He read aloud: “Gabriella Castoldi was a member of the Orchestra de la Teatro de la Fenice in Venice until recently moving to Kenmare in County Kerry. She frequently performs in evenings of chamber music at The Falls Hotel.”
He read it and felt lighter, imagining the hotel and the evenings of chamber music deep in Kerry. He took the piece of paper to his bedroom and lay down. He did not undress; he put his hands behind his great head and said Gabriella Castoldi, like a whisper to the wind. He said it like a message. He said it like a signal and a code, as if the sounding of the words might reach her wherever she was and that she might stop and turn her neck to the side, as if with the violin, and hear in the night air the soft beating of wings that was the incipient approach of his spirit. Gabriella. He said it over and over, clinging to it like the almost drowned, so that even Mick Clancy, his neighbour across the fields, heard it in mutated form in his dream and awoke to tell his wife, Nora, that the Angel Gabriel had announced something in Italian in his head.
7
The following morning Stephen drove the yellow car onto the flat-bottomed Killimer ferry to cross the river to Kerry. The old boat tugged at the grey sleeve of the Shannon. Stephen got out of his car and climbed up onto the viewing deck. Seabirds swung in the air overhead. As if by a conjuror’s trick, Kerry in front looked no different from Clare behind. As if the ferry was forever to cross between two reflections, neither of them as frighteningly real as the places of the homeless and murdered on the radio. Green fields sloped sleepily to the grey river. It was late November. There were no tourists on the ferry, only a milk tanker and the washed cars of a couple of salesmen who were talking on telephones in the middle of the river. The crossing took thirty minutes, but seemed longer. Away from school, Stephen felt the slow energy of the countryside seeping into him like a potion. There was a gentle easiness, an unhurried ordinariness in the waving of the ferryman as he directed the cars off on the other side. Even the little line of their traffic moved into Kerry with the slow grace of wanderers, not business people. In the small town of Tarbert women were stopped and talking. A butcher stood at his doorway. Stephen slowed down. He had awoken that morning with the urgency of arriving in Kenmare, but now, when he had moved beyond the habitual perimeters of his own life, he felt the wonderful ordinariness of the market towns he drove through: the shopping and talking, the women who slipped like breezes from the church after weekday Mass, the buying of carrots from parked vans, the saluting of friends, nods and laughter, gossip, deals, and the talk of funerals that moved the world along. By the time he had driven fifty miles into Kerry, Stephen Griffin had begun to learn the small history of life, the unchronicled plain fable of the everyday in which until that morning he had not taken part.
When he stopped the car for petrol at a small station on the side of the road, a short man in a suit and hat came out to serve him. He was sixty years old, and the absence of any teeth gave his smile the air of a deflated football.
“Lovely weather,” he mouthed, taking the pump.
Stephen looked up; it was not raining, but the sky was broken.
“Oh, it’s coming,” said the man, and moistened his sunken lips at the prospect. “Nice as summer this week coming.”
“I see.”
“Not yet you don’t, but you will.” He paused and grinned a gaping toothlessness at the sky. “I’m not wrong,” he added cheerfully. “You’ll be coming back this way?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Well. I mean, yes, I will.”
“You stop in and tell me if I wasn’t right. Lovely weather.” He turned his head at a slight angle to himself as if hearing an inaudible broadcast, and then resumed pumping the petrol.
The petrol gagged at the tank, and the old man stopped and hung up the pump.
“I’m Martin O’Sullivan. You never heard of me, I suppose?”
Stephen said nothing. The man smiled at the vastness of the world and the decreasing smallness of himself in it.
“No,” he said, “you did not.” And he left it at that, taking the fifteen pounds for the petrol and adding nothing of his own story, the fading fable of how once he had held the world record for holding his breath and imagined that the vast populations of everywhere admired him for it.
He waved off the car and watched it go into Killarney and the mountains. Then he walked back to the small seat inside the door of the shop, to watch the world becoming smaller and the wonderful weather arriving in the sky.
It was late afternoon by the time Stephen drove the winding road out of Killarney past the lakes and into the mountains. Here was a road with no shop or houses, a rising thread of grey through the thickening greenery and the rock. Streams ran across the roadway and fell farther towards the mirrors of the lakes below. It was a road in fairyland. A timeless way out of the pages of children’s tales. It wound like a spell, climbing all the time through a green hush that was older than Aesop. That November afternoon there were no cars ahead of Stephen or behind him. He was driving so slowly that arrival seemed to move ahead of him uncertainly. He rolled down the window and felt the cool air like a damp lusciousness enter the car. It was as if he were moving barefoot in deep undergrowth, and the smell of pine had cleared his mind to a serene vision of Gabriella playing the violin. He did not know that he was driving now in the places where she had walked, or that sometimes she had played the violin high among the trees on the sides of those mountains. He did not know it, but heard nonetheless in the thin purity of the air the notes that she had left.
In that verdant and ancient loveliness the yellow car crawled on, moving through a place where it was less difficult to believe there was a spirit that loved the world.
