As It Is in Heaven (21 page)

“Well,” he said at last to his wife. “This might go quicker than I thought, love.” And then, with a sudden but muddled enlightenment
that perhaps Christmas was to be somehow significant, that patterns ancient as creation make meaning of our days, he added,
“I'll go to Toby Madigan's for cloth. I'll make him a suit.”

And so that morning, without his painkiller, Philip drove into Dublin and left God the extra bonus of £345 behind the railings,
before walking over to the brown dust-snowed premises of Tobias Madigan, & Son. It was Son he dealt with. Son was already
a grandfather, but his son had decided to be the retail manager of a branch in a cheap clothing chain and the old shop had
been left to fade into the line of other buildings that were the ragged endpieces of the street's memory moments before renovation
took it away. Son answered the door when Philip knocked. He was all neck wattles and loose skin; he had an air of sagging,
as if he were a cloth man or his bones had already preceded him into the next life. He knew Philip Griffin when he saw him
and raised the shallow purses beneath his watery eyes as a greeting. “Ah, Phil,” he said, “long time.”

When the tailor told him what he wanted, Son drew him into the back room, where they walked across newspapers that Time had
worked into the floor and reached the bolts of material that Son brushed left to right with a flimsy hand. He was famous once
in Dublin for the quality of his cloth, in the vanished era when such things mattered.

“What about some of this?” he said, drawing out a yard of navy-blue material that was the fabric he had sold to his last customer,
the minister, almost two years earlier and before his appearance at the first Tribunal.

Philip felt it for texture and made a few short tugs between thumb and forefinger, as if teasing the cloth for weakness, the
way life does a man. He held the material sideways to the slant of low light that fell diffused through the grimy window and
then said he would take it. When Son was measuring and cutting, Philip waited in the front room, which had once been busy
enough to keep three salesmen when Prendergast had sent the young tailor across the river to buy more cloth. He stood where
he had stood as a young man and felt the heaviness of the years. Then, as he took the cloth, folded in brown paper wrapping
and tied with twine, he felt come on again the sharp pain of the cancer. He left the old shop quickly, saying goodbye to Tobias
Madigan's son as if not wanting to delay the old man's imminent departure into ghosthood and squeezing gently the offered
palm of his hand like a cool white handkerchief damp with tears.

The pain turned inside him as he walked back to his car. It seemed larger than his insides, in the same way that the immensity
of our sorrows dwarfs the smallness of our hearts. His breathing was lumpy, his throat was swollen inwards, and he could not
draw inside him the cool air of the December noon. He had to lean against a wall.

Oh God, he thought, not now. Not here. He saw his hand against the grey building, how it appeared like a freckled fallen bird,
useless, trembling with last life. He turned and saw people walking past him. He imagined with brief cruelty against himself
the thought of those who had found his money now passing by and his dying against the wall and falling on the cloth of Stephen's
unmade suit. His faith wavered and buckled like thin metal in heat; was there no pact after all? Was nobody listening? He
reached the knot of his tie with his left hand and pulled it back for air. His right hand clutched at his stomach. He was
going to die right there, and then suddenly, like light breaking, the pain eased once more.

He made it to his car and drove home for his lunchtime painkiller.

In the afternoon, when the medication had twirled the air about him into a white fuzz like candy floss, Philip opened the
cloth out onto the carpet in the front room. Then he lay down upon it. His son was nothing like himself, they were different
as tweed and cotton, but in lying on the blue cloth the father could imagine its shape upon his son. He knew Stephen's dimensions
chiefly in relation to his own and held out invisible extensions of his arms to the six extra inches in length that measured
the unreachable hands of his son. He marked the cloth without use of a tape measure, turning over on the ground and bringing
his face so close to the fabric that he could smell the shop forty years earlier, when he had gone there as an apprentice.
To save his ruined muscles Philip rolled over to get up. This would be the last suit he would make, and in the silence of
the empty house on that darkening December afternoon, he wished to make it better than any he had before. This was to be the
last testament of his skill and craft, the final expression of the many years spent cutting and shaping cloth, suiting the
city's men in the good-looking fabrics that not only dressed the body but, through some ancient magic of tailoring, bestowed
grace, too. This was to be the last one, the last Philip Griffin, and he took the thirty-year-old scissors and slipped it
like a surgeon into the thin veins of the cloth. He did not snip; he moved the scissors with an even confidence, making the
first cuts with that quality of assurance that he knew transferred itself directly into the finished garment.

For Stephen, his father wanted the suit to be the shadow of himself. When he cut out the arms he wanted them to be his own
and laid them in gestured embrace across the chest of the unmade jacket, hoping that the tenderness he felt in working on
the cloth would become part of the suit and forever evident to his son, that the failings and remoteness of his fatherhood
would be forgiven and redeemed in this tailoring that was to be his last gift to Stephen.

He switched on the light over his head and worked on while the headlamps of cars coming home arced across the window like
searchlights for love. He worked on into the evening, lying down on his back when his knees locked and delivering a series
of short blows to them with his two fists until they loosened and he could kneel like a priest to the work once more. He worked
on until the pain knotted up again and he had to stop and wait for the tablet to work. It was while he was sitting there,
feeling the now familiar dissolve inside him and the medication taking the pain to someplace beyond Dublin, that the doorbell
rang.

Philip left the cloth on the ground and went to answer it. He was the kind of man who expected that only calamity could make
the doorbell ring late in the evening, and was surprised when he saw the thin figure of Hadja Bannerje standing at the door.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said, “I was wondering how you were doing.”

