality and tapped his finge
rs twice on the table. He stood up at a moment when it seemed to Margaret the calling of Isabel had grown to its loudest.

  ‘How is . . . how are the newlyweds getting on?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Margaret, exploding in a series of sharp staccato coughs as she ushered the priest to the front door. Only when he was outside under the windy stars did she finish, ‘Fine, Father. Thank you.’

  ‘Right so,’ he said, and stepped off into the blind darkness.

  For hours that evening Nicholas filled the house with the restlessness of his lovelorn spirit. He paced, turned about, lay on the bed and stood absolutely still, hoping in some way to relieve the pressure on his heart. For minutes at a time he succeeded in chiding himself out of the rapture, touching briefly on the reality that he had only seen the girl for five days, that she was married, that nothing could come of it; he sucked on the air of this easier pain and then fell back into the longing, memories, and acute desire that were the familiars of his condition. By twelve o’clock Margaret could still hear him moving about, and as she went past his room to lie sleepless on her bed she thought for one rash moment that she glimpsed through the crack of his door white birds flying about in the feathery air.

  5

  The following morning Nicholas was sick. He did not come in for breakfast and the Master went to his room to see what was wrong with him. While he went Margaret spooned two boiled eggs from the pan onto Sean’s plate and held her breath to see if Muiris would find out the truth.

  ‘He’s staying in bed,’ he said, when he came back. ‘Must have caught a bit of a cold yesterday out about the island.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said his wife, relieved.

  ‘Stomach must be at him. He turned over and let out a groan when I mentioned an egg.’

  It was a tell-tale sign and Margaret was surprised and even a little disappointed the Master did not know it. While she drank her own tea and looked across at him she wondered at how far he had fallen from knowing the nature of love and recognising the fluttering heartbeats that could be heard now in all corners of the house. Was he deaf as well as blind to it? Could he not smell the perfume of his daughter, the sweet air of bruised roses that had drifted through every room during the night brought there by the intensity of the lover’s dreaming? How could he not know? She sipped at her tea and watched him more carefully than she had in weeks. But nothing, no sign of his having the faintest idea of the calamity that was happening not twenty feet away. This piece of wood I’m married to, she thought, this hopeless man in a bottle. Her son, she imagined, as nearer to it. Sean must know, he must have seen it happening in Galway. He would be Isabel’s accomplice, she reasoned, and handed him another two slices of toast.

  Nicholas did not get up that day. Nor the next. He waited on the post and told Margaret he was expecting a letter. Would the postman know to bring it to him here? Perhaps there was a letter waiting down at the post office? Had anything come today?

  It had not, and Margaret watched the news register in tiny lines around his eyes as Nicholas fell back on the bed and waited once more. His illness worsened. Doctor Doherty, a new doctor for the island arrived by boat on the Tuesday and included Nicholas on his rounds.

  ‘It’s a fever,’ he told Margaret outside the room.

  ‘It’s lovesickness,’ she said, amazed at another man not noticing the heavy suffocating fumes of roses in the room, the scent of which thickened when the window was open.

  ‘His hair is falling out,’ Margaret said to confirm her statement. The doctor looked at her and let his baldness reply. ‘I’ll be back next Tuesday,’ he said, ‘unless it worsens.’

  And it did. Three days later Nicholas was still in bed. No letter had come and he had fallen through the floor of longing into the place where love seemed impossible and the image of the beloved more real than the physical world. She was there with him. He alone saw her, and in his fevered and delirious imagining she lay beside him and he tasted and touched her, swept himself about her and clung there against her whenever no one was in the room. He fell in and out of this reverie, its happiest and most willing victim, whispering to Isabel to come back even as Margaret carried his untouched soup bowl back out to the kitchen.

  After five days, in a moment of clarity, when the wind blew in a great gulping breaths from the east and showered the island with the germs of a dry cough that had overtaken most of Galway, Nicholas wrote Isabel a second letter. He was not well enough to take it to the post office himself and so instead trusted it to Sean.

