“These are for you,” he said. “These are for celebration.” Gabriella held Alannah to the window to see, and even Moira became giddy with the notion of the secret sowings and came out from the car and threw fistfuls of poppy, rudbeckia, rose campion, dianthus, and feverfew into the gaiety of the wind.
On the Friday evening at the end of Alannah's first week, Gabriella wrote newly to Maria Feri and Nelly Grant. When she sat in the kitchen before the white pages, the enormity of what had happened to her life rose before her. It was the most ordinary event in the world, the love affair, the birth of the child, but somehow when she thought of it—that she was living now in the west of Ireland with a daughter a week old in the cradle beside her—it took on the dimensions of dreams. She hummed an air and wrote. To Maria Feri she told the news that she was an aunt, and how Alannah showed the time she had spent in Venice by the outrageous exuberance of her giggle, which, Gabriella wrote, was not in the least Irish. She sent her cousin wishes and thanks and lifted the pen from the white space where she glimpsed the evening sorrow of that small apartment above the canal. To Nelly Grant she wrote a shorter message: I have a baby girl. Please come visit.
But it was Maria and not Nelly who responded. In two weeks a piece of white lacework arrived from Venice with a note in the small careful hand of her cousin. It was written on handmade paper in violet ink and had the formal tone of old family property, offering congratulations in a manner that some might consider coldhearted. But Gabriella knew better, and read beyond the tone. She took the lacework in her hand and breathed its scent and caught at once the bittersweet melancholia of Venice; then she placed it in the case of her violin, as if for company.
From Nelly Grant there came no word, and by the time the first rains of autumn had begun to sweep in against the back of the cottage, Gabriella had written her three letters with no reply. Then, in the way a person can fall through the narrowest cracks of our lives, she wrote no more and put aside the little hurt of the silence by supposing that Nelly was simply a woman who disliked writing.
25
When the rain came it came in sheets. It was as if a great chest had been discovered in the heavens and an array of grey clothes were flung out of it into the skies. It streamed down. The light was washed out of the days, and the field where the music school was now almost complete was scored with streaks of an ochre mud. The building was a low glass pentagon with piers of Liscannor flagstone. The builders marvelled at it. Once they were inside it, finishing the timberwork and plastering, they felt something of the extraordinary nature of the thing they had created. It was a unique space, and felt as if it had fallen from the sky or risen from the ground. The golfers in the dunes nearby looked at it with the puzzled expressions of those who cannot imagine the reality of fantasy. But through the rainy days of September the men worked on inside it with a gathering good humour. There was something about the light, of how the rooms' long windows let in the sea views and blended them into the sky, of how strangely playful the space seemed, that made the carpenters whistle and the plasterers hum until the experience of each day inside that building took on the spirit-lifting quality of a concert in Verona. Men sang tunes they hardly knew. They teased each other and then responded to taunts by singing another, singing songs they sang only when drunk, and marvelling at how the sounds of their own voices rang in the high roof spaces.
Every day Stephen visited the building. The closer it came to being completed, the more uncertain he became that they would find the pupils to fill it. In the colder weather the population of the town shrunk. The whole landscape took on the air of a child crouching before a blow. And the rain swept on. Cold squalls blew in off the watery horizon, they lashed the coast of Clare, but according to the evening news on the television, seemed to have blown out and vanished long before they reached Dublin.
By the end of September Gabriella had returned to the violin with renewed energy. She played for Alannah, then played some more when the child was sleeping. Somewhere in the time she had spent away from it her style had changed. She had lost the sharp, edgy quality that was characteristic of her previous intensity. Now instead, she created a fuller and rounder sound and made a music that to Stephen seemed to echo his own feelings of grace. The two Fitzgibbon girls came for lessons. And one evening while Ciara, who was seven, was waiting in the sitting room, Stephen saw her looking at the chess set.
“Would you like to learn?” he asked her.
“Is it very hard?”
