Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

Author:Niall Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Four

1

There is no such thing as chance. Of this my father seemed more or less certain, choosing to view the haphazard chaos of his life simply as order of a different kind. If you believed in God you did not believe in chance, he told me. The cattle that had broken through the fence and ruined all but two of the paintings were not the instruments of misfortune or coincidence. They were signposts, message-bearers, and it was only a matter of time before my father figured out just what they had been sent to say. Similarly, the arrival of my Uncle John at the house three weeks after our return from the west was no mere luck either. First of all, he was not my Uncle John. He was Mr John Flannery, my father’s old colleague from the civil service, and when he stepped inside the clean but empty hallway of our house in the crisp beginning of that autumn I doubt if even he knew the part he was about to play.

It was, in my interpretation, a stroke of good luck, but to my father it was simply the next revelation of divine order. When Flannery sat in one of the hard wooden straight-backed chairs in the studio and listened to what had happened to the paintings, he could hardly believe it. He was at once struck by two things: that the accident, as he thought it, was the coincidence of a lifetime, and that my father had believed in the paintings with such a passion and faith that he was now either entirely mad or a certain genius. He sat back and sipped the strong milkless tea I brought him, staring across the studio at my father and waiting to ask a question.

Due to my father’s belief, it did not occur to him to question the sudden appearance of his old friend at the hall door. He had welcomed Flannery, as he had done on one or two occasions before, without the slightest hesitation or questioning of what the purpose of his visit might be. He expected grander, greater designs of order to be more mysteriously revealed and was somewhat taken aback when Flannery said: ‘Actually I was hoping to buy a painting.’

My father said nothing. Flannery explained. He was a member of a national organisation for the promotion of Irish culture, and had been commissioned to buy a painting to be given as a prize. I listened at the door. I was waiting for a new calamity when out of a long still pause I heard my father answer:

‘There are only two, they are over here, look.’

Flannery looked. I could hear him looking. I could feel in the quiet the slow magic of those fabulous pictures working on his mind, sense and smell the sea that was churning in them, the restlessness and beauty that my father believed were the restlessness and beauty of God Himself. Mr Flannery was overcome. I knew he would be for in

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