Four Letters of Love Read online

  By some curious mechanism that had more to do with the absence rather than the presence of choice, the shop came to Peader, the middle son. He had no idea what to do with it. He was twenty-five and until his father’s death had managed to scrupulously dodge the question of supporting himself. He lived at home in the old rooms above the shop, he did some carting of boxes and material and for this occasional duty drew a salary for himself whenever he was able to open the till unseen. What he cared about were his father’s three greyhounds. On weekday evenings he took them out. They sat into the back of the car, long and lean, their heads erect and peering forward into the Galway traffic. Northwards out of the city he drove them, heading along the Oughterard road to a place twenty miles away where he stopped and let them out. With their leather leashes wrapped around his fist he walked off the main road down a narrow botharin which he had discovered by accident led a full circle of seven miles back to the car. It was desolate beautiful country, the green and dun colour of the fields scattered with the great jags of rock, the sense of the land stretching endlessly away into the weathers of the sea. The hounds had been his father’s passion. Prionsias O’Luing had won money on them, and, growing up, Peader had heard various stories and rumours of how the shop had been gambled, lost and won back on two courses of the greyhounds. He imagined it was true, for the scope and breadth of his father’s infatuation with the dogs was such that the single dominant memory he left his sons was of his moving all three of them into one bedroom for two weeks before a race so that the hounds might benefit from the greater rest and comfort the interior of the house offered over the sheds. They were served stout in wooden bowls when not in training, their potatoes were half-boiled, not soft, soggy, or floury, and taken with a scoop of butter and no salt, broken but never mashed. They must always be walked seven miles when in training, preferably never returning along the same route but circling in an anticlockwise wheel in the last two hours before sunset. Sugar lumps were rationed for them, a sheep’s head boiled for a day in the back kitchen made them faster than wind. Such things were the inherited wisdom of the sport in the O’Luing household, and Peader accepted them, adding in turn his own secret methods, singing quiet choruses of country and western songs down the long, winding roads in the rain, whisphering the words fast, speed, and win into the cocked delicate shells of the hounds’ ears.

  Such was his life until the day he stopped the car and saw Isabel Gore for the first time.

  4

  In the heart of Galway city in the downpour, Isabel told him she was going to the bookshop. To get to it he drove around the one-way traffic system, bringing the car down the narrow curve of Shop Street and pulling up right outside the green door. The moment they arrived there was too soon for both of them. The engine was running, the windscreen wipers sloshing against the heavy rain. There was nothing to say, and in the instant before she reached for the handle, Isabel felt gather inside her a knotted ball of words and feelings. She flushed, wanting to say something and embarrassed herself for being so foolish. Then, in a single moment that was to last longer than a year’s memory of it, she opened the door and it blew sharply outwards off her hand. Rain clattered against it as she took a last quick glance across the car at him, his smiling eyes, his round face and the something she was never quite able to pin down that seemed so vulnerable in him as he said, Well, goodbye, and, Anytime you’d like to go walking in the rain, and she stood into the terrific wet chill of the wind and hail and leaned in to quickly tell him her name.

  It was a week before he arrived at the convent. The weather was still broken and the darkness that fell at four o’clock drummed hail against the high windows of the upstairs room where the girls sat to study. Peader pulled the red Ford up outside the arch of the main doorway and in a new tweed jacket he had taken from the shop rack that afternoon hurried up the four steps to bang the brass knocker of courtship. Almost at once he heard the footsteps coming, and when the door was opened by a plain-faced nun with a pursed mouth and small eyes, the wind, hail and he entered the long polished hallway like dangerous emissaries from another world crossing the drawbridge into a hallowed sanctuary. He asked for Isabel. The nun looked at him. She smelled the smell of sex but did not know it. The pursed mouth tightened and over the small eyes her eyebrows curved into question marks. From where her hands were held whitely together in front of her, the nun reached and turned the shone brown knob of the door into the reception room. ‘Are you family?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  There was rain and sweat on his brow. As he crossed to the window and looked outside he wondered what she would think. He opened his top shirt button and stretched his neck, he tapped his fingers nervously on a table and tried hard to hum the beginnings of a tune. When Isabel opened the door he felt his heart surge like electricity. The air went out of him. He had to heave on his lungs to keep himself standing, as the blow of her appearance overtook him and all the words he had prepared that day.

  ‘You?’ she said. ‘It’s you?’ The nun was still behind her at the door, and so immediately for her sake, she added, ‘Sean,’ and wrapped her arms around him in a quick embrace he was not to forget in all the restless sleeplessness of his next two days. As the nun closed the door she let him go. She put her hands to her mouth and stepped back towards the door, waiting, listening, holding for another moment on to her laughter until the retreating footsteps died away and she exploded. ‘You!’ she roared and then shushed herself, whispering and giggling as he grinned at her. ‘You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?’

