As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  Then, suddenly, it was over.

  The last note was played and the music stopped. There was a pause, a long beat in which that Venice of the mind lingered in the hot humid room of the Old Ground Hotel. There was a held moment of nothing, of silence, as if no one who sat there wished to embark on the home journey, to emerge once more in the November rain. Nobody moved. (Later, Piero Motte would swear that when he looked down at them, every single man and woman had wet faces and suntans. He would tell his aged father in the pasticceria in Burano that in the old music they had revealed a new invention that night, a kind of heart travel, he would say, that took them all, tutti, to the place of Vivaldi—which is not Venice but Vivaldi himself. They did not applaud, he would tell his father. They could not.)

  And how long passed before the first hands clapped could not be measured in time. It was a slow awakening, full of reluctance and dawning amazement, like sleepers rising from the most sensuous dream. Men raised their hands to clap and felt the dampness under their armpits and across the shirts on their backs. They stood and noticed they were in their stockings, and had slipped off their shoes earlier, in the mistaken certainty that they were sitting by the waterside. The women clapped their hands beneath their chins and felt their own air fanning them back from dizziness. Councillor O’Rourke, who had slipped out at the beginning of the concert to attend to mobile-phone calls, now stepped back in the door on the wave of applause. He smiled, raised his head to show his throat, and held up his hands to applaud so that Moira Fitzgibbon could see him clearly.

  The possibility of an encore vanished in the wave of people spilling forward towards the small stage. Stephen did not move; he stood applauding and lost sight of the musicians as the crowd swelled about them. He angled his head to see the woman better, but she had stepped off the podium and was lost to him amidst the jostle of the Miltown Malbay people. His mouth was dry, his eyes burned. In his chest his lungs seemed to have collapsed. He could not breathe. He felt as if he had been struck in the throat. There was a moment when he thought he would fall down; then he looked up and blinked at the chandeliers and was able to move quickly from the room.

  Once he made the doorway, he could move faster, and took the red carpeted stairs three at a time, hurrying down into the lobby like a man escaping a fire.

  The cool dark dampness of the evening after rain was like a blanket thrown over him. Now he could breathe. He walked out of the grounds of the hotel and past the pulling-away cars and the dazzling lights of the homeward bound. But he did not want to go home, he wanted to walk, to keep moving until he could travel all the way back into the feeling of the concert. He walked around the shut shops of Ennis and heard the music of Venice in his mind. Stephen Griffin walked, mute, beneath the moonless sky. It was two o’clock in the morning and he was six miles out on the Inagh road. He had been walking for four hours and not once lost sight of the face of Gabriella Castoldi.

  16

  Stephen did not go home that night. He walked as far as his car and sat inside it, certain at first that the sensation he felt when he got in was that of sinking. Rain had softened the world; the scar where the car had ploughed into the ground was opened like wet lips. Stephen closed his eyes and expected slow decline into the sucking soft mouth of the bog. Soundlessly, the lemon car eased to the right; he felt the gradual collapse and tender sighing like fire sizzling into water. Then it stopped and the car sat there.

  It was still sitting there at eight o’clock the following morning, when Patrick Mulvihill passed in his tractor, supposing it to be the abandoned remains of some young lad’s drunken evening, until he saw the figure of the teacher sitting behind the steering wheel.

  It took Mulvihill six minutes to tow the car from the bog. It was Stephen’s second rescue.

  “There is no such thing as stillness,” he said to Mulvihill, when the car had been pulled onto the road and the farmer had come back to unhitch the rope. He was a short man in a thick coat, his grey face was a balled newspaper. His facial expressions were so crumpled it was impossible to separate them more than: Wrinkled, or Very Wrinkled. He gave Stephen Very Wrinkled, and amidst the lost, closed-in folds of his red face his green eyes glinted.

  “She’s all right,” he said, smacking the bonnet of the yellow car and ignoring the driver. “You took her too fast round that bend on the greasy road. Made terrible rain last night.”

