As It Is in Heaven (41 page)

  They made love that night beneath the million drops of the rain running on the skylights above them like tears. They undressed
each other by the turf fire, where the slowness of their movements was like the movements in a dance. There was no music playing,
only the water falling out of the sky into the sea and the sea's slow churning in the ordinariness of time. With the small
hollows of the palms of his hands Stephen pressed upon the warm skin of Gabriella and travelled the places of her body backward
and forward in the endless sojourn of loving that finds no limit in the other's body but returns across the places caressed
as if they were a New World discovered, warmed and scented like the tropics. They entwined each other, the small woman and
the long man, sitting on the floor before the fire, where Gabriella held back her head so that he might kiss her neck and
her breasts and so that she could hold his head against her in the dream of their being one.

The rain fell above them, and the sea sighed in thin chains of surf in the night outside. The cottage creaked like a ship,
anchored at last in the known coordinates of Hope and Love, and secure in its own fastness. In the small hours Stephen and
Gabriella lay by the low fire with a blanket pulled over them. They did not move. They slept like swimmers stilled in painted
waters, one's arm around the other, leading towards the shore.

  And there was a morning of brilliant light that came across the surface of the sea and arrived so brightly that at first it
seemed the dazzlement of magic. The sky was cloudless and blue with the perfect weather of peaceful dreams. And into that
morning Stephen dressed himself and was waking Gabriella and bringing her tea and carrying Alannah in his arms through the
cottage to tell her mother how they could take the morning and drive into Ennis and buy a new cooker to replace the one that
was broken. And he had to find the baby's cloth shoes and pack the bag with nappies and powder and cream and the bottle and
the bibs, while Gabriella dressed in a burgundy dress and a black cardigan. And then they were driving into that brightness
that was not the brightness of November. They were packed into the car, with Gabriella holding Alannah in her lap in the back
seat and humming a tune for her and humming it over and over as the car drove on into Miltown Malbay and out the other side
and on past all the watery fields where cattle watched across the strands of barbed wire for the coming of fodder and where
none was coming, because there was nothing else on that road, no tractor or car, no man or woman, only the bright sunlight
that was too bright and the polished surface of the puddles that looked like glassy tears or the fallen fragments of a cold
heaven. And Stephen was driving and watching his hands turning the wheel and the road unspooling like a destiny before him
as they sped onward, and he was able to look in the mirror at Gabriella and Alannah behind him and behind them the road they
had come from and the fields flowing backward like a film blurring green and grey, and then there was suddenly the flooded
bend by Inagh and the car flashing into it and across the water until it hit the stone wall and Stephen flew forward into
the windscreen and felt the crash and the glass and the tremendous shattering and arrived in the terrible silence and the
taste of blood and looked back and saw that Gabriella and Alannah were dead.

  
V
  

  The enlightenment that comes from dreams is sometimes more potent than that which comes in the daylight. When Stephen lifted
his head, Gabriella was lying in his arms on the rug on the floor before the fire. He was bathed in the sweat of his dream
and drew back the blanket that covered them, to be reassured by the coolness of the morning. He turned towards Gabriella and
watched the sleeping body of her and heard across the cottage the infant noises of Alannah sounding in her crib. There was
a thin drizzle falling in the stillness outside.

It was some moments before the dream had left Stephen. He lay on the floor of the cottage, and Gabriella stirred beside him,
and he leaned over and kissed the top of her head. Then he rose and walked out of the room and lifted Alannah and brought
her back and placed her into the warmth of her mother. And he turned on Puccini's music and then lay down beneath the blanket
once more.

The music rose. And for the first time Stephen heard not grief but an aching joy. He heard in that music the long-enduring
love of his father, which had been undiminished by tragedy and had carried on like a difficult faith through all the lonely
days of his living. He heard the victory of Love over Death. And while the music played on and washed over the three of them
like grace, Stephen Griffin knew something of the puzzles of the world and understood that all love did not perish and could
survive beyond pain and hardship and loneliness; and in that innocent vision with which he was gifted that morning he saw
that the world fit together, each piece in its proper place, like the pieces on a chessboard, and that though the patterns
that emerged were complex and difficult and grew more so all the time, there was a design nonetheless, for though we live
in the impotency of our dreams to make better the world, the earth and its stars spin through the heavens at the rate of our
loving and is made meaningful only in the way in which we give ourselves to each other.

Stephen saw. He saw and understood the way you do in the middle of a chess game when the openings have been played and the
position takes on a beauty that belongs neither to one player nor to the other but is the perfect expression of both. He lay
on the floor in the cottage and knew now that he would live with Gabriella without being afraid. That in the puzzle of love
he was for her and Alannah, and they for him, and that what had happened so far was no more than the opening movement of the
pieces.

He turned to Gabriella. The drizzle was falling. She reached and touched his face, then they moved closer together and held
the child between them.

“A delicate and graceful love story that is also an exaltation of love itself…. A luminously written, magical work of fiction.”

—N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
B
OOK
R
EVIEW

“A deeply spiritual work of art…. Niall Williams has achieved a master stroke with this novel.”

—B
OSTON
G
LOBE

“Lush and lyrical… a compelling meditation on love, art, and the vicissitudes of love.”

—S
AN
F
RANCISCO
C
HRONICLE