An hour passed. Philip studied the backs of his hands, where he knew all manner of signs were made visible, and that the freckles and sunspots of early vitality became there the bumps and splotches, scaliness, discoloration, and moles in which every organ speaks. The more time passed, the more ill he felt himself becoming. It was too warm in the bright room; there was a cramping sensation in his left thigh, the toes of his right foot were going numb. He was breathing shallowly. He asked for a glass of water, but was even more alarmed when he drank it and realized it tasted of bitter lemons.
When the last patient had left the waiting room, Philip Griffin stood up, felt his heart racing, and quietly began to say the Our Father. It was not something he was accustomed to doing, and he began it slowly and carefully, feeling with each phrase the discernible slowing of his heart rate and the evanescence of his panic. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as …
“Philip.”
Tim Magrath was standing in the doorway.
The doctor looked like his own grandfather. Since his wife had died he had suffered what was once called nerves, and was in fact the collapse of his soul. The subsequent vacuum in his chest had reduced his shirt size by four inches, and his head of hair seemed dusted with the white talcum makeup of a theatrical ghost. His eyes floated in sunken bags of skin and were caught in fine nets of blood vessels that looked on the point of bursting. Tim Magrath held his hands while he stood. There was no discernible line to his lips, as if he had sucked them in and mutely gnawed on his grief until only the thin gap remained. When he spoke, his voice was a whispery remnant of a voice.
“Philip, how are you? Please come in.”
Although the man had changed, the room had not. Philip sat in the same seat as before, looked across at the bare trees of the square, and then made an announcement.
“I’m not a man who believes in medicine,” he said.
Tim Magrath sat down. He held his hands still and made the slightest quivering in the muscles of his mouth.
“I’m not here for miracles, Doctor,” Philip Griffin added.
“Tim.” It was less than a whisper.
“I’m not here for miracles, Tim. I’ve cancer. I’ve had it for years. It’s moving into the final stages now and I want to know how much longer I have.” He paused and looked across at the doctor, who had slid like a shadow into a seat by the wall. “It’s not fear,” he said, “it’s not that I want to cancel it out, it’s just a question of how long, do you get me? I need a delay in it. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How long have you been …”
The whisper died, the lipless mouth dried the words into an ashen silence, and Tim Magrath raised the fingers of his right hand to see if he could find them.
“I was never checked. I know it myself. It’s here.” He patted his stomach and below. “And here. Spreading. A pain in the morning like I’ve swallowed knives. There’s an aching round the back, and this, see.” He stuck out the wedge of his tongue. “That’s not right, is it?” He had closed his mouth again before the doctor had even risen to look.
Tim Magrath did not know what to say; he himself looked more like death than the majority of his patients. He could outnumber the ailments of any of them and had already moved into that company of men whose gatherings in the clubhouse were dominated by discourse of disease and the dropped dead. He had weekly funerals to go to, and eyed the mourners with the small comfort of knowing that at least some of them would be at his. Now he lowered the grey head of his hair and looked at the fine carpet on the floor. He felt the disconsolate, irredeemable sense of dread in his soul, the feeling he had experienced daily since the death of his wife that he was in fact an impostor, that he had dressed himself in a fine suit and sat with patients for thirty-six years in a room where he wrote prescriptions for drugs that merely masked and postponed the true pain of life. That medicine cannot stop illness or death but merely divert it was a truth he had denied daily. To fifty patients a week there was little Tim Magrath could say, and even as his doubts in the efficacy of medicines grew, he was unable to sit by the bedside and say there is no cure for this condition we live in, and instead felt the gratitude and hope of the sick swim over him when he said, Take three of these every morning noon and night.
But Philip Griffin was different: he didn’t want curing, he wanted time, and in the moments while Tim Magrath stared at the carpet he gathered in himself the resolve to speak the truth and not offer the bald man the bottle of tablets. When he looked up the patient was looking directly at him.
“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”
2
And so, like medieval knights bound on a ceaseless quest for an obscure and chivalrous honour, for the defence of an unattainable ideal with which they themselves had only the briefest acquaintance but whose threatened extinction provoked in each of them the deepest resolve, for the victory of Love over Death, Tim Magrath and Philip Griffin plotted into the afternoon how they would slow down the cancer. The first thing to find out was the size and age and speed of the enemy. Philip needed tests. The earliest available appointment with Carthy, the specialist, was two and a half months later, February 1.
“By then you could be dead,” Tim told him.
“I could,” Philip agreed.
