As It Is in Heaven (20 page)

She stood there. She stood there in the green velvet dress, and he imagined he could sense the Adriatic and the sunlight in
the skin of her shoulders. She was as different as Venice, and when she spoke again, giving him words like fruit in her rounded
and softly bruised English, he had to try hard not to reach out and touch her.

“We play tomorrows,” she said. “There will be maybe more people.”

“I don't care.” The idiot was making his words into flurried, pauseless gasps now. “I mean I don't … if nobody comes I will
be … You might prefer to play with more people … but I could pay more for … not that it's the money, you … But I …”

And there the words ran out and he was tongue-tied and trussed with a glittering crown of sweat falling from his forehead.

“No.” She touched his arm once more, as if she were a balm. “It doesn't matter. I like to play,” she said, moving a step back
from him, this strange, anguished man with the stiffly bent wire of his emotions piercing his insides. “Bye-bye.”

She was already walking towards the door with her violin when the idiot freed him and Stephen could whisper after her, “I
will be here,” closing his eyes and lifting his heart to repeat it louder, “I will be here,” and causing Gabriella Castoldi
to stop at the doorway and look back at him one last time before she said bye-bye again and was gone.

  She did not even know his name. And yet when Stephen rose from the bed he had not slept in the following morning and opened
the window on the continuing blue-bright and balmy summer of the first day of December, he felt the force of goodness moving
in the world. He sensed the sweet energy of regeneration and bloom, the tenderness of light, the majesty of birdsong, and
all the rapturous gladness and wonder that were the familiar quick-pulsed delights of those who since time immemorial have
fallen in love. He was the Hollywood version of himself, the more handsome, white-shirted, and well-proportioned man singing
while he shaved and finding that the perfect clean lines of his blemishless skin revealed no cuts and only the immaculate
smoothness of his own face. Everything was charged, loaded with a richness of sensation: the water he splashed on himself,
the scent of the witch hazel and aloe vera in the lotion, the peppermint in the toothpaste. Music should have been playing.
And was when he arrived in the small dining room, where Mary White was bringing him his breakfast.

It was a micro-season of happiness, a blissed-out moment of abandoned candlelight, and Stephen Griffin could sit at the table
in the brief pleasure of knowing: This is joy, this is the richness of things, the brimming sense of the impossible becoming
real, when the Hollywood version of himself might have danced about the table and taken Mary White in his arms, spinning her
in loops of gaiety, fox-trotting and cha-cha-chaing out through the French doors and into the garden that even then exploded
with fireworklike blossoms of orange and gold. There was tenderness in the sunlight and, in the gentleness of the air of that
house that morning, a kind of clemency, as if the past had been swept softly with a horsehair brush and the lines of grief,
disappointment, and failure were blurred now into the faded and waterpainted corners of the paper.

She had spoken to him.

Gabriella Castoldi had spoken to him, and for whatever came afterwards, whatever lay in the crisscrossed double-knotted stitching
of the plot, and despite the reflex habitual expectation he had of everything in his life ending like a useless, lost thread
that fitted nowhere in the fabric, Stephen Griffin was that morning briefly illumined with faith and calm in his heart, though
he balanced precariously on the fast and silver needle of love.

He did not think of the way ahead. The morning gifted him with a blind optimism that was partly the confusion of his body
following the sleepless moon-night, and he did not consider anything beyond that evening and seeing Gabriella play again.
No thought of the following week lodged in his mind; Mrs. Waters and the school were not there, nor the enquiries she had
already made about his father's health and the growing impatience and suspicion that were mounting in her mind, causing her
to hear the morning news on the radio with the stiff cold porridge of dread in her mouth, certain that her history teacher
would at any moment be covered in a bright red scandal and discovered in bed with another man. Neither this, nor any of the
dull cautionary counsel of ordinary life that scorns and mocks romance, tells you you cannot leave your job and get in the
car and go to Kerry to hear a woman play a violin, that you cannot walk out of your life like that on a whim, on a feeling,
no, none of this did Stephen Griffin consider.

When he walked into Kenmare that morning, Nelly Grant sensed him coming. The town was in the sleepy aftermath of the party
for the Man Who Releases the Balls and no custom had yet arrived for the Saturday traders at the top of the triangle. Stephen's
stride was slaphappy and easy, and when he entered the shop he radiated the manic intensity that is shared by the hopelessly
lost and the recently found. Nelly had known sometime in the night that his spirit was well, for the stillness of the moonlight
foretold it, she believed, holding to the fairy credo that the energy of her principal clients was always reflected in the
skies that they drew like children's paintings above them. It was an unproven but certain fact, she reckoned, that people
make their own weather, that you could hold a grey cloud motionless in the air above you simply by the predisposition of your
character towards the negative ions of depression. Look, she would say, at Connemara, and tell me it's not true.

When Stephen was three feet in front of her, he smelled like lilies, and this despite the aromatic display of oranges and
lemons that filled the counter and the burning oil of rosewood in the dish beside the register. It was the scent of Gabriella
Castoldi. And when Nelly caught it, opening her eyes wide as she drew it in, she knew the depth of feeling into which Stephen
had alien and remarked silently to herself how she must sometime write down the wisdom of that mystery: how we come to smell
of those we love and can carry them like the smallest ghosts in the infinity of our pores.

