As It Is in Heaven (14 page)

Philip opened his mouth wide and screamed. He astonished himself with his own sound, and looked into the space in front of
him as if he could see the twisted shape of agony. He looked at the doctor standing over him and saw the urgency in the other
man’s eyes, the need he had to make this medicine work and see the patient carried out of his surgery to hospital; he saw
it and he screamed on, raising and lowering the cries as Tim Magrath rushed out to his receptionist and ordered an ambulance,
turning on his side and crying out the long cry that drained him like a sewer of the gathered and broken debris of his life,
crying for himself, for the miseries and disappointments of his own childhood, the terrible fearfulness of the world that
grew inside him, the timidity he had carried until the moment he met Anne Nolan and she blew it from him like a cobweb, the
loss, the inestimable loss that was born out of knowing that he had missed so many opportunities to express love while his
wife and daughter were alive, the death of loveliness, and the wounded bafflement of his son, for all of it Philip Griffin
screamed on the floor, until he was howling out of an emptiness and grief that constituted a pain more real than the pain
of cancer.

He cried out and wept until the sorrow exhausted him and he was lying in a hospital bed with a white sheet tucked tightly
like a bandage across his chest. He had been given something for pain, he was told, and lay there in the soft pillowy mountains
and valleys of his half-consciousness, waiting to be investigated. When he saw the doctor coming, it was as if from a very
long distance, and his white coat shone like the illumined raiment of an angel.

  Stephen drove west with Vivaldi playing in his head and the face of Gabriella Castoldi lingering between him and the windscreen.
He saw her more clearly than he saw the road, and only a small miracle brought him round the bend in Kinnegad. He did not
know yet the dimensions of his own heart or that love developed like a geometric progression and could increase rapidly in
the shortest of time, without seeing or hearing or touching the other person at all. Neither did he consider yet that his
life was changed entirely now and that while the turbulence of emotions churned within him he could not return to the ordinary
life of teaching. He imagined it was something which would subside. But still he saw her face. All across the country as he
drove she was there before him. He saw the angle of her head as she turned to the violin, the sharpness of her elbow where
it bent below the fingerboard, the taut contracted muscles of her shoulder when she bowed the sharp fierce notes of “Winter.”
Crossing Westmeath he touched that shoulder with his mind and was surprised only that it did not stop the music in his head.

And all the time the progression was tumbling on, doubling, trebling in intensity within him as the car moved westward.

The west was a vast and soft wetness as he entered it. It was midday. The towns he drove through arose on the road after miles
of greenery, their small clusters of Massgoers hastening along with newspapers over their heads against the drizzle, or standing
in against the shop window and watching the strange car pass. There was a soft grey complacency everywhere, as if the people
were resolute in being undisturbed and guarded a kind of holy faith in mute sufferance and the continuing ordinariness of
their lives. They were towns scheduled for by-pass.

Stephen drove in a semi-trance. He did not turn on the radio but listened instead to the concert that was now inside him.
He tried to think of history, of Italy in the time of Vivaldi, of the city-state of Venice and the boats in the lagoon, the
long and troubled fable of the Doge, and the fragments he knew of Venetian wars, conspiracies, and betrayal. If he could think
of the history, if he could turn the pages of time and find in himself the dust of the past, he could make it home; if he
could refind the dry and ash-laden language of the dead, he could refind himself and escape the sweating in his palms on the
steering wheel, the throbbing in the left side of his temple, and the ceaseless drying of his lips. He wet them a thousand
times between Ballinasloe and Loughrea, and for all the dampness of the grey air outside, the wet face of the day that kept
sticking to the windscreen and would not be wiped away, his lips dried in an instant and then stung as if kissed by nettles.
He tried desperately to think of the history of Venice. What did he know of it? He shut tight his eyes to concentrate, and
opened them to swerve the car back onto the road. Venice, Venice. He couldn’t remember. He slowed the car to thirty and held
the wheel with his left hand, licking his lips and fingering with his right hand a place above his right eye, as if looking
for the switch that would return the past and free him from thinking of the woman. He was two miles outside Loughrea. The
mist was thickening into rain, and the car slowed until it was barely quicker than walking pace. The rain fell in a hush.
Stephen let out a small cry and the car stopped altogether in the middle of the road.

