As It Is in Heaven (16 page)

“I won’t come in,” she called again into the wind, for the door was still held wide open and the weather was running through
the house like a party of drunken ghosts. “I found something,” she said. “Maybe she’s not there now, I don’t know.”

“Where?”

She held up a pamphlet that the wind-ghosts almost took.

“Kenmare,” she said, “in Kerry. She plays there. Or did, anyway.”

The teacher took the paper and looked at her. “Thank you,” he said.

She looked at him, and then could not look at him, as if his vulnerability and innocence in dreaming of love were a sweetness
so easily shattered that she dared not imagine it for long. “I have to go, Mr. Griffin,” she said.

He reached to touch her shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said.

And she was gone.

Stephen brought the piece of paper inside. He sat where the wind had been sitting in the low chair by the fireless chimney
and greedily read the words until he found her name. Gabriella Castoldi. What it was to read her name. What it felt like to
see the figuration in print and allow himself to imagine her now in the small gatherings of those letters. He touched them,
traced them, he sounded the name slowly,
Gabriella,
and then quickly, calling it softly at first and then getting up and walking through each room and calling it,
Gabriella,
as if summoning her there at the very moment that she was just leaving each room, as if her name was the first part of her
that he could claim in the privacy of that house by the sea and the saying of it was a kind of company that admitted without
rejection his outrageous declaring of love.
Gabriella.

He read aloud: “Gabriella Castoldi was a member of the Orchestra de la Teatro de la Fenice in Venice until recently moving
to Kenmare in County Kerry. She frequently performs in evenings of chamber music at The Falls Hotel.”

He read it and felt lighter, imagining the hotel and the evenings of chamber music deep in Kerry. He took the piece of paper
to his bedroom and lay down. He did not undress; he put his hands behind his great head and said Gabriella Castoldi, like
a whisper to the wind. He said it like a message. He said it like a signal and a code, as if the sounding of the words might
reach her wherever she was and that she might stop and turn her neck to the side, as if with the violin, and hear in the night
air the soft beating of wings that was the incipient approach of his spirit.
Gabriella.
He said it over and over, clinging to it like the almost drowned, so that even Mick Clancy, his neighbour across the fields,
heard it in mutated form in his dream and awoke to tell his wife, Nora, that the Angel Gabriel had announced something in
Italian in his head.

  The following morning Stephen drove the yellow car onto the flat-bottomed Killimer ferry to cross the river to Kerry. The
old boat tugged at the grey sleeve of the Shannon. Stephen got out of his car and climbed up onto the viewing deck. Seabirds
swung in the air overhead. As if by a conjuror’s trick, Kerry in front looked no different from Clare behind. As if the ferry
was forever to cross between two reflections, neither of them as frighteningly real as the places of the homeless and murdered
on the radio. Green fields sloped sleepily to the grey river. It was late November. There were no tourists on the ferry, only
a milk tanker and the washed cars of a couple of salesmen who were talking on telephones in the middle of the river. The crossing
took thirty minutes, but seemed longer. Away from school, Stephen felt the slow energy of the countryside seeping into him
like a potion. There was a gentle easiness, an unhurried ordinariness in the waving of the ferryman as he directed the cars
off on the other side. Even the little line of their traffic moved into Kerry with the slow grace of wanderers, not business
people. In the small town of Tarbert women were stopped and talking. A butcher stood at his doorway. Stephen slowed down.
He had awoken that morning with the urgency of arriving in Kenmare, but now, when he had moved beyond the habitual perimeters
of his own life, he felt the wonderful ordinariness of the market towns he drove through: the shopping and talking, the women
who slipped like breezes from the church after weekday Mass, the buying of carrots from parked vans, the saluting of friends,
nods and laughter, gossip, deals, and the talk of funerals that moved the world along. By the time he had driven fifty miles
into Kerry, Stephen Griffin had begun to learn the small history of life, the unchronicled plain fable of the everyday in
which until that morning he had not taken part.

When he stopped the car for petrol at a small station on the side of the road, a short man in a suit and hat came out to serve
him. He was sixty years old, and the absence of any teeth gave his smile the air of a deflated football.

“Lovely weather,” he mouthed, taking the pump.

Stephen looked up; it was not raining, but the sky was broken.

“Oh, it’s coming,” said the man, and moistened his sunken lips at the prospect. “Nice as summer this week coming.”

“I see.”

“Not yet you don’t, but you will.” He paused and grinned a gaping toothlessness at the sky. “I’m not wrong,” he added cheerfully.
“You’ll be coming back this way?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Well. I mean, yes, I will.”

“You stop in and tell me if I wasn’t right. Lovely weather.” He turned his head at a slight angle to himself as if hearing
an inaudible broadcast, and then resumed pumping the petrol.

The petrol gagged at the tank, and the old man stopped and hung up the pump.

“I’m Martin O’Sullivan. You never heard of me, I suppose?”

Stephen said nothing. The man smiled at the vastness of the world and the decreasing smallness of himself in it.

“No,” he said, “you did not.” And he left it at that, taking the fifteen pounds for the petrol and adding nothing of his own
story, the fading fable of how once he had held the world record for holding his breath and imagined that the vast populations
of everywhere admired him for it.

He waved off the car and watched it go into Killarney and the mountains. Then he walked back to the small seat inside the
door of the shop, to watch the world becoming smaller and the wonderful weather arriving in the sky.