“You are well today,” she said, raising a lemon to her face and breathing the sharpness of its fragrance for clarity.

“You are a wonderful woman,” Stephen said. “I feel very well.”

“The concert was good?” She did not need to ask him, but wanted to hear in the timbre of his voice the inflection of the spirit.

“There was almost nobody there. Ha!” He laughed despite himself, thinking about it. “Well, she was. They both were. He played
the piano, she …”

And the words were gone, vanished on the moment when he was about to speak of her and leaving him to fall into the whiteness
of space, where his praise and yearning went, unsayable and vast. His Adam's apple, large as a Granny Smith, plunged and rose
in the narrow and ropey confines of his gorge.

“Sit down in there. Drink this,” Nelly told him.

“What is it?” he asked her as she was stepping past him towards the ash-blond and supercilious figure of Helena Cox, the forty-five-year-old
wife of the twenty-six-year-old butcher, Francie, who was just then entering the shop.

“Water. Good morning, Helena.”

“Isn't the weather so unpredictable?” said the butcher's wife, looking about for the disappeared man she knew was there. She
had seen him come in all week from her window across the street and only now managed to arrive across in time before he left.
Her face fell twelve years when she realized she had missed him.

“Like all of us,” said Nelly, taking with the smallest of smiles the net bag of Brussels sprouts that Helena held and which
she knew were not the vegetable that the bound bowels of the Coxes needed. When the customer was gone, moving slowly with
heavy weights of suspicion about the thickness of her ankles, Nelly Grant returned to Stephen in the backroom.

“She thinks you're having an affair with me,” she said, folding her arms on the warmth of herself and beaming at the man who
was gulping the water and gazing on the air. “She senses love, though she doesn't know it. She has not found it with the butcher
and is afraid somebody else might have found some.”

“I want something,” Stephen said. “I want something to help keep this, this.” He gestured at the air about himself as though
there were visible a cloud.

“Strawberries,” she said. “Fruit of optimism.” And handed him a punnet she had bought at the morning market in Cork.

  Darkness fell at four o'clock. It was the first day of December, and when the sunlight was thinned out like beaten metal in
the mid-afternoon the fog floated in like fine wrapping. The air smelled of wool and herbs, and might have slipped the town
into fairytale sleep had it not been for the iron clatter of Guinness barrels, the last delivery between the mountains, and
the twin Keogh brothers carting crates of empties that cackled with remembered delight like false teeth come alive.

Meanwhile, the town readied itself for Saturday night; it held its breath and did the small jobs. It hurried around the yard,
it checked the football scores and ate its bread and butter and its slice of curranty brack, hearing the nightly tragedies
on the news with mute and impotent anger, before washing its face, putting on a clean shirt, and going to stand outside seven
o'clock Mass. By the time Father Moriarty was giving out Communion to the variously odoured breaths of his congregation, the
pulse of the town had quickened, and for the first of the escapees, who had drifted away on the last word of the Gospel, the
porter was already filling pint glasses on mahogany counters.

When Stephen walked out into the night, it was like walking into a pillow. He had to hold his face upward towards the obscured
moon to find air. Scarves of fog entwined the mountains. When he arrived at the hotel, Maurice Harty on the door gave him
a nod like a movie spy; the same girl was at Reception, and while she gave him his ticket she told him with deep self-pity
that the crack at the previous night's computer bingo had supposedly been Unreal.

There were forty people for the concert. He sat in the third row in the aisle seat and did not take his eyes off Gabriella
from the moment she entered in a blue dress.

While she bowed the thousand notes, she saw and heard nothing else, and neither the polite applause nor the coughing fit that
took one of the elder Donoghue sisters moved her from the far country of the music. It was only between the pieces that she
sometimes glanced down at the audience, turning the sheet music with her bow hand and looking briefly at the faces of those
astonished to have found such a musician playing in the hotel. It was in those moments that she looked for the face of Stephen
Griffin and found him there in the third row looking at her. She saw him and he looked away, and before she had drawn breath
to begin the Kreisler, she was already moved by him. A quality of longing in his look pierced her, and as she pressed into
her chin rest, she had to steady herself against the suddenness of feeling. (Although she did not know it yet, there was common
ground between them, for Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of
despair. Neither did she realize yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and
that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow
like a brother of our own.) She did not think of this yet. She played the Kreisler. She played the Elgar after that, and did
not look down at him again until the concert was over. Then, as unexpectedly as life, Gabriella Castoldi walked down amongst
the chairs and the departing audience to Stephen Griffin and asked him if he would like to walk out into the fog with her.

  When the salt-smelling letter of Eileen Waters arrived at his house, demanding to know the whereabouts of Stephen and stressing
his responsibilities to his students, Philip Griffin realized the love affair must be progressing. He felt the pain less keenly
that morning and thanked God for keeping their bargain while he skipped the first tablet of his day. By eleven o'clock the
pain that was overdue had still not arrived in his insides, and he stood by the front window looking out on the tranquillity
of the suburban street for a sign of anything changed in the world. But there was nothing. The chestnut tree was bare and
hung its limbs in the still air above the green pentagon of lawn. A few women and old men walked by to the shops.