They sat on the moment and felt the November light dying behind them. Cars were moving outside with the illusion of progress, but the clock was almost standing still. February seemed several years away, and the fear of the winter ahead crept in their skin like age. The weathers of wind and rain, of chill, frost, and hail, blew in imagination at the backs of the old men’s necks as they sat wondering how they would outwit Time. The stilled air was grey between them, and they held their hands between their knees and their heads bowed while the icy weight of the word “winter” lodged on their spirits like a sentence.
Then Tim Magrath spoke.
“Fall down,” he said. “Go on, fall down, cry out.”
There was a half-second, a moment it took for the complicity to register, and then, as if his seat had suddenly been thickly oiled, Philip Griffin slid down onto the carpet at the doctor’s feet. His first cry was smaller than a bird’s.
“Louder,” the doctor whispered over him. “Scream it out, and keep doing it until you are in a hospital bed.”
Philip opened his mouth wide and screamed. He astonished himself with his own sound, and looked into the space in front of him as if he could see the twisted shape of agony. He looked at the doctor standing over him and saw the urgency in the other man’s eyes, the need he had to make this medicine work and see the patient carried out of his surgery to hospital; he saw it and he screamed on, raising and lowering the cries as Tim Magrath rushed out to his receptionist and ordered an ambulance, turning on his side and crying out the long cry that drained him like a sewer of the gathered and broken debris of his life, crying for himself, for the miseries and disappointments of his own childhood, the terrible fearfulness of the world that grew inside him, the timidity he had carried until the moment he met Anne Nolan and she blew it from him like a cobweb, the loss, the inestimable loss that was born out of knowing that he had missed so many opportunities to express love while his wife and daughter were alive, the death of loveliness, and the wounded bafflement of his son, for all of it Philip Griffin screamed on the floor, until he was howling out of an emptiness and grief that constituted a pain more real than the pain of cancer.
He cried out and wept until the sorrow exhausted him and he was lying in a hospital bed with a white sheet tucked tightly like a bandage across his chest. He had been given something for pain, he was told, and lay there in the soft pillowy mountains and valleys of his half-consciousness, waiting to be investigated. When he saw the doctor coming, it was as if from a very long distance, and his white coat shone like the illumined raiment of an angel.
3
Stephen drove west with Vivaldi
playing in his head and the face of Gabriella Castoldi lingering between him and the windscreen. He saw her more clearly than he saw the road, and only a small miracle brought him round the bend in Kinnegad. He did not know yet the dimensions of his own heart or that love developed like a geometric progression and could increase rapidly in the shortest of time, without seeing or hearing or touching the other person at all. Neither did he consider yet that his life was changed entirely now and that while the turbulence of emotions churned within him he could not return to the ordinary life of teaching. He imagined it was something which would subside. But still he saw her face. All across the country as he drove she was there before him. He saw the angle of her head as she turned to the violin, the sharpness of her elbow where it bent below the fingerboard, the taut contracted muscles of her shoulder when she bowed the sharp fierce notes of “Winter.” Crossing Westmeath he touched that shoulder with his mind and was surprised only that it did not stop the music in his head.
And all the time the progression was tumbling on, doubling, trebling in intensity within him as the car moved westward.
The west was a vast and soft wetness as he entered it. It was midday. The towns he drove through arose on the road after miles of greenery, their small clusters of Massgoers hastening along with newspapers over their heads against the drizzle, or standing in against the shop window and watching the strange car pass. There was a soft grey complacency everywhere, as if the people were resolute in being undisturbed and guarded a kind of holy faith in mute sufferance and the continuing ordinariness of their lives. They were towns scheduled for by-pass.
Stephen drove in a semi-trance. He did not turn on the radio but listened instead to the concert that was now inside him. He tried to think of history, of Italy in the time of Vivaldi, of the city-state of Venice and the boats in the lagoon, the long and troubled fable of the Doge, and the fragments he knew of Venetian wars, conspiracies, and betrayal. If he could think of the history, if he could turn the pages of time and find in himself the dust of the past, he could make it home; if he could refind the dry and ash-laden language of the dead, he could refind himself and escape the sweating in his palms on the steering wheel, the throbbing in the left side of his temple, and the ceaseless drying of his lips. He wet them a thousand times between Ballinasloe and Loughrea, and for all the dampness of the grey air outside, the wet face of the day that kept sticking to the windscreen and would not be wiped away, his lips dried in an instant and then stung as if kissed by nettles. He tried desperately to think of the history of Venice. What did he know of it? He shut tight his eyes to concentrate, and opened them to swerve the car back onto the road. Venice, Venice. He couldn’t remember. He slowed the car to thirty and held the wheel with his left hand, licking his lips and fingering with his right hand a place above his right eye, as if looking for the switch that would return the past and free him from thinking of the woman. He was two miles outside Loughrea. The mist was thickening into rain, and the car slowed until it was barely quicker than walking pace. The rain fell in a hush. Stephen let out a small cry and the car stopped altogether in the middle of the road.