It was late afternoon by the time Stephen drove the winding road out of Killarney past the lakes and into the mountains. Here
was a road with no shop or houses, a rising thread of grey through the thickening greenery and the rock. Streams ran across
the roadway and fell farther towards the mirrors of the lakes below. It was a road in fairyland. A timeless way out of the
pages of children’s tales. It wound like a spell, climbing all the time through a green hush that was older than Aesop. That
November afternoon there were no cars ahead of Stephen or behind him. He was driving so slowly that arrival seemed to move
ahead of him uncertainly. He rolled down the window and felt the cool air like a damp lusciousness enter the car. It was as
if he were moving barefoot in deep undergrowth, and the smell of pine had cleared his mind to a serene vision of Gabriella
playing the violin. He did not know that he was driving now in the places where she had walked, or that sometimes she had
played the violin high among the trees on the sides of those mountains. He did not know it, but heard nonetheless in the thin
purity of the air the notes that she had left.

In that verdant and ancient loveliness the yellow car crawled on, moving through a place where it was less difficult to believe
there was a spirit that loved the world.

At half past four in the afternoon Stephen arrived in Kenmare. He drove down off the mountains with a falling mist closing
in behind him. By the time he arrived at the top corner of the triangular town, the mountains themselves had disappeared,
like the toys of God. Drifts of soft drizzle moved in the air, dampened the pink faces of the townspeople, and made their
radios crackle. He had no idea exactly where to go. He walked along the footpath, past the shops, his heart fluttering with
the bird within him. He tried to amble, to walk with pretend interest along the street, while all the time anxiety roiled
his stomach. It was only when he was already out of the car and walking in Kenmare that the possibility of meeting Gabriella
on the street dawned on him. He stopped and tried to swallow the sharp pieces of his panic; he thought of retreating, acting
a small pantomime of forgetting something and urgently running back along the path. Having driven a hundred miles, he was
suddenly terrified to meet her. What if she was there in front of him, walking her shopping home? An appalling sense of the
outlandishness of it froze him to the ground; of seeing a woman play a violin and then dropping everything, abandoning a life
and driving off like a latter-day Lancelot into the mountains to see her again. He had a surging sense of the absurd anachronism
of romance, of its implausible and obsolete currency in the world, as though it belonged to ancient history and, along with
words like Valour and Honour and Truth, was credible only in fables. His black hair fell down in front of his eyes as he studied
around his feet the running rain stains that looked like maps of lost countries. He stood there in his thick coat and told
himself again that he was not there to speak with her, that he had come because he wanted to hear her play again, because
he wanted to watch her, and in that watching was a kind of healing he could not explain. He reasoned it in a slow argument
like a practising solicitor and tried to climb the specious rungs of logic until it did not seem absurd.

He was standing, arguing the case of himself, when Nelly Grant saw him from the vegetable market across the street. When he
moved off the wet space he had been standing in and walked down the path again, she saw the strange hesitation in his manner,
the way he shuffled along half-turned from the people coming against him, and was at once suspicious of his contorted energy.

A man like that, she thought, needs plums.

It was another twenty minutes before he arrived back up the other side of the street to her shop. Later, Stephen would tell
himself that he had stepped in the door because it was open and not because he wanted fruit. But the moment he appeared before
her Nelly Grant already recognized in the twisted shambles of his body the jangling and unaccommodated condition of his spirit.
All his organs are in deep stress, she thought, and smiled at him as he fingered an apple on the side of the stack.

“Quiet time of year for a visit,” she said across to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“Taking a small holiday? It’s a good time for it. Kenmare is too busy now in the summers. Though I shouldn’t be complaining,
should I? But it’s nice and quiet now. You’ll get a nice few days if the mist lifts. Which it will too, I’d say.” She paused
and looked at him. “Try a few plums,” she suggested lightly, and raised her eyebrows with her voice as if approaching a delicate
bridge between them. “Try one, they’re lovely. Taste of autumn in them.”

And he did. He bit the plum, and lifted his head for the first time as the juice ran down his chin.

It’s worse still, thought Nelly Grant when she saw the egg-yolk hue of his tongue and the lifeless colour of his teeth. She
had to turn for a moment to the shelf behind the counter where she kept the vitamin and mineral supplements. She moved two
jars of A and E and recalled it was Tuesday last since she had checked her own tongue for the pinkness of her life force.

“I need …”

“Yes?” She turned, like luck.

Stephen scratched his forehead, and small skin cells flaked falling in the shop light. He looked to the right in a loop of
hesitation, but Nelly Grant came forward and with her the affirming scent of cinnamon oil that was burning in pottery by the
register.

The loop unknotted.

“I need someplace to stay.”

“Oh yes,” said Nelly. “Well, there’s still a few places that stay open all year round. I have a card here for …” She turned
to the crowded noticeboard behind her, but stopped when the man behind her spoke.

“There’s a hotel here,” he said. His voice was skipping like a record and he had to swallow hard before he added quickly,
“It’s called … The Falls, The Falls Hotel.”

“That’s right.” Nelly Grant turned and looked at him, detecting only now the burden of secrecy he carried.

“I don’t want to go there. Not stay there. I mean I just—It’s not far, is it?”

“Oh no. It’s just up the street,” she said.

“Right. That’s fine. Thank you. There’s em …” Stephen felt his transparency like a face blemish and half-turned towards the
door while Nelly Grant blew the scent of the cinnamon softly forward once more. “There is, there are … em … concerts there
sometimes?”

“Oh, there are,” she said.

“Good. Good.” He nodded and drew breath like the drowning, and it was a few moments before he realized that he was standing
at a shop counter but had nothing to buy.

“Do you want this, it’s Mary White’s place. Very nice and comfortable,” said Nelly Grant, holding out the card. “It’s not
far from the hotel,” she added, already a half-conspirator in the plot of his loving.