Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

When he returned her heart lifted.

“Here,” he said. “I do not take thee to be my wife,” and placed it on her wedding finger. There was a moment, an instant in which she glanced at it and the awful resolve — her disbelief in her own ability to sustain love — might have eased, but the child moved inside her and she looked away.

“Here's your first cup of Clare tea,” Stephen said.

And that was it, the smallest ceremony, the ordinary moment that memory would return to and crystallize and turn into the small preciousness that Stephen Griffin would carry everywhere. The ring on the road to Clare, the ring that was not for sacrament but for protection against the spite of others, but which from the moment Gabriella put it on became a kind of sacrament, nonetheless, and was a promise beyond their saying, a mute and fragile daring that perhaps something imperishable existed. They drove away. They travelled from Killimer along the apparent aimlessness of a quiet road that wound past the bird-heavy hedgerows of spring.

Gabriella watched everything. She had the sense of arriving in Stephen's landscape, and read its soft hills and white-thorn hedgerows like secret messages. This was not the lush and verdant paradise of Kenmare. This was nothing like that. What she saw was a desolate windburnt beauty, an endurance of the spirit in the face of hardship, a stone-walled resistance to the battering of the Atlantic air. A place where the trees stiffened in the long arthritis of brutal weathering and yet did not die, but grew sideways, like the severely backcombed heads of stern aunts who softened once a year and gave sweets in May like white blossoms. Gabriella saw it, and then saw the sea. She let out a little cry, and Stephen looked over at her.

“It's something, isn't it?” he said. But she did not reply. She was looking at the waves crashing in the mid-distance, the great shooting spume of white wind brushed into the air like a game for the gulls. She began to smile, smiling more and more as the car followed the sea road around by the beach at Spanish Point and the sandy field and the fallen-down house of Moses Mooney. Stephen slowed the car before the empty curve of sand.

“So this is your beach?” Gabriella said.

“This is it.”

“Can we stop? It's so beautiful.”

“We have nowhere else to go,” Stephen said. “My house is over there.”

And so they walked down onto the sand, and while the school buses were converging on the school, and cars and coaches and lorries were moving in the ordinariness of everyday, they instead felt the dimensions of freedom that blew in from the breaking waves of the sea. They walked across the wet sand of the foreshore with sunken steps and hopped from the waves in the place where Stephen had once almost drowned. Gabriella took his hand.

“If I died now I'd be happy,” she said, but the wind took her words and he did not hear her.

They slept that night in Stephen's house by the sea. The wind made a creaking music in every window and door, and for hours Gabriella lay wide-eyed in a sleepless dream of happiness. The morning and afternoon had unpacked them into the house, and in the putting out of each thing — the herbal remedies of Nelly Grant, the music books from Venice — was another of the infinitesimal gestures of trust through which we make our covenant with the world. By six o'clock the rooms had begun to look like the rooms in Kenmare, and Gabriella became aware of how simply rooms could resemble a relationship. It was only the first of many such moments. She understood that in the afternoon's unpacking was a sense of more than mere geographical arrival. As each moment passed and she moved from one room to the next, she felt the physical ease of the child inside her. Stephen had set up the music player, and in the small island of the house his father's music sounded triumphant, heralding the heartsongs of ages while he came and went with the boxes.

All of this flew back through Gabriella's mind as she lay sleepless in bed. She fingered the ring and held it out in the starlight as if it belonged to another. Then suddenly she thought of Maria Feri, whose ringless hand in Venice she remembered when it touched the bars of the cage where the bird sang. She saw her cousin sitting in the evening that had just passed, she saw the stillness of the house and the courteous, diffident manner of the older woman who was more still than aged dust and more sorrowful than failed summer, and in that moment, lying on the bed beside Stephen in that first evening in west Clare, Gabriella saw the tragedy of wasted life and the uselessness of losing days in attending dreams. She heard the bird singing in the cage, and in the wind-creaking bedroom heard the singing as it grew louder and louder, until its notes transformed into another music and was the playing of violins, bowing a joy that made her smile in the darkness. It was imagined and not remembered music. It was the music she had dreamt of playing by the sea in Venice when she was a child, before she had ever mastered the violin. It was the perfect music that plays in visions and makes the world shake with possibilities when we are young and feel our souls limitless. It was the music of inspiration, the kind that plays in the heart and makes a child want to pick up an instrument for the first time. Gabriella heard it in the darkness and remembered. Then_ she turned and rocked Stephen's shoulder, and when he raised his head swiftly to ask her what was wrong, she told him, “Nothing is wrong.”

Then she touched his face and said, “Stefano, I want to start a music school.”

In the morning when Gabriella awoke, she had the luminous radiance of purpose. Where the idea of the music school came from was unclear, but did not matter. She did not quite compute the complex formula that music had been the saviour of her own childhood and relate that to the child she carried inside her. She thought only that it was right, and felt the zeal of those who discover in midlife the meaning of their lives. Over breakfast she looked out the window that gave onto the sea and began to plan with Stephen.

The extravagance of her idea, its wild improbability — a classical music school on the west coast of Clare, and beside a town with a legendary reputation for traditional players — did not disturb him in the slightest, and he sat opposite her at the table with that lit expression of love and belief that saw all things as possible. He did not think for a moment that this was her pregnancy speaking again, that it was the whimsical fantasy of a moment, or that in three days, maybe four, she would be returned to the lassitude of her bed. Instead, he sat and listened. He heard her tell him again with the visionary excitement of the night before how, on that desolately beautiful coastline where he had chosen to live, she could imagine a building where music played, where children came with their instruments and walked out afterwards into the big sky and crashing sea. Her cheeks were roses while she spoke, her eyes widened to see the wonder of the future, and her words tumbled like the streams of April. The quickened heartbeat of the season beat through her, and Stephen sat there that morning witnessing her rapture with passionate gratitude.

This, he thought, is my happiness, to be given this chance to make her happy.

While Gabriella elaborated on how the teachers were to be enlisted, where the pupils might come from, what instruments, Stephen had risen from the chair and paced about. Soon he was finishing the sentences she started. They were unable to speak quickly enough, telling of the different studios there could be, of the long panels of glass that would view the sea, of rooms, too, where parents could wait and listen to anything from a full library of discs, how there could be special morning classes for the retired or the unemployed, how the school itself could have guest rooms where visiting musicians might come and stay, and would, too, because there would be no charge but the sharing of their musicianship, and in that place where they made this building, somewhere right there by the sea, music would be celebrated and made alive and reach out into the lives of people. “And we,” said Gabriella, “can make that…”