As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  When Gabriella had stopped playing and returned down the mountainside, she had decided she was going to stay and live in Kenmare. She did not yet know how or for how long, but as she walked along the black road back to the town and felt the rain coming in her face, she knew the decision was irreversible.

  It was three days before she got a job in the vegetable shop of Nelly Grant. By the time the summer arrived and her skill on the violin had been discovered, she was invited to play three evenings a week before the great fireplace in the mustard-coloured lounge of The Falls Hotel. It was there that Isabella Curta, junior secretary of the Italian embassy, had discovered her, and been so moved by her playing that she had written down the name Gabriella Castoldi, and was able to recall it two years later when Vittorio Mazza fled back to Italy.

  9

  On the first Friday of November, Stephen Griffin did not know that his life was about to change. He had long given up the vanity of supposing that life was something you could plan, or that wishes and desires could be achieved. For years he had lived in a kind of ghostly nowhere, a place of continuing days and nights whose only feature was its own unremarkableness. He expected nothing, and opened his eyes each morning in the back bedroom of the small house by the sea, uncertain as to whether he was among the living or the dead.

  This was nothing new. He had a facility for living with ghosts. As he grew up in the house of his father, he had grown used to encountering his mother and his sister in the shadowy corners of the past. It did not frighten him, and he soon understood that the treasured moments of his family’s loving remained undiminished and unvanquished despite the passing of time. Indeed, it was the sweetest of sorrows, and when he was alone in the house as a young man and startled himself with the sudden vividness of a certain moment—his sister, Mary, coming down the stairs with the doll Philomena—he discovered that the grief was assuaged by the understanding that for some things time does not pass, it recycles.

  Life in that house in Dublin had taught him to cherish the company of the invisible. When he went to university and began to study history, it was the now familiar presence of the disappeared that attracted him. He sat in the glass-fronted room of the library and lost himself with the ghosts of the previous three hundred years. He kept his head down and his eyes moving on the pages, but his mind took flight, and soon even his body was elsewhere, a fact noticed only by old Murtagh, the ancient librarian assistant, who himself had long ago vanished into the books of Thomas Hardy. The power of language was a conjuring magic, it magicked doors in castles and courtyards, and through them Stephen entered. He was the student humped over in the library, reading the books until the night porter came round clearing the tables and sending him home. When he rose and walked out into the glitter frost and million stars of the Dublin night, he was walking with others in a different place. He had abstracted himself from the world so thoroughly that by the age of twenty-one, when he was in his final year, he hardly needed the book to be open for him to slip into the past.

  He was a quiet fellow. He did not go to the dances on Friday nights, nor heed his father’s urging to go down and sit with the others in the students’ bar. So solitary was his life that Philip Griffin grew fearful that his son had been overprotected since the trauma of the tragedy and would never emerge in the plain daylight of the world. He sat downstairs and worried, while Stephen lay in the bedroom overhead with a book propped on his chest. It did not bother Stephen that no other student was like him. He passed the summer exams, and within two years had read every university book of merit on the subject of European history at the turn of the century. His face grew pale as paper; his eyes had the peering expression of the myopic, and his lips thinned and grew light-coloured, as if they had never tasted fruit.

  He lived in books, and by the time he was ready to graduate with honours from the history department of University College, Dublin, his complexion was delicate and radiated the grey light of imminent illness. In May of his final year he stood in the doorway of his tutor’s room, and Dr. Margaret McCormack realized that he was almost lost to life. She had seen students almost devoured by the study of history before, but it had always been temporary. Usually they reached a point—often in April—when the sudden sweetness of the sensual world swept over them. Their books became weighty and dry in the perfumed air that spun and dazzled and was blown about with almond blossom.

  But for Stephen Griffin it was not like that. For three years he had sat in the lecture halls and quietly taken his notes in longhand. He handed in his papers on time and worked through the brightening days of spring, barely lifting his head when the brilliance of the May sunshine made his pages too white for reading. None but his father had told him to stop, and even Philip Griffin surrendered, imagining that his son knew better than he what was needed for a university degree.

  So, in the last weeks of his final year, Stephen stood in the doorway of his tutor’s room and told her he was hoping to be accepted for the master’s degree, and then the doctorate. Dr. McCormack looked at him and then looked away. The sunlight flooded into the room through the window behind her, she could feel its warmth pressing on her back.

  “Doctorate?” she said. “I see.”

  “Yes,” he said, hanging there in the doorway, his eyes gazing downward, as if he had just confessed a crime.

  Dr. McCormack had to hold her breath. She had been teaching for twenty years in the second-floor room which was the reward for her own schoolday acuity at history, a permanent office. And she despised it. But she was fit for nothing else; she knew it, and knew that each day she moved further along the dull inevitability that had been her life since she came to college to study history. There in the sunlight she looked at the pale man with the white face and thin black hair. He was transparent. There was about him such a pitiful shrinking from life that it caused a lever to release in Margaret McCormack and the truth of her own lifetime of withdrawal, timidity, and ungrasped opportunity to be unloaded with a crash upon her.

