As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  Nonetheless, from the few the sickness of greed grew. And by the time the light died on that April evening, the story of Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi had spun a kind of thick yellowish brume out of the window of O'Loughlin's and Coughlan's, and O'Siochru's pub, too, and the air was so heavily scented with the exhaled bitterness and envy that it choked the lungs and browned the stars and half obscured the moon itself, so that it hung over the town like a gouged eye.

  13

  The following morning brown rain was falling. As if some malignancy were weeping, the water seeped off the sky from early dawn. It fell steadily and screened the mountains and made the town seem small and miserable. In his morning sermon at ten o'clock Mass, Father Dempsey scowled at the small gathering of weekday Massgoers and told them sometimes we have to feel God's Own Disapproval. Helena Cox had already told him of the illicit lovers and their fortune, and the news had arrived like acid in his stomach in the middle of his breakfast fry; why must the ways of the Unjust prosper, O Lord? he asked, and had taken some comfort when he walked out into the deluge.

  And still the rain fell. It fell heavily, like regret, and flooded gutters and drains that by mid-morning were spilling over like the eyes of new widows beyond consolation. The streets of the town were awash in brown water. That the suddenness of the deluge was part of the capriciousness of west Kerry springtime was briefly overlooked, and in half a dozen shops old men and women were already gloomily discussing the vanishing of seasons and the nearness of the end of Time.

  It rained. It sheeted down all that day, and the next, and the one after that, too. It rained so hard that television cameras appeared on the streets of Kenmare to film it. It rained on the rivers that were the streets of the town and which coursed along now at the speed in which a heart can change its feelings. It rained relentlessly, until the falling of the drops themselves seemed redolent with meaning and were interpreted variously on the radio and television programmes that mushroomed on the airwaves. But none of the callers who phoned in read the gloom of the weather as Gabriella did. None of them saw it as a colder vision of Venice, as the nightmarish return of murky uncertainty and the washing away of love.

  While the rain fell Gabriella stayed in her bed and suffered a new form of her old despair. Her pregnancy now brought her so low in her spirit that she had not the energy to get up. She had seen the disapproval in the face of Moran when he looked at her, and knew it to be the look of her own father, too. When two men called in Wellingtons to tell Stephen at the front door that they had heard of his lottery win and wouldn't he like to donate something to the football club, Gabriella knew at once that the town must be speaking of them and that the islanded paradise of their house was destroyed now.

  “There'll be no peace for us here,” she said.

  It did not matter that there were hundreds of others living around the town who, when they heard of the imagined lottery win or saw the ringless hand of Gabriella and the curve of her belly, thought nothing of it and understood and accepted that even their country was in a constant flux of change and that those notions of transgression which had made sinners of all in the past were faded now to the easier morality of only the endeavour of human goodness. To Gabriella it did not matter. The rain beat down. She could not sleep. She lost concentration and threw the chess pieces at the curtains. When Stephen tried to comfort her, she lowered her head and hit her fist into the side cushion of the couch, and hit the memories of her father in the house in the Calle Visciga, the sharp cold air of intolerance and judgment.

  Stephen brought her cocoa. He was stunned and wordless, and as the wet evening deepened into drowned night, his face expressed a mute horror. He put turf on the fire. He sat in the armchair across from Gabriella by the ruined chess game and tried to tell her everything would be all right. But Gabriella just stared. And so he did not say any more. He sat in the chair, long and thin and defeated, and in the dim light that glowed from the flames watched his happiness burn away like fire.

  An hour passed. The rain fell.

  “I love you,” he said in a small voice, when the light in the room was too diminished for him to tell whether Gabriella was awake or asleep and when the telling of those three words seemed suddenly impotent. There was no answer. Eight feet away Gabriella lay motionless. Her eyes might have been closed. Stephen did not know; he said the words again and immediately wished he had not, for in the loneliness of no reply he faced the cold, undeniable truth that Gabriella's happiness was not in his power, nor could he change the world for her. He sat and listened and the rain fell. At last he moved over beside her and reached and stroked her hand, and was still not certain that she was not sleeping, until finally the smallest movement of her fingers curved onto his and held.

