Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

The light held for a time. Even before Killarney he could smell the trees and the mountains; the smells returned to him like visions of Gabriella, and by the time he passed the silver lakes, the air in the car was sharp with impossible yearning. Upon her rested his life's happiness; it was as clear as that, and if, once, the enormity of risk might have fractured his resolve and turned him around on the road, it was no longer so. He blinked at the light that came through the mountains, and drove on into them, feeling only the central most basic and human emotion that makes meaning of all our days: the urgency to love.

(He did not know yet the counter-balancing necessity of allowing himself to be loved in return, which would require a more difficult faith, and the passage of time.)

He drove the car into Kenmare and out to the house of Mary White. Both car windows were wide open now, and the scent of loving escaped everywhere and announced his return even to those who did not know his name.

Mary White was at home. She received Stephen with a brief pleasant rise of her thin eyebrows and brought her two hands together before her to clutch the happiness.

“Welcome,” she said, “welcome,” she said again, beaming a great contentment and nodding, as if she saw spirits entering with Stephen and was delighted with such elevated company. “You're back with us again,” she said, saying “us” even though she lived alone.

“If it's all right?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I was so hoping we'd have you back.” She paused and looked at him, and felt the way people do when a corner of the jigsaw has come together. “Now come on,” she said, “I have your room ready.”

And so Stephen followed her back into the room where he had dreamt so vividly of Gabriella that the presence of her was still in the corners of the ceiling. He felt it was right and proper to begin again; there was something fitting about returning to that house, as though life moves in spiralling circles and we arise along invisible tracks that were laid in the air. He felt the sense of it without knowing why, for it was not until he sat to tea with Mary White and told her about the death of his father in Dublin that she asked him if he was the son of Anne, who had died in the crash years ago and with whom Mary White had once been in school.

When Stephen awoke the world spoke with birdsong and the buzzing of spring flies. He smelled the sweet tang of the garden's annual resurrection, the slow stirring and secret life of the flowers not yet opened but breathing nonetheless in the open bedroom window. It was the morning of the declaration of love. When he opened his eyes, he caught the tonic air of wild rhubarb and was sharpened in his awareness that this was to be the beginning of new life. He would give himself to Gabriella and the child, and if she would not marry him, he would take any job he could get and live near her and be whatever he could to her for the rest of his days. He was filled that morning with such innocence. That morning, while he lay in the bed breathing the spring, he had a view of a world beautiful in its simplicity: that we act on our hearts and follow the things that move us. That it was outlandish and naïve and impractical, that it was the kind of thinking once expected of a child up to the age of twelve, then ten, but now, in our days, no more than the age of eight, that innocence had diminished so and the world become so old and weary that belief in such things had all but vanished did not bother Stephen Griffin. He lay on his bed on the outskirts of that town in Kerry and dreamed like a saint of a selfless loving.

When he rose he saw Mary White hanging clothes on the line in the garden. The soft wind billowed the white sheets.

Down in Kenmare that morning the streets were lively with men and beasts. Cattle trailers and wagons moved slowly, and the trapped cattle bellowed and stomped in the traffic. People watched them passing on their way to the spring mart and took the soured air of the dung and urine as another emblem of the new season, the countryside awakening and descending on the town. Wisps of straw litter were about the place, and there were children late going to school who had been drovers at dawn, leading cattle with hose-pipe sticks to the loading. There was a buzz of excitement, the noise of engines and the salutes and waves and cries of those leaning forward in their tractor cabs to call down to a neighbour some news of animal or man.

Into this throbbing Stephen walked. The streets of the country town were alive about him. Before he had reached the corner where Nelly Grant kept her shop, he knew that his footsteps were bringing him to the doorway of his new life. He sensed the enormity of it with the freshness of a child facing First Communion, and by the time he had arrived at the fruit and vegetable stalls outside the shop, he had begun to shake inside his clothes. He took a moment to master himself. He raised his head, opened his mouth, and swallowed full the host of redemption. Then he stepped into the shop and saw Nelly Grant raise her eyebrows.

“Stephen!”

She was holding two Seville oranges, and with them in her hands came forward and embraced him.

“She's here,” she whispered as she held on to him, taking the opportunity to smell the uncertain blended aroma of his hope, anxiety, and love. “You have a new radiance,” she said, and stood back to admire his aura.

“Gabriella!” she called out before Stephen had even said a word to her.

And then, through the beaded curtain that separated the shop from the small back office, where the geranium oil was burning and choral music playing, Gabriella stepped out.

“Stefano,” she said. She said it like a whisper. “Oh, Stefano.” She brought her hands to her mouth as if to hold in a cry.

And in his bed that morning, quietly, while the rain that first seemed to fall only in Clare and then only in Miltown Malbay spilled down through the broken roof of his cottage and pooled on the floor and made the cats come from the cupboard to the shiplike dryness and comfort of his bed, while the water was filling so steadily across the flagstone floor that he laughed to think the nearby hurley stick might be his oar and his bed once more a sailing schooner off the distant shores of Peru, easily then, like moorings loosened at last or notes rising in that supernatural music that rose from the throat of Maria Callas, Moses Mooney closed his blind eyes in the falling spills of weather inside his house and saw the lovers Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi and knew what he knew and wept like rain, and softly died.

“I cannot marry you, Stephen. I cannot.”

They had left the shop of Nelly Grant and, like people carrying heavy burdens, walked mutely from the town. They had taken the Killarney road towards the mountains instinctively, as if the bigness of their emotions demanded the otherworldly landscape of rock and wood silvered now with the torrents of the season. Water was everywhere running and made a noise louder than the birds. Stephen and Gabriella did not touch. They walked two feet apart up the slow incline, and by the time they had left the close cattle smells of the town behind, the air was thin and blue and clean as pine. The bread van passed and stopped and offered them a lift to Killarney, but they waved it on, not meeting each other's eyes but moving like figures in a romantic painting, as if to a prearranged spot in the vastness of that green wilderness.