Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

Then, by the bad bend at Crusheen, Stephen misjudged the sharpness of the curve and briefly threatened to hit the wall of the bridge at speed. At the last moment he managed to save himself, just. He pulled the car over beneath the hedgerows. His face glistened, and he brought his hands up over it to cover his eyes, where briefly he was seeing the vision of his father and mother and sister in the backseat behind him. Philip Griffin had his arm on his wife, guarding her around the bad bend. It was the briefest moment, and gone by the time Stephen had palmed the cold sweat from his forehead, but it broke like a dawn inside him, nonetheless, and made him fully understand a simple truth about his father: Philip Griffin had loved Anne with his life; he had loved her so entirely with himself that when she died, there was little left of him, only the corner he had kept alive for his son. She was everything to him. She was the figure behind all that music that rang out and sang through the little house in her absence, she was behind each of those infinitesimally aching arias that Philip Griffin listened to year after year with his head back and his eyes shut and his hands holding the armrests, as if taking off after her into the heavens.

And with that understanding Stephen drove from Crusheen and left the grief behind him, and felt newly the resolve of life that for him was the loving of Gabriella Castoldi.

Eileen Waters was warned by her secretary when Stephen arrived in the carpark. She looked out and saw him alight from his father's car and come quickly up the driveway. What she did not see was the zeal in his eyes or the sense of mission that carried him forward and bounding up the school steps.

“Tell him to wait when he comes,” Mrs. Waters said. “Tell him I'm on the phone, I'm busy.” She went back inside her office and examined her face. She moved the files into neater piles that they might establish more clearly her power. She pared two pencils and placed them lead upright in the green beaker before her. Then she looked across at the timetable on the wall opposite her, to remind herself of all the staff that were under her, the numbers enrolled, the size of the building, and the full and varied dimensions of her power. She waited fifteen minutes. Finally, she brought the largeness of her soft self forward so that no vulnerable space existed between her and the desk, and then placed her two pink hands together in a mime of tranquil forbearance.

“Carol.”

Carol Blake opened the door.

“Will you bring me in the attendance book for 3A?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Waters, Mr. Griffin is here to see you.”

“Really?” She enjoyed that, and said it louder to be sure he heard. “Really, Mr. Griffin?” She said his name as if it were an antiquated appellation from the Old Testament.

“Will I bring him in?”

“Do.”

Outside, the class bell sounded and the corridors of the school echoed with the jostle and rush of the students.

“You are back with us again,” Eileen Waters said to Stephen as he came in the door. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “I had thought … I had thought you might have been back last week. Or even the week before. I had thought — while of course a family bereavement is — I had thought, a week, a week or ten days tops.” The pink hands floated up before her and palmed the underside of the air, as if fondling amorphous bosoms of power. She weighed them like moralities and looked gravely. “I have to tell you, Mr. Griffin,” she said, “you put me in a very difficult position. I have been forced to make allowances again, and some of the other members of the staff …”

“Mrs. Waters.”

The principal was vexed to stop mid-sentence. It was not even the end of her paragraph. She opened her mouth and shrank three inches smaller. Her eyes were blurry with unease.

“I didn't come to hear your lecture,” Stephen said. “I want to say something.”

“If you think a brief apology …”

“I have nothing to apologize for. Mrs. Waters, I'm not here for apology.” Stephen looked directly at her and saw the fright freeze her expression. “I'm here because I've reached the end of this life, I'm not going to be back here anymore, I'm stopping teaching.”

Mrs. Waters's face dropped; it fell on the desk with the powdery softness of marshmallow. It was a moment before she could recover it.

“Well,” she said, having no idea what to say next.

“I'll tell you the truth: I'm not really a teacher anyway, I don't care enough about codes of discipline, acceptable standards of uniform, punctuality, all that.” He waved his hand as if clearing a desk. His eyes were burning. “I care about the history and the few who want to learn it. But what I have discovered is this: it's not my life. It's someone else's life that I'm living, that I just fell into, the way people take wrong turns and don't know it and just keep going because it's too hard and frightening not to, and then they find themselves years later in some place they never wanted to be, with the regrets eating them up like cancers.”

The air in the room throbbed. Stephen's words came quickly and the passionate fluency of his expression flooded the small world of the woman and drowned the minor armies of her objections. She could not imagine this was happening. She could not imagine such rashness.

“Someone else's history is the coming and going from here every day,” Stephen said, “not mine. Staff meetings and test results and …” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, where he knew his family were watching him. “Anyway, it's over. Thank you for giving me the job, but it was a mistake. I won't be coming back.”

Stephen stood up. He was a different man from the one Eileen Waters had reprimanded earlier. He was already un-stooped and taller, and met her eyes with the strange defiance of those who imagine they have suddenly seen the plot of the world. She stared at him as if he were visiting from another planet. Her blood pressure pounded along the hardening arteries of her heart, her eyelashes felt cakey and weighted with the falling dust of years.

“What are you going to do?” she said. Her voice was as faint and whispery as the turning of pages in an old copybook.

Stephen raised his two hands into the air, and then he smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile. It became a small laugh, and then he said; “I don't have the slightest idea.” The smile kept circling around his lips and made glisten his eyes. “I'm in love,” he said, saying those simple words there in that office and not even realizing that they sounded to Eileen Waters strangely childish and unreal, as if they belonged to some outmoded and tarnished notion of romance that no longer had any place in the country she lived in, which by the end of that millennium had been hardened by a thousand revelations of abuse and corruption and greed, until the very notion of a man declaring such a thing out loud in an office seemed as farfetched as a fairy tale.

“There is a woman, she's in Kerry, she …” He stopped. He seemed to be seeing someone else in the room. “Well, goodbye,” he said then, and walked out of the office, never to return, leaving Eileen Waters stunned and wordless and diminished as she watched the empty space after him and tried to repair and close the chasm that had opened between the life she was living and the one Stephen Griffin had briefly shown her.

The following afternoon he headed south into Kerry. The stillness of the landscape did not mirror his heart. The fields were like the fields painted on a plate. Thin light glistened on the hedgerows and made the first yellow blossoms of the gorse luminescent with the re-emergence of springtime. The hidden verb of life pulsed in secret, and the countryside was made gentle with obscured sunshine. Winter was over, and the precarious existence of bulb and root beneath the soil was made easier now; it was that kind of afternoon. The cattle nosed the wire that kept them from the spring grass. They smelled the alluring and sweet sticky scent of regeneration and moaned softly with the satisfaction of a favoured dream.