Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

There was no such spot; a car with four swearing singing bachelor footballers raced past them on their way home from the night, and Stephen stepped into the verge and slipped and almost twisted his ankle, but caught against Gabriella. Her face was white. “I'm sick,” she said.

“Oh God, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say?”

They sat down on a ledge of rock, the mountain behind them.

And for a moment, nothing.

They breathed and looked away. The valley was below, and deep within it the thin morning smoke of three houses rose and vanished in the air.

“Are you all right?”

“It passes.”

“Here, do you want my jacket?”

“No no, keep it.”

Stephen looked at himself for something to offer. He was suffused with a desire for giving to Gabriella, and was only just understanding that singular characteristic of love, that the impulse to do something for the other reached a point of such immediacy that it almost erased him entirely and left only the urgency. He looked at the side of her face with a dizzy desire to put the palm of his hand against it.

“I am so glad you came back,” he said.

“I wasn't sure I would,” said Gabriella, “not when I left. And it's not because of the child.”

“I know.”

“I wanted …” She stopped, and her face briefly frowned, a frown that travelled down from her forehead to her mouth like a wind rumple in a sheet and flowed on then into Stephen. “I wanted to know. I want my life to be, you know, to find a kind of certainty, it's stupid, I know, but just not to fall into things, you know, to feel that …”

“I love you.”

She turned her face towards him, and he saw the pain he had put in her eyes.

“I know that, Stephen. Oh, I know.”

“I want to take care of you. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

She lowered her head until her chin rested low on her fists. A car travelled slowly up the hill and stopped five yards away from them to look down at what the driver imagined the two people must be looking at. It was not until the two tourists had looked all around for the spectacular view they couldn't find that they got back in the car and drove past. They waved at the tall man and the woman sitting on the rock, but no greeting was returned. Gabriella's brown hair fell forward across her cheeks, the pink whorl at the top of her ear appeared through the strands. Stephen held on to his knees. He looked down as if from a precipice at the life he wanted to plunge into. He looked at Gabriella's clothes, her walking boots, the corded wine trousers, the thick woollen coat, and like a demented disciple, he loved them, too. If she had taken off her coat he would have hugged it to him and breathed its scent.

“Gabriella?”

She turned to him. “There's no need to say anything, Stephen,” she said. “I know I know I know” She touched his face and felt the emotion buckle him. “I am terrible,” she said. “I am mean and hard.”

He had turned his mouth to kiss her hand where it touched him.

“Please,” he said.

“Don't.”

“Please.”

“Stephen.” She brought up her other hand and was holding his wet face. “I cannot marry you,” she said. “It wouldn't … I would always feel that I had forced you.” She stopped and held back her head to face the sky. “I love you, Stephen Griffin. I do. But I am not in love with you. I cannot marry you.”

“Don't, then. Don't,” he said, and now held on to her hands at his face and did not let them go. “Don't marry me, but just let me …” He ran out of words and let the pleading rush from his eyes with the force that runs rivers into seas.

“You are the best man,” Gabriella said, and shook her head in disbelief that such a man existed, and then she reached forward and pressed herself against him with such force it might have been for healing or to be healed, and then she kissed his face and then his mouth that was salty like the sea.

Nelly Grant knew when she saw them return into the town of Kenmare. She read their aurae like an ancient book whose pages have worn and yellowed from the feverish finger grease of a thousand readers. When they re-entered her shop and Stephen knocked against the Granny Smiths and sent four tumbling green globes onto the floor, Nelly could read the aftershocks in him and feel the trembling that had not yet subsided and that had brought the strange clamour from the birds in the yet unleaved sycamores behind Sugrue's. Gabriella stooped to pick up the apples at the same moment as Stephen. They are like twin clocks, Nelly thought, but do not realize it. She smiled and said nothing and watched them replace the fruit. The relationship is so unbalanced, she told herself, he loves her so much, that at any moment things might fall off shelves, spark, combust. Watching them standing in the small free space of the shop was like watching springtime in fast forward.

“Well?” said Nelly, and smiled. She watched the light from them radiate across the ceiling. Then Gabriella stepped forward and embraced her.

It was one of the qualities of Nelly Grant that she could become different people at different moments; and in that embrace on the shop floor, she was briefly the mother Gabriella had wished for. She was wise and knowing. Her body in a chunky blue sweater felt like a lifetime's bulk of warmth and hope, and Gabriella held on to it. While she did, Nelly Grant winked at Stephen and almost toppled him. She took Gabriella's thanks with soft protest, and when the younger woman told her she was moving back into the house she had left before Christmas, Nelly clapped three small claps for this minor victory of love and then went to fill a fruit bag for the two of them. While she circled the stalls, drawing oranges and grapes and a sweet pineapple, she watched out of the corner of her eye where Stephen's hand dangled dangerously in the air, charged with the imploding desire to reach and take Gabriella's fingers. He did not do it.

“Take these with you,” Nelly said then, coming forward quickly with the fruit, before anything else could happen, and standing so close to Gabriella that the younger woman had to step backward and brush into the chest of Stephen. His hands landed like large birds on her shoulders, and the relief softened the line of his mouth. “And a little of this,” said Nelly, bringing them a small bottle of a kind of milk made from the flour drawn from roots of the early purple orchids and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. “It is good for everything,” she told them, “especially to keep resolve of the spirit.” Then she placed her hand on Gabriella's head and let her go. “Call to see me.”

“I will.”

“We will,” said Stephen.

The lovers walked out of the shop, and fruit rolled off the shelves. Everything is energy, thought Nelly, and laughed to watch the bananas twirl on the S hooks.

That afternoon, while the farmers slowly returned from the mart and the money began to surface on polished counters in all the pubs of the town, Gabriella moved back into the house she had left before Christmas. And whether it was the burgeoning spring, the relief of animals sold, the excitement of animals bought, or the radiant spirit of loving returned, by early evening the town was singing and smoking and swallowing pints in that strange mixture of celebration and hope and reminiscence that is the true hallmark of the end of winter.

In the house on the hill, when darkness had fallen, Gabriella sat on the floor before the fire and Stephen sat in the chair to the side of her. Their music was not the music of the town below them. It was a recording of Puccini's Tosca that Stephen had brought from his car and played for Gabriella when he told her of his father's death and that this was the music his father had listened to for thirty years. While the sweetest arias played they did not speak. They ate the fruit Nelly Grant had given them and listened, and it was not until the third act that Gabriella lifted her head and raised her hand and met Stephen's fingers and drew him so swiftly down to her on the floor that the turf smoke billowed out over them in a cloud. And in that moment, while the town below them was singing and the heavens above were thronged with spirits and stars, while the diva sang “Vissi d'arte” and made the small room one with others in different places and different times, Gabriella Castoldi kissed the man who loved her and took his head and touched his wet eyes and held her fingers upon his lips.