  In the darkness at the end of that night, when it seemed the world's sourness had slipped beneath their door and made the house of loving frail and unprotected as a china doll, Gabriella moved her face close to Stephen's, and in a voice that held the ceaseless yearning of her own childhood to make real and lasting the existence of love, she whispered, “Stefano, take me away from here.”

  14

  It was the small hours of the morning. Rain was still beating against the windows when, with the tenderness of those who care for the wounded, Stephen took his arms from around Gabriella and rose from the couch where she was lying and began to pack. He did not discuss it. He did not explain his plans or try to reason with her or say that perhaps it was the rashness of her pregnancy speaking or a bright morning would see a change of heart. He rose and packed. Within an hour there was an assemblage of small boxes and vases, an Italian hilltown, inside the front door. When he opened the door to bring them to the car, the clatter of the rain made Gabriella stir on the couch. She raised her head slightly, the way sleepers do to look at dreams, and then lay back again.

  Whether she was awake or not in his coming and going Stephen did not know. He gathered her clothes from the chairs and the end of the bed, where she had left them, and folded them into the brown case she had brought from Venice. Although there was space, he did not put his own clothes with hers. He took the case of her violin and the few books of sheet music she never travelled without, one of which had been given to her by Maestro Scaramuzza and was now like some yellowed covenant carried into the future. In his own case he packed the chess set, going around by the curtains on his hands and knees to gather up the pieces Gabriella had thrown aside.

  At last he had packed everything that was theirs, except for the small black music player and Vivaldi, Puccini, and Mozart.

  “Where are we going?” Gabriella whispered without moving. His long figure crossed the darkness to her.

  “To make a home,” he said. “I am going to make you happy. I am.”

  “Sssh,” she said, and raised a finger to quiet him. “Play the music, kill the rain.”

  And so he did, and they lay in the last darkness as the rain fell in a world somewhere outside the otherworldly singing of Kiri Te Kanawa; Stephen and Gabriella held to each other and closed their eyes and escaped on the music away from the questions of tomorrow. They did not sleep. They drowsed on the disc that had been set to Repeat, and stirred on the fourth singing of “Dove sono” with paralyzing cramps and Gabriella's bladder bursting. Once she had rushed through the empty house, the mood was broken. She returned to where Stephen was hopping, trying to straighten the locked muscle of his thigh. He leaned on her shoulder. “My saviour,” she said as he hopped, and she smiled.

  In ten minutes they were in the car. They drove into Kenmare in the dawn and saw the flooding waters of the street part to either side in the headlights. Gabriella wanted to leave word with Nelly Grant, and through the steady spilling of the rain she hurried up the small garden path while Stephen held an umbrella over her. She knocked twice, but there came no answer. She knew from her own nights in the cottage the deep dreams that Nelly Grant nightly explored and did not knock a third time; instead she wrote in pencil: “We had to leave
. We will let you know. Thank you. Gabriella.” She did not add “Stephen,” nor see the small pain the absence of his name alongside hers caused him.

  They drove out of Kenmare through empty streets and throttled the engine to climb into the mountains. Stephen told her they could go to Clare, and hurried the car as if to outrace the uncertainty of finding happiness there. They sped into Killarney and arrived in Tralee when only squat lorries and milk bulk tanks were travelling the road. The rain was still pouring down as the dawn came up, so that the grey light and water mixed to make the day the colour of despondency. In the emptiness of the long north Kerry road Stephen and Gabriella said almost nothing. Gabriella watched the landscape flattening out in pale greens towards the Shannon and wondered if the dry scent caught in the car was cardboard boxes or desperation. They arrived at the ferry dock in Tarbert a full hour before the first sailing, and waited and watched the morning struggle to separate from the dark waters of the river. When at last they drove onto the ferry, Tom Blake, the ticket collector, came and looked in at them across the falling rain. When he saw the collection of their belongings packed into the car, he knew they were not tourists and was at once disconcerted by the impression that they were people taking flight. As the boat pulled away, he watched the road down to the pier as if expecting pursuit.

