As It Is in Heaven (30 page)

“Everything,” she said, “is not up to us. The thing is, Gabriella, to care for the child, Yes?” she said, and sounded almost
in echo of Maria Feri as she pressed her warm palm on the woman's stomach.

Now in the new day Gabriella sat in the kitchen, where the door was open to the view of the mountains and the birds came and
went across the dew-silvered grass. The air was fresher than in Venice, and the pale blue of the sky seemed the colour of
mercy. The calm Gabriella felt was like the furled bud of the season, and for the first time that morning she dared to imagine
it flowering. Imagine, she thought, imagine just for a moment it could be perfect.

She opened the case of her violin and, as if for many children, born and unborn, she played her music out the cottage door.

  There was a small congregation at the funeral of Philip Griffin. Snow flurried in the air. The roads were iced and the limbs
of the trees beseeching. A little cluster of old men in well-cut coats and felt hats stood at the graveside like last sentries,
watching the disappearance underground of another of their world and time. The son of Tobias Madigan was there. He gripped
Stephen's hand with gloved fingers and held his eyes with his as if he glimpsed there the retreating figure of Philip Griffin
skating away across the immaculate ice of the heavens. Then he released the hand and said, “He was a good man. A lot of good
men are gone now.”

One man was not wearing a long overcoat. Hadja Bannerje was muffled in wool hat and scarf and a thick anorak. He stepped forward
only when the others had gone.

“I know you very well,” he said. “I am so very very sorry, Stephen.” The snow fell across them. He held out a hand and Stephen
took it, and in that moment Hadja Bannerje felt he understood something of the mystery of our connectedness, of how the old
man's life had longed for some redemption, for the passing to his son of an immeasurable and secret grace, which now, at that
moment, by the crazy mechanism of the world through which one person's life touches anothers, Hadja Bannerje himself was empowered
to bestow.

“I must tell you how your father loved you,” he said simply.

The light snow flew about. Stephen looked down at the fresh earth and felt the loss grow huge inside him. The last time he
had seen his father was when he left for the airport in the blue suit. “He wanted you to be happy,” said the Indian. “It is
what all fathers want. You should not be sad.”

Stephen stood there. He looked up into the snow sky and felt the pieces of it fall into his eyes.

“I am sorry I did not come to see him,” he said quietly. “I did not even know.”

“Don't regret it. He saw you,” said Hadja. “He saw you in Venice, he told me so in the hospital. It was better you did not
come. He died a happy man.”

Later, they returned to the house, and the Indian doctor sat in the room where the last chess game was still apparent. Stephen
brought him tea as if Hadja were his father, and was astonished to find that since he had last played, his position in the
game had been greatly improved.

“Your father played your moves,” said Hadja. “I am afraid I played his.”

Stephen sat in his usual chair, and while the clock ticked in the hallway, the tears fell down his face. They fell in the
dead stillness of the early afternoon in that suburban house where a long, ordinary everyday tale of grief and longing and
regret had finally ended, where the last shadow seemed to have fallen. The queen's knight's pawn, which had been unremarkable
and forlorn, was now moved forward, until it arrived at the seventh rank of the board, threatening to transform defeat into
victory.

“He kept on moving that white pawn,” said the doctor. “I was distracted from it. Now it is hopeless for Black.” He smiled
and tapped the palms of his hands softly beneath his chin.

The afternoon died away, but Stephen Griffin did not turn on the light. The companionship of the other man touched him in
a way he had not experienced in his adult life. The silence was soothing, like the deep blankets of a morning bed. And in
the dying half-light of the snowy afternoon, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the figure of the other man across
the chessboard became the figure of Philip Griffin, as it became, too, for Hadja Bannerje, the figure of his father, whom
he had heard from his brother in Bombay was dying now from a slow disease in his bloodstream.

And in that time, that grey and easeful afternoon while the two men sat after the funeral in the old armchairs and said almost
nothing, there was something like peace shared between them. The pawn at the seventh rank did not need to be moved forward.
The board faded into the dimness and floated away, and the snow fell. It fell forever out of the Dublin nighttime, and was
falling still when at last Hadja Bannerje stood up and shook Stephen's hand again and said goodbye and that they must see
each other again. And Stephen agreed and said that he would like that very much, and then opened the door and watched the
muffled doctor print his footsteps out the driveway and away, vanishing into the blown and falling flurries of the snow, and
(although Hadja did not know it yet) out of Stephen Griffin's life forever, as, three days later, Hadja would leave Dublin
to return to his father in India.