At half past four in the afternoon Stephen arrived in Kenmare. He drove down off the mountains with a falling mist closing in behind him. By the time he arrived at the top corner of the triangular town, the mountains themselves had disappeared, like the toys of God. Drifts of soft drizzle moved in the air, dampened the pink faces of the townspeople, and made their radios crackle. He had no idea exactly where to go. He walked along the footpath, past the shops, his heart fluttering with the bird within him. He tried to amble, to walk with pretend interest along the street, while all the time anxiety roiled his stomach. It was only when he was already out of the car and walking in Kenmare that the possibility of meeting Gabriella on the street dawned on him. He stopped and tried to swallow the sharp pieces of his panic; he thought of retreating, acting a small pantomime of forgetting something and urgently running back along the path. Having driven a hundred miles, he was suddenly terrified to meet her. What if she was there in front of him, walking her shopping home? An appalling sense of the outlandishness of it froze him to the ground; of seeing a woman play a violin and then dropping everything, abandoning a life and driving off like a latter-day Lancelot into the mountains to see her again. He had a surging sense of the absurd anachronism of romance, of its implausible and obsolete currency in the world, as though it belonged to ancient history and, along with words like Valour and Honour and Truth, was credible only in fables. His black hair fell down in front of his eyes as he studied around his feet the running rain stains that looked like maps of lost countries. He stood there in his thick coat and told himself again that he was not there to speak with her, that he had come because he wanted to hear her play again, because he wanted to watch her, and in that watching was a kind of healing he could not explain. He reasoned it in a slow argument like a practising solicitor and tried to climb the specious rungs of logic until it did not seem absurd.
He was standing, arguing the case of himself, when Nelly Grant saw him from the vegetable market across the street. When he moved off the wet space he had been standing in and walked down the path again, she saw the strange hesitation in his manner, the way he shuffled along half-turned from the people coming against him, and was at once suspicious of his contorted energy.
A man like that, she thought, needs plums.
It was another twenty mi
nutes before he arrived back up the other side of the street to her shop. Later, Stephen would tell himself that he had stepped in the door because it was open and not because he wanted fruit. But the moment he appeared before her Nelly Grant already recognized in the twisted shambles of his body the jangling and unaccommodated condition of his spirit. All his organs are in deep stress, she thought, and smiled at him as he fingered an apple on the side of the stack.
“Quiet time of year for a visit,” she said across to him.
“I’m sorry?”
“Taking a small holiday? It’s a good time for it. Kenmare is too busy now in the summers. Though I shouldn’t be complaining, should I? But it’s nice and quiet now. You’ll get a nice few days if the mist lifts. Which it will too, I’d say.” She paused and looked at him. “Try a few plums,” she suggested lightly, and raised her eyebrows with her voice as if approaching a delicate bridge between them. “Try one, they’re lovely. Taste of autumn in them.”
And he did. He bit the plum, and lifted his head for the first time as the juice ran down his chin.
It’s worse still, thought Nelly Grant when she saw the egg-yolk hue of his tongue and the lifeless colour of his teeth. She had to turn for a moment to the shelf behind the counter where she kept the vitamin and mineral supplements. She moved two jars of A and E and recalled it was Tuesday last since she had checked her own tongue for the pinkness of her life force.
“I need …”
“Yes?” She turned, like luck.
Stephen scratched his forehead, and small skin cells flaked falling in the shop light. He looked to the right in a loop of hesitation, but Nelly Grant came forward and with her the affirming scent of cinnamon oil that was burning in pottery by the register.
The loop unknotted.
“I need someplace to stay.”
“Oh yes,” said Nelly. “Well, there’s still a few places that stay open all year round. I have a card here for …” She turned to the crowded noticeboard behind her, but stopped when the man behind her spoke.
“There’s a hotel here,” he said. His voice was skipping like a record and he had to swallow hard before he added quickly, “It’s called … The Falls, The Falls Hotel.”
“That’s right.” Nelly Grant turned and looked at him, detecting only now the burden of secrecy he carried.
“I don’t want to go there. Not stay there. I mean I just—It’s not far, is it?”
“Oh no. It’s just up the street,” she said.
“Right. That’s fine. Thank you. There’s em …” Stephen felt his transparency like a face blemish and half-turned towards the door while Nelly Grant blew the scent of the cinnamon softly forward once more. “There is, there are … em … concerts there sometimes?”
“Oh, there are,” she said.
“Good. Good.” He nodded and drew breath like the drowning, and it was a few moments before he realized that he was standing at a shop counter but had nothing to buy.
“Do you want this, it’s Mary White’s place. Very nice and comfortable,” said Nelly Grant, holding out the card. “It’s not far from the hotel,” she added, already a half-conspirator in the plot of his loving.
Stephen took the card and thanked her, then tried to repay the graciousness of the woman by going over to the nearest stall and taking a bag of apples. Then a bag of oranges. Then a clutch of green bananas.
My God, thought Nelly as she watched him, he has hardly ever bought fruit. Plums, she knew, were the fruit for him, and she tried to guide his body towards them with the energy of her mind. This man has no balance, and plums are the fruit of balance; the softness of the flesh to the solidity of the stone hints at it, the perfect proportion of the stone to the fruit tells it even more clearly. Peaches work in the same way for people of southern climates, but it is plums, thought Nelly Grant, that balance the Irish. Pick a plum. Pick a plum.
