6
The following afternoon he headed south into Kerry. The stillness of the landscape did not mirror his heart. The fields were like the fields painted on a plate. Thin light glistened on the hedgerows and made the first yellow blossoms of the gorse luminescent with the re-emergence of springtime. The hidden verb of life pulsed in secret, and the countryside was made gentle with obscured sunshine. Winter was over, and the precarious existence of bulb and root beneath the soil was made easier now; it was that kind of afternoon. The cattle nosed the wire that kept them from the spring grass. They smelled the alluring and sweet sticky scent of regeneration and moaned softly with the satisfaction of a favoured dream.
The light held for a time. Even before Killarney he could smell the trees and the mountains; the smells returned to him like visions of Gabriella, and by the time he passed the silver lakes, the air in the car was sharp with impossible yearning. Upon her rested his life's happiness; it was as clear as that, and if, once, the enormity of risk might have fractured his resolve and turned him around on the road, it was no longer so. He blinked at the light that came through the mountains, and drove on into them, feeling only the central most basic and human emotion that makes meaning of all our days: the urgency to love.
(He did not know yet the counter-balancing necessity of allowing himself to be loved in return, which would require a more difficult faith, and the passage of time.)
He drove the car into Kenmare and out to the house of Mary White. Both car windows were wide open now, and the scent of loving escaped everywhere and announced his return even to those who did not know his name.
Mary White was at home. She received Stephen with a brief pleasant rise of her thin eyebrows and brought her two hands together before her to clutch the happiness.
“Welcome,” she said, “welcome,” she said again, beaming a great contentment and nodding, as if she saw spirits entering with Stephen and was delighted with such elevated company. “You're back with us again,” she said, saying “us” even though she lived alone.
“If it's all right?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I was so hoping we'd have you back.” She paused and looked at him, and felt the way people do when a corner of the jigsaw has come together. “Now come on,” she said, “I have your room ready.”
And so Stephen followed her back into the room where he had dreamt so vividly of Gabriella that the presence of her was still in the corners of the ceiling. He felt it was right and proper to begin again; there was something fitting about returning to that house, as though life moves in spiralling circles and we arise along invisible tracks that were laid in the air. He felt the sense of it without knowing why, for it was not until he sat to tea with Mary White and told her about the death of his father in Dublin that she asked him if he was the son of Anne, who had died in the crash years ago and with whom Mary White had once been in school.
7
When Stephen awoke the world spoke with birdsong and the buzzing of spring flies. He smelled the sweet tang of the garden's annual resurrection, the slow stirring and secret life of the flowers not yet opened but breathing nonetheless in the open bedroom window. It was the morning of the declaration of love. When he opened his eyes, he caught the tonic air of wild rhubarb and was sharpened in his awareness that this was to be the beginning of new life. He would give himself to Gabriella and the child, and if she would not marry him, he would take any job he could get and live near her and be whatever he could to her for the rest of his days. He was filled that morning with such innocence. That morning, while he lay in the bed breathing the spring, he had a view of a world beautiful in its simplicity: that we act on our hearts and follow the things that move us. That it was outlandish and naïve and impractical, that it was the kind of thinking once expected of a child up to the age of twelve, then ten, but now, in our days, no more than the age of eight, that innocence had diminished so and the world become so old and weary that belief in such things had all but vanished did not bother Stephen Griffin. He lay on his bed on the outskirts of that town in Kerry and dreamed like a saint of a selfless loving.
When he rose he saw Mary White hanging clothes on the line in the garden. The soft wind billowed the white sheets.
Down in Kenmare that morning the streets were lively with men and beasts. Cattle trailers and wagons moved slowly, and the trapped cattle bellowed and stomped in the traffic. People watched them passing on their way to the spring mart and took the soured air of the dung and urine as another emblem of the new season, the countryside awakening and descending on the town. Wisps of straw litter were about the place, and there were children late going to school who had been drovers at dawn, leading cattle with hose-pipe sticks to the loading. There was a buzz of excitement, the noise of engines and the salutes and waves and cries of those leaning forward in their tractor cabs to call down to a neighbour some news of animal or man.
