Four Letters of Love: A Novel

by Niall Williams

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.

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.

a woman who combined hasty fire and brutal common sense in such proportions that he had long abandoned debate with her.

Yet now, in this locked embrace without word or sound, Muiris Gore saw with amazement the hopeless inadequacy of the human mind to fathom the miracle of love.

When he did finally arrive at the office, Flannery sitting across the table from him saw at once the embedded dagger of one-way love still hanging from between my father’s ribs.

you need to feel that sureness, Isabel, for all the things that’ll be ahead of you. You need that. Because there’ll be trials, and you’ll need to know that you were sure he was the one when you face them.’

the human need to feel one can cure another is more powerful than fire.

Angels, my father once said, must pass us in the street every day. They must be ordinary as birds, he said, and recognisable only in the brief moment of their connection to our lives. There was, according to this reasoning, a moment when you knew you were met by an angel and that whatever aid it gave you, however subtle and difficult to trace, your life was changed.

My angel was a bachelor. Alone in his house in Drumcondra he had cultivated a brand of good manners that was not readily available elsewhere, and he knew that the appropriate line with victims of tragedies where the father has been burnt to a crisp in the living room is to punctuate the silence with sage nods toward the surviving son. Say nothing, just look over when you come to a red light and nod twice; as if to say, Oh yes, my friend, I know just how bad it is, and do you know how you know I know? You know because I know it’s so bad I can’t even begin to say, you know? Then drive on.

I think I knew then that he was not aware that he was my angel. He had no idea of the wheels and minute mechanisms of life I was only then gleaning for the first time. He didn’t know – as I slowly began to see – that the meaning was in the plot, the shape, that 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 – as I was following him.

We sat like that for a while, as if expecting the arrival at any moment of our conversation.

It was such a miraculous night that he had gone for a walk out of heaven while my mother was tidying up.

Dreams, my father was certain, are the other you talking back.

how lives shattered with the fall of one day’s light.

Nothing in the natural world is random, was the principal tenet in William Coughlan’s philosophy.

The priest shushed them, and waved them hopelessly back towards the gate. He was a quiet man who sought quietness, and was suddenly alarmed at what had landed in his parish. Panic prickled in his lower stomach like a bag of needles. It was the kind of thing you wished on your worst enemy, this: miracles. Let the Bishop have them, give them to Galway, but not here. Why were they always happening in out-of-the way rural places? God!

words can sometimes flatten the deepest emotions or pin them like wild butterflies stunned out of magnificent flight, flimsiest souvenirs of what moved and coloured air like silk. Better to imagine it.