“Not for a girl who can play the violin.”
And so they began. He taught her how to play while the rain whipped against the windows and her sister bowed “Song of the Wind” on the violin. He showed her the moves and watched her innocence and astonishment at the bizarre secrets of the game, how the knight could jump and the king castle, and as he lifted the pieces and spoke of them, he had to pause three times in mid-sentence, for in the timbre of his own voice he heard the unmistakable speech of Philip Griffin teaching him the same game so many years before. He moved the bishop and looked at his own hand holding it and, seeing the wrinkling he had not noticed before, realized how he had become his father.
* * *
On Saturday, the fifth of October, Stephen and Gabriella opened the music school in the pentagonal building of glass and stone in Mooney's field on the west coast of Clare. It was a day of wild weathers, and the beginning of that long season of flu, head colds, and chest coughs that were to mark that year's winter like overdue payment for a good summer. It was the predicted gloom that made happy the misfortunate. The wind came in broken, sudden breaths, as if the lungs of the year had collapsed inwards, and a momentary stillness was followed by forceful gasping. Rain was spat out and then vanished, then clattered again on the glass.
For a week the school had been advertised. Moira had made posters. She had spoken to the people at the Clare Champion and been promised an article, which did not appear. She had mentioned the virtuosity of Gabriella Castoldi, the great progress on the violin her own daughters were making, the opportunity of the school. She had even let slip the name of Moses Mooney and used it like a touchstone to remind those who did not wish to remember that he was a blind old man who had died disappointed. Moira had campaigned for the school tirelessly, but on the morning of the fifth of October she awoke with the terrible unease of those who are about to be ill. The weather was a bad omen. Perhaps no one will come, she thought. And for a final time in her life returned to the old doubt in herself: Perhaps behind my back they are laughing, thinking, Who does she think she is, she who failed more exams than anyone in the parish. Moira had stood at the rain window and cursed. Then said, God forgive me.
By ten o'clock she had arrived at the new building, where Stephen and Gabriella and the baby were waiting for her. The air in the school smelled of painted colours. Inside the front hall there was a music system softly playing Vivaldi's Concerto in G major for violoncello, strings, and basso continuo; there was a table with cheese and wine, and another with leaflets and admission forms overhung by the green and yellow paper ribbons that Moira had saved since the last World Cup. At half past ten Councillor O'Rourke arrived. He held his head at such a high angle that it was impossible to tell whether it was in disdain or approval (and in fact he himself was undecided and would wait for confirmation one way or the other when his constituents arrived); he studied the building carefully to avoid conversation and looked at his watch with the practised air of a man who must always seem to be urgently needed elsewhere.
Gabriella paced with the baby, and Stephen made small circles in the front hallway behind her. He was wearing the repaired suit made by his father. His eyes followed the floor. He walked and stopped abruptly, listening intently into the wind for the sound of cars and then hurrying on when there was none. Whenever he arrived close to Gabriella, he tried to tell her it would be all right. But by the fourth time he gave up and used only his eyes to give her the calm he did not possess.
It did not work.
Gabriella glistened with perspiration. Alannah, picking up the high-frequency signal of her mother's fear, fretted and made a low moaning sound that wavered as Gabriella rocked her in her arms.
They walked around the hallway. They tried not to look out the long windows that showed the road where no cars were coming. The rain fell, and to protect the terrible vulnerability of their dream, Moira turned the music up loud, then took the councillor on a tour through the empty rooms.
It was eleven o'clock, half an hour past the advertised opening. At last, as if she had finally paced all the way to the far end of hope, Gabriella stopped in the middle of the hallway. She paused a moment for her spirit to break. Then Stephen told her, “There are two cars.”
It was a moment typical of their life together, for within it was a kind of desperate yearning, an outrageous dreaming that belonged to a more innocent world than this, and which appeared to be always on the point of crashing headlong into the chill reality of failure, but then was rescued. As if God were juggling glass-ball moments with mischievous riskiness, letting them hurtle towards the ground and then defying the odds to pull off once more the little miracle of salvation.
