Four Letters of Love Read online

  FOR MY MOTHER

  hidden among the stars

  Contents

  Introduction

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  FIVE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  SIX

  1

  SEVEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Afterword

  A Note on the Author

  Also by Niall Williams

  Introduction

  Four Letters of Love was first published in 1997 when I was living in County Wexford. I know the book was given to me by a clever friend who felt that I would respond to its uniquely Irish cadences. How right they were, whoever they were, for I regret that neither the author nor myself is quite sure how the book found its way to me. If you’re reading now, John or Marianne or Mim or another kind and perceptive person, I hope I thanked you at the time but if I didn’t, I thank you now for your understanding and recognition.

  From the moment I read the first lines, ‘When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn’t say much.’ I was hooked, I was a goner, tumbling headlong into this sweeping, magical tale. This is odd to me – I am by nature, or more possibly upbringing, of a more pragmatic mind. The boldly romantic does not always sit easily. I confess that had I read some of the reviews (which were fulsome in their praise) I might well have thought, ‘Well, I’m sure it’s wonderful but I don’t think it’s quite for me.’ How very sad that would have been.

  I’ve considered this, turned it around, worried at it. Of course, the writing is fabulous, at times sublime but I realize now that what held me and sent me careering on, cock-a-hoop, was something which I believe is at the very heart of good film-making. You cannot be as life is, you can only create a new reality and style equals reality, by which I mean find the style and you find the reality. Williams has created, through language rather than image on screen, a complete world and although it is one which I might find in a lesser writer’s hands hard to take, I trust him and I believe enough in the reality of that world to enter it wholeheartedly.

  In Four Letters of Love ‘the natural and supernatural conspir[e]’ to form a reality in which we see daggers, spears, shards of glass where none exist. We smell eucalyptus, juniper, bruised and crushed roses in places where they shouldn’t be. We meet angels, winged horses, shining fluttering white birds and people who no longer inhabit the everyday world. We witness miracles and, most alarmingly, we come across God, tucked into the very fabric of the narrative.

  Williams himself, revealingly, even refers to this phenomenon within the novel. ‘[Nicholas] said it without exaggeration or comment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and perhaps for this reason it struck Muiris and Margaret as just that.’ I think I’ll give him the last word there.

  The connection between this highly literary novel and film is something that intrigues me. Time shifts and sways. Months and years pass in a twinkle or moments extend seemingly indefinitely. We half enter scenes as our attention is directed towards one particular character or moment and we realize, sometimes with a shock as we are led back into the main action, that the scene has been playing without us.

  I recall a particular example when Sean is telling his father and mother about the momentous visit to Galway to see Isabel when the focus subtly shifts to Margaret as she watches Nicholas and catches ‘the scent of hopeless love’. ‘Every day?’ someone asks, jolting us back into the scene. Every day, what happened every day? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter. We are refocused onto the three men with a new understanding.

  God told Nicholas’ father, William, ‘to be a painter’. This is the third line of the novel. My parents told me to be a painter or rather they suggested that a career as an art teacher might be more stable than that of an actor. My father was a vicar so there is an odd sort of echo there, somewhere. Painting and the love of painting (not to mention its frustrations and agonies) has been a large part of my life and indeed one I return to more and more. To find the joys, the pain, the fury, the hopelessness, all perfectly experienced and described, is thrilling and chastening at the same time. How often have I ‘stared at paintings [I] could not paint.’

  The writer’s prose is often painterly and always masterful whether he is describing William’s canvases – ‘It was a picture of raging colour, a fable of greens and yellows and blues ...’, the weather – ‘the fraying clouds and the water spinning, like so many downstrokes of a sable brush’, or the Irish landscape, and whatever you may have heard about my not being Irish I have certainly felt ‘the freshening wildness of those western places that was not to leave me. . .’.

  Williams’ love and passion for Ireland, for the west, is there on almost every page. It is clear in the characters he creates to people this landscape – Muiris the poet, Margaret the wise woman, the beauteous Isabel, the miraculous Sean, Nicholas, William, the earthbound Peader (’Muiris was appalled by him’) who never stood a chance. How real they are, how recognizably they have grown out of the ‘soft green fields’, ‘the great expansive skies, the little stonewalled fields trapping the runaround summer breeze, the endlessly felt presence of the hushed or crashing sea.’

  The rhythm of the language and the choice of imagery are almost orchestral in their complexity, in their breadth and boldness, from the intimate description of William – ‘the pale green of his naked body . . . might be the colour of the wind’ – to the astonishing, breath-taking description of his death when God arrives ‘in a fiery chariot with trumpeting angels down the streets of Dublin.’

