As It Is in Heaven (11 page)

What it was about the music he couldn’t say. He didn’t know the simplest of all mathematics, that the potency of the relation
was in direct proportion to the needs of his own heart, that man plus woman equals both nothing and everything, that the factors
of love are hope and chance, and that the million variables between two people depend more on the second than on the first.

He sat in the room, but was unable to re-engage the spirit of the evening. He tried to hum himself into it, and was sitting
there humming, a tall man who had not slept all night, his hands clutching his knees, his shoes muddy, the bottom of his trouser
legs dark with water stains, and his eyes closed, when Margaret Meade stopped hoovering the top stair of the red carpet and
looked in the door. She was forty-seven years of age, had fallen in love twenty-two times, fourteen with men she had never
spoken to, and recognized at once the signs of a serious fall.

“Hello, love,” she said.

Messages are everywhere, if only we can read them. Margaret was a woman who knew the whole history of hope in love; she knew
the front and back pages of each volume in the library of lovesickness. She knew the music Stephen hummed was more than music
and that the rocking in the chair was his way of tunnelling back into the moment when he had seen the woman; it was his way
of being close to her. She knew how the heart fooled itself, how the forced muting of the loudest emotions travelled through
the body itself and found expression in pimples, bumps, lumps, diarrhoea, cramps, vomiting, sweats hot and cold, dry mouth,
toothache, rashes of every kind, itchiness, general flakiness, and fourteen varieties of trapped wind. (Once, she had loved
a married plumber from Tulla so intensely that, knowing she could not tell him outright, her stomach swelled to nine-month
pregnancy, and to carry the hugeness of her attraction she had to wear maternity clothes for two months; notwithstanding,
she continued dismantling the central heating pipes by night so that he would return daily and she could watch the place she
loved on his backside where the low sling of his jeans didn’t meet his shirt. And all for love.) Margaret Meade could have
told Stephen so much, but he was not yet ready to listen, and the message and the moment passed. She stood inside the door
and watched him rocking and humming in the chair. There was a kind of beauty in it, the hopeless and desperate figure he cut
at half past nine on a Friday morning; she was moved by it and glad she had worn the darker stockings that made her legs look
younger than her face. She drew herself up ever so slightly and touched her hair before calling to him again.

“Love?” she said, and then smiled.

Stephen jumped up from the chair. He licked at the awful dryness of his lips, then quickly took from his left-hand pocket
his ticket to the concert.

“There it is,” he said, looking at the ticket like some rarity he had mislaid, and keeping his eyes firmly on it as he paced
across the concert room and out the door past Margaret Meade.

She watched him go. “Oh, love,” she said softly, and then picked up the hose of the hoover and dragged it into the room, whose
dust she knew was richer now for the feelings that lingered there.

Stephen left the hotel no better than when he had arrived. He walked down the curve of O’Connell Street still holding on to
the ticket. He loped along as if he was going somewhere. He was thirty yards up the street when he noticed Nolan’s music shop,
and he went inside and bought the only Vivaldi disc there, a cheap version of
The Four Seasons.

Then he had something. He had something tangible of the evening and felt an easement of the pressure of desire, knowing that
once the music was playing, once he could sit and listen to it, Gabriella Castoldi would be with him again.

But she was already. She was there waiting when he arrived at the small house by the sea. She was there in the roundabout
road he took, avoiding Miltown Malbay and the school and coming in secret to his own house; she was there in the very fact
of him feeling that he should take the phone off the hook and not answer the door; she was there in the trembling of his hands
as he put on the disc and pressed Play, as he sat in the seat that looked westward into the sighing sea and heard the first
notes with the volume turned up loud enough to make the music system tremble. She was there. She was not playing the music,
but was the music. And Stephen Griffin set it to Repeat even before “Summer” was midway through, even as the downrush of the
strings made wildflower meadows of the air and the life of every leaf and blossom gathered, pulsed, exploded with free riotous
expression, until the room itself was mid-season July and the fullness of the music scented everything and made beat the dry
and dust-filled corners of the world in which he had been living. He had never heard music quite as he heard it then. He did
not know the sharpness of his own senses or the tenderness that poured through his ears. He watched the sea and listened to
Vivaldi, moving his head backward and forward to the rhythms of the strings, until at last, in the ninth “Spring,” his eyes
were closed and he was standing up, his whole body conducting the energy and passion of the music into the deep places of
his heart, where only now he was beginning to admit that he had fallen in love. He was too afraid to think it. He was too
certain that the moment the walls about him were breached he would not be able to bear the incipient grief and loss he associated
with love. He was certain, too, she could not love him. But the music played on, insistently beating on the vulnerable hidden-away
part of the soul that longs for the sweetness of another person like the sweetness of God. He wanted to see her; God, he wanted
to see her again, and with the despair of that unfilled desire and
The Four Seasons
like a wild clock advancing Time so swiftly that years of the heart passed, he brought his hands to his forehead, cried out,
and sank into the armchair by the window.