  In the days that followed, Stephen lived in the house and journeyed through the places of regret and loss, until he became
aware that he was gradually feeling more love than grief. The face of Gabriella appeared in his mind, and he knew now that
the loving of her was centrally connected to the meaning of his world. The air lightened. He opened all the windows, and the
house whistled with a steady music. The clarity of the notes was remarkable, and as the wind rose and fell in the giddy and
capricious games of early spring, the spirits of the dead Griffins danced. All the memories of the house nudged Stephen as
he came and went on the stairs and in the hallway, carrying boxes of books and papers. He paused a half dozen times on each
journey, bewildered, until slowly he became accustomed to the presence of the reunited family, the strange harmonious sense
of them all together there in the house. He remembered more than he remembered he had forgotten, then discovered for himself
the truth that nothing of life vanishes completely but can be recovered whole from the past. It was like memories of kisses
on the skin. So, in three bright, wind-polished days of early February, when light snow came and went on the air and the music
of Puccini played without being switched on, Stephen was joined in the house by Mary his sister, Anne his mother, and Philip
his father. The many persons of himself were there, too. He was himself at age four watching his father in the hallway on
the evening his parents were going out to the Rathmines Opera. His father wore a black suit and a scent of sweet oil as he
hummed an air to the hall mirror. His mother's shoes came down the stairs, slipping slightly on the carpet, they were so light
and thin and silvery. He was himself at eight looking at his sister sleeping; he was ten and at the kitchen table while his
mother served skinless white boiled potatoes and peas alongside slivers of roast beef that were islands in gravy; he was hearing
the first cello notes from Mary's quarter-sized cello in the front room, where the wallpaper was the same still and where
the family had smiled watching her, and he had passed jealousy and rivalry and felt simply the visit of a communal happiness.
All of himself was there in the house, and all of the others, too. And the more they were present, the lighter was the burden
of grief, until it lifted up and floated away altogether, disappearing down the road like a noxious yellow cloud, to be blown
into another household, visiting it like a sour priest and smelling of bitter lemons.

  Two days later Stephen left the house. He took his father's car. He put the Puccini in the boot and the folded-up, faded chessboard
with the little box of pieces.

For a week the snow had dusted upon the windows of the house, but when Stephen came out and walked down the garden beneath
the chestnut tree there was no whiteness on the ground. For a moment he thought it might be some weird meteorological condition
and that the snow was falling only about their own house, but then realized that the snow was falling only, it was not alighting.
It lived in the air and vanished into the ground, like a spirit.

Stephen drove away from Dublin a last time and headed west on the road where already he was thinking of Gabriella and where
the air was too warm for snow. He drove the Galway road towards a bright sky, and in the early afternoon turned off at Loughrea
to head down into Clare. Past noon the day had begun to leak a little of its brilliance, the colour thinning and the line
between land and air blurred. Bits of sky had fallen on the fields. And by two o'clock on the road out of Loughrea there were
low white spumes of mist scattered here and there inside the stone walls. In that sleeping landscape Stephen thought of Gabriella
and in his mind played a passage he remembered of the Vivaldi “Summer.” By the time he passed the sign that welcomed visitors
to County Clare, the interior of the car was deeply perfumed once more with the scent of lilies.

Then, by the bad bend at Crusheen, Stephen misjudged the sharpness of the curve and briefly threatened to hit the wall of
the bridge at speed. At the last moment he managed to save himself, just. He pulled the car over beneath the hedgerows. His
face glistened, and he brought his hands up over it to cover his eyes, where briefly he was seeing the vision of his father
and mother and sister in the backseat behind him. Philip Griffin had his arm on his wife, guarding her around the bad bend.
It was the briefest moment, and gone by the time Stephen had palmed the cold sweat from his forehead, but it broke like a
dawn inside him, nonetheless, and made him fully understand a simple truth about his father: Philip Griffin had loved Anne
with his life; he had loved her so entirely with himself that when she died, there was little left of him, only the corner
he had kept alive for his son. She was everything to him. She was the figure behind all that music that rang out and sang
through the little house in her absence, she was behind each of those infinitesimally aching arias that Philip Griffin listened
to year after year with his head back and his eyes shut and his hands holding the armrests, as if taking off after her into
the heavens.

And with that understanding Stephen drove from Crusheen and left the grief behind him, and felt newly the resolve of life
that for him was the loving of Gabriella Castoldi.

  Eileen Waters was warned by her secretary when Stephen arrived in the carpark. She looked out and saw him alight from his
father's car and come quickly up the driveway. What she did not see was the zeal in his eyes or the sense of mission that
carried him forward and bounding up the school steps.