As It Is in Heaven (32 page)

  And in his bed that morning, quietly, while the rain that first seemed to fall only in Clare and then only in Miltown Malbay
spilled down through the broken roof of his cottage and pooled on the floor and made the cats come from the cupboard to the
shiplike dryness and comfort of his bed, while the water was filling so steadily across the flagstone floor that he laughed
to think the nearby hurley stick might be his oar and his bed once more a sailing schooner off the distant shores of Peru,
easily then, like moorings loosened at last or notes rising in that supernatural music that rose from the throat of Maria
Callas, Moses Mooney closed his blind eyes in the falling spills of weather inside his house and saw the lovers Stephen Griffin
and Gabriella Castoldi and knew what he knew and wept like rain, and softly died.

  “I cannot marry you, Stephen. I cannot.”

They had left the shop of Nelly Grant and, like people carrying heavy burdens, walked mutely from the town. They had taken
the Killarney road towards the mountains instinctively, as if the bigness of their emotions demanded the otherworldly landscape
of rock and wood silvered now with the torrents of the season. Water was everywhere running and made a noise louder than the
birds. Stephen and Gabriella did not touch. They walked two feet apart up the slow incline, and by the time they had left
the close cattle smells of the town behind, the air was thin and blue and clean as pine. The bread van passed and stopped
and offered them a lift to Killarney, but they waved it on, not meeting each other's eyes but moving like figures in a romantic
painting, as if to a prearranged spot in the vastness of that green wilderness.

There was no such spot; a car with four swearing singing bachelor footballers raced past them on their way home from the night,
and Stephen stepped into the verge and slipped and almost twisted his ankle, but caught against Gabriella. Her face was white.
“I'm sick,” she said.

“Oh God, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say?”

They sat down on a ledge of rock, the mountain behind them.

And for a moment, nothing.

They breathed and looked away. The valley was below, and deep within it the thin morning smoke of three houses rose and vanished
in the air.

“Are you all right?”

“It passes.”

“Here, do you want my jacket?”

“No no, keep it.”

Stephen looked at himself for something to offer. He was suffused with a desire for giving to Gabriella, and was only just
understanding that singular characteristic of love, that the impulse to do something for the other reached a point of such
immediacy that it almost erased him entirely and left only the urgency. He looked at the side of her face with a dizzy desire
to put the palm of his hand against it.

“I am so glad you came back,” he said.

“I wasn't sure I would,” said Gabriella, “not when I left. And it's not because of the child.”

“I know.”

“I wanted …” She stopped, and her face briefly frowned, a frown that travelled down from her forehead to her mouth like a
wind rumple in a sheet and flowed on then into Stephen. “I wanted to know. I want my life to be, you know, to find a kind
of certainty, it's stupid, I know, but just not to fall into things, you know, to feel that …”

“I love you.”

She turned her face towards him, and he saw the pain he had put in her eyes.

“I know that, Stephen. Oh, I know.”

“I want to take care of you. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

She lowered her head until her chin rested low on her fists. A car travelled slowly up the hill and stopped five yards away
from them to look down at what the driver imagined the two people must be looking at. It was not until the two tourists had
looked all around for the spectacular view they couldn't find that they got back in the car and drove past. They waved at
the tall man and the woman sitting on the rock, but no greeting was returned. Gabriella's brown hair fell forward across her
cheeks, the pink whorl at the top of her ear appeared through the strands. Stephen held on to his knees. He looked down as
if from a precipice at the life he wanted to plunge into. He looked at Gabriella's clothes, her walking boots, the corded
wine trousers, the thick woollen coat, and like a demented disciple, he loved them, too. If she had taken off her coat he
would have hugged it to him and breathed its scent.

“Gabriella?”

She turned to him. “There's no need to say anything, Stephen,” she said. “I know I know I know” She touched his face and felt
the emotion buckle him. “I am terrible,” she said. “I am mean and hard.”

He had turned his mouth to kiss her hand where it touched him.

“Please,” he said.

“Don't.”

“Please.”

“Stephen.” She brought up her other hand and was holding his wet face. “I cannot marry you,” she said. “It wouldn't … I would
always feel that I had forced you.” She stopped and held back her head to face the sky. “I love you, Stephen Griffin. I do.
But I am not in love with you. I cannot marry you.”

“Don't, then. Don't,” he said, and now held on to her hands at his face and did not let them go. “Don't marry me, but just
let me …” He ran out of words and let the pleading rush from his eyes with the force that runs rivers into seas.

“You are the best man,” Gabriella said, and shook her head in disbelief that such a man existed, and then she reached forward
and pressed herself against him with such force it might have been for healing or to be healed, and then she kissed his face
and then his mouth that was salty like the sea.

