Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

They walked away from the cottage back to the car. Moira Fitzgibbon could scarcely believe what was happening, and said she needed the bracing exercise of a good walk back to the town to reassure herself that she had in fact got out of bed. “Go on,” Moira said, shooing them off like hens, “you go away, I'll walk. I'll call up to the house tomorrow.”

And it was only when they had driven away, and Moira had turned one last time to look back at the old man's cottage and whisper to him that maybe his dream was going to happen, that she saw three black cats coming from the cottage and tumbling on the wild long grass of the lawn.

The progress of dreams is in fits and starts. Time hastens and slows and makes of the clock of desire not minutes and hours but fevers, flushes, and languid long eternities. So in one day everything happened, and after it almost nothing at all.

Money does not travel quickly, and the more of it there is, the more leisurely its pace, Stephen learned. He imagined Moran, the assistant manager in Kenmare, reading with tight small eyes the request for the transfer of funds, and delaying it with a kind of exquisite spite that is the triumph of the small-minded. Nothing happened, no money arrived. Mr. MacNamara, a small man who came in a large exhausted car, told Stephen and Gabriella he was the auctioneer for the Mooney property. He laughed into his fist, as if holding a small microphone, and said yes yes yes in constant repetition, replying to some question no one could hear but himself. He looked at them and said yes yes yes; he looked at the window and did the same. When Stephen told him they were only waiting on the money to arrive, Mr. MacNamara gave his triple affirmative and added a wink, running his tongue about the inside of his mouth so it appeared he was chasing a lozenge and not a sale. He left abruptly after that, but returned the next day as if he had forgotten that he had ever been there. He stood in the doorway and said yes yes yes when Stephen told him he had no news. In the following two weeks he made six appearances, sometimes standing in the sitting room with his hands lost behind his back under the flaps of his jacket and looking about him for a clue as to his purpose.

While the plans for the building were in stasis, other aspects of the music school were not. Gabriella struck up a friendship with Moira Fitzgibbon, and in morning meetings over the strong tea which Stephen made in the kitchen they planned together how the word might be spread. Gabriella grew bigger almost by the moment. She sat at the table and bloomed, as if the hope in her spirit grew the child more quickly now and warmed the air in the room with incipient life. Moria Fitzgibbon gave her tips and counselled sea walks on the noon shore; she recounted the adventures of her own pregnancies, and through the simple means of her own personality gave Gabriella Castoldi the gift of being grounded. So while the talks began in air and music, they ended in the earthed practicalities of house heating, plumbing, and a place for the cot. After Moira's third visit, Gabriella had redrawn the inside of the cottage; as Stephen watched with a kind of fearful astonishment, she showed him where they should break out the roof and add skylights, where the extra bedroom needed to be made off their own, where the central heating pipes could run and the bathroom replace the hose-like shower that hung over a discoloured draining sink.

So, in those light blustery days at the end of April, when the sun appeared in the sky above the sea like a promise delivered, builders arrived at the cottage and broke holes in the slate for the skylights. Corry & Son & Nephew opened the roof like a great wound, pushing aside a thickly woven web of time and watching spiders fall down and scurry to new hiding across the floor below. Because Gabriella loved the idea of them so, Stephen doubled the order to four skylights and watched as the series of squares were cut away from the roof, making the house suddenly appear absurdly vulnerable and exciting at the same time, as if it were a giggling and intrepid centenarian going across the sunlit grass in the nude. Birds flew in and out of the house and bats arrived in the twilight, flickering across the starred heavens to alight inside the high ceilings in a sign Tom Clancy said guaranteed good fortune. For three days the house breathed through its top while Corry & Son & Nephew climbed the ladders and sat on the roof and smoked Woodbines, looking out at the fine view of the ocean; Corry said sometimes you wouldn't think it stretched all the way to America and watched the waves from that high position with a kind of grieven mesmerism that only Son knew betrayed he was thinking of Son Two, who was that noontime waking to work in Duggan's Bar in Brooklyn. The Corrys took their time; they threw down the old slates, which Son said were as crisp as cream crackers, and when Stephen at last broke through his diffidence and asked if the windows would be in soon because he feared a change in the weather, the father shouted down to him that he had it on several counts — the frog spawn, the movements of the heron, and the cloud formations reported over Mount Brandon — that the dry spell would continue for weeks. Nephew concurred. He had it from Sky News Long Range, he said, and looked up at the blue heavens as if towards a satellite God.

In a house of birds, bats, and spiders, then, Gabriella and Stephen lived within the breathing of the sea. Little by little word of their arrival had reached every house in the town and beyond. But there was something in that parish — perhaps it was the notion of its own broadmindedness, the influence of summer continentals, or the whole bizarre history of life which had finally exhausted the parish imagination and capacity for being surprised — that meant the news of Stephen and Gabriella did not raise an eyebrow, not even when the story of their proposed music school reached the bars at Considine's and Clancy's and circulated with the strange scent of apple blossom.

In the first days of May a letter came announcing that the money had arrived in Miltown Malbay.

There was £267,000.

That the figure was astonishingly high, and arrived now at the moment they needed it, did not strike Stephen as strongly as it might, for he believed that it came from his father, that it was evidence of his spirit watching over him and making easier the way ahead.

Mr. MacNamara was in the house on one of his visits when the news arrived, and saying yes yes yes to Corry & Son & Nephew, looking down through the skylights on the roof above him. When Stephen told him he was ready to pay for the Mooney land, Mr. MacNamara looked sincerely surprised, as if it was a remarkable coincidence that there might be some business to be done. “That's grand,” he said, and scratched his left temple to recall who Mooney was. The following day Moira Fitzgibbon arrived in the olive-carpeted sitting room of Councillor O'Rourke and told him they would be seeking planning permission. She told him of the importance of the school, the need for the permission to be hurried, and knew enough to make the case seem impossible unless he was able to help them. She puffed a despairing sigh and watched it cross the room to arrive in the magnanimous heart of the councillor. He paused, and then like an emperor nodded a single nod.

Maytime blossomed. In the deep calm of mid-morning Stephen and Gabriella took walks into the west Clare countryside. They did not go far. Ten minutes outside the town they walked along roads where the hedgerows of blackthorn were deeply tangled with wild blackberry. Birds flew before them and sang the songs of summer in the blue air. Dung flies buzzed where the cows had passed and formed into diamond-shaped gauzes as the walkers came upon them. The sound of tractors travelled everywhere, and was so steadily part of those walks that it became one with the landscape and was as if the throttling of those engines was the action of a supernatural sewing machine, going back and forth, stitching into being the patchwork of the fields. The noise itself was reassuring, and lent the walks the indolent pleasure of summer-afternoon sleeps while the lawn mower mows.