She let the suggestion flow like a current to the back of Stephen’s head. But his body and spirit were too out of balance to receive it, she decided, and so said, “I have a special on those plums this week.”
“Oh yes, thank you,” said Stephen, jostling the bags of apples and oranges against his chest, holding the bananas down with his chin, and reaching toward the basket of plums. Nelly came forward. When she moved across the small shop the oils that scented her body followed her through the air. She was able to fill the space like a large sound.
“I’ll take these,” she said, and unloaded the fruit bags and bananas, standing briefly next to the stranger so that the wholeness of her energy and the scent of lavender might soothe his embarrassment. He was the most awkward man she had ever seen, but that very awkwardness was attractive, too, for it broadcast an intensity of feeling. She watched him gather three more plums, and then the two of them moved back to the register. As if she would not allow him to buy them, Nelly put the other fruits to one side. She did not weigh the plums, but charged him two pounds.
Hurriedly Stephen reached inside his coat for coins. Even that, Nelly thought, reveals him.
“And the … em …” He looked over at where she had left the apples and oranges.
“These are very good,” she said, ignoring his gesture, looking directly at him with the green compassion of her eyes and patting softly with her right hand the bag of plums.
“Oh yes, I’m sure,” he said. “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.” He nodded quickly, as if to an allegro, and then turned towards the door.
“Come back again,” Nelly Grant said. “All my customers come back.”
“Yes; yes, I will.” He stopped at the door as if he had suddenly remembered something important to say to her. He turned. She was looking at him.
“Em …”
Then he sighed, nodded, and was gone.
8
Stephen stayed that night at the small clean guest house of Mary White, a woman of fifty-nine who had buried her husband and lost her children to the invisible places where only telephones reached them. She was a slender woman with fine white curls and thin legs who, since losing her left breast, had become a close friend of Nelly Grant’s and believed without hesitation it was she who had helped her recover in the world. When she saw the man arriving at the front door with the bag of plums, she knew where he had come from and brought him forward into the yellow bedroom that had once belonged to her eldest daughter. Then she went and made him tea, calling him from the room with a gentleness he felt like a mother’s hand.
“Perhaps you’d like me to wash the plums?” she asked as he sat down in the living room, where the extraordinary green beauty of her back garden rose before the window.
“Or just tea,” she added, “and some biscuits.” Then she left him alone there and went to warm fresh towels for his room. Mary White was a slight woman, but knew the enormous goodness of giving comfort. That it might be given to her, that she might deserve or need it, did not enter her mind. She warmed the towels, turned on the oven, and baked fresh scones and brown bread for her visitor out of that simple and immeasurable force of goodness that moved within her. When he finished his tea she brought him more, and asked him to tell her if there was anything he needed to feel comfortable.
That evening the mist came down into the streets of the town. A damp clothlike darkness fell, and when Stephen slipped out of the house within it he could smell the pine trees in the mountains. He walked to the hotel, feigning casualness and calm. His forehead shone beneath the yellow streetlights, and the moisture of the night glittered on his hair like a crown. By the time he had arrived at the wide gateway and the illumined sign welcoming visitors, he was breathing so shallowly the thin air of both fear and desire that he might have fallen down there on the pathway. He balled his fists inside his coat pockets, as if squeezing the life of his own timidity, and then headed up into the bright lights of the hotel. The stone steps were red-carpeted. A round-faced man in a black uniform and cap nodded to him as he entered and stood in the timbered hallway where a wood fire was burning. Ste
phen didn’t know where to go. He had planned on getting to the hotel to see Gabriella play the violin, but now that he was standing inside the door, he felt lost. He ran his hand up over his forehead and hair, and then had to hide it momentarily in the collar of his jacket, until the drench of white sweat disappeared. The porter stepped over.
“Evening, sir.”
The man had a way of making the greeting seem like a question, a way of looking with round brown eyes that declared he had seen the world in all its guises come through the doors of this hotel and now knew intimately, intimately, sir, the myriad vagaries of the visitor in Kerry. He knew Stephen did not belong there. Or so Stephen imagined, holding like a lip-tremble the impulse to hurry back out the door.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Stephen held his lower lip between his teeth.
“Sir?”
“For the em, for the music. I em was hoping to hear some music. Played.”
Maurice Harty studied him like a new text, reading in him the plot of a simple mystery novel and noting the clues with a small satisfaction. “What music would that be, sir?”
“Here. I thought there was—a concert, of violin and …” Stephen looked away down the hallway towards a large lounge. Maurice Harty touched his arm and was startled to feel its thinness.
“That would be Friday or Saturday night, sir,” he said, and watched Stephen Griffin’s spirit fall like a shadow.
“Friday?” It was a breathy sigh. As if the swimmer had closed his eyes and made a hundred strokes, only to open them and see the shoreline had receded even farther.
“Or Saturday, sir.”
Stephen did not move, he floated there on the harsh awareness that he was encumbered with some invisible baggage of misfortune which guaranteed the unease of his passage.
As It Is in Heaven Page 11