Four Letters of Love Read online

  In a week we tidied the house. There was a small room off the hall that had kept its carpet and chairs, and it was to there my mother would retire in the evenings, sitting alone after I had gone to bed, watching the lights in the neighbours’ houses and wondering what would become of the bills when the furniture money ran out. Across the hall was now my father’s room. I had not, in that first month, stepped inside it. From moments when he opened the door, I had glimpsed rolls of canvas, timber stretchers, a little mountain of half-squeezed tubes of dark oil paint, others curved like dying slugs on the bare floor below the table. Now, as I lay in bed with the summer night never darkening, it was to that room my imagination took me, and in the first two months of my father, the painter’s, absence I could imagine him in there, working away all the time, having never left us for a moment.

  When the summer holidays came my school report signalled the collapse of my education. I had failed everything but English, and in English was told I suffered from too much imagination. ‘An Elephant in Our House’ had been the title of my essay.

  As I was sitting across the kitchen table with my mother one Saturday morning, she told me in an urgent whisper that I was the little man of the house now. I had to work hard in school and get a good job and make money. I was twelve years and seven months old, and watched her pretty round face contort with the huge grief and anxiety God had put there. All her loveliness, the jolly nut-eyed smile and quick laugh that had ringed my childhood were vanished that summer. She was suddenly a tired engine of a woman. Her hands held each other tightly, if one of them got free it flew up to her face, rubbed the side of her cheek, ran down and held at the thin line of her lips. Our neighbours did not call or come in. And for a time our house seemed an island in the street, the place from which William Coughlan had gone off to paint. When I was sent down the road to the shop, always deliberately getting there in those last empty moments before it closed, wheezing bosomy Mrs Heffernan turned and looked at me over her half-moon glasses and added a free bag of jellied sweets to the single tin of beans or soup my mother had asked for. ‘There you are, love,’ she’d say across the swirls of her perfume, ‘eat them all up yourself.’

  Within a month or so, at the turn in the road before the shop I had learned to toss my hair, pull out my shirt tail, rub a little dirt on the side of my neck and around my mouth. This never failed to bring Mrs Heffernan from behind her counter, tut-tutting and breathing loudly, lifting the corner of her apron to her mouth and cleaning me up before giving me a bag of assorted apples and oranges to improve my health.

  That first summer we were not sure if my father would return at all. My mother, of course, told me he would, and how happy we’d all be again, and how he’d be delighted to know I was reading schoolbooks all summer and becoming so clever. The more she told me that the more I read, leaving aside the goalkeeper’s gloves on the dresser beside the window and devouring books in a vain search for any boy who had a painter for a father.

  The days were golden. It was a famous summer in Ireland. Our lawn mower had been sold and a daisied, wildflower meadow sprung up in our front garden. The grass grew three feet tall, and sometimes in the evenings I went out and lay down hidden inside it, feeling the soft waving motion of its sea around me and above me and watching the blue of the sky deepen to let out the stars. I kept my eyes open and thought of my father, out there, painting the hood of night over me.

  4

  By the middle of August we had had two postcards. One from Leenane, County Mayo, one from Glencolumbkille in Donegal. Both of them told us he was doing well, working hard at painting. Both of them said he would be home soon. They were put on the windowsill next to the table in the kitchen, and in the mornings before I went back to school I read and reread them, sitting with a mug of milk-rationed tea and, a little anxiously, fingering the grey patch on the knee of my trousers.

