Niall Williams: As It Is in Heaven

It was perfect. For Gabriella had arrived that May in a mood of quiet ease. The mid-wife had told her the pregnancy was going well, and by the time the first plans for the music school had been tacked up on the wall of the kitchen, she was feeling the absence of regret for the first time in her life. She sang notes in her bed in the morning while Stephen brought her herbal teas. She allowed her anxieties and the rigour of her self-criticism to slip gradually away, and instead adopted the new life in that cottage by the sea as if it were she and not the child that was being born.

In the afternoons she played the violin. When Stephen wanted to sit in the room listening, she told him it was not a public performance and laughed, saying, “Well, perhaps it is, for one member of the public.” So he sat outside the door and listened; he heard her playing her way back into the first rooms of her childhood, heard the first music Scaramuzza had taught her returning now like a new season for the child she was carrying. She played the infant beginner's tunes with such feeling that even outside the door Stephen could imagine her weeping as she played. She played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and then slid from the simple notes into a series of variations which grew ever more ornate and intricate, until they were the music of ineffable hope and longing, the music that contained the boundless dreams of mothers for their children's happiness. Gabriella played for an hour each afternoon, and Stephen did not disturb her. When she came out of the room she wore a rosy bloom and pretended she had not heard Stephen hurry away from the door.

“You have been doing great work out here,” she said when she came across him in the kitchen.

“Oh yes.” He turned to run a cloth across the sink. She stood beside him. “Feel,” she said, and took his hand and put it on the place where the child was moving like a swimmer in a sea. “It's the music.” They stood, innocent and hopeful, by the kitchen sink, and imagined the possibility that life could after all be that simple, that nothing would come and threaten that easeful and tender living by the sea, and that God was merciful and good and redeemed all grief in the end. They stood there, wordless, and felt the child. Looking on the slope of grass that ran down towards the fall to the sea, Gabriella said, “Could we have a garden?”

The following day Stephen bought a shovel and pitchfork. He returned from McInerney's in Miltown Malbay with the white wooden handles sticking out the car window and carried the tools onto the grassy space with the set jaw of a Wild West pioneer. He went to foot the shovel into the ground, but the old tufted grass resisted and the shovel made a slow fall to the side. Stephen was not to be outdone. He spat somewhat carefully on his hands and walked over the ground where during the evening Gabriella had imagined out loud a perennial border. The grass was tall and wild and was like a long-enduring and hairy demon upon whom the shovel struck but made no impact. Stephen drove the blade again and again as a moon row of blisters opened in his palms. His long back curved into it. He had never dug a day in his life, and now in the breeze that came up from the sea he hacked and jabbed at the ground for the beginnings of a dream garden. His sweat fell in grey droplets. He watched the embrowned flaps of the blisters open and fingered them back into place like a child imagining damage repaired. The white handles of the shovel and fork grew smeared with the dull colour of labour.

That afternoon he worked on while the birds gathered. The following day and the next, though he woke with his body stiffly locked like a coffin, he did the same. He stretched his fingers and sat while Gabriella poured olive oil on them. He opened the ground for a vegetable garden, for a herbal border, and the curved shape where he imagined flowers would bloom for Gabriella and his child. He worked in silence to the whispering collapse of the sea, the crown of his head burning a red corona until Tom Clancy, admiring the work from the stone wall that surrounded it, brought Stephen a straw hat that made him look like a gondolier.

The following day they bought the plants. Gabriella had a book with colour plates of poker-headed kniphofia, bright yellow achilleas, and crimson rosa moyesii, and with the childlike fantasy of a first gardener imagined them growing in the brown ground outside the window. In Miltown Malbay the selection of plants was too narrow for such dreams, and so they drove into north Clare to the hidden nursery of Mick Kinsella. He was a tall, ponytailed figure in jeans who had for fifteen years pretended to be an accountant in Dublin, until the morning he realized that he could not remember the smell of roses. Since then he had run the nursery in the hills of north Clare and with his wife, Maggie, reared three wild-looking girls among the tangle of flowers that were his garden. He sat inside the gateway in a small wooden hut, where he used his laptop computer to browse among the world's exotic plant catalogues. When Stephen and Gabriella arrived he told them he had just found a new terrestrial orchid from New Zealand and ordered three dozen of them. Then he walked them through the heavily scented grass path into the garden proper, pushing aside the flowerheads.

“We have a garden dug out,” Gabriella told him.

Mick Kinsella looked at them. “It's your first?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Here, take a chair,” he told Gabriella, and sat her in the garden, where she could watch while he and Stephen walked back and forth picking out the plants that were not the ones in the book but were the ones Mick Kinsella said would grow. Stephen and Gabriella brought them home, packed into the back of the car like children going on summer holidays. That evening they placed them out in the garden that faced the sea, and sat and watched them until the light died away.

And so the summer rolled in. Somewhere out in the Atlantic a dazzling blue formed and stilled the winds and made the sea warm and gentle and inviting, lapping all the way to the shores of Clare. The sun shone like Spain. Sombreros appeared like strange blooms, and the smell of almond oil hung in the air above the salmon-skinned and the freckled. Miltown Malbay sold out of electric fans. The evening the schoolchildren were released for the summer, the sea at Spanish Point was thronged with leaping white bodies, beating winglike arms against the waves that collapsed across their thighs. All through June the soft blue filled the sky. The tenderness of the days was a blessing which some called a curse and said the end of the world was beginning with a drought. But in the garden behind the house of Stephen and Gabriella the plants of Mick Kinsella grew. Stephen watered them three times a day. He fed them no fertilizer but, when Tom Clancy suggested it, he barrowed cow dung down the road and made a kind of manure dressing which stunk the air and kept the cats away for three days.

In the cool of the stone house Gabriella hid from the sun. The moment she appeared in the daylight, the sweat gathered beneath the heaviness of her breasts and ran cold rivers down her stomach. The heat made her heavier, and so instead, she sat in the lie-out chair-bed inside the house with the fan oscillating across her while she played the violin to the unborn. She wrote three short letters to Maria Feri, telling her in discreet language the progress of love, and then wrote another to Nelly Grant explaining the strange mixture of marvel and terror that was alternating through her spirit. No reply arrived from either woman.

Still, the days were delivered like polished gems. Gabriella said she woke and saw the sea and thought she was in Italy. Stephen opened all the skylights, and the house slept like that, with arched eyebrows, where the moon was reflected in quadruple. By the end of July Gabriella found it impossible to sleep during the nights. She lay on the bed beside the exhausted figure of Stephen and tapped his shoulder when his snoring sounded like pain. He woke with a suddenness, as if his world were a rolling glass globe, and shot out his hands to catch it in the dark. But she was all right. Sometimes she wanted to talk, sometimes she didn't. He brought her cocoa and herbal teas and water and chocolate. She told him he was too good for her, and sometimes the very act of him coming through the door with the mug made tears start in her eyes. “You are a saint,” she said.