  “The doctorate, yes,” she said, and touched the stilled flowers in subdued yellow that decorated her dress. The sun was two warm hands on her back. She felt her own dust falling in the air.

  “I’m hoping you’ll give me a recommendation,” said Stephen.

  That’s not what you’re asking, thought Margaret McCormack. You’re asking for an escape, you’re asking to be allowed to slip in here to one of these box rooms where you can gather books on the shelves and turn the pages of students’ essays until they tap on your shoulder and say next year is your retirement.

  Margaret did not answer him at once. She felt a varicose vein on the inside of her left leg begin to throb, and turned from him and sat down.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she said and, looking down at the coffee mug that held her pens, added, “I’ll certainly give it my consideration.”

  In fact, she had already decided. By the time Stephen was walking down the green carpeted corridor to the library once more, Margaret McCormack had made up her mind that Stephen Griffin was to be saved from her own fate, and that the rejection he would feel when the letter came telling him he had not been accepted into the program would in fact be the coded message of her own mercy ushering him forward into the world. He was worse than she, she thought; he was a book. And only twenty-two years old. She sat at her desk after he left and felt a sense of mission. It’s everything he wants, but only because he cannot imagine facing the terrible realities of the world. He does not really want it, she thought, it is fear. She touched the small drops of perspiration that had arrived on her top lip. She knew what it was like to have no gift for small talk and feel the alarming sense of being the only person unable to relax into a fragment of conversation or idle a moment with a colleague on the stairs. She had recognized herself so acutely in Stephen Griffin that she could not bear it.

  She picked up her pen and wrote a letter to the head of the department outlining why she could not recommend Stephen Griffin for the master’s
program at this time. She finished the letter as the sun was moving from her window. Then she put her head on the desk and softly cried.

  By midsummer of that year, when Stephen had been turned down for the master’s program, he received an offer of a place for the Diploma in Education course. He was so astonished by the rejection that he did not think clearly of the possibilities of his life but enrolled with the narrowed vision of those who have lost confidence in their future. One year later, he emerged from university a teacher. It was not a career he seemed suited for; at first he read from the textbook and lost the class, and it was only when he stopped reading and looked down at the pupils that he suddenly realized he was building a wall between them and himself. He stopped reading in class after that and began a new, risky tactic: talking the history out, telling it, unwinding the moments as if they were the first slender threads of a long, deeply entwined rope that led, impossibly, all the way back to that very moment in the classroom, the very instants of their breathing there in the school. And somehow it worked. Somehow the seriousness of him, the undiminished intensity of his focus, won over the classes, and the brightest followed him while the weakest looked away in dreams.

  10

  Stephen Griffin had bought the ticket for the concert when Moira Fitzgibbon had brought them into the staff room at breaktime. Every teacher had taken two, and although he had no intention of going himself, never mind the impossibility of bringing anyone, he had taken a pair of tickets and put them in the pages of Ireland since the Famine. Half the staff were not intending to go either, and some of the men unknowingly mirrored the behaviour of the boys outside by teasing each other about who would be interested in classical music. They threw the word “culture” at each other like dried dung. Their laughter proved their distance from it. It was a thing for the women. But they bought the tickets anyway, to give them to their wives or put them on the windowsill, for Moira Fitzgibbon had a forbidding sense of mission as she stood among them. She was not slow to remind them of the sorry fate of Moses Mooney or to make them feel an uneasy guilt at how many of them had singularly failed to teach her anything and how the failure of her Leaving Certificate examinations in six subjects was the single most unmentioned achievement of the school in the past fifteen years.

  Stephen did not intend to go to the concert, not because he disapproved or wanted to distance himself from the notion of such music in a place like west Clare, but because there would be people there. Then Moira Fitzgibbon pressed the tickets into his hand. She was a small woman of thirty-three who had, since leaving the school, become a leading member of the Community Development Association; she knew her mind, but not books, she told the other members on the night of the first meeting, asking for all business to be read aloud and excusing herself by explaining without embarrassment that the education system had taught her nothing and she was taking night classes in reading.

  Stephen finished school and went home at four o’clock. The wind was blowing and the forecast was for worse. The darkness was already falling into the sea. He sat in the front room and turned on the radio. It was four hours before the concert and he had no intention of attending. With the music on the radio and the muffled company of the dark sea outside, the room was an island in November and he was soon asleep. It was the way he finished every schoolday in winter, drowsing in the corner armchair into a forgetfulness, like slipping through the back door of the world. His dreams were not fretful or anxious but a changing tapestry of recollection and mild invention, which was in fact the history of his heart. His head lay tilted to one side, and his white face looked painted in the deepening shadows. If he had died then, there in the armchair, the world would have moved on without him with little pause or regret, like a winter army leaving the long-suffering wounded to fall behind in the snow. He was a casualty of circumstances, and as he sat slumped in the chair, with the music playing and the sea breaking in the wind outside, he had no idea that rescue was at hand.