There was a tremendous green quietness. When he rolled down the window he could hear the rain falling in the old grass of
November. No bird was singing. He opened the window for air, but found none. Then he opened the driver’s door, lowering his
head as if to vomit and seeing in the rainwater pattern of the tarred road the squiggled shape of his own journey to understanding.
A life cannot go backward forever, and as he raised his head Stephen Griffin knew that he could not escape what had already
happened.

“I can’t remember, I can’t remember the books,” he said. He said it without excitement or panic, said it matter-of-factly,
as if cataloguing a comical loss that had already happened. He waited and wet his lips again. “What’s the name of the history
book for fifth years’?”

A pause; then he answered: “I don’t know, can’t remember. Book for third years’?” he asked, and then began to laugh. He laughed
until his shoulders were shaking.

The dimension of his defeat was enormous, as his father might have told him the previous evening studying the chess game.
When something of great size moves into the heart, it dislodges all else, in just the same way that the forward movement of
the queen reshapes the board. So, with the arrival of Gabriella Castoldi in his heart, Stephen Griffin had lost history, dates,
facts and figures that he had built his life around and that now on the wet road to Gort slipped from his mind and vanished
in the air. He knew nothing of history now.

It was an hour before he could drive on. Or at least so it seemed, for although no car came or went on the black wet ribbon
of the tar, time might have stopped for love. When Stephen drove on into Gort and across into Clare, he carried in the cage
of his chest the ease of accepting love, and felt it lightly there like a white bird of promise and hope. It was the most
ordinary thing, after all. It was the fulcrum of life, and if the years he had spent studying history had shown him that the
world turned not on love but on hatred and greed, then this was the new unwritten history of the marvellous, of which he himself
could be the author. The bird fluttered around the car as he drove; he was in love. It was all right. Love exists, he thought,
and drove with his head out the window of the car, banishing for the time being the multiple improbabilities of courtship
or requital, shaking the lank black strands of his hair in the rain and shouting a single long wavering vocable of hope as
he sped on homeward to the sea.

When he arrived, the bird was still flying inside him. He parked the car and walked immediately round the back of the house
and down the slope of the black rocks to the small shore. It was late afternoon. The tide was withdrawing towards the failing
light on the horizon, and gulls blew up like newspaper over the fields’ edge. Stephen walked on the wet rocks, and for the
first time in his life did not study his footsteps but moved with the sure inviolability of the lover, briefly certain that
the world would not trip him. With the tide out he could walk all the way around the rocky edge and arrive on the long beach
of Spanish Point. The sand when he stepped onto it was clean of footprints. The winter tide had erased the past, and Stephen
Griffin, walking in a long coat, his face wet with rain and sea spray, was the first and only of a new tribe. He set off down
the extravagant beach, where the roaring of the Atlantic was a ceaseless accompaniment and even the soft plashing of his shoes
on the shallow pools raised no sound. The sea was majestic in its tumbling and crashing, the size, the energy of it. Stephen
imagined he had never seen it before and walked with his head turned sideways, bursting out laughing at the riotous boisterousness
as the white surf was combed and ebbed in the froth of fulfillment. Rain ran down his face. He drank the saltiness on his
lips and skipped two steps, not quite dancing, but moving in a growing giddiness along the sand beneath the enormous sky.

“I’m in love,” he said. But the wind took his voice away.

“I’m in love with that woman,” he called out louder, feeling the terrible release of the words like a pain that was part of
healing. “I’m in love with her!” he cried again, only then discovering that the emotion was such that it would gather constantly
inside him and hurt like an ulcer until he cured it with confessions.

He had reached the far end of the beach when the rain stopped. Evening was drawing swiftly across the sky, and the seabirds
had vanished inland. In half an hour it would be darker than ink; already the line of the rocks was smudged into the sea and
sky, and Stephen would have to walk home around by the road. But he did not. He felt the bird flying in his chest and the
dazzlement of love making him lighter and brighter than nightfall. For the first time in his life he felt the radiance of
a pure and visionary faith. He was bright with enlightenment. It felt like a reckless surge of invincibility. He opened his
coat and took it off. Then he pushed off his shoes. Soon he was standing in his underpants in the dark on the beach at Spanish
Point, with the wind blowing off the sea cold against his skin. He walked forward into the frozen waves.

