As It Is in Heaven (31 page)

“Tell him to wait when he comes,” Mrs. Waters said. “Tell him I'm on the phone, I'm busy.” She went back inside her office
and examined her face. She moved the files into neater piles that they might establish more clearly her power. She pared two
pencils and placed them lead upright in the green beaker before her. Then she looked across at the timetable on the wall opposite
her, to remind herself of all the staff that were under her, the numbers enrolled, the size of the building, and the full
and varied dimensions of her power. She waited fifteen minutes. Finally, she brought the largeness of her soft self forward
so that no vulnerable space existed between her and the desk, and then placed her two pink hands together in a mime of tranquil
forbearance.

“Carol.”

Carol Blake opened the door.

“Will you bring me in the attendance book for 3A?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Waters, Mr. Griffin is here to see you.”

“Really?” She enjoyed that, and said it louder to be sure he heard. “Really, Mr. Griffin?” She said his name as if it were
an antiquated appellation from the Old Testament.

“Will I bring him in?”

“Do.”

Outside, the class bell sounded and the corridors of the school echoed with the jostle and rush of the students.

“You are back with us again,” Eileen Waters said to Stephen as he came in the door. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes.
“I had thought … I had thought you might have been back last week. Or even the week before. I had thought—while of course
a family bereavement is—I had thought, a week, a week or ten days tops.” The pink hands floated up before her and palmed the
underside of the air, as if fondling amorphous bosoms of power. She weighed them like moralities and looked gravely. “I have
to tell you, Mr. Griffin,” she said, “you put me in a very difficult position. I have been forced to make allowances again,
and some of the other members of the staff …”

“Mrs. Waters.”

The principal was vexed to stop mid-sentence. It was not even the end of her paragraph. She opened her mouth and shrank three
inches smaller. Her eyes were blurry with unease.

“I didn't come to hear your lecture,” Stephen said. “I want to say something.”

“If you think a brief apology …”

“I have nothing to apologize for. Mrs. Waters, I'm not here for apology.” Stephen looked directly at her and saw the fright
freeze her expression. “I'm here because I've reached the end of this life, I'm not going to be back here anymore, I'm stopping
teaching.”

Mrs. Waters's face dropped; it fell on the desk with the powdery softness of marshmallow. It was a moment before she could
recover it.

“Well,” she said, having no idea what to say next.

“I'll tell you the truth: I'm not really a teacher anyway, I don't care enough about codes of discipline, acceptable standards
of uniform, punctuality, all that.” He waved his hand as if clearing a desk. His eyes were burning. “I care about the history
and the few who want to learn it. But what I have discovered is this: it's not my life. It's someone else's life that I'm
living, that I just fell into, the way people take wrong turns and don't know it and just keep going because it's too hard
and frightening not to, and then they find themselves years later in some place they never wanted to be, with the regrets
eating them up like cancers.”

The air in the room throbbed. Stephen's words came quickly and the passionate fluency of his expression flooded the small
world of the woman and drowned the minor armies of her objections. She could not imagine this was happening. She could not
imagine such rashness.

“Someone else's history is the coming and going from here every day,” Stephen said, “not mine. Staff meetings and test results
and …” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, where he knew his family were watching him. “Anyway, it's over. Thank you for giving
me the job, but it was a mistake. I won't be coming back.”

Stephen stood up. He was a different man from the one Eileen Waters had reprimanded earlier. He was already un-stooped and
taller, and met her eyes with the strange defiance of those who imagine they have suddenly seen the plot of the world. She
stared at him as if he were visiting from another planet. Her blood pressure pounded along the hardening arteries of her heart,
her eyelashes felt cakey and weighted with the falling dust of years.

“What are you going to do?” she said. Her voice was as faint and whispery as the turning of pages in an old copybook.

Stephen raised his two hands into the air, and then he smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile. It became a small
laugh, and then he said; “I don't have the slightest idea.” The smile kept circling around his lips and made glisten his eyes.
“I'm in love,” he said, saying those simple words there in that office and not even realizing that they sounded to Eileen
Waters strangely childish and unreal, as if they belonged to some outmoded and tarnished notion of romance that no longer
had any place in the country she lived in, which by the end of that millennium had been hardened by a thousand revelations
of abuse and corruption and greed, until the very notion of a man declaring such a thing out loud in an office seemed as farfetched
as a fairy tale.

“There is a woman, she's in Kerry, she …” He stopped. He seemed to be seeing someone else in the room. “Well, goodbye,” he
said then, and walked out of the office, never to return, leaving Eileen Waters stunned and wordless and diminished as she
watched the empty space after him and tried to repair and close the chasm that had opened between the life she was living
and the one Stephen Griffin had briefly shown her.

  The following afternoon he headed south into Kerry. The stillness of the landscape did not mirror his heart. The fields were
like the fields painted on a plate. Thin light glistened on the hedgerows and made the first yellow blossoms of the gorse
luminescent with the re-emergence of springtime. The hidden verb of life pulsed in secret, and the countryside was made gentle
with obscured sunshine. Winter was over, and the precarious existence of bulb and root beneath the soil was made easier now;
it was that kind of afternoon. The cattle nosed the wire that kept them from the spring grass. They smelled the alluring and
sweet sticky scent of regeneration and moaned softly with the satisfaction of a favoured dream.