Into this throbbing Stephen walked. The streets of the country town were alive about him. Before he had reached the corner where Nelly Grant kept her shop, he knew that his footsteps were bringing him to the doorway of his new life. He sensed the enormity of it with the freshness of a child facing First Communion, and by the time he had arrived at the fruit and vegetable stalls outside the shop, he had begun to shake inside his clothes. He took a moment to master himself. He raised his head, opened his mouth, and swallowed full the host of redemption. Then he stepped into the shop and saw Nelly Grant raise her eyebrows.
“Stephen!”
She was holding two Seville oranges, and with them in her hands came forward and embraced him.
“She's here,” she whispered as she held on to him, taking the opportunity to smell the uncertain blended aroma of his hope, anxiety, and love. “You have a new radiance,” she said, and stood back to admire his aura.
“Gabriella!” she called out before Stephen had even said a word to her.
And then, through the beaded curtain that separated the shop from the small back office, where the geranium oil was burning and choral music playing, Gabriella stepped out.
“Stefano,” she said. She said it like a whisper. “Oh, Stefano.” She brought her hands to her mouth as if to hold in a cry.
8
And in his bed that morning, quietly, while the rain that first seemed to fall only in Clare and then only in Miltown Malbay spilled down through the broken roof of his cottage and pooled on the floor and made the cats come from the cupboard to the shiplike dryness and comfort of his bed, while the water was filling so steadily across the flagstone floor that he laughed to think the nearby hurley stick might be his oar and his bed once more a sailing schooner off the distant shores of Peru, easily then, like moorings loosened at last or notes rising in that supernatural music that rose from the throat of Maria Callas, Moses Mooney closed his blind eyes in the falling spills of weather inside his house and saw the lovers Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi and knew what he knew and wept like rain, and softly died.
9
“I cannot marry you, Stephen. I cannot.”
They had left the shop of Nelly Grant and, like people carrying heavy burdens, walked mutely from the town. They had taken the Killarney road towards the mountains instinctively, as if the bigness of their emotions demanded the otherworldly landscape of rock and wood silvered now with the torrents of the season. Water was everywhere running and made a noise louder than the birds. Stephen and Gabriella did not touch. They walked two feet apart up the slow incline, and by the time they had left the close cattle smells of the town behind, the air was thin and blue and clean as pine. The bread van passed and stopped and offered them a lift to Killarney, but they waved it on, not meeting each other's eyes but moving like figures in a romantic painting, as if to a prearranged spot in the vastness of that green wilderness.
There was no such spot; a car with four swearing singing bachelor footballers raced past them on their way home from the night, and Stephen stepped into the verge and slipped and almost twiste
d his ankle, but caught against Gabriella. Her face was white. “I'm sick,” she said.
“Oh God, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say?”
They sat down on a ledge of rock, the mountain behind them.
And for a moment, nothing.
They breathed and looked away. The valley was below, and deep within it the thin morning smoke of three houses rose and vanished in the air.
“Are you all right?”
“It passes.”
“Here, do you want my jacket?”
“No no, keep it.”
Stephen looked at himself for something to offer. He was suffused with a desire for giving to Gabriella, and was only just understanding that singular characteristic of love, that the impulse to do something for the other reached a point of such immediacy that it almost erased him entirely and left only the urgency. He looked at the side of her face with a dizzy desire to put the palm of his hand against it.
“I am so glad you came back,” he said.
“I wasn't sure I would,” said Gabriella, “not when I left. And it's not because of the child.”
“I know.”
“I wanted …” She stopped, and her face briefly frowned, a frown that travelled down from her forehead to her mouth like a wind rumple in a sheet and flowed on then into Stephen. “I wanted to know. I want my life to be, you know, to find a kind of certainty, it's stupid, I know, but just not to fall into things, you know, to feel that …”
“I love you.”