  He opened his mouth for no words and just stared; how beautiful she looked, the two sleeves of her cardigan were pushed up midway on her arms. She had been drawing a strand of her hair down over her face in studying and it flew loosely in front of her. She blew it to the side. ‘I’ve already a week’s punishment exercise because of you . . .’

  He stepped towards her. ‘Maybe I came to give ya a hand at it,’ he said, mastering the weakness inside himself with a show of false bluster and moving closer to the girl in her mother’s cardigan whose face and eyes and hair had shot him through with arrows.

  ‘Well, you’ve great nerve,’ she said. ‘Anyway I can’t go out. I’m kept in afternoons, evenings, Saturdays and Sundays.’

  ‘But . . . what about with your cousin?’

  Standing there across the spotlessly clean room from her, with the hailstones beating outside, Peader O’Luing grinned the round ridiculous grin she would fall in love with, and began the conspiracy of their courtship.

  On Sunday he called to take her to her uncle’s for dinner. She would be returned by seven in the evening, he told the pursed mouth and small eyes, offering Isabel his hand and telling her a wildly invented stream of family chit chat as they turned their backs on the nun and walked out the doorway of Isabel’s prison into the bluster of the weather and down the steps to the car. Out the driveway their laughter bubbled, and as the windscreen wipers worked the rain beyond the gates they were already given to each other. The countryside the small red car swept into was flooded and frozen, grey not green. The shadows of stonewalls were white with unmelted hail. Nobody stood about or took walks. The sky was a steamed glass that cracked daily, letting slant through the falling air the shards of that long winter’s stay. And yet, to Isabel and Peader, in the purr of the car fan and the smell of hounds, it was the perfected landscape of illicit love.

  5

  That evening after he left Isabel back in the convent Peader went home, returned the jacket to the shop rack and stepped next door to Blake’s. His mother was there, her eyes rolling a little in drink and her massive chin falling on the wedge of her chest. In the steaming crowd of the brown pub a red ring of faces was nodding over their pints. The music was quick and gay and light, there was jubilation and celebration in it, and as the first mouthful of his drink ran down his throat, Peader felt he was hearing it for the first time. Nothing was like this before. His eyes travelled from the bow and fi
ddle, the stops and quick fingering of the whistle, up and across to the small window of clear glass and the view of rain made briefly golden as it fell across the streetlight. He watched the rain and heard the music and saw only the returning memory of the girl’s face.

  They had been together for little more than four hours. He had not even kissed her; she had glanced her lips against him as she opened the car door and stepped into the rain. Thanks, see ya, Sean. And yet the idea of her had completely overtaken his mind. She was the girl out for a walk in the wildest day in a decade. She was the girl who smelled of rain and wind. Now, sitting at the counter in Blake’s hearing music and feeling the alcohol warming inside him, he fell down the steps of what he thought was love, falling ever deeper as he played over, time and again, the image of her face and let himself feel the hollow pain of longing to see her again.

  Half an hour after entering the pub, he was more in love with her than he imagined it was possible to be in love with anyone. He wanted to talk, tell about her, shake himself and jump, kick, scream, laugh, roar, throw things and break them; he wanted to let it out, the sudden balloon of beauty that she had inflated below his heart, to express her, to fall back, sigh, sing and be for as long as for ever the sweetness of this happiness; he wanted to be the music.

  When they closed the pub and his mother passed him on the way to her bed she saw it in his face as clear as a rash and thumped up the stairs without a word, already knitting the rows of worry that she was losing her son. Peader said nothing. He went out the side door into the rain, drove the car in a skittery wobble through the midnight downpour as far as the sheds of the hounds. There he unlocked the galvanized door and let himself in under the clattering roof to lie in the incredible clamour of the rain, whispering to the dogs her name.

  He did not sleep for two days. He grew red-eyed and wild-looking, already sickened by the fear that she would not, could not care for him. It was the worm in his winter rose. For nothing was as deeply set in the heart and mind of Peader O’Luing than the nagging suspicion that underneath all he was worthless. He took the hounds out for interminable walks, leading them through winds and rains he wouldn’t ordinarily walk in himself. One moment, skies clearing, the air clean and fresh with even the slightest tremor of spring, and he was ecstatic and light with hope, walking the greyhounds along the rainbow of himself; the next moment he was overcast, shadowed into a personal darkness where a stone in his hand might have beaten the dogs to death. Isabel, Isabel. He said her name out loud along the road, letting the voices of the rainwind take it into the air so that it went before and after him across the countryside.

  Isabel, Isabel.

  Tying the leashes of the hounds to the back of the car, he got in alone and sat, letting his wet clothes breathe and closing his eyes in a hopeless search to refind for a moment that smell of Isabel in the rain.

  For Isabel it had not been the same. She had thought of him, brought him closer at times, sitting in a dull class of French grammar or Russian history, only to let him go again and switch her mind away to the chalked words and figures on the blackboard and the prospect of her future. She had been a good student, could still get to university, the nuns had told her, telling her too that if she gave up now the world would have nothing for her.