  But there was none he could see. For what they were fleeing was not visible; it was the condition of their own disbelief, a long, enduring, and dogged sense of defeat so deeply buried in the spirit that sometimes no love nor hope nor faith can seem to outrace it. It was the feeling that blows would always fall, that the state of happiness was somehow unnatural and would, by necessity, be brief, perishing under the persistence by which Time arrives and passes. It was that they were fleeing, but Tom Blake did not know it. He imagined when he saw them get out of the car and cross the rain-swept deck to climb the iron steps and look out at the grey-green lump of Clare that they were estimating how long the crossing would take, and how long it would be before the enemy was after them. And there was something—in the way the long man leaned to the small woman, in the shape of her, was that a child she was carrying inside the raincoat? in the blown-about crazy scent of lilies that could not be lilies—that made him change his view and nod and decide that he hoped they made it.

  When they drove off into County Clare, the light was still pale and the rain falling. Tom Blake waved them off. “Good luck now,” he said, as if it were an innocent salute. They arrived up the sloped roadway at the café and souvenir shop, which was on the point of opening.

  “Wait,” said Gabriella. Stephen stopped the car short. “Tea,” she said, “and a ring.”

  He looked at her.

  “It does not mean I am marrying you,” she said, raising an eyebrow and holding a half-smile, then turning away and looking at the rain that was not so heavy now, and waiting while the astonished man got out and crossed into the shop for the improbable purchase.

  When he returned her heart lifted.

  “Here,” he said. “I do not take thee to be my wife,” and placed it on her wedding finger. There was a moment, an instant in which she glanced at it and the awful resolve—her disbelief in her own ability to sustain love—might have eased, but the child moved inside her and she looked away.

  “Here's your first cup of Clare tea,” Stephen said.

  And that was it, the smallest ceremony, the ordinary moment that memory would return to and crystallize and turn into the small preciousness that Stephen Griffin would carry everywhere. The ring on the road to Clare, the ring that was not for sacrament but for protection against the spite of others, but which from the moment Gabriella put it on became a kind of sacrament, nonetheless, and was a promise beyond their saying, a mute and fragile daring that perhaps something imperishable existed. They drove away. They travelled from Killimer along the apparent aimlessness of a quiet road that wound past the bird-heavy hedgerows of spring.

  Gabriella watched everything. She had the sense of arriving in Stephen's landscape, and read its soft hills and white-thorn hedgerows like secret messages. This was not the lush and verdant paradise of Kenmare. This was nothing like that. What she saw was a desolate windburnt beauty, an endurance of the spirit in the face of hardship, a stone-walled resistance to the battering of the Atlantic air. A place where the trees stiffened in the long arthritis of brutal weathering and yet did not die, but grew sideways, like the severely backcombed heads of stern aunts who softened once a year and gave sweets in May like white blossoms. Gabriella saw it, and then saw the sea. She let out a little cry, and Stephen looked over at her.

  “It's something, isn't it?” he said. But she did not reply. She was looking at the waves crashing in the mid-distance, the great shooting spume of white wind brushed into the air like a game for the gulls. She began to smile, smiling more and more as the car followed the sea road around by the beach at Spanish Point and the sandy field and the fallen-down house of Moses Mooney. Stephen slowed the car before the empty curve of sand.

  “So this is your beach?” Gabriella said.

  “This is it.”

  “Can we stop? It's so beautiful.”

  “We have nowhere else to go,” Stephen said. “My house is over there.”