  But Sean, in the week since returning from the mainland had grown lazy in the use of his legs and was happy when his mother offered to make the journey to the post office for him. He gave her the letter, and that evening when she had ushered the father and son out the door to Coman’s, Margaret sat in the kitchen by the opened door of the range to see how the love was progressing.

  6

  Dear Isabel,

  No letter has come from you. I cannot wait any longer and must write again tonight. It’s a kind of madness, I know, this continual haunting in my blood. It runs along my arteries, I feel it in every part of me, a longing to be in touch with you, to be writing down words that you will read. Even when I stop my hand briefly on the page it is to feel your breath paused there above the paper, resting with me there. There. In the place where for an instant there is a shared peace. I think your mother imagines I am losing my mind. I notice the way she looks at me, as if expecting at any moment I am going to stand on the table and start screaming. She is still thinking of Sean, I think, and what happened, and looking for proof or something hidden that might reveal another truth.

  Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. To love you. It is hardly even what I think of as loving. I have to see you. I feel a compulsion like fire inside my skin. Do you understand? Do you know what this is like? Even as I write I hear voices telling: she has forgotten you already. Already you are nothing but a fleck of dust blown into her past. You were that day on the road to Oughterard, but now, nothing, you’ve vanished.

  I don’t believe it. This is no such thing as chance. Everything fits somewhere. It has to. If you knew the story of my father; if you knew you’d know everything has a reason. There was a reason why. There had to be, and a reason why you came that day in the car on the road to Oughterard. You drove like a snake down the middle of the road, thirty miles before you told us you couldn’t really drive. And then letting Sean try and looking back at me, and smiling.

  I am going mad. I am. I am still there. I am still in the stopped car on the side of that road, and Sean has gone out across the boggy fields and you are laughing and then you are kissing me. And your kiss is like this sweet fire. Like this unreachable sweet, sweet ache deep inside me. How trite and stupid it all sounds. God, I cannot write it. I cannot even get near it. O Isabel. Isabel, is a bel. Please. I want. I want . . .

  Please please please write to me write to me please

  N.

  7

  The letter was fed to the fire and Nicholas’s illness raged on. He was lost in the abyss between worlds and could neither go about in this one nor fully return to the one he had left behind. He waited in a burning agony for the letter that would not come. He supposed a dozen excuses every hour as to why it did not and lay in the bed and tossed the covers through the afternoon torturing himself with the sweet thorns of memories. His mind was vivid with Isabels and when he was alone in the room he could all but summon any number of them into the room; here was Isabel with her fabulous hair falling to one side as she bent to kiss him; here was Isabel telling him he was different from anyone she had ever met; here she was holding his hand up and kissing his fingers and laughing at the disbelief marching across his face; here was the woman holding his head to her breasts in the guest house room on the night before they returned to the island, her hand moving on his hair and when he lifted his face pressing her finger to his lips not to speak when she told him she did not deserve real love. All these moments floated through
Nicholas’s mind sweeter than fantasies; but they were shipwrecked now amidst the sickening seas of rejection. She had not written and now his stomach churned and his face blanched. He tried hard to swallow the grey lumps of hopelessness but vomited every meal. His trips through the house to the bathroom began to punctuate every day; the degree of each day’s passion measured by the time between eating and expulsion. If the vision of the girl was strong enough he could hold the food for two hours; but if the voices of reason, the words of sense, were ringing in his ears telling him no love could be so, that the woman didn’t care for him and that, besides, nothing could come of it, then the meal lasted barely five minutes. With each bout of vomiting came a strange aftercalm and Nicholas would return to his bed with a beatific smile, as if the rioting of his innards were a valid testament, a bouquet he offered into the silence.

  Although the entire village on the island had begun to suspect something awry and the unmistakable scent of broken rose stems was easily detected in the vomit, Margaret Gore tried desperately to disguise it and burned holy candles made of beeswax in the bathroom all day. She told her husband it was the mind of fever she had seen once before, and that it would surely clear up in another week. When Muiris suggested maybe Nicholas should be moved to the regional hospital in Galway, she looked at him as if he had seven eyes and she could not figure out on which to focus. No, no, not at all. He would be fine, she told him and opened her mouth wide in the hope of freeing the balloon of guilt caught in her midriff.