As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  It was during those evenings while minding Alannah that he first brought the chess set there. While the baby slept he sat in a corner of the room and played against himself. Within two weeks he had a few regular opponents, the waiting parents of the children, and the chess and music became so entwined during that winter that sometimes Stephen stopped in mid-game and felt the spirit of Philip Griffin beside him.

  Soon it was clear it was to be a wretched winter. The sea grew high and wild and angry. Morning evening and night the wind howled, until at last it was impossible to imagine a place far out in the Atlantic that was before the beginning of the wind. The new slates that Corry & Son & Nephew had put on came off and shattered on the road outside. The air was full of salt. Faces dried and cracked, and a general rheuminess ran through all the parishes of the western seaboard. In the garden that faced the sea the plants burned, and Stephen watched them from the kitchen window with a sudden chill in his heart. In the fierce winds of All Souls' Night whole shrubs were lifted out of the ground and tossed into Clancy's down the road. To Stephen it felt like a portent. For three days he went outside in the gusting sea-winds and tried to secure the plants that remained. He dressed them in sacking and staked them and bound them with yellow baler twine, until they resembled weird effigies of the plants they had been in summer.

  Despite the harshness of the season the music school prospered. Adults came for classes in the wild driven rain of the mornings, and sat on in the small coffee shop Moira ran, where they listened to music they had never heard before and which nourished them in their spirits and helped them endure the terrible vicissitudes of grief and loss that are the inheritance of all.

  Gabriella was happy. She almost did not dare to admit it. When she held Alannah in her arms she felt the wonder of the child and wept often, alarming Stephen into offering all kinds of remedies, which she turned down, telling him he was such a great fool he did not know sorrow from joy. “This,” she said, with lemon-scented tears flowing down her cheekbones, “is joy.”

  “Oh, right,” he said, and stood there, hopeless and inadequate to understand what was flowing between the mother and the child.

  And so, even in the battering and scouring of that winter, a kind of healing occurred for Stephen and Gabriella. It was the kind that comes when people are living side by side in a small house in a beautiful and desolate place, where little by little the past vanishes and the present moment seems large enough to contain a whole life. It was the kind of healing that is made of endless cups of tea, of changing nappies, of music playing, of books picked up and put down after three pages, of short naps and long dreams, and of the deeply comfortable silences that grow between a man and a woman who come to know each other so utterly that they breathe each other's breath and do not need many words. And in that winter, Stephen and Gabriella grew together, while the leafless plants in the garden were bound and motionless outside. They knew each other's rhythms like clocks in a jeweller's shop that chime at staggered midnights. Stephen began to learn Italian and walked through the cottage, at first saying phrases from Frasi Utili e Idiomi, and then progressing to short passages learned from Dante's Purgatorio and II Paradiso, which had the double bonus of astonishing Alannah and making Gabriella laugh.

  Gabriella knew how she could tease Stephen. She still loved to measure the sincerity of his feelings with countless tiny tests, requesting that he change his habit of leaving the tea caddy open, leave down the toilet seat, allow the bedroom window to be left open all night even in the fierce winds of November let the cats sleep in the kitchen, wash his feet before bed. To all Stephen complied without hesitation. He saw them as a myriad of proofs of his own loving, and then recognized that each time Gabriella asked him something it was also to tell him that she was preparing to live with him forever.

  At no time did Stephen ask Gabriella again to marry him. Sometimes, in a fit of gloom, Gabriella would feel the absence of space between them, the claustrophobia that weighs on lovers until they redefine each other's strangeness. Then she would look up from a book and think to throw it at him, to hit out at the suddenly infuriating omnipresence of his affection. She would make a demand: Did he not notice how the cooker was broken? how the gas kept shutting off and had to be fiddled to get right?

  “Do you not notice things like that?”

  “I will look at it now.”

  “No, it's too late. I don't mean you to do it now. It's just you don't …”

  She would shake her head at herself and sit in the heavy silence, wondering why she felt the need to strike out at him. He had the dissatisfying reality of saints. He knew nothing of the real world. He would not know the names of three politicians, how to fill tax forms or fix the plumbing. But then, just as suddenly, the gloom would relent and she would look at him and be astonished that she was living with such an extraordinary man.

  Then, on the last evening of that November, they returned home from the school and found a letter from Nelly Grant waiting. It was written in a rounded looping hand and told her own adventure, how she had shut the shop and left Kenmare two weeks after them to follow her imagination to Italy; how she has spent six months there, arriving in Venice in the rain and travelling the Adriatic coastline to Ravenna and Rimini, where she had stayed, eating a diet of every kind of shellfish, until she said her dreams took on the warm and salty quality of that sea and left her experiencing the softness of life that we forget in building our shells. She had learned new cures, and discovered her age was imaginary, for when she returned to Kenmare she felt the bigness of the mountains like a child.

  Stephen and Gabriella read the letter in turns, while the wind blew rain and sea foam against the windows and Alannah slept. And when Stephen was reading it Gabriella looked at him and saw the gladness moving across his face. The light from the tasselled lamp was beautiful upon him, and she understood with the sudden clarity of enlightenment that shows us the shape of the world. And it was his stillness and peace that she felt, the loving that was deeper and wider than she could encompass. And she whispered: “Stefano.”

  He was startled and looked up quickly from the page.

  “You know I love you,” she said.

  He said nothing. The wind blew outside, the child slept.

  “No matter how impossible I am.”

  The letter quivered in his hand.

  “No matter what I say, I do,” Gabriella said. “Please don't ever leave me.”

  He had slipped across to her from his armchair and was crouched low beside her. Her hand touched his face.

  “I won't,” he said. “I couldn't live. I love the impossible.”