  “I’ve been sitting here all night wondering what to do,” Stephen said.

  “The rain’s gone, but the road’s still greasy.”

  “How do you know what to do? God, I don’t. I didn’t think that … I never expected. It’s not what you … well, maybe for some. But I’m not that kind of man. I just …”

  “You don’t notice it in a tractor, with the heaviness.”

  “I want to see her again,” Stephen said.

  “But in a light car like that. She could slide right off easy enough.”

  “I have to. I have to see her again.”

  Mulvihill paused; he made crinkled lips and raised his face to where the light was breaking on the far side of Ennis.

  “That’s exactly right,” he said, and reached down to untie the tow rope. “That’s exactly right,” he repeated, and then walked back to his tractor.

  “Goodbye now,” Mulvihill said over his shoulder, climbing into the cab and throwing in the rope beside him, puttering off down the road towards the dawn, disproving once again his brother’s belief that he needed a hearing aid, proud of his conversational skills, and certain that the younger man had no idea he was deaf as a stone.

  17

  Stephen’s life had already begun to change. It was too soon yet for him to know outright, he was a cautious man and too long accustomed to his own unremarkable history to suppose his life could catch fire. He did not yet sense that the fluctuation in his heart rate, the fuzziness of his hearing, and the sweetness of tart apples were the early signs of love. He was disturbed, he was upset; he admitted that much, and knew too that it was because of the woman with the violin. But just as one day he had accepted that no sleep was deep enough or dream powerful enough to bridge him to the next world and meet the lost half of his family, so too Stephen Griffin had long accepted that he was to be alone. Imagining love is real makes life hard, and so he had instead moved it beyond the history of his future, leaving it rolled up and put away like a scroll of fairy tales in the farthest corner of his heart. Now, on the morning after the concert, it was not love he was thinking of. He was not thinking he had to see Gabriella Castoldi again so that she might see his face or speak to him, find an attraction in the timidity and melancholy of his character, that she might fall in love with him; it never entered his mind. Instead, he thought that the desire that was running along the arteries of his arms, that was tingling in his fingers and making them beat softly on the top of the steering wheel, was only the desire to hear her play the music again.

  He drove into Ennis. The shops were not yet open, and the narrow streets had a desolate air of aftermath. The chip-bag and beer-can litter of tawdry romance was strewn along the gutters of wet footpaths. Dogs roamed and sniffed the dead butts of love talk and other promises and pissed the walls and moved on.

  Stephen parked the car by the River Fergus, hurried across Parnell Street and down through the empty market to the Old Ground Hotel. The wet air woke his face and gave him a polished rawness like a fruit thinly skinned. He walked in the front door and past the reception, bounding up the stairs, as if some mission was balanced on the point of failure and his smallest of worlds could only be saved by arriving on the first floor.

  The doors to the concert room were closed, and when he held on to the cold metal of the handle, he was astonished by the heat of himself. He stepped into the room; it had not yet been tidied, and the chairs, pushed back in lines slightly askew, spoke more of the leaving than of the concert. Stephen moved to his own seat and sat down. He put his hands under his chin and stared up at the empty space where the Italian
s had played. He closed his eyes and sought the image and the sound of them; he sat there in the low susurrus of the muffled morning traffic, the distant clink of china and cutlery downstairs, the squeak in the chambermaid’s trolley moving down the hall, the tramping of the hundred schoolchildren and the shopkeepers and their customers, the steady unstoppable noise of the small town with lorries and vans and buses and cars, and in that galaxy of sounds he listened for the music of yesterday.

  What it was about the music he couldn’t say. He didn’t know the simplest of all mathematics, that the potency of the relation was in direct proportion to the needs of his own heart, that man plus woman equals both nothing and everything, that the factors of love are hope and chance, and that the million variables between two people depend more on the second than on the first.

