Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“Why am I so difficult?” she said beneath the singing, shaking her head as if to escape her father's knuckling fists landing upon her.

And for once Stephen did not remain quiet, but in a low voice answered her and said, “Let go, just try and let it go.”

And in the simple, brief, and yet momentous way in which a life is decided, in which the hold of the past is released and the future arrives like new skin, Gabriella closed her eyes and at last surrendered to that impulse that was as timeless, inevitable, and relentless as spring itself, and was the subject of all the songs the men were singing in the town below.

Stephen stayed that night, and the one after that, and after that again. He brought his things from Mary White's, who bade him goodbye once more, this time with the gentlest of smiles and a wave of her hand, telling him he was welcome always and holding herself in her thin arms as if embracing some of the loving that glowed off him.

The easterly winds that were the harbingers of March and were nightly forecast did not arrive in Kenmare. The season was mild and the earth became tender. The soil moistened as it unfroze and released a sweet scent everyone seemed to have forgotten from the year before. Old women warned that good weather should not be trusted and wore their thick coats into the town with the sour wisdom of life's disillusioned. They stood at butcher counters ordering the cheapest cuts of meat, and when the new season potatoes arrived from Israel they looked at them with scornful downturned mouths and went home to enjoy the thick-skinned bitter gnarled potatoes that God had spared them in the shed since last July. But for others the softness of the beginning of March came as a blessing, not a curse. The worst winds that were sent from Finland whispered and diminished over north Tipperary and did not reach the Kerry mountains. The sun rose in clear skies. Among the lifted spirits of the town Stephen bought the groceries and things for the house. That he had no skill for carpentry or repair-work did not stop him buying hammer and nails and screwdriver and gazing fixedly at the closely packed shelves in Donoghue's hardware shop, wondering but not asking what things were. He returned to the house, where Gabriella was writing a letter to her cousin, and with a determined kind of manliness, he hammered lumps out of the doorjamb that was loose, and screwed crookedly new screws into the mirror frame that was falling forward out of the dressing table, and now only toppled backward.

He had moved into Gabriella's life like a kind of deferential giant; he wanted to be useful for her. He wanted to make her life easier, and in everything he did he thought first of what she would like. In that way in the mild spring days and nights of that year Stephen Griffin made vanish his own will, and instead shaped his life like a suit of clothes that would fit and shield Gabriella Castoldi from the brute vicissitudes of life. He fell in love with the idea of being her hero. He imagined that in all her life she had never come across anyone like him, that the men she had known were a selfish crowd of louts who had only deepened her grief and furthered the belief that men were weak spirits who sought nothing in women but the banishment of loneliness and a reflected proof of their own power. I am not like them, he told himself. He looked at the grey shadows underneath Gabriella's eyes and each day renewed his vow to make her happy. When she awoke he brought her tea in bed, and not coffee; he lit the turf fire downstairs and turned on the music. When she stayed in the bed and did not get up, he brought her soapy plates of stiff pasta with a jar of tomato sauce poured over it. He cooked fried eggs flecked with bits of shell and mistimed the toast so that the butter would not melt.

He had told her of the money he would inherit from his father and that he was not returning to teaching. But he did not tell her his work was there in the house about her, for even he feared that incredible declaration, and instead stood by her bedside and smiled the uncertain half-smile of those who are just beginning to trust in enduring goodness.

Meanwhile, Gabriella slowly moved beyond the time of morning sickness. In the soft and tender weather the child grew within her and lent her a deep and sensuous laziness. She lay in wide bed and felt Stephen wrap around her through the night, and in the mornings after he had risen she walked her legs into the warmth he had left in the sheets and kept her eyes closed so that she might linger there forever in the glowing afterheat that was the small proof of a comforting humanity. She had swift sudden fits of gaiety and high spirits. Noontimes, when the sun flowed as a stream through the window and Stephen peeped around the door to see if she wanted lunch, she saw the white moon of his face and burst out laughing.

“What is it?” he asked her, stepping a half-step inside the door and smiling like a man who does not see the bucket falling on his head.

But Gabriella could not answer; she giggled and turned her face into the pillow, laughing, laughing in relief and disbelief, with the first gradual easing of the tightness in her spirit.

“What is it? tell me,” Stephen said, emboldened by the laughter and the sunlight, and coming forward to the bed to grab on to her where she was wriggling and he was already tickling her.

“Nothing! Nothing! Stop, o grido! Ahhh!”

It became one of the things she loved about him: how she could erase the terrible seriousness of his face, how the pale earnestness of his expression inspired her to sudden small acts of rebellion. He could not tell the difference yet between her real and her fake reactions, and as if she was compelled to continually test the strength and limits of his love, she delighted in teasing him. She watched the instant and deep furrowing of his brow when she told him she had a pain, and only when he had come to her side to ask her where, did she giggle and point to different parts of her body, moving her hand across herself in the bed and drawing up her nightgown until her giggling was wilder and Stephen was travelling her with kisses. She was amazed by him. She did not tell him again that she would not marry him, but the boundaries of the relationship were always there nonetheless, and in those bright and hope-filled days at the beginning of spring Gabriella danced along them. She asked for ice cream when he brought her breakfast, then lay back on the pillow and listened to the ignited car engine as a metaphor of love, while Stephen drove hurriedly into the town for three kinds of ice cream cornettos. In the afternoons she did not rise, but rolled softly from the bed, believing that the carrying of the child to the sitting room was work enough for one day and, in thick red jumper and elasticized sweatpants, sat with Stephen to watch one of the many video films he brought her from Kenmare.

“Do you think it's any good?” he asked her.

“No.”

He stopped the machine and stood up. “I'll go get another one.”

“No, don't.”

“I will. I don't mind.”

“Stephen.”

“I'd be back in ten minutes.”

“I could have killed myself by then.”

“What?”

“Yes. You better not leave me. Ten minutes and I could have …” She mimed an elaborate knife across her throat and rolled her eyes.

“Gabriella!”

“Or perhaps.” She put her forefinger into her mouth and cocked back her thumb to make a gun. “Bang!” She flopped her head dead. Then from the side she opened her eyes and looked at him. When she spoke her voice was soft: “Don't, Stefano. Don't go. I don't need another one now. They are all such rubbish, I shouldn't even watch them, but”—she paused and smiled at how indolent she was allowing herself to be—“I like to sit here on the couch with you, passing the afternoon. Is it so terrible?”