  27

  They made love that night beneath the million drops of the rain running on the skylights above them like tears. They undressed each other by the turf fire, where the slowness of their movements was like the movements in a dance. There was no music playing, only the water falling out of the sky into the sea and the sea's slow churning in the ordinariness of time. With the small hollows of the palms of his hands Stephen pressed upon the warm skin of Gabriella and travelled the places of her body backward and forward in the endless sojourn of loving that finds no limit in the other's body but returns across the places caressed as if they were a New World discovered, warmed and scented like the tropics. They entwined each other, the small woman and the long man, sitting on the floor before the fire, where Gabriella held back her head so that he might kiss her neck and her breasts and so that she could hold his head against her in the dream of their being one.

  The rain fell above them, and the sea sighed in thin chains of surf in the night outside. The cottage creaked like a ship, anchored at last in the known coordinates of Hope and Love, and secure in its own fastness. In the small hours Stephen and Gabriella lay by the low fire with a blanket pulled over them. They did not move. They slept like swimmers stilled in painted waters, one's arm around the other, leading towards the shore.

  28

  And there was a morning of brilliant
light that came across the surface of the sea and arrived so brightly that at first it seemed the dazzlement of magic. The sky was cloudless and blue with the perfect weather of peaceful dreams. And into that morning Stephen dressed himself and was waking Gabriella and bringing her tea and carrying Alannah in his arms through the cottage to tell her mother how they could take the morning and drive into Ennis and buy a new cooker to replace the one that was broken. And he had to find the baby's cloth shoes and pack the bag with nappies and powder and cream and the bottle and the bibs, while Gabriella dressed in a burgundy dress and a black cardigan. And then they were driving into that brightness that was not the brightness of November. They were packed into the car, with Gabriella holding Alannah in her lap in the back seat and humming a tune for her and humming it over and over as the car drove on into Miltown Malbay and out the other side and on past all the watery fields where cattle watched across the strands of barbed wire for the coming of fodder and where none was coming, because there was nothing else on that road, no tractor or car, no man or woman, only the bright sunlight that was too bright and the polished surface of the puddles that looked like glassy tears or the fallen fragments of a cold heaven. And Stephen was driving and watching his hands turning the wheel and the road unspooling like a destiny before him as they sped onward, and he was able to look in the mirror at Gabriella and Alannah behind him and behind them the road they had come from and the fields flowing backward like a film blurring green and grey, and then there was suddenly the flooded bend by Inagh and the car flashing into it and across the water until it hit the stone wall and Stephen flew forward into the windscreen and felt the crash and the glass and the tremendous shattering and arrived in the terrible silence and the taste of blood and looked back and saw that Gabriella and Alannah were dead.

  V

  1

  The enlightenment that comes from dreams is sometimes more potent than that which comes in the daylight. When Stephen lifted his head, Gabriella was lying in his arms on the rug on the floor before the fire. He was bathed in the sweat of his dream and drew back the blanket that covered them, to be reassured by the coolness of the morning. He turned towards Gabriella and watched the sleeping body of her and heard across the cottage the infant noises of Alannah sounding in her crib. There was a thin drizzle falling in the stillness outside.

  It was some moments before the dream had left Stephen. He lay on the floor of the cottage, and Gabriella stirred beside him, and he leaned over and kissed the top of her head. Then he rose and walked out of the room and lifted Alannah and brought her back and placed her into the warmth of her mother. And he turned on Puccini's music and then lay down beneath the blanket once more.

  The music rose. And for the first time Stephen heard not grief but an aching joy. He heard in that music the long-enduring love of his father, which had been undiminished by tragedy and had carried on like a difficult faith through all the lonely days of his living. He heard the victory of Love over Death. And while the music played on and washed over the three of them like grace, Stephen Griffin knew something of the puzzles of the world and understood that all love did not perish and could survive beyond pain and hardship and loneliness; and in that innocent vision with which he was gifted that morning he saw that the world fit together, each piece in its proper place, like the pieces on a chessboard, and that though the patterns that emerged were complex and difficult and grew more so all the time, there was a design nonetheless, for though we live in the impotency of our dreams to make better the world, the earth and its stars spin through the heavens at the rate of our loving and is made meaningful only in the way in which we give ourselves to each other.

  Stephen saw. He saw and understood the way you do in the middle of a chess game when the openings have been played and the position takes on a beauty that belongs neither to one player nor to the other but is the perfect expression of both. He lay on the floor in the cottage and knew now that he would live with Gabriella without being afraid. That in the puzzle of love he was for her and Alannah, and they for him, and that what had happened so far was no more than the opening movement of the pieces.

  He turned to Gabriella. The drizzle was falling. She reached and touched his face, then they moved closer together and held the child between them.

  CRITICS ADORE

  FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE

  “A delicate and graceful love story that is also an exaltation of love itself…. A luminously written, magical work of fiction.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “A deeply spiritual work of art…. Niall Williams has achieved a master stroke with this novel.”

  —BOSTON GLOBE

  “Lush and lyrical… a compelling meditation on love, art, and the vicissitudes of love.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Elegiac… a canvas to step back form and rejoice in.”

  —CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  “A powerful portrait of tragedy and the redemption offered by love… a remarkable first novel… spellbinding. Brilliant.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)

  “In spare… beautiful language… Williams wonderfully explores the mystery that is love.”

  —USA TODAY

  “Rolls with courage and clarity towards a breathtaking affirmation of magic, miracles, and the power of human love. Read it, and believe in angels.”

  —THE TIMES (LONDON)

  “Magical… inspired.”

  —PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE REVIEW

  “Lyrical, romantic, and moving.”

  —REDBOOK