  Then, on the first wet school morning of September, I came downstairs and heard banging and knocking sounds in my father’s room across the hall. He had come back during the night, a thin figure with a hat and a small bag sloping up the path to knock on his own front door. My mother must have thought him a beggar or a thief. She heard him knocking and didn’t move from her bed, half-imagining she dreamt the long-awaited sounds that had woken her sleep. When he let himself in around the back and she heard him move through the kitchen and across the bare floor of the hall, she knew it was him. He left his bag at the bottom of the stairs and came up to the bedroom. He looked in on me, I imagine, imagining too his long-fingered cool hand reaching across the bedroom dark to smooth my hair. Then, backing out, from the dark of the room to the dark of the landing to open the bedroom door. A figure in a drenched raincoat and dripping hat, he stood in the boots that had brought him from the west and looked at my mother. He was expecting insults, curses, any kind of coldness. She propped herself on one elbow to look at him and was a moony whiteness in her nightdress on the sheets. There was a moment she waited to be certain she wasn’t dreaming, then, ‘Thank God,’ she said, and held out her arms to him coming.

  I didn’t know all this yet, of course. That damp morning I heard the noises in his room and thought in a flash of panic we were selling his things. I opened the door to look in and found him banging away, making a large frame with stretchers. He didn’t see or hear me. I opened my mouth to call out his name but found the sound gone. Instead, gaping in the doorway, I watched him, now he seemed to be bent over, lost in the concentration of making, hammering at the wood like some still, frozen figure in a painting, heedless of all the world clamouring past. I stepped away and closed the door. I went into the kitchen and made my breakfast in silence with swirls of terror and joy inside me. When I opened my mouth to eat I felt them rush upwards and gag me, my face bulged. A stream of unvoiced words gushed around. Had he come back, then? Was life to resume order and peace once more, or was he frantically banging the stretchers apart and not together? Was his painting all over? Had God spoken again?

  My eyes read the postcards on the windowsill as they had done for weeks now, and then I felt his hand alight upon my shoulder.

  ‘Dad,’ I said and, turning, felt burst in tears the watery balloon of emotion. Onto the damp turpentine smell of his thin chest I clung and cried, until at last he patted my back and held me out from him. He looked me up and down, and dabbing the tears with the fraying sleeve of my grey jumper, I hoped he could see the summer of study glowing off me. I hoped he could see how I had become the little man of the house, how I had fooled Mrs Heffernan into pounds of fruit and sweets, and how I knew all along that he would come back to us.

  Holding me back from him, he let those blue flecks of his eyes examine me for an age. His hair had grown long and in the morning light seemed white not grey. Even his eyebrows seemed lightened. A pale translucence was in him now, so that the more I looked at him the more he seemed to disappear, to be a quality of light, not a person, to be what I had begun to imagine was something like God.

  ‘No need to go to school this week,’ he said. ‘What do you say? All right?’

  Of course it was all right. It was marvellous. Mother came down from her bed in a green dress I had never seen. She sent me to the shops for potatoes and carrots, and I came back with a turnip too.

  My father had sent his summer’s paintings by train to Dublin, and so later that morning he took me with him to meet them at the station. It is the first real journey into the city that I remember, sitting upstairs on the double-decker bus in the front seat with thin branches of sycamore and chestnut trees brushing against the window, how they loosed their leaves behind us onto the little housed roads along the way. I put my hands on my knees, and forgot about the patch, turning at a glance at the still silent figure of my father. I could not say he looked happy to be back among us. He was a man of such thin bare stillness that his emotions themselves seemed to fall lightly into the day, as soft and soundless as little swirls of unseen leaves spiralling down in the half dark of autumn aft
ernoons. You didn’t see his feelings, but somehow noticed a great littering of them all around you in the after-traces when he was gone. Just so, then, I can say he hated the city. Something in him despised the fact that he had been born there, that there he had gone daily to work in an office and wasted so many days of light.

