Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“No, I'm not.”

“But I think you are. I am in bed with a saint.” She said it and looked at him and smiled, and then she told the child and lay there in the grey starlight, where her face was lost and none could read the gratitude and prayer in her eyes.

Often in those dead hours between the sunset and the four o'clock dawn they talked of the music school. It added another meaning to their days, though it still existed more solidly in words than in stone. They talked it into happening. They lay with their faces to the open skylight and told how it would be, as if telling the heavens to prepare the way. There was comfort in the company of that dream, and so almost like an incantation Stephen told Gabriella what it would be like, how the lessons would be, and the pupils, and the concerts they could have on the grass between the school and the sea. He told her until at last she asked him no more and he supposed she was sleeping. But she was not. She was closing her eyes and watching beneath her eyelids the extraordinary edifice of love built in solid air. And it was only in those moments, in that strange starry stillness when the world seemed to sleep without her, that she truly dared to believe it might happen.

Finally, the builders arrived in the hillocky field and began to dig out the foundations as the hares darted about into the dunes. To relieve herself of the overattentiveness of Stephen, Gabriella insisted he go each day to see what was happening and walk back along the seashore before coming to tell her. It gave her an hour on her own. For in the nearness of the birth she was revisited by visions of her mother's miscarriages, and although she was safely beyond miscarriage, she fretted about the possibility of an invisible curse moving in her bloodline. She sat in the deep armchair that looked out on the sea and tried to breathe with the focussed concentration she had when about to play extraordinary music.

Stephen stood, she sat in the chair.

“You'll stay there?” he said.

“Of course I will.”

He put on a disc of Vivaldi's concertos. “I'll be back before it's over,” he said.

“I know you will.”

He went out the door. She stayed in the chair.

The music played.

Five minutes later she had risen with a sudden impatience. She saw the bitter face of her pregnant mother standing scouring the sink in the kitchen of their house in the Calle Visciga. She saw it. She saw the fist of steelwool circling, and she cried out. She stood up and crossed to turn the music up louder. She moved the volume until the notes were huge and full and pulsing through the cottage.

Then the pain lanced through her and she slid to the floor.

“O mio Dio.”

She reached for the counter, but her fingers clenched in spasmic fists and hit against the wood. The sharpness of the pain was so severe that her back arched and her mouth opened wide with a soundless cry. She lay on the cold tiles and banged against them with the back of her head, sucking and blowing as if drowning in the tide of life. A minute seemed endless. The pain had a narrowness of point so exquisite that it seemed to find her deeply and then rip upwards. The floor pooled with a little blood and water. Gabriella screamed into the Vivaldi and banged her head again. She screamed so loudly through the music that the blackbirds rose off the roof and flew in the air about the house with the strange and morbid excitement of funeral-goers. They hung around. They mirrored her woe with a beakish crying that upset the cats who lay in the shadow of the plants in the garden and made them come to the windowsill, where the saucer was empty of milk. Time stopped. There was nothing but the waves of pain in the throbbing music, the urgent and relentless hurting that was the pain of sorrow and loss and doomed love and expectant tragedy, and was the pain of the beginning of life, too.

Oh God, Gabriella thought, we are going to die. Then the air seemed rung with muffled hornlike sounds and thickened with floating pinpricks of dusted light that were the onrush of a violent dizziness. And then, blackout.

Moira Fitzgibbon found her lying on the floor.

There had been no answer to the doorbell, and when Moira let herself in through the back door she caught at once the queer whiff of disaster. The atmosphere was weirdly aslant, like the grin on a misbehaved child when the crime is as monstrous as he imagines. The molecules themselves seemed disordered, as though the world had been bumped against and some secret and perfect order was discovered enormously flawed. Moira came in slowly, she called and heard no answer. The music player had stopped and was buzzing with the loud volume of emptiness.

Then Moira heard the breathing and, like a finger held upon a wound and now releasing, time rushed like blood. Gabriella was still alive, the child was not yet born. Moira Fitzgibbon made bloodprints with her feet and rang the mid-wife and the doctor and opened the door and called for Stephen in a voice the seawind whipped away. She hurried and ran water and got towels and lifted Gabriella's head and told her not to die, talked to her in a long and seamless stream of urgings that were the confession of her own longing for the child to be born and for the music lessons and the school and the dream of their life by the sea that she told Gabriella was proof of something, and which offered Moira, when she lay in the dark, the single best example of something good and true and beautiful.

On the beach Stephen walked beneath the crying of the seabirds. A breeze was gathering from somewhere out in mid-ocean, and the gulls came before it like grey prophecies across the cloudless sky. The wind was salted and dry. Stephen carried his shoes and walked in the wet sand, where the waves painted his turned-up trouser legs. He walked in the place where once he had thought his life was going to end. Now, on that afternoon beach, he walked to re-encounter that earlier self and renew his gratitude for so much that was given to him. The music school had been started, Gabriella was in their house where the garden was begun. He believed newly in God and felt the simplicity of grace.

He tried not to think that the music school might be a folly, that it might be built beside the sea and open and find no pupils. That within a year it might be an empty shell whistling the long, unhappy note of doomed dreams. That Gabriella might change her heart and want to leave. He did not want to think of such things and kept a waferlike belief in goodness balanced on his soul. He walked the long beach until he was past the cliffs and out almost to the broken rocks, where his figure was too small to be seen by those searching for him along the sand.

When he reached the remote end, he turned, tossed a Stone in the water, and held back his head a moment until the brilliant light of the sky bathed his face.

He narrowed his eyes at the sun and did not hear the cries. The waves slapped. Gulls soared and screamed.

Then Stephen turned to see the three Coughlan children clambering over the rocks to tell him to come quickly, there was trouble.

His heart stopped. He imagined he was in a nightmare, for the journey back across the summer beach seemed to take place amidst the garish light and hollow cries of grim hallucination. Sunbathers sat up on their towels and watched him. He could not hurry quickly enough, and his long strides sank in the softened sand and gave him the jagged, uneven rhythm of a jogger suffering heart attack. His long neck angled forward, his arms pumped, and when his hat flew off he left it behind him on the water, running in a gasping horror, as if across his wide eyes there suddenly flashed the doomed future of all their loving, and upon his getting to the cottage depended one last chance for its rescue.