She turned her face towards him, and he saw the pain he had put in her eyes.
“I know that, Stephen. Oh, I know.”
“I want to take care of you. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
She lowered her head until her chin rested low on her fists. A car travelled slowly up the hill and stopped five yards away from them to look down at what the driver imagined the two people must be looking at. It was not until the two tourists had looked all around for the spectacular view they couldn't find that they got back in the car and drove past. They waved at the tall man and the woman sitting on the rock, but no greeting was returned. Gabriella's brown hair fell forward across her cheeks, the pink whorl at the top of her ear appeared through the strands. Stephen held on to his knees. He looked down as if from a precipice at the life he wanted to plunge into. He looked at Gabriella's clothes, her walking boots, the corded wine trousers, the thick woollen coat, and like a demented disciple, he loved them, too. If she had taken off her coat he would have hugged it to him and breathed its scent.
“Gabriella?”
She turned to him. “There's no need to say anything, Stephen,” she said. “I know I know I know” She touched his face and felt the emotion buckle him. “I am terrible,” she said. “I am mean and hard.”
He had turned his mouth to kiss her hand where it touched him.
“Please,” he said.
“Don't.”
“Please.”
“Stephen.” She brought up her other hand and was holding his wet face. “I cannot marry you,” she said. “It wouldn't … I would always feel that I had forced you.” She stopped and held back her head to face the sky. “I love you, Stephen Griffin. I do. But I am not in love with you. I cannot marry you.”
“Don't, then. Don't,” he said, and now held on to her hands at his face and did not let them go. “Don't marry me, but just let me …” He ran out of words and let the pleading rush from his eyes with the force that runs rivers into seas.
“You are the best man,” Gabriella said, and shook her head in disbelief that such a man existed, and then she reached forward and pressed herself against him with such force it might have been for healing or to be healed, and then she kissed his face and then his mouth that was salty like the sea.
10
Nelly Grant knew when she saw them return into the town of Kenmare. She read their aurae like an ancient book whose pages have worn and yellowed from the feverish finger grease of a thousand readers. When they re-entered her shop and Stephen knocked against the Granny Smiths and sent four tumbling green globes onto the floor, Nelly could read the aftershocks in him and feel the trembling that had not yet subsided and that had brought the strange clamour from the birds in the yet unleaved sycamores behind Sugrue's. Gabriella stooped to pick up the apples at the same moment as Stephen. They are like twin clocks, Nelly thought, but do not realize it. She smiled and said nothing and watched them replace the fruit. The relationship is so unbalanced, she told herself, he loves her so much, that at any moment things might fall off shelves, spark, combust. Watching them standing in the small free space of the shop was like watching springtime in fast forward.
“Well?” said Nelly, and smiled. She watched the light from them radiate across the ceiling. Then Gabriella stepped forward and embraced her.
It was one of the qualities of Nelly Grant that she could become different people at different moments; and in that embrace on the shop floor, she was briefly the mother Gabriella had wished for. She was wise and knowing. Her body in a chunky blue sweater felt like a lifetime's bulk of warmth and hope, and Gabriella held on to it. While she did, Nelly Grant winked at Stephen and almost toppled him. She took Gabriella's thanks with soft protest, and when the younger woman told her she was moving back into the house she had left before Christmas, Nelly clapped three small claps for this minor victory of love and then went to fill a fruit bag for the two of them. While she circled the stalls, drawing oranges and grapes and a sweet pineapple, she watched out of the corner of her eye where Stephen's hand dangled dangerously in the air, charged with the imploding desire to reach and take Gabriella's fingers. He did not do it.