  But don’t let me lead you into thinking that it’s all high romantic lyricism. There’s plenty of room for the everyday, what one might call the mundane – ‘the grey suit’, ‘the briefcase flopping by the telephone table’, ‘the fog of November evenings’, ‘thinly buttered stacks of toast’, ‘the perfect still lifes of cups on saucers, stacked plates, cutlery back in a drawer’. But somehow even the ordinary moments become illuminated as if someone had turned a spotlight on them.

  The lives of the two characters who are the very reason behind the four love letters, Nicholas and Isabel, are mapped separately throughout the book until they finally come together in the single page, single chapter of Part Six (the book is divided into seven parts). We fir
st meet Isabel in Part One – ‘Isabel was born on an island in the west’ and then we know where the story will take us, not how but certainly why. Time collapses, collides, one person’s three years becomes a slightly different three years for someone else, everything is there for a reason (’the last fragment of his painting had some part to play’) resonating not only forward into the narrative but also tingeing the sense of what we have already read. Moments bridge the two stories as they hurtle ever closer to that point where Nicholas writes ‘This is how I came to see Isabel Gore for the first time.’

  ‘The meaning was in the plot ...’ he had realized earlier, ‘the way and whom we met in the course of our simplest doings was so intricately and finely fitted into a grander pattern, that all we had to do was follow the sign.’

  Of course, the novel is essentially about love. It deals with ‘the hopeless inadequacy of the human mind to fathom the miracle of love’,’the unknowable puzzle of love’. Love appears in many forms, between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, sisters and brothers. Love of the land, love of the sea, love of the home, love of God, love of gods. Failed love, dying love, feigning love, changing love, imperceptible love, secret love. All playing out under the immense canopy of a love that was meant to be, a love that not even the courageous Margaret – for who are we to say that she was wrong in trying to protect her daughter from ‘the hopelessness and grief of all romantic love’, ‘hurrying out to try and stop Fate itself – can change. It sweeps us up from the housing estates of Dublin and buffets us ‘through the galaxies of the improbable’ until we land foursquare on that island in the west.

  I could go on, in fact now I’ve started what was a seemingly impossible task, I find myself saying, ‘But what about grief, what about leaving, what about growing up? You haven’t talked about miracles or poets.’ I also haven’t talked about my personal revelation that the writing changes from the first person to the third person when Nicholas arrives on the island because everything up to that point is the final letter to Isabel. You’ll be relieved to discover that I’m not going to. You’re here to read Four Letters of Love, not to listen to me. You have a rare treat in store.

  JOHN HURT

  Lovers pave the way with letters.

  Ovid, The Art of Love

  One

  1

  When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn’t say much. He told my father to be a painter, and left it at that, returning to a seat amongst the angels and watching through the clouds over the grey city to see what would happen next.

  At the time my father was a civil servant. He was a thin man, tall and wiry, with bones poking out into his skin. His hair had turned silver when he was twenty-four and given him a look of age and severity which was later to deepen and increase to such an extent that he could not walk down a street without catching notice. He looked touched by something, an impression furthered by the dazzling blueness of his eyes and the fewness of his words. Although I had no brothers or sisters, from the first twelve years of my life I can remember little of what he ever said to me. The words have vanished and I am left mostly with pictures of my early childhood: my father in a grey suit coming in the front door from the office in the fog of November evenings, the briefcase flopping by the telephone table, the creak in the stairs and across the ceiling above the kitchen as he changes into a cardigan and comes down for his tea. The great shelf of his forehead floating up above the line of a newspaper in response to some question. The New Year’s Day swims in the frozen sea at Greystones. I hold his towel and he walks his high frailty into the water, his ribcage and shoulders like a twisted jumble of coat hangers in an empty suit bag. His toes curve up off the stones, off the ends of his arms he seems to carry invisible bags. Seagulls don’t move from him and the pale gleam of his naked body as he stands before the blue-grey sea might be the colour of the wind. My father is thin as air, when a high wave crashes across his wading thighs it might snap him like a wafer. I think the sea will wash him away, but it never does. He emerges and takes the towel. For a moment he stands without drying. I am hooded and zippered into my coat and feel the wind that is freezing him. Still, he stands and looks out into the grey bay, waiting that moment before dressing himself into the New Year, not yet knowing that God is about to speak.

  He had always painted. On summer evenings after the grass was cut, he might sit at the end of the garden with a sketchpad and pencils, drawing and cleaning lines as the light died and boys kicked a ball down the street. As an eight-year-old boy with freckles and poor eyes, I would look down from my bedroom window before crawling under the blankets, and feel in that still, angular figure at the end of the garden something as pure, peaceful, and good as a night-time prayer. My mother would bring him tea. She admired his talent then, and although none of his pictures ever decorated the walls of our little house, they were frequently gifts to relations and neighbours. I had heard him praised, and noted with a boy’s pride the small WC that was his mark in the corner of the pictures, pushing my train along the carpet, driven with the secret knowledge that there was no one with a dad like mine.