There were two cars, the Kennys' and the O'Connells'. Then there were three more, The Mulvihills', Mangans', and Greenes'. They came in with the low-chinned circumspection of those who enter new rooms for the first time. They had come from the Lahiffe funeral, they explained over the Vivaldi, draining the councillor's face when he realized he had missed it. They smiled and shook hands and did not seem to resist the sudden switch from the mood of the graveside to the bright triumphant joy of the music. Others were coming along, Joe Kenny said. But the traffic was all caught up in Miltown Malbay. He took the wine Moira offered him and drank it back in a shot, then looked up at the bare walls as if at paintings.
Big Tom Lernihan came in the door. Then Josie Hassett, Nuala Normoyle, the three Looney girls, the Penders, the Reidys, the Mohallys, and six families of Ryans. Within half an hour the funeral had arrived at the music school. There were a hundred people in the hallway, and the mud of the graveyard slipped from their boots, and the heat of their bodies rose and filled the air with the smell of rain returning heavenward. The music played through the talking, the deep notes of the cello beating like rhythmic wings across the space above them all. Timmy Purtill said it was music like he'd never heard in his life and sat beside the speaker eating a cheese from Denmark. Mary Enright took the arm of Gabriella and told her she had a boy who wanted lessons. So did Maura Galvin. Then the barrel-chested Donie Cussen, who was called Casanova, smiled his full mouth of teeth at Gabriella and said, “Any chance of a tune for us?”
Then she was playing.
The disc was turned off, and while Stephen held the baby and the crowd hushed, Gabriella Castoldi played Fibich's aching “Poeme.” She played with slow and sweet melancholy, and stopped the hearts of those who heard her, so that their mouths opened and their spirits flowed out into that hallway to meet the soul of the woman with the violin. It was nothing less than that. For even from the first notes it was apparent to everyone that this was a woman communicating something rare and tender and profound, that the action of her bow on the strings was not simply the mechanics of music, but that between the instrument and her there was no distinction, and that the infinitesimal beauty of the high notes came like some ambrosial breath from within her. When Gabriella finished there was not a sound. There was only the astonished faces of those who had had no idea they could be so moved by such music.Casanova Cussen raised his big hands and crashed the air, but before the ovation could reach fullness Gabriella was playing again. “Party pieces,” she said, and swept into Kreisler and then Dvoák. She played as if she were dancing. She played out of relief and gratitude, out of an understanding that she was not alone and that in the rain of west Clare that day in October, with Stephen Griffin holding their child, was as much happiness as she dared accept from the world. She played Brahms's “Hungarian Dance” and Dvoák's “Humoresque,” and was pausing between pieces when she saw the tear-wet face of the woman who was Eileen Waters talking to Stephen and then taking his offered hand and slowly shaking it.
What happened after that occurred in the vague uncertain way that time has decided traditional seisiúns should begin; whether Francie Golden spoke first, told anyone, or simply carried his fiddle everywhere, whether there was an imperceptible signal, a nod or wink, or whether it was the moment the warming of the French wine in his blood reached the point of inspiring action, there was an instant when the crowd were clapping for Gabriella, and then it was Francie Golden who was playing “Upstairs in a Tent” and grinning sideways in the terrible pleasure of his own devilment. Like Gabriella he flowed one tune into the next, and for the first time in that building made the air dance to a jig. There was clapping along and toe-tapping and little waves of quick encouragements: “Good man, Francie,” “That's it, boy,” “Now ye're playin,” and a few plain whoops of wordless gaiety.