“Take these with you,” Nelly said then, coming forward quickly with the fruit, before anything else could happen, and standing so close to Gabriella that the younger woman had to step backward and brush into the chest of Stephen. His hands landed like large birds on her shoulders, and the relief softened the line of his mouth. “And a little of this,” said Nelly, bringing them a small bottle of a kind of milk made from the flour drawn from roots of the early purple orchids and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. “It is good for everything,” she told them, “especially to keep resolve of the spirit.” Then she placed her hand on Gabriella's head and let her go. “Call to see me.”
“I will.”
“We will,” said Stephen.
The lovers walked out of the shop, and fruit rolled off the shelves. Everything is energy, thought Nelly, and laughed to watch the bananas twirl on the S hooks.
That afternoon, while the farmers slowly returned from the mart and the money began to surface on polished counters in all the pubs of the town, Gabriella moved back into the house she had left before Christmas. And whether it was the burgeoning spring, the relief of animals sold, the excitement of animals bought, or the radiant spirit of loving returned, by early evening the town was singing and smoking and swallowing pints in that strange mixture of celebration and hope and reminiscence that is the true hallmark of the end of winter.
In the house on the hill, when darkness had fallen, Gabriella sat on the floor before the fire and Stephen sat in the chair to the side of her. Their music was not the music of the town below them. It was a recording of Puccini's Tosca that Stephen had brought from his car and played for Gabriella when he told her of his father's death and that this was the music his father had listened to for thirty years. While the sweetest arias played they did not speak. They ate the fruit Nelly Grant had given them and listened, and it was not until the third act that Gabriella lifted her head and raised her hand and met Stephen's fingers and drew him so swiftly down to her on the floor that the turf smoke billowed out over them in a cloud. And in that moment, while the town below them was singing and the heavens above were thronged with spirits and stars, while the diva sang “Vissi d'arte” and made the small room one with others in different places and different times, Gabriella Castoldi kissed the man who loved her and took his head and touched his wet eyes and
held her fingers upon his lips.
“Why am I so difficult?” she said beneath the singing, shaking her head as if to escape her father's knuckling fists landing upon her.
And for once Stephen did not remain quiet, but in a low voice answered her and said, “Let go, just try and let it go.”
And in the simple, brief, and yet momentous way in which a life is decided, in which the hold of the past is released and the future arrives like new skin, Gabriella closed her eyes and at last surrendered to that impulse that was as timeless, inevitable, and relentless as spring itself, and was the subject of all the songs the men were singing in the town below.
11
Stephen stayed that night, and the one after that, and after that again. He brought his things from Mary White's, who bade him goodbye once more, this time with the gentlest of smiles and a wave of her hand, telling him he was welcome always and holding herself in her thin arms as if embracing some of the loving that glowed off him.
The easterly winds that were the harbingers of March and were nightly forecast did not arrive in Kenmare. The season was mild and the earth became tender. The soil moistened as it unfroze and released a sweet scent everyone seemed to have forgotten from the year before. Old women warned that good weather should not be trusted and wore their thick coats into the town with the sour wisdom of life's disillusioned. They stood at butcher counters ordering the cheapest cuts of meat, and when the new season potatoes arrived from Israel they looked at them with scornful downturned mouths and went home to enjoy the thick-skinned bitter gnarled potatoes that God had spared them in the shed since last July. But for others the softness of the beginning of March came as a blessing, not a curse. The worst winds that were sent from Finland whispered and diminished over north Tipperary and did not reach the Kerry mountains. The sun rose in clear skies. Among the lifted spirits of the town Stephen bought the groceries and things for the house. That he had no skill for carpentry or repair-work did not stop him buying hammer and nails and screwdriver and gazing fixedly at the closely packed shelves in Donoghue's hardware shop, wondering but not asking what things were. He returned to the house, where Gabriella was writing a letter to her cousin, and with a determined kind of manliness, he hammered lumps out of the doorjamb that was loose, and screwed crookedly new screws into the mirror frame that was falling forward out of the dressing table, and now only toppled backward.
As It Is in Heaven Page 21