The Indian was younger than Stephen. He had come from the hospital to find the dying man because he could not forget how the
old patient had told him of his son being in love, and because the tailor had mentioned Dr. Tim Magrath. He had come, too,
for reasons he did not yet understand, some part of that submerged algebra of our actions that makes obtuse and elaborate
relation between X, the absence of his own father in India, and Y, the man wanting to live a little longer for his son. He
came into the front room, where the cloth was cut out and the sewing machine had been uncased, and when Philip Griffin told
him that he was making a suit for Stephen, Hadja Bannerje made a small bow, acknowledging the act as something true and correct
in the unclear workings of the world. He sat down and saw the chess game laid out on the side table.

For a few moments the tailor said nothing. He sat in the chair across the room with the suit on the ground between them. He
lowered his head and ran his hand up over it, as if smoothing the ghosts of his vanished hair. He was fearful for a while
that the Indian had come to tell him the tests had revealed something new, and only when the silence had settled like old
spirits between them did he look across the space. Hadja Bannerje was waiting.

“You have not heard the news of Dr. Magrath,” said the Indian.

Philip felt a chill on the back of his neck. Here it was, calamity after all.

“He died this afternoon.”

When I should have, thought Philip Griffin, when I was fallen against the wall and it passed over. Oh God.

Silence clotted the air with the unsayable sorrow. Philip Griffin was painted in a stained wash of guilt and put his hands
beneath his chin to keep his head from falling. He felt the old unworthiness of those who survive and the loss of the man
who had helped him.

“I am sorry, to tell you,” said Hadja. “I remember you mentioned his name.”

“Yes.”

“It was heart failure. He was dead in his home.”

Tim Magrath's heart had failed so long before, thought the tailor. He held his head like an iron weight and breathed the short,
shallow breaths of upset, until his visitor asked him could he make him a cup of tea.

“No. No, thank you.” A small emptiness, and then, lifting his spirit with weary effort into the lightweight world of politeness,
Philip asked, “Would you like one?”

“No. Not for me, thank you very much, Mr. Griffin.”

“Right.”

The two men sat still in the late evening. The doctor was wearing a pale green raincoat, and with his arms folded and his
face restful, he dwelt in such apparent ease that it did not seem necessary to speak.

It was some time before the tailor noticed him looking over at the chess game.

“Do you play?” Philip asked him.

“This is a vulnerable position.”

“Yes.” He nodded to the truth. “My son is White. You can see what he is like. But he's a fine player most of the time.” Philip
stood up and went over to the board. “Would you like to play a game?”

“This is not finished,” said the Indian. “You don't want to disturb it.”

But already the older man was taking the pieces and resetting them to begin. “I have it memorized,” he said, and lifted the
suit cloth from the floor and laid it aside and drew his chair closer.

And so they played. It was past ten o'clock. A glittering cold was falling on the unwalked paths and stilled driveways of
Dublin, where the windscreens of cars went blind with ice. Television light died away and families were curtained into sleep
while the doctor and the tailor played a game of chess. Hadja was an accomplished player; he had been gifted with that quality
of deep patience and forbearance which characterize the ultimately victorious, and which allowed him to suffer many losses
without ever losing sight of his long-term goal. He took the capture of his king's knight without the slightest expression
of sorrow, and neither did he rejoice when, almost an hour later, he won Philip Griffin's queen's bishop in a forked move
on the king's side. It was the game and not the men that spoke. Positions and counter-positions of the pieces flowed between
them as its own language, and in that exchange both men got to know each other in a way that would scarcely have been possible
in the three hours the game lasted. In that playing each man revealed his own suffering and small triumphs; the chess game
mirrored perfectly the pattern of life, and showed in the gradual dwindling of pieces the ceaseless exhausting of energy that
is the action of time.

When Philip Griffin could see more board than pieces, it was already one o'clock in the morning. He was a slow player who
did not believe in the constraints of a stop-clock. Although, by that hour, he was aware of the hopelessness of his position,
he did not consider resigning. He liked the game played out to its end, for even the coming of the inevitable had a certain
beauty. His only gesture at resistance was that, with the Indian about to checkmate him in four moves, he took longer and
longer over his turn, gazing down at the checked timber forever, until at last Hadja Bannerje looked over at him and, seeing
the transfixed expression of a dream, realized that his opponent was soundly asleep.

  Gabriella Castoldi walked with Stephen Griffin into the night, unaware that it was the transforming moment of her life or
that the farfetched and wildest happenstance could sometimes be the inevitable. She took his arm when they reached the night
air. He is shaking like a tree on fire, she thought, and steadied herself against him, walking out through the grounds of
the hotel to where a river waterfall was lit brilliant and white, the last expression of mountain streams as they jabbered
in the swollen throat of the river running down into the free translation of the sea.

They were mismatched: his long legs and arms, the extra foot of his stride he had to keep shortening, the loom of his head
over hers that made him seem craning, crooked, slowing and then towing her, all combined to make them seem oddly paired, a
knee- and an ankle-sock out walking. The spray came up to meet them. Immediately their faces were wet.

“I love this,” she said and, letting go his arm, stepped towards the bank of the rushing water and opened her mouth wide to
meet the spray. She was a slight figure in a grey wool coat. Her hair was pulled back and lost in the collar, and the light
off the water found the vulnerable places above the angles of her cheekbones. She stood and he waited three feet behind her.
He had no idea what to do. Gabriella looked back at him.