The light held for a time. Even before Killarney he could smell the trees and the mountains; the smells returned to him like
visions of Gabriella, and by the time he passed the silver lakes, the air in the car was sharp with impossible yearning. Upon
her rested his life's happiness; it was as clear as that, and if, once, the enormity of risk might have fractured his resolve
and turned him around on the road, it was no longer so. He blinked at the light that came through the mountains, and drove
on into them, feeling only the central most basic and human emotion that makes meaning of all our days: the urgency to love.

(He did not know yet the counter-balancing necessity of allowing himself to be loved in return, which would require a more
difficult faith, and the passage of time.)

He drove the car into Kenmare and out to the house of Mary White. Both car windows were wide open now, and the scent of loving
escaped everywhere and announced his return even to those who did not know his name.

Mary White was at home. She received Stephen with a brief pleasant rise of her thin eyebrows and brought her two hands together
before her to clutch the happiness.

“Welcome,” she said, “welcome,” she said again, beaming a great contentment and nodding, as if she saw spirits entering with
Stephen and was delighted with such elevated company. “You're back with us again,” she said, saying “us” even though she lived
alone.

“If it's all right?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I was so hoping we'd have you back.” She paused and looked at him, and felt the way people do when a
corner of the jigsaw has come together. “Now come on,” she said, “I have your room ready.”

And so Stephen followed her back into the room where he had dreamt so vividly of Gabriella that the presence of her was still
in the corners of the ceiling. He felt it was right and proper to begin again; there was something fitting about returning
to that house, as though life moves in spiralling circles and we arise along invisible tracks that were laid in the air. He
felt the sense of it without knowing why, for it was not until he sat to tea with Mary White and told her about the death
of his father in Dublin that she asked him if he was the son of Anne, who had died in the crash years ago and with whom Mary
White had once been in school.

  When Stephen awoke the world spoke with birdsong and the buzzing of spring flies. He smelled the sweet tang of the garden's
annual resurrection, the slow stirring and secret life of the flowers not yet opened but breathing nonetheless in the open
bedroom window. It was the morning of the declaration of love. When he opened his eyes, he caught the tonic air of wild rhubarb
and was sharpened in his awareness that this was to be the beginning of new life. He would give himself to Gabriella and the
child, and if she would not marry him, he would take any job he could get and live near her and be whatever he could to her
for the rest of his days. He was filled that morning with such innocence. That morning, while he lay in the bed breathing
the spring, he had a view of a world beautiful in its simplicity: that we act on our hearts and follow the things that move
us. That it was outlandish and naïve and impractical, that it was the kind of thinking once expected of a child up to the
age of twelve, then ten, but now, in our days, no more than the age of eight, that innocence had diminished so and the world
become so old and weary that belief in such things had all but vanished did not bother Stephen Griffin. He lay on his bed
on the outskirts of that town in Kerry and dreamed like a saint of a selfless loving.

When he rose he saw Mary White hanging clothes on the line in the garden. The soft wind billowed the white sheets.

Down in Kenmare that morning the streets were lively with men and beasts. Cattle trailers and wagons moved slowly, and the
trapped cattle bellowed and stomped in the traffic. People watched them passing on their way to the spring mart and took the
soured air of the dung and urine as another emblem of the new season, the countryside awakening and descending on the town.
Wisps of straw litter were about the place, and there were children late going to school who had been drovers at dawn, leading
cattle with hose-pipe sticks to the loading. There was a buzz of excitement, the noise of engines and the salutes and waves
and cries of those leaning forward in their tractor cabs to call down to a neighbour some news of animal or man.

Into this throbbing Stephen walked. The streets of the country town were alive about him. Before he had reached the corner
where Nelly Grant kept her shop, he knew that his footsteps were bringing him to the doorway of his new life. He sensed the
enormity of it with the freshness of a child facing First Communion, and by the time he had arrived at the fruit and vegetable
stalls outside the shop, he had begun to shake inside his clothes. He took a moment to master himself. He raised his head,
opened his mouth, and swallowed full the host of redemption. Then he stepped into the shop and saw Nelly Grant raise her eyebrows.

“Stephen!”

She was holding two Seville oranges, and with them in her hands came forward and embraced him.

“She's here,” she whispered as she held on to him, taking the opportunity to smell the uncertain blended aroma of his hope,
anxiety, and love. “You have a new radiance,” she said, and stood back to admire his aura.

“Gabriella!” she called out before Stephen had even said a word to her.

And then, through the beaded curtain that separated the shop from the small back office, where the geranium oil was burning
and choral music playing, Gabriella stepped out.

“Stefano,” she said. She said it like a whisper. “Oh, Stefano.” She brought her hands to her mouth as if to hold in a cry.