Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

The following day Philip Griffin drove to his bank on Merrion Square and withdrew £5,000. When the teller heard the amount he hesitated and disappeared. An assistant arrived, and Philip Griffin was drawn down the counter and asked what he wanted the money for.

“To give away,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“To get rid of, to give away,” the old man said, “not that it’s your business. It’s my money”

“Yes, sir, only that …”

“What?” He shot the word so quickly and with such pointed indignation that the assistant manager withdrew. “I’ll get you a draft, sir,” he said.

“Cash. It must be cash.”

There was a flat, beaten moment between them.

“Five thousand pounds? In cash?”

“Correct.” The old tailor looked the other man directly in the eyes. How difficult is goodness, he thought, everything blocks it. And deep within him, Prendergast turned like a knife.

It was half an hour before he got the money. It lay neatly in a long envelope, and when he walked out the doors of the bank it conferred on Philip Griffin a sudden power of joy. He was exuberant with possibility. His small eyes flickered at the city, as if seeing everywhere now the chance to touch another’s life. And, in a moment of beatific vision as he passed a bus queue, he wondered if many others were not secretly engaged in doing the same.

This time he did not wait to get the car, but walked directly towards Stephen’s Green. It was, he had decided, the appropriate place, and would remind God of the reason for their pact, Stephen, Stephen’s green. He smiled to himself at the small joke, although in fact the banknotes were less green and more the colour of bruises.

As Philip neared the park once more, he reached inside the envelope and took a clutch of twenty-pound notes. He kept them in his hand and walked on. Sweat gathered in the brim of his hat and he felt his trouser catch at the back of his knee. Three hours had passed since he had taken his morning painkiller, and now he was emerging from it like from a tunnel into the bright searing of the pain. God, help me. The money was wet in his hand inside his pocket, the railings made him dizzy, and he had to stop and lean and wait for a small group of schoolchildren and their teacher to pass by. Then, once they had passed, he took £480 and quickly slipped it down onto the ground between the railings.

He had to hold on for breath. He could have changed his mind and reached in and withdrawn the money. But he did not. He knew that it could be taken by dogs, eaten by rats, or befouled in any number of ways, that it could be found by the avaricious or the mean-spirited, any number of the evil or selfish undeserving as easily as by the needy. But that did not matter to him. For he trusted in God, and knew that the puzzle of His ways is beyond us, and only vanity leads us ever to imagine that there is more than only the smallest corner of the jigsaw perceivable at any time. No, the money would go where it was to go, Philip reasoned. His job was only to drop it off there, like a deposit of good energy given back into the universe. He watched the winter sky as if light might suddenly break through the heavy blankets of the cloud. But nothing changed, and he walked on. The city of Dublin trundled past, and the small man in the felt hat was lost in the crowds.

(It was only later, when he was back in the sitting room, looking at the set-up chess game on the small table and listening to the music of Madama Butterfly with the painkiller blurry in his stomach that Philip Griffin could sigh and think of Stephen and wonder if the love affair was progressing now, if a father could touch his son on the other side of the country, if goodness travelled through the air like luck or love and could arrive unexpected and simple as a blue sky over Stephen’s head two hundred miles away in the west.)

During the night the mist withdrew like an artist’s drapery and in the morning revealed that the mountains had moved closer to Kenmare. It was a John Hinde postcard sky, a blue so intense that it seemed the unreal season of childhood memory. Summer had arrived in Kerry in time for Christmas, and while Stephen sat to the softly boiled egg Mary White had prepared for him, he heard birds singing in the garden. Mary came and went like moments of kindness. She brought him more toast, a fresh pot of tea, entering the room from where she sat for her own tea in the kitchen with the raised eyebrows and pursed mouth of gentle apology, moving around the guest in her own house with the air of being herself an unfortunate interruption. She did not enquire what Stephen was doing in Kenmare, nor did she hover in the room about him while he ate. When he told her after breakfast that he would like to stay until after the weekend, she said only one word, “Lovely,” and allowed herself to smile at the simplicity of this small joy as she hugged with thin arms the long-felt loss inside her.

For Stephen there was almost a week to wait. He did not know whether Gabriella Castoldi had returned yet to Kenmare. The fear of actually meeting her tied the knots of his stomach. But finally, when Mary White knocked softer than a knock on his door and asked if she might tidy his room now, Stephen walked outside into the sunshine. When he reached the town he did not know where to go. He walked around the lampposts like a man looking for his dog. The morning sunshine saddled his shoulders. By half past eleven he had toured the triangle of the streets seven times and had already been noticed by all the shopkeepers. (Mick Cahill on the door at the bank had decided he could be up to no good and must have come over the mountain from Limerick or somewhere to rob them. Veronica Hehir up at the bookshop considered he was a renegade priest, exactly like the one in the book she was reading. When she told Kathleen O’Sullivan, Kathleen replied that he was the eighth that week alone. What was it in Kenmare that drew them?)

“You brought the weather with you.”

Nelly Grant stopped him from her doorway. She had sensed the energy of his restlessness arriving in the town fifteen minutes before she saw him and had kept an eye over the shoulders of her customers for the confirming vision of him loping down the street.

“I’m sorry?”

“The weather.”

“Oh yes,” he said weakly, and then added, “Thank you.”

“We get that here sometimes. Balmy as summer. Makes you think somebody has been looking through the books and decided we’re due a few more good days before the year’s end.” She watched how he stood there, the mute tightened presence of him that bespoke imbalance and combustion at the same time. “How did you like the plums?” she asked him.

“Very well. Thank you.”

His politeness barely contains him, she thought, like a paper cup of scalding water.

“Come in for more.”

She was abrupt and jovial in the same moment, generous and insistent, and for the second time Stephen Griffin entered the fruit and vegetable shop to be given the plums of balance. Within five minutes Nelly had drawn from him that he was going to stay for the rest of the week, and while she weighed the plums on the old-fashioned scale on the side of the counter, she decided that he was in love. It was the gift of her character that she could be pointed without wounding, and when she told Stephen that he should visit Sonny Sugrue, the barber across the street, she was able to make it seem not a comment on his looks but a prescription for the health of his spirit.

“The growing of hair,” she told him, “can steal our energy. Visit Sonny, and come back for your plums,” she said, and raised her hands to relieve him of his coat before he was aware of it.