  He sat in the room, but was unable to re-engage the spirit of the evening. He tried to hum himself into it, and was sitting there humming, a tall man who had not slept all night, his hands clutching his knees, his shoes muddy, the bottom of his trouser legs dark with water stains, and his eyes closed, when Margaret Meade stopped hoovering the top stair of the red carpet and looked in the door. She was forty-seven years of age, had fallen in love twenty-two times, fourteen with men she had never spoken to, and recognized at once the signs of a serious fall.

  “Hello, love,” she said.

  Messages are everywhere, if only we can read them. Margaret was a woman who knew the whole history of hope in love; she knew the front and back pages of each volume in the library of lovesickness. She knew the music Stephen hummed was more than music and that the rocking in the chair was his way of tunnelling back into the moment when he had seen the woman; it was his way of being close to her. She knew how the heart fooled itself, how the forced muting of the loudest emotions travelled through the body itself and found expression in pimples, bumps, lumps, diarrhoea, cramps, vomiting, sweats hot and cold, dry mouth, toothache, rashes of every kind, itchiness, general flakiness, and fourteen varieties of trapped wind. (Once, she had loved a married plumber from Tulla so intensely that, knowing she could not tell him outright, her stomach swelled to nine-month pregnancy, and to carry the hugeness of her attraction she had to wear maternity clothes for two months; notwithstanding, she continued dismantling the central heating pipes by night so that he would return daily and she could watch the place she loved on his backside where the low sling of his jeans didn’t meet his shirt. And all for love.) Margaret Meade could have told Stephen so much, but he was not yet ready to listen, and the message and the moment passed. She stood inside the door and watched him rocking and humming in the chair. There was a kind of beauty in it, the hopeless and desperate figure he cut at half past nine on a Friday morning; she was moved by it and glad she had worn the darker stockings that made her legs look younger than her face. She drew herself up ever so slightly and touched her hair before calling to him again.

  “Love?” she said, and then smiled.

  Stephen jumped up from the chair. He licked at the awful dryness of his lips, then quickly took from his left-hand pocket his ticket to the concert.

  “There it is,” he said, looking at the ticket like some rarity he had mislaid, and keeping his eyes firmly on it as he paced across the concert room and out the door past Margaret Meade.

  She watched him go. “Oh, love,” she said softly, and then picked up the hose of the hoover and dragged it into the room, whose dust she knew was richer now for the feelings that lingered there.

  Stephen left the hotel no better than when he had arrived. He walked down the curve of O’Connell Street still holding on to the ticket. He loped along as if he was going somewhere. He was thirty yards up the street when he noticed Nolan’s music shop, and he went inside and bought the only Vivaldi disc there, a cheap version of The Four Seasons.

  Then he had something. He had something tangible of the evening and felt an easement of the pressure of desire, knowing that once the music was playing, once he could sit and listen to it, Gabriella Castoldi would be with him again.

  But she was already. She was there waiting when he arrived at the small house by the sea. She was there in the roundabout road he took, avoiding Miltown Malbay and the school and coming in secret to his own house; she was there in the very fact of him feeling that he should take the phone off the hook and not answer the door; she was there in the trembling of his hands as he put on the disc and pressed Play, as he sat in the seat that looked westward into the sighing sea and heard the first notes with the volume turned up loud enough to make the music system tremble. She was there. She was not playing the music, but was the music. And Stephen Griffin set it to Repeat even before “Summer” was midway through, even as the downrush of the strings made wildflower meadows of the air and the life of every leaf and blossom gathered, pulsed, exploded with free riotous expression, until the room itself was mid-season July and the fullness of the music scented everything and made beat the dry and dust-filled corners of the world in which he had been living. He had never heard music quite as he heard it then. He did not know the sharpness of his own senses or the tenderness that poured through his ears. He watched the sea and listened to Vivaldi, moving his head backward and forward to the rhythms of the strings, until at last, in the ninth “Spring,” his eyes were closed and he was standing up, his whole body conducting the energy and passion of the music into the deep places of his heart, where only now he was beginning to admit that he had fallen in love. He was too afraid to think it. He was too certain that the moment the walls about him were breached he would not be able to bear the incipient grief and loss he associated with love. He was certain, too, she could not love him. But the music played on, insistently beating on the vulnerable hidden-away part of the soul that longs for the sweetness of another person like the sweetness of God. He wanted to see her; God, he wanted to see her again, and with the despair of that unfilled desire and The Four Seasons like a wild clock advancing Time so swiftly that years of the heart passed, he brought his hands to his forehead, cried out, and sank into the armchair by the window.