The moment Francie finished, faces turned to Gabriella, as if she might disapprove of that simple old jaunty music that was theirs. But at once she caught the violin under her chin and said, “Like this?” and played the same tune back to Francie Golden, who laughed and joined her, and led her on another tune in which she followed him and then another. Then Gabriella played Schubert, and Francie was urged to try his fist at it, and did; and the twin O'Gormans, who had been there and gone home for their instruments, arrived back and joined in on two flutes. And Moira Fitzgibbon called Frawley's from the car phone of the councillor and ordered all the hot food they had to be brought up to the school in Dempsey's van, and the four Keoghs went for stout and came back with it with Micky Killeen, the box player, and Johnsie Kelly, the pipe-playing tiler from Kilmurry. And though the rain beat on outside and the car park puddled deeply beneath the bruised sky, none in Miltown Malbay that day gave it a care, for the music was like a long and intricate spell, and transformed grief and worry to laughter and delight in the very same way it had done for centuries. The walls rang with it. Men took off their jackets and danced the Clare set with their wives. They battered with toes and heels on the carpeted floor, as if it were flagstone, and spun in giddying quick circles that returned them to the moments of their childhoods, when the magic of dancing first saw them leap and spin on kitchen floors. They danced and the music played on. More people arrived, and soon the crush of the crowd made some spin off down the corridors and dance in each of the rooms of that pentagonal building, dancing even beyond the hearing of the music, and making steps and keeping time to the music that was already inside them. Gabriella put down her violin and danced with Stephen and Alannah in a bumping, uneven jigtime. Stephen danced like a man who had been given wooden legs. They flew out in sharp angles and measured space like a pair of pincers. He kept his head bolt upright, where it perched above Gabriella's and caught the swirling perfume of lilies as it rose off her hair. He felt the smallness of her back beneath his hand and pressed there to draw her to him, so that she might feel his happiness and love and never leave that moment. And she was laughing while she danced. And while they flew through the other couples (passing the thrown-back head of Eileen Waters where she abandoned herself to the rhythm coming through the wine and danced Eamon with a particular and memorable vivacity), cars started to arrive from Mullagh and Quilty and Cree and Doonbeg, and the space inside those walls had to expand and defy laws of science to accommodate all the ghosts and musicians and dancers of those and other parishes, and that, although they did not know it, the music they were playing was already transforming, and becoming ever so slightly something new, something which absorbed, which was both of that place and others, and allowed the classical to speak to it and would become in time the music of the new millennium. It did not matter. They played and danced on and were like a sea, changing moods like tides, now bright and quick, now slow with airs of sorrow. And while the moon was lost beneath the coverings of thick cloud and the stars were put out i
n the western sky, the party continued. It continued all that starless, moonless night, while the rain fell and the wind blew and none cared, for it was as if in those moments of music and dance each man and woman was seized with the knowledge of the boundless hardship and injustice of life and knew that this night in the pentagonal building of the music school in Moses Mooney's field was one they would look back on from the edge of life and realize that yes, there they had come as close as they ever had to true happiness.
26
By All Souls' Day the school had thirty-five pupils. Gertie Morrisey taught piano, Martin Hosey the silver flute, and Seamus Cooney the traditional timber flute, while Gabriella and Sonny Mungovan divided the violin and fiddle. It was a school that broke all rules of musical education, that defied the strict classification of training practices and existed instead in a free-flowing river of styles and traditions, with the only aim being to foster the pleasure of playing. From the beginning Gabriella had decided that the school would enter no pupils for examinations, that those who wished could do so, but that no time or effort would be given towards the preparation of children to play for the judgement of others. In this Stephen was in complete accord and marvelled at how the very students who had trudged to school now came to the glass building with the enlivened air of children arriving at a swimming pool. His own function in the school was not clearly defined. Moira was its manager and showed a surprising capability for keeping timetables, organizing classes, and advertising. While Gabriella took classes in the five hours that followed schooltime, Stephen played with his daughter. He carried and wheeled her along the corridor that ran all the way around the pentagon, listening to the different musics escaping each room, telling Alannah what they were and watching how already she knew which playing was her mothers.
As It Is in Heaven Page 26