  Stephen dreamed he was a child on the stairs. He was standing on the small landing where the stairs turned, and his mother was downstairs in the kitchen cooking. It was only when he looked down that he realized he had legs, for he seemed frozen and was unable to move even when Anne Griffin called out his name and his sister, Mary, came running past him with her doll Philomena. He heard his name being called again, and then saw the long, slim figure that was his mother appear at the bottom of the stairs and say to him, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And still he could not move. The wallpaper with its printed flowers in yellow and gold seemed to give way beneath his hand as he reached for something to grasp, and then there was music playing. It sounded like a cello, like the simple cello music Mary made that swam around the house and was soft and easy, and still he could not move his legs, even when his mother said again, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And he wanted to, wanted with all the desperation only dreams can hold, as he saw his mother walk away into the kitchen and heard the music grow louder and louder still, swaying the stairs, the hallway, the house itself, until he had to turn his head and let out a cry and open his eyes to see the darkness of the room about him.

  He lowered his head into his hands and felt the filmy sweat of his dream.

  Then he heard the music.

  It was coming from the radio. It was a Mozart quartet. Whether Stephen had heard a fragment of the music as he was sleeping or whether he had dreamt it, the strange synchronicity of its playing to the tune and tempo of his dreaming was a manifestation of something. He sat up in his armchair and felt strangely that the music was for him. Whatever makes the world move moved the world then for Stephen Griffin. Whatever causes the drear of ordinariness to shake and be dazzled with brilliance, until the illumination changes forever the shape of the thousand moments that follow, it dazzled then. Though Stephen did not quite know it. He listened to the piece until it was over and then heard the announcer on the Clare station say it was the Interpreti Veneziani, who were playing that evening in the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis.

  One hour later he was driving past the night fields of Inagh in the ten-year-old yellow Ford that was the only car he had ever owned. He drove with a kind of jerky, quick-slow motion, pressing on the accelerator and letting his foot off again at each bend, until the car slowed and he pumped it again. It was a style of driving that sickened any passenger but had become so habitual to Stephen that he hardly seemed to notice the way his foot pressed the pedal as if it belonged to a piano. Foot on, foot off, the car seemed to row forward like a yellow gondola, pressing and easing against some invisible current that was flowing ceaselessly against him in the darkness.

  He drove on with music playing in his head. His face was a white moon pressed forward over the steering wheel. Wind buffeted the car. Bits of hedgerow and black plastic flew through the beams of the headlights. The wipers smeared the spits of rain each time they passed and made the car blind and seeing in turns. The night was breaking up, and Stephen had to grip the wheel hard to keep the car in the centre of the narrow road. He drove until he saw something coming against him; it too motored down the centre of the road, which fell away at a slope into the running murk of the ditch on both sides. When the two cars were close enough to threaten crashing, they veered over and with a mad gaiety swished past each other before retaking the centre once more. Sometimes the drivers managed frantic salutes as they flew past, desperately trying to keep from knocking off the wing mirrors.

  The journey was dark. The road wound wildly across bogs that stretched away into the fallen night and soaked in the rain like parts of a vast sea creature. Soon the rain that was blowing across the front of the car was blowing directly at it. And still Stephen pumped the car forward, lurching it towards the destiny he did not know was as simple and momentous as falling in love. He was in a state. His thin lips were dry, but his face was wet. He kept thinking of the music, the music playing like that, and the dreaming and the music becoming one. The car radio had never worked and neither had the fan; so he
imagined the music playing, and to its even tempo rubbed at the windscreen with his sleeve. Not that he could see. He was travelling a wet blackness that might have been circling upon itself like a tail, but still he pressed on.

  He was unlike himself with the fierceness of his intent. But with the mysterious illogic by which one instant of life becomes charged with passion, he would not surrender or turn back in the rain for anything.

  On the passenger seat beside him he had the tickets for the concert. He glanced over at them and in that moment made the car veer sharply to the left. The wheel hit the top of the ditch and he thumped his head against the fabric of the ceiling a half dozen times before he was able to bring the car skidding back into the slick centre of the road.

  And across the other side, to crash nosedown into a ditch.

  God.

  11

  Sitting up in his bed and grinning as the fierce teeth of the Atlantic bit off the slates above him and flung them a hundred yards into the fields, Moses Mooney told the cats not to worry. Thomas and Angela were curled in the warm place where his knees bent in the blankets, and he stroked them blindly as he spoke. The black cat called Angela purred and turned her head in against him. The important thing, he told them, was to realize that the future was indestructible. That no force could arrest it, and that it proceeded with the same relentless and undiminished energy as the sea itself.