  And so they walked down onto the sand, and while the school buses were converging on the school, and cars and coaches and lorries were moving in the ordinariness of everyday, they instead felt the dimensions of freedom that blew in from the breaking waves of the sea. They walked across the wet sand of the foreshore with sunken steps and hopped from the waves in the place where Stephen had once almost drowned. Gabriella took his hand.

  “If I died now I'd be happy,” she said, but the wind took her words and he did not hear her.

  15

  They slept that night in Stephen's house by the sea. The wind made a creaking music in every window and door, and for hours Gabriella lay wide-eyed in a sleepless dream of happiness. The morning and afternoon had unpacked them into the house, and in the putting out of each thing—the herbal remedies of Nelly Grant, the music books from Venice—was another of the infinitesimal gestures of trust through which we make our covenant with the world. By six o'clock the rooms had begun to look like the rooms in Kenmare, and Gabriella became aware of how simply rooms could resemble a relationship. It was only the first of many such moments. She understood that in the afternoon's unpacking was a sense of more than mere geographical arrival. As each moment passed and she moved from one room to the next, she felt the physical ease of the child inside her. Stephen had set up the music player, and in the small island of the house his father's music sounded triumphant, heralding the heartsongs of ages while he came and went with the boxes.

  All of this flew back through Gabriella's mind as she lay sleepless in bed. She fingered the ring and held it out in the starlight as if it belonged to another. Then suddenly she thought of Maria Feri, whose ringless hand in Venice she remembered when it touched the bars of the cage where the bird sang. She saw her cousin sitting in the evening that had just passed, she saw the stillness of the house and the courteous, diffident manner of the older woman who was more still than aged dust and more sorrowful than failed summer, and in that moment, lying on the bed beside Stephen in that first evening in west Clare, Gabriella saw the tragedy of wasted life and the uselessness of losing days in attending dreams. She heard the bird singing in the cage, and in the wind-creaking bedroom heard the singing as it grew louder and louder, until its notes transformed into another music and was the playing of violins, bowing a joy that made her smile in the darkness. It was imagined and not remembered music. It was the music she had dreamt of playing by the sea in Venice when she was a child, before she had ever mastered the violin. It was the perfect music that plays in visions and makes the world shake with possibilities when we are young and feel our souls limitless. It was the music of inspiration, the kind that plays in the heart and makes a child want to pick up an instrument for the first time. Gabriella heard it i
n the darkness and remembered. Then_ she turned and rocked Stephen's shoulder, and when he raised his head swiftly to ask her what was wrong, she told him, “Nothing is wrong.”

  Then she touched his face and said, “Stefano, I want to start a music school.”

  16

  In the morning when Gabriella awoke, she had the luminous radiance of purpose. Where the idea of the music school came from was unclear, but did not matter. She did not quite compute the complex formula that music had been the saviour of her own childhood and relate that to the child she carried inside her. She thought only that it was right, and felt the zeal of those who discover in midlife the meaning of their lives. Over breakfast she looked out the window that gave onto the sea and began to plan with Stephen.

  The extravagance of her idea, its wild improbability—a classical music school on the west coast of Clare, and beside a town with a legendary reputation for traditional players—did not disturb him in the slightest, and he sat opposite her at the table with that lit expression of love and belief that saw all things as possible. He did not think for a moment that this was her pregnancy speaking again, that it was the whimsical fantasy of a moment, or that in three days, maybe four, she would be returned to the lassitude of her bed. Instead, he sat and listened. He heard her tell him again with the visionary excitement of the night before how, on that desolately beautiful coastline where he had chosen to live, she could imagine a building where music played, where children came with their instruments and walked out afterwards into the big sky and crashing sea. Her cheeks were roses while she spoke, her eyes widened to see the wonder of the future, and her words tumbled like the streams of April. The quickened heartbeat of the season beat through her, and Stephen sat there that morning witnessing her rapture with passionate gratitude.