Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“I want to go to the concert,” he said. He said it very calmly, without looking at her. He was stooped forward towards the windscreen, with his black hair fallen over his right eye. “I want to go to the concert.”

(Later, when he was sitting at the fire in the house by the sea, listening to another storm blowing in across the invisible horizon of the nighttime, Stephen would wonder back to that moment and smile at the strange and unknowable conspiracies of the world, how the notion of the concert had become a resolve and how the night had almost blown him off its edge before the woman pulled over. He would read it for its meaning, and glimpse in that evening the shape of the world, a puzzle so intricate that not even the millionth part of the outer edge of its frayed pieces is discernible until so much later. Then it would make sense to him, and he would understand that the journey to the concert was the beginning of the most important journey of his life, and that the moment he insisted on going to the concert, he was acting out of a blind foreknowledge that told him it was the right thing to do, supposing that rightness was something that existed for every moment of every life and that the possibilities of humankind were so myriad and tortuous that knowing the right thing to do and then choosing it were the longest odds in man’s history. But just then in the car Stephen had chosen; and later, to that moment, like an old explorer fingering the route he had taken across the unknown, he would trace all his happiness.)

They drove past the hospital to the hotel. Moira talked. She told him about Moses Mooney; she told him she wasn’t sure why or how she had become involved in the concert; Stephen had probably heard of her in the school, she said, she was too stupid for them to teach her anything, so it was the last thing she expected to be doing, running a concert of Italian music in Ennis; she had two children for goodness’ sake, and Tom is back in Miltown Malbay now, sitting on a high stool and telling jokes about how his missus is off having a bit of culture. “Agri or horti, that’s his joke,” she said. “That’s what he says, because I’m thick. He thinks that’s a great joke. They get you to do it because they don’t want to do anything themselves, Tom says. Why are you running it? he says.

“And I can’t answer him. Especially when you see a night like this and you think you’re mad. You’re just mad, Moira. There’ll be nobody there and you’ll be walking in like this in a state with your eighteen-pound hairdo looking like a wet monkey’s backside, and four Italian musicians looking at you wondering why in the name of … I’m talking too much, I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin, I always talk too much when I’m nervous.”

“Stephen.”

“Stephen. Sorry, Stephen. Would you open that? See is there lipstick in it?”

The carpark was full. Moira bumped the car onto the footpath outside and then apologized to Stephen for forgetting he had just had an accident. When they got out of the car the rain was not falling. The ivy on the front of the old hotel was lit with hidden lamps, puddles glistened with reflection, and the slick black of the tarmac might have been the low waters of a canal in Venice. Or so Moira imagined. She raised her head as Stephen lowered his, and they strode forward with the brief invulnerability of the rescued.

At the front door they heard the buzz of people and the strains of the strings playing. For an instant, they imagined the same thing: that their watches had stopped and time had moved on without them, the concert was about to end. But by the time they had reached the doorway at the top of the red stairs, it was clear that the musicians were only warming up their instruments, and Moira Fitzgibbon blinked tears of gratitude, seeing the throng of people waiting in the rows of high-backed dining chairs and realizing that there was something fine and good and true in their being there, and that the bringing of the music and the people together that was the dreaming of old Mooney was worth the price of her hairdo, the ruining of her new suit, and the enduring of fatigue, hardship, and mockery.

In the delay, Councillor O’Rourke had seen his opportunity and taken Moira’s position at the front of the room. He was a skeletal man with a sharp nose and the largest Adam’s apple in Clare. He was a man who believed in men, as long as he was leading them, and derided Moira Fitzgibbon for her bluntness and well-meaning, and for not being at home. He held his nose high and smiled with narrow squints of his eyes, turning the immaculate whiteness of his soap-scented hands and letting only the rise and fall of his gorge betray how he disliked the company of his constituents. He was about to announce the opening of the evening’s concert when the figure of Moira Fitzgibbon appeared. He lifted a white hand and let the dismay suck and plunge in his throat. Bloody woman!