  From him on that late morning bus journey, I took my own anger at the city. What a leafless, grey fright it was, a huge changing puzzle of concrete muddled with little hurrying lines of people in brown coats and wet faces. I wanted to hold his hand when we stepped from the bus, but didn’t, tucking cold fists deep into the pockets of my duffle coat and trying to match the long, purposeful slap of his strides. He had not shaved in over a week and his face was finely silvered with beard, the wisps of his white hair blew sideways in a little wind to show pink patches of his skull. He wore no hat down the streets and caught the eyes of passersby along the quays, as if the oddity of his looks, long hair nearly to his shoulders and those blue flints of his eyes, were a guarantee of some celebrity. I think he took note of nothing along the way to the station, not the wail of the sticky-mouthed baby in its mother’s arm nor the oily splash that an incoming bus painted across both our trouser legs. He was, I imagined, like me, and my mother back at the house, picturing the pictures. Perhaps he was already there, in the open landscape of browns, greens and purples, standing in the places where day after day he had tried to hold and lay the coloured light on the canvas.

  We entered the great windy arch of the railway station and my heart leapt at the sight of the trains. At a railing before an engine he told me I could stand and look while he went to see about his packages.

  The slow heavy arrival of the trains, uniforms, loud distorted announcements, place names from out there beyond the end of the long platforms.

  ‘Right, then.’

  The back seat and boot of a taxi were already loaded with a series of brown-papered canvases. We crowded into the front seat next to the driver. I sat upon my father’s sharp knees and he leaned forward and rubbed the hoar of our excitement off the windscreen, leaving us a small smudged circular view of the streets as we sped along. I was full of pride then; these paintings we were ferrying home were to be the trophies of the summer’s grief. My mother would look at them and clap and raise her hands to her mouth. The paintings would all be sold in a week, we’d have a carpet in the hall and a red car in the garage. I bubbled with the soapy happiness of it all as the car weaved its way into the quiet serpentine estates of semi-detached houses where all the men had gone to work and all the children were locked in school.

  5

  Ours was not, in the ordinary way of speaking, a religious family. Until I was ten, my father and mother had accompanied me to Mass on Sunday mornings. We sat in the polished cedar pews amongst our neighbours and stood and knelt and sat at all the right places. Sometimes, when the priest’s sermon grew too dull or his invective too hot, my father would practise a kind of loud deep breathing that shut the sounds from his ears, and caused those nearby to think he was sleeping with his eyes open. He was not; he was controlling rage, I heard him tell my mother. Besides, wasn’t breathing, he said, the purest form of prayer?

  ‘God, Nicholas,’ he told me later, ‘does not live in red-brick churches in the suburbs.’ It was a summer’s afternoon. We were out walking, my mother was taking a nap. We took my father’s favourite route, a steep hill towards the countryside. Once we were beyond the estates, the rings and loops and labyrinths of new houses, the air changed. My father straightened and seemed to grow, to expand, a giant of deep feeling moving silently past the tumbling red blooms of wild fuschia and yellow woodbine. The broader skies seemed to suit him, his strides lengthened in the sunlight. He pulled the sticky leaf of a laurel hedge and kept it, rolling it between his fingers like a memory. I knew he was happy then. And when he said the sentence about God and churches, leading me round a corner of sunshine that was slanting over a hedgerow thick with birdsong, I didn’t think twice. I knew he was right.

  We stopped going to Mass sometime after that. And a little afterwards, it seemed to me, God came to live in our house. He was not often spoken of, and was never addressed. And yet we knew He was there. Not exactly holy, not exactly prayerful, but a kind of presence. Like central heating, my mother said. When my father was gone, He stayed.

  In the wrapped canvases in the back of the taxi I knew we carried home the proof of God.

  When we arrived my mother was upstairs, she was in a fluster, and of the two main crisis reactions of her personality, retiring to bed or gearing herself up into a kind of mindless superactive machination of cleaning, sweeping, brushing and dusting, she had chosen the latter. She was cleaning the bedroom window without looking through it, without seeing the parade of brown squares and rectangles making its way from the taxi to the room off the hall. She believed that upon them, those fragile coloured pieces of his art, lay all our family’s future, that behind the brown paper wrapping were the pictures that had tossed and turned the sea of her sleepless mind since the night before. Unseen, they were a kind of torment to her, and yet now, at the moment when she might have run downstairs and opened the door to us, torn off the wrapping and stood back to let peace swim in over her mind, she dared not. She rubbed the window she had already cleaned.