  18

  When Moira Fitzgibbon arrived outside the house, she heard the music playing and knew that she was right to have come. Once, she would have surrendered to the protocol of respectability and would not have called on a single man; but with each new day she emerged more as herself and felt a growing confidence in the intelligence of her heart. She had been right about the concert, the people had come, and that morning there was radiance and astonishment on the streets of Miltown Malbay. Word of the concert had arrived almost ahead of its audience, and by the time the lights had come back on with the return of the first car, the town already knew. Those who had not gone to the concert accepted the news of its success with silent dismay; but during the night they washed their consciences in a deep salty sleep as sudden showers blew in off the sea and swept through the damp bedrooms like a scouring God. The wind ran through the town and gathered all spite and bitterness, so that in the morning all awoke full of unanimous praise for Moira Fitzgibbon. The begrudgers had disappeared, transformed into the good citizens of earnest support who made it their business to mention in Hynes’s, Galvin’s, and other shops that they had so enjoyed the music. Moira had been right. She brought the profits from the concert to the bank to lodge them in Moses Mooney’s account and there met Eileen Waters. When the principal congratulated her, Moira felt a surge of weakness and water in her eyes, but shook her own sentimentality free with the knowledge that a day earlier the same woman would have crossed the road rather than meet her.

  “Well, when you believe in something,” Moira said.

  “Yes. Oh, that’s right,” said Eileen Waters. “Absolutely right.”

  “You don’t like to just give up on it.” Moira let the phrase linger a moment and, there in the bank, collected another of the small victories that were becoming common for her. Was it her imagination that made the November street seem brighter, livelier, that morning? was there dazzlement fa
lling? was there an all but imperceptible lift in the air that made men seem to move more lightly from their tractors or salute across the erratic hotchpotch of parked cars in Bank Place with a broader sweep of their arms? Were the twin babies of the Kellys ever laughing like that before? Moira wondered, sauntering along the footpath. Was it always like this, and she had failed to notice? As if enlightenment was a condition of Miltown Malbay that noontime, harmony seemed everywhere. People had their best day. They were illumined with an inexplicable sense of things being right in the world. Their own ordinariness seemed majestic, and in all the coming and going of their everyday shopping and conversation, from the market to the post office, from Galvin’s to Hynes’s, they were like the townspeople in paintings of towns and villages of long ago, when time was slower and everything more innocent.

  And it was the concert. Somehow it was, Moira Fitzgibbon told the dashboard of her car, and drove to Stephen Griffin’s house, where she had seen the yellow car earlier and knew that he could not be working.

  She heard Vivaldi playing when she opened her car door and stood, allowing her heart to understand the situation before moving up to knock. She knocked four times to no answer and looked up at the clear sky without discouragement, as if it were the next white page of the story only just coming to her; then she walked around the back and let herself in.

  “Autumn” was playing, that slow collapse of notes that made the air itself seem to fall as Moira stepped inside the back kitchen. Once she arrived in it she knew she had trespassed some intimacy, that the simplest sights and smells of the domestic disorder were private revelations, and that the stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, the opened cartons of sour milk left by the windowsill, the grey smudge that was an ancient sponge, the dusty cobwebs like netting across the corner of the ceiling, these were each as vulnerable and naked expressions of the heart as rough, raw, first-draft poems. She knew more about Stephen Griffin with each step, and held herself briefly in the kitchen until the myriad impressions had flown into the farthest corner of her mind. Then she called his name.