  When Moira Fitzgibbon arrived outside the house, she heard the music playing and knew that she was right to have come. Once,
she would have surrendered to the protocol of respectability and would not have called on a single man; but with each new
day she emerged more as herself and felt a growing confidence in the intelligence of her heart. She had been right about the
concert, the people had come, and that morning there was radiance and astonishment on the streets of Miltown Malbay. Word
of the concert had arrived almost ahead of its audience, and by the time the lights had come back on with the return of the
first car, the town already knew. Those who had not gone to the concert accepted the news of its success with silent dismay;
but during the night they washed their consciences in a deep salty sleep as sudden showers blew in off the sea and swept through
the damp bedrooms like a scouring God. The wind ran through the town and gathered all spite and bitterness, so that in the
morning all awoke full of unanimous praise for Moira Fitzgibbon. The begrudgers had disappeared, transformed into the good
citizens of earnest support who made it their business to mention in Hynes’s, Galvin’s, and other shops that they had so enjoyed
the music. Moira had been right. She brought the profits from the concert to the bank to lodge them in Moses Mooney’s account
and there met Eileen Waters. When the principal congratulated her, Moira felt a surge of weakness and water in her eyes, but
shook her own sentimentality free with the knowledge that a day earlier the same woman would have crossed the road rather
than meet her.

“Well, when you believe in something,” Moira said.

“Yes. Oh, that’s right,” said Eileen Waters. “Absolutely right.”

“You don’t like to just give up on it.” Moira let the phrase linger a moment and, there in the bank, collected another of
the small victories that were becoming common for her. Was it her imagination that made the November street seem brighter,
livelier, that morning? was there dazzlement falling? was there an all but imperceptible lift in the air that made men seem
to move more lightly from their tractors or salute across the erratic hotchpotch of parked cars in Bank Place with a broader
sweep of their arms? Were the twin babies of the Kellys ever laughing like that before? Moira wondered, sauntering along the
footpath. Was it always like this, and she had failed to notice? As if enlightenment was a condition of Miltown Malbay that
noontime, harmony seemed everywhere. People had their best day. They were illumined with an inexplicable sense of things being
right in the world. Their own ordinariness seemed majestic, and in all the coming and going of their everyday shopping and
conversation, from the market to the post office, from Galvin’s to Hynes’s, they were like the townspeople in paintings of
towns and villages of long ago, when time was slower and everything more innocent.

And it was the concert. Somehow it was, Moira Fitzgibbon told the dashboard of her car, and drove to Stephen Griffin’s house,
where she had seen the yellow car earlier and knew that he could not be working.

She heard Vivaldi playing when she opened her car door and stood, allowing her heart to understand the situation before moving
up to knock. She knocked four times to no answer and looked up at the clear sky without discouragement, as if it were the
next white page of the story only just coming to her; then she walked around the back and let herself in.

“Autumn” was playing, that slow collapse of notes that made the air itself seem to fall as Moira stepped inside the back kitchen.
Once she arrived in it she knew she had trespassed some intimacy, that the simplest sights and smells of the domestic disorder
were private revelations, and that the stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, the opened cartons of sour milk left by the windowsill,
the grey smudge that was an ancient sponge, the dusty cobwebs like netting across the corner of the ceiling, these were each
as vulnerable and naked expressions of the heart as rough, raw, first-draft poems. She knew more about Stephen Griffin with
each step, and held herself briefly in the kitchen until the myriad impressions had flown into the farthest corner of her
mind. Then she called his name.

“Mr. Griffin? Oh, Mr. Griffin?”

He did not answer, and Moira walked slowly from the kitchen to the door of the sitting room. Everything about that minor journey—the
condition of the carpet, the faded greyish quality of the wallpaper, cool as old skin when she touched it, and the swell of
melancholy in that movement of the music that was tangible in its pain and dying—made her afraid. When she put her hand on
the door and moved it ever so slowly open, she was inseparable from her own visions of television women detectives arriving
on the scene of murder.

She eased open the door and put her head around it first. Then she saw him: Stephen Griffin, poleaxed, lying back in the armchair
with his head turned to one side. His right hand conducted in a slow waving. His eyes were closed; he did not sense her beside
him, and even when she said his name again with some alarm, nothing happened. Then Moira pulled out the plug of the music
system.

“Mr. Griffin?”

Stephen opened his eyes. He did not want to.

“Mr. Griffin, are you all right?” She was standing over him. She did not ask him if he was injured or ill or if he wanted
to get up; she did not suppose that he had been drinking, nor that a sudden seizure had knocked him back into the chair. Moira
Fitzgibbon was more intelligent than that. The knowledge had gathered in her before she had to think of it.

“I said I’d call in because of tonight,” she said. “I have a complimentary ticket for the concert in Galway.”

  Stephen took the ticket. Of course he did. He took the ticket as if it were a hand reaching down to him and drove the yellow
car to Galway that night to hear Gabriella Castoldi play Vivaldi in the Town Hall. By the time he had arrived in his seat,
his inner organs had each contracted into tight balls of anticipation and he carried them like a bag of stones inside the
tight sweated cotton of his shirt. But when the musicians came onto the stage and Gabriella lifted her bow to the first note,
the stones dissolved and everything was forgotten. He could breathe. There was a scent of lilies in the air, and as the concert
continued, this time he did not take his eyes from the slender woman with the sorrowful face. He looked at her throughout.
There was something about her face, he thought, something there in the places beneath her eyes, in the washed and drawn pallor
of her skin, the smallness of her mouth, which was turned so minutely downward, the furrow in her brow as she frowned over
the instrument and gazed down along the strings as if looking for evidence of the impossible. She is as fragile as the violin,
he thought, and thought of the mesmerism of her sadness and how it merged into the notes. He loved how she played and loved
the sorrow, too, seeing some part of himself reflected in her, the way lovers do.