  When the young Dr. Hadja Bannerje sat on the edge of the bed and told Philip Griffin that he had advanced cancer in his left
lung and that the disease had spread into his bone marrow, the tailor received the news with no surprise and simply leaned
forward to ask how long.

“How long have I to live, Doctor?”

The Indian was unsure Philip had understood.

“It is widespread,” he said. “It is growing all the time.”

“How long? Tell me.”

“We can’t tell the time precisely. It is not exact.” He paused; the patient was waiting for more. “There is no science, Mr.
Griffin, for the passing of a spirit.”

“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

Dr. Bannerje looked at the old man and saw the watery signs of illness in his eyes.

“We’ll do more tests,” he said. “You can consider radiation, but in your case …”

“Will I have six months?”

“You must have terrible pain. There are many with less than your condition who are dead.”

“Will I have six months?”

The young Indian did not answer at once. He was twenty-nine years old and had come to Dublin from Bombay. The second son,
he was the one chosen to be the doctor, while his brother had taken over the small family shop. He had a stillness like white
linen folded inside him. But when he heard in the man’s tone the desperate beseeching for life, Hadja Bannerje felt the grief
rumple him like an illness of the stomach and acknowledged in himself the awfulness of reaching this place at the end of medicine.
This, he thought, is beyond the last page of all the books I have studied. This is a place further than prescription.

And yet it was familiar to him. His dark eyes turned to the thin curtain about the bed, and for a moment he was not seeing
it. He was a twelve-year-old boy seeing his mother when she was dying in the small bed in the back room with the candles lit
beside her. His father had moved out into the tiny bedroom of his sons and transformed what had once been the untidy room
of his marriage into the ordered and serene place of the dying. The old man had carried lotus and jasmine from the market
in his arms and filled bowls, jugs, and vases about the room so that the scent in the air was more heavy and beautiful than
sorrow. He had told Hadja death was coming, and the young boy had sat by the bedside waiting for it daily. His mother had
lost speech, but lay in the bed weeping and moaning continuously until the medication daily slipped her through the door of
oblivion and settled a small peace. When she awoke, two hours before she was allowed the next injection of the morphine, she
opened her eyes to see Hadja sitting there and began weeping at once. She could move her hands only in hopeless wavering gestures
that fell away from what they reached. Within minutes of her waking, the pain would burn through her again, and she would
cry and groan with it. He had thought she was trying to tell him something, and time and again leaned down to moisten her
dry and flaked lips and place his ear next to her mouth. But the message never came, she could make no words. Day after day
she lingered in that place between living and dying. His father threw out the flowers onto a growing heap in the back yard
and brought new ones, sitting through the night in that room where the pain kept coming back and death did not arrive. He
held her hand as he would a child’s crossing the road, but no crossing happened, only the agony inside her and the cries they
could not cure. She endured for five weeks and two days, and in that time Hadja, who had already been nominated a future doctor
by his father and his teacher, sat beside her bed and understood in her eyes that the beseeching was not for death but for
life. She could not let go despite the pain, and the waves of it that rode her body could not wash away that final resolve
to cling. His father had thought there was something she wanted to say to them, and had assembled the two boys, an aunt, and
two uncles by her bedside. The heat outside fell on Bombay like hell’s blanket, and the little group stood around the dying
woman waiting. Hadja’s father held a copybook and pencil to note down the slightest sounds that might have been curled-up
words. But there was only moaning and the human evidence of anguish. Sweat dripped off them, and the perfume of the flowers
made their heads swim. She might be trying to say goodbye to us, his father had said. But Hadja knew it was not that, and
when, after elaborate and suggestive goodbyes, the aunt and uncles had gone, he stayed by the bedside and watched his mother’s
milky eyes flash with the desperate longing for him to help her. She did not want to die, and threw her head backward and
forward on the feather pillow, crying out in terror when she saw the spirits in the room waiting to take her.