  On a Saturday evening in study class the words of pages suddenly slid away. She couldn’t concentrate. She found an hour passing with nothing done. She had turned twenty pages of textbook without the slightest memory of what they had contained. She looked up and saw the pursed mouth and small eyes staring down at her from the top of the room. She turned to the window and smiled.

  It was the game she loved at first, the comedy of it as he called at the door in his tweeds and respectfulness and the steady pat of Sister’s shoes coming down the long corridor to summon her for her cousin. She would hear it coming before the rap on the door, sitting there on the side of her bed or at the desk where for a week she had been trying to write a letter home. She would hear the footsteps and laugh, putting a hand to her mouth to catch it quickly, throwing back her hair and standing up to get ready, holding off that look in her eyes that was proud and victorious until she was already down the corridor and out through the front door once more, feeling the wind like an embrace and the raw kiss of freedom.

  6

  They drove west into Connemara. As the car hurtled down the centre of narrow roads, racing away into the great emptiness of bog and mountain, Isabel felt the exhilaration of freedom and danger. She loved the madness of it, this Sunday escape with the almost stranger, the giddy speed. Peader was so nervously happy in the seat next to her that words burst against each other in the pipe of his throat and as he drove the hummed nasilized fragments of cowboy tunes betrayed his bubbling gladness. He said nothing to her for ten miles, each minute feeling the growing distance from the convent as a gathering proof that she cared for him. It was almost too much to believe, and staring ahead he hardly dared tell himself that it was she next to him. He drove and hummed and followed the road that seemed to go nowhere with nobody on it. The grim loneliness of the winter landscape was beautiful too, and, although Peader did not think of it, had not plotted it as another suitor might, nor imagined the effect on an island girl for weeks imprisoned in the rooms of a convent, it was the perfect setting.

  An hour out of Galway he asked her where she would like to go.

  ‘Anywhere,’ she said. And then, ‘I’d love to get out and walk.’

  He grinned and laughed. ‘Jesus, but you’re mad,’ and pulled over the car by the side of the road.

  ‘Isn’t that why you like me?’ she said, and was into the wind with her hair blown forward over her face before he had time to think of an answer.

  They walked beside each other along the verge of the road under a great white sky. The mountains were a pale blue in the distance. Water ran in drains or gleamed like fallen bits of sky amidst boggy places that were brown and black with winter. No birds flew. A single car passed them in an hour’s walking, so slowly and gradually vanishing down the curving ribbon of the endless road ahead that as they looked after it time and distance seemed recast in a new way and the road became an eternity. It was the stillness Isabel liked, and even the chill of the wind. And while the round squat figure of the man bundled in a thick tweed coat beside her was not the one she might have dreamed in sunlit moments on school afternoons, he was the one who had brought her out to this, and she did not pull back or shiver when he took her hand. Still they said almost nothing. It was a place without words, that road in Connemara, so steeped in the wind and silence that even the road that ran through it seemed a slow stopless passing on. The world was elsewhere with its motion and noise, here was only loneliness and quiet. The rain had held off in the slopes about them. The wind was behind them, its hundred hands on their backs nudging them onwards, gusting so that they stumbled closer together on the uneven way. His eyes were stinging. He felt the limp weight of her hand in his. The slim wedge of it he was grasping onto as if it were the buoy that kept his soul from floating off over the mountains. It was like holding on to the hand of a doll, and yet, even the slightest movement of his fingers within hers, the merest caress spun him like a top and he ached to kiss her. The sound of their footsteps on the road as they walked on, the scent of her that bloomed and hid in the Connemara wind. What was she thinking? What feelings ran from the pale hand into the clutch of his fingers around it? If he let it go would it search the cold air a moment to refind him? The questions loosened the bolts of Peader’s nerve, in a moment unhinging his happiness. The sleeplessness of his last few days fell on top of him, his brain thrummed, he felt his legs so weak and held on to her hand tighter. The unsaid words sickened inside him. Why, why had he said nothing to her? Why hadn’t he told her? Why couldn’t he bring himself to begin? He couldn’t. It was all soured with fear. The silence frightening not beautiful. The air darkened, the clouds rising and coming down off the mountains like spiteful gods. The stillness of the mome
nt was gone, and, as if time itself had returned and beat faster than before, Peader saw Isabel going back inside the convent and another spiral of wakeful dream-swept days and nights beginning. He could not bear it. He raised his head and blew a sigh and squeezed her hand in his. He squeezed it tighter and then tighter, shutting his hand around it so strongly that in a moment he was crushing it within his fingers, as if the bones might shatter and their skins blend. Isabel let out a cry. She turned towards him, a wisp of her hair caught in the corner of his lips, and like a man going down in shattered pieces, Peader O’Luing buckled and sighed, turning and reaching to find her face with his reddened hand and founder at last on the island of her kiss.

  7