  Nelly Grant knew when she saw them return into the town of Kenmare. She read their aurae like an ancient book whose pages
have worn and yellowed from the feverish finger grease of a thousand readers. When they re-entered her shop and Stephen knocked
against the Granny Smiths and sent four tumbling green globes onto the floor, Nelly could read the aftershocks in him and
feel the trembling that had not yet subsided and that had brought the strange clamour from the birds in the yet unleaved sycamores
behind Sugrue's. Gabriella stooped to pick up the apples at the same moment as Stephen. They are like twin clocks, Nelly thought,
but do not realize it. She smiled and said nothing and watched them replace the fruit. The relationship is so unbalanced,
she told herself, he loves her so much, that at any moment things might fall off shelves, spark, combust. Watching them standing
in the small free space of the shop was like watching springtime in fast forward.

“Well?” said Nelly, and smiled. She watched the light from them radiate across the ceiling. Then Gabriella stepped forward
and embraced her.

It was one of the qualities of Nelly Grant that she could become different people at different moments; and in that embrace
on the shop floor, she was briefly the mother Gabriella had wished for. She was wise and knowing. Her body in a chunky blue
sweater felt like a lifetime's bulk of warmth and hope, and Gabriella held on to it. While she did, Nelly Grant winked at
Stephen and almost toppled him. She took Gabriella's thanks with soft protest, and when the younger woman told her she was
moving back into the house she had left before Christmas, Nelly clapped three small claps for this minor victory of love and
then went to fill a fruit bag for the two of them. While she circled the stalls, drawing oranges and grapes and a sweet pineapple,
she watched out of the corner of her eye where Stephen's hand dangled dangerously in the air, charged with the imploding desire
to reach and take Gabriella's fingers. He did not do it.

“Take these with you,” Nelly said then, coming forward quickly with the fruit, before anything else could happen, and standing
so close to Gabriella that the younger woman had to step backward and brush into the chest of Stephen. His hands landed like
large birds on her shoulders, and the relief softened the line of his mouth. “And a little of this,” said Nelly, bringing
them a small bottle of a kind of milk made from the flour drawn from roots of the early purple orchids and spiced with nutmeg
and cinnamon. “It is good for everything,” she told them, “especially to keep resolve of the spirit.” Then she placed her
hand on Gabriella's head and let her go. “Call to see me.”

“I will.”

“We will,” said Stephen.

The lovers walked out of the shop, and fruit rolled off the shelves. Everything is energy, thought Nelly, and laughed to watch
the bananas twirl on the S hooks.

That afternoon, while the farmers slowly returned from the mart and the money began to surface on polished counters in all
the pubs of the town, Gabriella moved back into the house she had left before Christmas. And whether it was the burgeoning
spring, the relief of animals sold, the excitement of animals bought, or the radiant spirit of loving returned, by early evening
the town was singing and smoking and swallowing pints in that strange mixture of celebration and hope and reminiscence that
is the true hallmark of the end of winter.

In the house on the hill, when darkness had fallen, Gabriella sat on the floor before the fire and Stephen sat in the chair
to the side of her. Their music was not the music of the town below them. It was a recording of Puccini's
Tosca
that Stephen had brought from his car and played for Gabriella when he told her of his father's death and that this was the
music his father had listened to for thirty years. While the sweetest arias played they did not speak. They ate the fruit
Nelly Grant had given them and listened, and it was not until the third act that Gabriella lifted her head and raised her
hand and met Stephen's fingers and drew him so swiftly down to her on the floor that the turf smoke billowed out over them
in a cloud. And in that moment, while the town below them was singing and the heavens above were thronged with spirits and
stars, while the diva sang
“Vissi d'arte”
and made the small room one with others in different places and different times, Gabriella Castoldi kissed the man who loved
her and took his head and touched his wet eyes and held her fingers upon his lips.

“Why am I so difficult?” she said beneath the singing, shaking her head as if to escape her father's knuckling fists landing
upon her.

And for once Stephen did not remain quiet, but in a low voice answered her and said, “Let go, just try and let it go.”

And in the simple, brief, and yet momentous way in which a life is decided, in which the hold of the past is released and
the future arrives like new skin, Gabriella closed her eyes and at last surrendered to that impulse that was as timeless,
inevitable, and relentless as spring itself, and was the subject of all the songs the men were singing in the town below.

  Stephen stayed that night, and the one after that, and after that again. He brought his things from Mary White's, who bade
him goodbye once more, this time with the gentlest of smiles and a wave of her hand, telling him he was welcome always and
holding herself in her thin arms as if embracing some of the loving that glowed off him.