  At twelve, then, the world changed. My father came home in his grey suit one evening, sat to tea and listened to my mother tell how all day she had waited for the man to come to repair the leak in the back kitchen roof, how I’d come home from school with a tear in the knee of my pants, how Mrs Fitzgerald had called to say she couldn’t play bridge this Thursday. He sat in that rumpled, angular quietness of his and listened. Was there a special glimmering of light in his eyes? I have long since told myself I remember there was. It cannot have been as simple and understated as I see it now, my father swallowing a second cup of milky tea, a slice of fruit loaf, and saying, ‘Bette, I’m going to paint.’

  At first, of course, she didn’t understand. She thought he meant that evening and said, ‘Grand, William,’ and that she would tidy up after the tea and let him go along now and get changed.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly, firmly, speaking the way he always spoke, making the words seem larger, fuller than himself, as if the amplitude of their meaning was directly related to the thinness of himself, as if he were all mind. ‘I’m finished working in the office,’ he said.

  My mother had stood up and was already putting on her apron for the dishes. She was a petite woman with quick brown eyes. She stopped and looked at him and felt it register, and with electric speed then crossed the kitchen, squeezed my upper arm unintentionally hard and led me from the table to go upstairs and do my lessons. I carried the unexploded fury of her response from the kitchen into the cool darkness of the hall and felt that gathering of blood and pain that was the bruise of God coming. I climbed six steps and sat down. I fingered the tear in the knee of my trousers, pushed the two sides of frayed corduroy back together as if they could mend. Then, my head resting on fists, I sat and listened to the end of my childhood.

  2

  ‘I’m going to paint full-time,’ I heard my father say.

  There was a stunned pause, a silence after a blow. From beyond the door on my perch on the stairs I could see my mother’s face, the flickering speed of her eyes in panic, the tight bustle of her energy suddenly arrested, stunned, until: ‘You’re not serious. William, you’re not serious, say you’re not . . .’

  ‘I’ll sell pictures. I’ve sold the car,’ he said.

  Another pause, the silence loading like a gun.

  ‘When? Why—? How can you just—? You’re not serious.’

  ‘I am, Bette.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. How . . . ?’

  She paused. Perhaps she sat down. When she spoke again her voice was edged, swallowing the broken glass of tears. ‘Jesus, William. People don’t just come home one evening and say they’re not going back to work. You can’t, you can’t say that and mean it.’

  My father said nothing. He was holding hi
s words in that narrow, thin chest of his while lowering the great dome of his head into the palm of one hand. My mother’s voice rose.

  ‘Well, don’t you think I should have some say in it? What about Nicholas? You just can’t. . .’

  ‘I have to.’ His head had come up. The phrase thumped out on our life like a dead child and a sick silence swam around it. Then, in a voice I hardly heard, and told myself later I hadn’t, had imagined it in the half dark of my bedtime when my prayers were said and the streetlamps edged the curtains with golden light: ‘I have to do it. It’s what God wants me to do.’

  3

  The following days I came home from school to find the house in a state of transition. God had moved in overnight. The garage was full of the living-room furniture, the venetian blinds had been taken down to let in more light, carpets were taken up, and a great board table was set up on concrete blocks in the corner where the television had been. Our telephone was disconnected and sat forlornly on the floor for a month inside the front hallway. My mother had taken to bed. I was given no explanation for this by my father and took the burned rashers and fried egg he cooked for my mother up the stairs to the bedside like some coded message crossing the drawbridge into the place of siege. A furniture lorry came and emptied the garage. Neighbours’ children stood around the gateway and watched the old life of the house being taken away. ‘You’ve no telly,’ a boy jeered at me. ‘Coughlans have no telly!’ ‘We don’t want one,’ I shouted back, and went to stand between the makeshift goalposts of two jumpers thrown on the grass, holding up my hands and squinting at goals that went flashing past.

  Then it was early summer. My mother got out of bed, my father went away on the first of all those trips in springtime and summer, disappearing into the yet blank canvas of the season, and leaving my mother and me in the colourful but faintly rotting mess that was our house four weeks after God arrived.

  ‘Your father, the painter, has left us,’ my mother would say to me, and then, with heavy irony, ‘Only God knows when he’ll be back.’ Or, ‘Your father, the painter, doesn’t believe in bills,’ when I came from the dentist’s mumbling and holding out a small brown envelope.