  When the taxi-man had been paid and the still-covered paintings stood like tilting tombstones around the bare room, my father stood for a moment looking at them. His long arms hung down by his sides. It was ten minutes to three o’clock. Standing, waiting for instructions, I watched him across the pale light of the room and smelled the smell of trains and oil. The window was behind him. Wild wisps of his hair stood into the light and haloed his head. I wondered if he was waiting for my mother.

  ‘Will I call Mammy?’

  He moved and I realised how still he had been. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you can help me. Fold the paper when I give it to you, all right?’

  On one knee, then, with those thin, bony, long-fingered hands slowly undoing the wrapping, he went around the room revealing the pictures. I heard my mother come downstairs and begin to sweep energetically in the hall. Following a step behind my father, I folded the sheets of brown paper in silence. I didn’t dare speak; I barely looked. When we had uncovered the last one my father took the single wooden chair and placed it in the midst of them. He sat down and folded his arms and was gone from me, breathing deeply, lost inside a fog of silence. I went outside and closed the door after me.

  In the hall my mother was still sweeping. There was no little pile of gathered dirt and instead she swept the floor in long lines back and forth, back and forth, pushing ever ahead of her the moment when she would have to go inside and view the pictures. She didn’t let herself look at me when I came out but glided past, brushing the bare floor and fixing her brown eyes downwards as if expecting a blow on the head.

  I went upstairs to my room. I sat on the edge of my bed and let what I had seen crash in on me. For my father’s paintings had not been the field and mountain, sea and shore images we had expected. There were no green fields dotted with cattle, no grey peaks riding into Connemara clouds. Instead the thirty canvases that ringed my father in his silent chair were to my twelve-year-old eyes a confusion of colours, a wild and eccentric fury of featureless daubings so forcefully done, so full of suddenness and energy that they were not pictures at all. Had he really painted these? I had looked at them and looked away, not wanting to see displayed for all the world the incipient madness that I feared would now sweep us away. After the first shock I had deliberately avoided looking, telling myself I didn’t understand, that really they were wonderful, and concentrating on folding the brown paper in exact lines, finding comfort in being neat. Flashes of grey and brown, colliding slashes of angry mauves and blacks kept catching my eye and I stared. What brutal compositions they were, all black above, splashed, dribbled with brown, stippled blue then purple, washed across with a wave of white. Another, in green and red, broad arcs of
colour flowing off the edge of the canvas, yellow run amok everywhere, and again black. So much black and brown. They were the paintings of a demented child; I could make out nothing in the furious nexus of coloured curves and lines and after a few moments looked no more. By the time I had left the room and gone upstairs I had convinced myself it was some trick of the light that had kept me from seeing. I sat on the bed clinging to the last traces of the faith I had had coming from the railway station. My father was a genius. He was a great painter. We were all going to be happy and rich and famous.

  When my mother at last stilled her nerve and entered the room where my father had not yet moved from his chair, she pushed the sweeping brush ahead of her and was halfway toward the far wall when she stopped. She was wearing a yellow apron. The afternoon light was quickly fading and the paintings around the room had taken on the grim air of the dying day. She stopped, as if to let the dust settle a moment before the brush, and chanced the look that all summer she had been waiting for. Her small brown eyes travelled the paintings like a bird, staying nowhere, moving quickly from one to the next and on again. She circled the whole room without moving from her place. The silence was charged and immense, and within it she felt herself fall and land in the little dusty pile of her broken spirit. She gripped the handle of the sweeping brush, she found breath and moved her legs. Without a word, without a sign, she turned and swept herself out of the room.

  My father, watching her from the throne of his immense stillness and quiet, made no gesture or effort at explanation. He sat still, angled slightly forward with the palms of his hands pressed between his knees, his shoulders aslant, the bones of his elbows poking out like wings. Only his eyes were moving, only his eyes were telling her it would be all right.