There was a tremendous green quietness. When he rolled down the window he could hear the rain falling in the old grass of November. No bird was singing. He opened the window for air, but found none. Then he opened the driver’s door, lowering his head as if to vomit and seeing in the rainwater pattern of the tarred road the squiggled shape of his own journey to understanding. A life cannot go backward forever, and as he raised his head Stephen Griffin knew that he could not escape what had already happened.
“I can’t remember, I can’t remember the books,” he said. He said it without excitement or panic, said it matter-of-factly, as if cataloguing a comical loss that had already happened. He waited and wet his lips again. “What’s the name of the history book for fifth years’?”
A pause; then he answered: “I don’t know, can’t remember. Book for third years’?” he asked, and then began to laugh. He laughed until his shoulders were shaking.
The dimension of his defeat was enormous, as his father might have told him the previous evening studying the chess game. When something of great size moves into the heart, it dislodges all else, in just the same way that the forward movement of the queen reshapes the board. So, with the arrival of Gabriella Castoldi in his heart, Stephen Griffin had lost history, dates, facts and figures that he had built his life around and that now on the wet road to Gort slipped from his mind and vanished in the air. He knew nothing of history now.
It was an hour before he could drive on. Or at least so it seemed, for although no car came or went on the black wet ribbon of the tar, time might have stopped for love. When Stephen drove on into Gort and across into Clare, he carried in the cage of his chest the ease of accepting love, and felt it lightly there like a white bird of promise and hope. It was the most ordinary thing, after all. It was the fulcrum of life, and if the years he had spent studying history had shown him that the world turned not on love but on hatred and greed, then this was the new unwritten history of the marvellous, of which he himself could be the author. The bird fluttered around the car as he drove; he was in love. It was all right. Love exists, he thought, and drove with his head out the window of the car, banishing for the time being the multiple improbabilities of courtship or requital, shaking the lank black strands of his hair in the rain and shouting a single long wavering vocable of hope as he sped on homeward to the sea.
When he arrived, the bird was still flying inside him. He parked the car and walked immediately round the back of the house and down the slope of the black rocks to the small shore. It was late afternoon. The tide was withdrawing towards the failing light on the horizon, and gulls blew up like newspaper over the fields’ edge. Stephen walked on the wet rocks, and for the first time in his life did not study his footsteps but moved with the sure inviolability of the lover, briefly certain that the world would not trip him. With the tide out he could walk all the way around the rocky edge and arrive on the long beach of Spanish Point. The sand when he stepped onto it was clean of footprints. The winter tide had erased the past, and Stephen Griffin, walking in a long coat, his face wet with rain and sea spray, was the first and only of a new tribe. He set off down the extravagant beach, where the roaring of the Atlantic was a ceaseless accompaniment and even the soft plashing of his shoes on the shallow pools raised no sound. The sea was majestic in its tumbling and crashing, the size, the energy of it. Stephen imagined he had never seen it before and walked with his head turned sideways, bursting out laughing at the riotous boisterousness as the white surf was combed and ebbed in the froth of fulfillment. Rain ran down his face. He drank the saltiness on his lips and skipped two steps, not quite dancing, but moving in a growing giddiness along the sand beneath the enormous sky.
“I’m in love,” he said. But the wind took his voice away.
“I’m in love with that woman,” he called out louder, feeling the terrible release of the words like a pain that was part of healing. “I’m in love with her!” he cried again, only then discovering that the emotion was such that it would gather constantly inside him and hurt like an ulcer until he cured it with confessions.
He had reached the far end of the beach when the rain stopped. Evening was drawing swiftly across the sky, and the seabirds had vanished inland. In half an hour it would be darker than ink; already the line of the rocks was smudged into the sea and sky, and Stephen would have to walk home around by the road. But he did not. He felt the bird flying in his chest and the dazzlement of love making him lighter and brighter than nightfall. For the first time in his life he felt the radiance of a pure and visionary faith. He was bright with enlightenment. It felt like a reckless surge of invincibility. He opened his coat and took it off. Then he pushed off his shoes. Soon he was standing in his underpants in the dark on the beach at Spanish Point, with the wind blowing off the sea cold against his skin. He walked forward into the frozen waves.
4
When the young Dr. Hadja Bannerje sat on the edge of the bed and told Philip Griffin that he had advanced cancer in his left lung and that the disease had spread into his bone marrow, the tailor received the news with no surprise and simply leaned forward to ask how long.
“How long have I to live, Doctor?”
The Indian was unsure Philip had understood.
As It Is in Heaven Page 9