Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

Already Tom Fitzgibbon was rising in his chair.

“I don’t know,” Moira whispered quickly. “I don’t know where she is. I’ll …”

Her husband’s hand was on the door lock.

“I’ll try and find out,” she said and, motioning Stephen backward with her head, added in a louder voice, “Thank you now, goodbye,” before turning back to meet her husband coming out the door. “Some business of the Development Association,” she said, and went back inside.

At ten o’clock that evening Stephen was sitting in the front room of his house awaiting the inevitability of fate. When he saw the headlights move in an arc across the far wall, he did not need to turn around and look out the window, but knew that it was Moira Fitzgibbon and that the plot of his life was moving now in swift grand strokes that made little of great difficulty and certainty out of the improbable. He opened the front door as she was about to knock. The wind shouldered past him like a sea lord and banged the doors of the two rooms.

“I won’t come in,” Moira said. Her words were blowing back into the town along the road where Moses Mooney was listening for them. The car’s engine was running, and its lights had been left on as if to illumine the murky turning of the plot and make clear the way ahead, for Moira Fitzgibbon was not sure why she had come, why the intensely burning figure of the man at her door had moved her so, or what it was in the disconsolate beseeching of his eyes that made her slip upstairs to her bedroom and go through the letters and papers she had until she found a mention of Gabriella Castoldi playing a residency in a hotel in Kenmare; she did not know why, other than that it was the response of her heart, which, like the purest of souls, felt the grief of another like the grief of herself, and by healing it could heal the world.

“I won’t come in,” she called again into the wind, for the door was still held wide open and the weather was running through the house like a party of drunken ghosts. “I found something,” she said. “Maybe she’s not there now, I don’t know.”

“Where?”

She held up a pamphlet that the wind-ghosts almost took.

“Kenmare,” she said, “in Kerry. She plays there. Or did, anyway.”

The teacher took the paper and looked at her. “Thank you,” he said.

She looked at him, and then could not look at him, as if his vulnerability and innocence in dreaming of love were a sweetness so easily shattered that she dared not imagine it for long. “I have to go, Mr. Griffin,” she said.

He reached to touch her shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said.

And she was gone.

Stephen brought the piece of paper inside. He sat where the wind had been sitting in the low chair by the fireless chimney and greedily read the words until he found her name. Gabriella Castoldi. What it was to read her name. What it felt like to see the figuration in print and allow himself to imagine her now in the small gatherings of those letters. He touched them, traced them, he sounded the name slowly, Gabriella, and then quickly, calling it softly at first and then getting up and walking through each room and calling it, Gabriella, as if summoning her there at the very moment that she was just leaving each room, as if her name was the first part of her that he could claim in the privacy of that house by the sea and the saying of it was a kind of company that admitted without rejection his outrageous declaring of love. Gabriella.

He read aloud: “Gabriella Castoldi was a member of the Orchestra de la Teatro de la Fenice in Venice until recently moving to Kenmare in County Kerry. She frequently performs in evenings of chamber music at The Falls Hotel.”

He read it and felt lighter, imagining the hotel and the evenings of chamber music deep in Kerry. He took the piece of paper to his bedroom and lay down. He did not undress; he put his hands behind his great head and said Gabriella Castoldi, like a whisper to the wind. He said it like a message. He said it like a signal and a code, as if the sounding of the words might reach her wherever she was and that she might stop and turn her neck to the side, as if with the violin, and hear in the night air the soft beating of wings that was the incipient approach of his spirit. Gabriella. He said it over and over, clinging to it like the almost drowned, so that even Mick Clancy, his neighbour across the fields, heard it in mutated form in his dream and awoke to tell his wife, Nora, that the Angel Gabriel had announced something in Italian in his head.

The following morning Stephen drove the yellow car onto the flat-bottomed Killimer ferry to cross the river to Kerry. The old boat tugged at the grey sleeve of the Shannon. Stephen got out of his car and climbed up onto the viewing deck. Seabirds swung in the air overhead. As if by a conjuror’s trick, Kerry in front looked no different from Clare behind. As if the ferry was forever to cross between two reflections, neither of them as frighteningly real as the places of the homeless and murdered on the radio. Green fields sloped sleepily to the grey river. It was late November. There were no tourists on the ferry, only a milk tanker and the washed cars of a couple of salesmen who were talking on telephones in the middle of the river. The crossing took thirty minutes, but seemed longer. Away from school, Stephen felt the slow energy of the countryside seeping into him like a potion. There was a gentle easiness, an unhurried ordinariness in the waving of the ferryman as he directed the cars off on the other side. Even the little line of their traffic moved into Kerry with the slow grace of wanderers, not business people. In the small town of Tarbert women were stopped and talking. A butcher stood at his doorway. Stephen slowed down. He had awoken that morning with the urgency of arriving in Kenmare, but now, when he had moved beyond the habitual perimeters of his own life, he felt the wonderful ordinariness of the market towns he drove through: the shopping and talking, the women who slipped like breezes from the church after weekday Mass, the buying of carrots from parked vans, the saluting of friends, nods and laughter, gossip, deals, and the talk of funerals that moved the world along. By the time he had driven fifty miles into Kerry, Stephen Griffin had begun to learn the small history of life, the unchronicled plain fable of the everyday in which until that morning he had not taken part.

When he stopped the car for petrol at a small station on the side of the road, a short man in a suit and hat came out to serve him. He was sixty years old, and the absence of any teeth gave his smile the air of a deflated football.

“Lovely weather,” he mouthed, taking the pump.

Stephen looked up; it was not raining, but the sky was broken.

“Oh, it’s coming,” said the man, and moistened his sunken lips at the prospect. “Nice as summer this week coming.”

“I see.”

“Not yet you don’t, but you will.” He paused and grinned a gaping toothlessness at the sky. “I’m not wrong,” he added cheerfully. “You’ll be coming back this way?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Well. I mean, yes, I will.”

“You stop in and tell me if I wasn’t right. Lovely weather.” He turned his head at a slight angle to himself as if hearing an inaudible broadcast, and then resumed pumping the petrol.

The petrol gagged at the tank, and the old man stopped and hung up the pump.

“I’m Martin O’Sullivan. You never heard of me, I suppose?”

Stephen said nothing. The man smiled at the vastness of the world and the decreasing smallness of himself in it.