“Moira.” O’Rourke mouthed her name without sounding it and smiled thinly as she came through the room. Stephen Griffin sat in a chair towards the back, and Moira Fitzgibbon walked away from him, minding the loosened heel in her left shoe and taking the nods and greetings of the audience, who, she realized with a flood of warmth and thanksgiving, were the people of Miltown Malbay, dressed in their best and looking at her like a friend. When she reached the podium at the front of the room, Councillor O’Rourke stepped aside slightly and hovered. Moira turned to the musicians. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “there was a man crashed off the road.” She motioned towards Stephen with her head; it was the smallest movement, but the musicians looked down into the audience all the same. They were already feeling the extraordinary electricity of that room, the heated expectancy that fanned upwards towards them. It was as if they were bringing music for the first time to a country long deaf and only recently healed, as if the notes they were about to play were the ancient medicine of youth and happiness. The Italians sensed it in the air like the presence of white birds; Paolo Mistra fingered his cello and felt the sweat running across his left wrist and down inside the cuff of his white shirt; Piero Matte moved his neck to the right before placing his violin and found the cords of his muscles were tightened like a boxer’s. Gabriella Castoldi looked down; she too was astonished, the simplicity of these people sitting there, the generosity of spirit, a man who crashed off the road and still came to hear the music? Tonight, if ever, please, God, she thought, may I do the music justice.

Life is not simple, nor love inevitable. Stephen sat with his hands on his knees and his head stooped over. The black thinning mop of his hair fell forward, and when he looked down he saw the thick mud on his shoes from when he had stepped out into the ditch. He moved them back beneath the seat as if they were evidence against him, obscure proof that he was a misfit. It was a common feeling for him. He didn’t quite fit and, knowing this, took it with an embarrassed acceptance, as if it were an unsuitable birthday gift that could not be returned. So he sat there waiting for the concert and kept his head low between his shoulders.

Then the music began.

It began with pace and rhythm. It swept into the air like a bird with four wings, as the four musicians bowed their strings and released the notes that had been gathering within them all evening. The music flew through the room and filled it with a kind of sweet breathing that rose and fell in the breasts of the audience. They were mesmerized at once. The musicians played beyond themselves, and within instants of beginning they knew it was a concert they were to remember years later. They dared brief glances at each other; Paolo Mistra looked up from the cello into the face of Gabriella Castoldi and saw the light gleaming from it. They were playing Scarlatti’s Quartet in C minor, and by the time they had reached the allegro the warm air of the long room seemed to be dancing in white shapes above them. The room grew warmer each minute. (Kiaran Breen startled himself by standing up in the middle of the audience to look towards the window and see if it was not in fact morning and the sun was coming up.) In the middle of the third piece the audience started taking off their coats. Briefly they jostled in their seats and then lay the coats across their laps, so that from the front of the room their bright blouses and blue and white shirts looked like spring in Italy. The music transported them. Every man and woman was already in some Italy of the mind, and the storm of the November night blew outside with all the fruitlessness and ineffect of a government warning. When they had finished playing the Vivaldi, the people swept to their feet and let their coats fall to the floor. They applauded loudly and with such frantic joy that Piero Motte felt tears spring up in his eyes. With the applause ringing in the high chandeliers above them, the musicians looked at each other in bewilderment. The room was balmy with delight. And when the people sat again for the slow and romantic melancholy of the Puccini, they were pillowed on a deep and heartfelt gladness. Eamon Waters took the plump and warm fingers of his Eileen’s right hand and held them in his lap. Smelling the deepening scent of her perfume rising in the heat of the room, Jack Nolan at fifty-seven kissed Margaret Mungovan on the side of her neck and only barely kept himself from telling her he was ready to marry again. (It did not matter, for she knew it already, and when the music began once more, she allowed her head to lean against his shoulder and let him know in the silent language of perfume that she wanted his arms around her.)