Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

He drove into Ennis. The shops were not yet open, and the narrow streets had a desolate air of aftermath. The chip-bag and beer-can litter of tawdry romance was strewn along the gutters of wet footpaths. Dogs roamed and sniffed the dead butts of love talk and other promises and pissed the walls and moved on.

Stephen parked the car by the River Fergus, hurried across Parnell Street and down through the empty market to the Old Ground Hotel. The wet air woke his face and gave him a polished rawness like a fruit thinly skinned. He walked in the front door and past the reception, bounding up the stairs, as if some mission was balanced on the point of failure and his smallest of worlds could only be saved by arriving on the first floor.

The doors to the concert room were closed, and when he held on to the cold metal of the handle, he was astonished by the heat of himself. He stepped into the room; it had not yet been tidied, and the chairs, pushed back in lines slightly askew, spoke more of the leaving than of the concert. Stephen moved to his own seat and sat down. He put his hands under his chin and stared up at the empty space where the Italians had played. He closed his eyes and sought the image and the sound of them; he sat there in the low susurrus of the muffled morning traffic, the distant clink of china and cutlery downstairs, the squeak in the chambermaid’s trolley moving down the hall, the tramping of the hundred schoolchildren and the shopkeepers and their customers, the steady unstoppable noise of the small town with lorries and vans and buses and cars, and in that galaxy of sounds he listened for the music of yesterday.

What it was about the music he couldn’t say. He didn’t know the simplest of all mathematics, that the potency of the relation was in direct proportion to the needs of his own heart, that man plus woman equals both nothing and everything, that the factors of love are hope and chance, and that the million variables between two people depend more on the second than on the first.

He sat in the room, but was unable to re-engage the spirit of the evening. He tried to hum himself into it, and was sitting there humming, a tall man who had not slept all night, his hands clutching his knees, his shoes muddy, the bottom of his trouser legs dark with water stains, and his eyes closed, when Margaret Meade stopped hoovering the top stair of the red carpet and looked in the door. She was forty-seven years of age, had fallen in love twenty-two times, fourteen with men she had never spoken to, and recognized at once the signs of a serious fall.

“Hello, love,” she said.

Messages are everywhere, if only we can read them. Margaret was a woman who knew the whole history of hope in love; she knew the front and back pages of each volume in the library of lovesickness. She knew the music Stephen hummed was more than music and that the rocking in the chair was his way of tunnelling back into the moment when he had seen the woman; it was his way of being close to her. She knew how the heart fooled itself, how the forced muting of the loudest emotions travelled through the body itself and found expression in pimples, bumps, lumps, diarrhoea, cramps, vomiting, sweats hot and cold, dry mouth, toothache, rashes of every kind, itchiness, general flakiness, and fourteen varieties of trapped wind. (Once, she had loved a married plumber from Tulla so intensely that, knowing she could not tell him outright, her stomach swelled to nine-month pregnancy, and to carry the hugeness of her attraction she had to wear maternity clothes for two months; notwithstanding, she continued dismantling the central heating pipes by night so that he would return daily and she could watch the place she loved on his backside where the low sling of his jeans didn’t meet his shirt. And all for love.) Margaret Meade could have told Stephen so much, but he was not yet ready to listen, and the message and the moment passed. She stood inside the door and watched him rocking and humming in the chair. There was a kind of beauty in it, the hopeless and desperate figure he cut at half past nine on a Friday morning; she was moved by it and glad she had worn the darker stockings that made her legs look younger than her face. She drew herself up ever so slightly and touched her hair before calling to him again.

“Love?” she said, and then smiled.

Stephen jumped up from the chair. He licked at the awful dryness of his lips, then quickly took from his left-hand pocket his ticket to the concert.

“There it is,” he said, looking at the ticket like some rarity he had mislaid, and keeping his eyes firmly on it as he paced across the concert room and out the door past Margaret Meade.

She watched him go. “Oh, love,” she said softly, and then picked up the hose of the hoover and dragged it into the room, whose dust she knew was richer now for the feelings that lingered there.

Stephen left the hotel no better than when he had arrived. He walked down the curve of O’Connell Street still holding on to the ticket. He loped along as if he was going somewhere. He was thirty yards up the street when he noticed Nolan’s music shop, and he went inside and bought the only Vivaldi disc there, a cheap version of The Four Seasons.

Then he had something. He had something tangible of the evening and felt an easement of the pressure of desire, knowing that once the music was playing, once he could sit and listen to it, Gabriella Castoldi would be with him again.

But she was already. She was there waiting when he arrived at the small house by the sea. She was there in the roundabout road he took, avoiding Miltown Malbay and the school and coming in secret to his own house; she was there in the very fact of him feeling that he should take the phone off the hook and not answer the door; she was there in the trembling of his hands as he put on the disc and pressed Play, as he sat in the seat that looked westward into the sighing sea and heard the first notes with the volume turned up loud enough to make the music system tremble. She was there. She was not playing the music, but was the music. And Stephen Griffin set it to Repeat even before “Summer” was midway through, even as the downrush of the strings made wildflower meadows of the air and the life of every leaf and blossom gathered, pulsed, exploded with free riotous expression, until the room itself was mid-season July and the fullness of the music scented everything and made beat the dry and dust-filled corners of the world in which he had been living. He had never heard music quite as he heard it then. He did not know the sharpness of his own senses or the tenderness that poured through his ears. He watched the sea and listened to Vivaldi, moving his head backward and forward to the rhythms of the strings, until at last, in the ninth “Spring,” his eyes were closed and he was standing up, his whole body conducting the energy and passion of the music into the deep places of his heart, where only now he was beginning to admit that he had fallen in love. He was too afraid to think it. He was too certain that the moment the walls about him were breached he would not be able to bear the incipient grief and loss he associated with love. He was certain, too, she could not love him. But the music played on, insistently beating on the vulnerable hidden-away part of the soul that longs for the sweetness of another person like the sweetness of God. He wanted to see her; God, he wanted to see her again, and with the despair of that unfilled desire and The Four Seasons like a wild clock advancing Time so swiftly that years of the heart passed, he brought his hands to his forehead, cried out, and sank into the armchair by the window.

When Moira Fitzgibbon arrived outside the house, she heard the music playing and knew that she was right to have come. Once, she would have surrendered to the protocol of respectability and would not have called on a single man; but with each new day she emerged more as herself and felt a growing confidence in the intelligence of her heart. She had been right about the concert, the people had come, and that morning there was radiance and astonishment on the streets of Miltown Malbay. Word of the concert had arrived almost ahead of its audience, and by the time the lights had come back on with the return of the first car, the town already knew. Those who had not gone to the concert accepted the news of its success with silent dismay; but during the night they washed their consciences in a deep salty sleep as sudden showers blew in off the sea and swept through the damp bedrooms like a scouring God. The wind ran through the town and gathered all spite and bitterness, so that in the morning all awoke full of unanimous praise for Moira Fitzgibbon. The begrudgers had disappeared, transformed into the good citizens of earnest support who made it their business to mention in Hynes’s, Galvin’s, and other shops that they had so enjoyed the music. Moira had been right. She brought the profits from the concert to the bank to lodge them in Moses Mooney’s account and there met Eileen Waters. When the principal congratulated her, Moira felt a surge of weakness and water in her eyes, but shook her own sentimentality free with the knowledge that a day earlier the same woman would have crossed the road rather than meet her.