Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

He came up the dunes on all fours. He saw the cars at the gateway to the cottage. Then he slowed down. His rib cage hurt, his arms were heavy. The blood in his legs felt like molten lead and swayed his walking, so that the Coughlans caught up with him and took his hands on either side, guiding him the last paces along the road to the cottage that he was now afraid to enter. He stopped at the gate. He stared at the house, and the children looked up at him. And for a moment he waited. His breath escaped in long sighs. And while he stood there, on that cusp of what he supposed to be unutterable loss, he begged God in a prayer for it not to be so.

Then he heard the baby cry.

Gabriella Castoldi did not die that afternoon in the hot July of the long summer but lived when her doctor said she should not have, and gave birth to a baby girl they called Alannah. A small, brown-eyed baby, she was born with a face that revealed neither her mother nor her father, though they each took turns to declare she was exactly like the other; as though they could not quite believe such tender beauty was their own.

For four days after Alannah was born, Gabriella did not move from her bed; she refused to travel to the hospital in Ennis and instead took the difficulties of the birth as a sign that within life was an inevitable force of goodness which flowed beyond our understanding. She relied upon the ancient knowledge of the mid-wife and summoned the healing energy of Nelly Grant to awaken within her. She wept and drowned the bed in water and milk, turning the bedroom air a pale creamy colour that was more filling than food and strangely without the scent of sourness. The near-tragedy brought company. When the word of what had happened reached the town, it had the double effect of raising anger by highlighting the absence of maternity facilities in Ennis and transforming Gabriella into a native of the parish. Visiting ladies brought Lucozade and chocolates and made soft noises above the baby. They relived the hard labour in vivid imaginations and revisited through the new mother their own birthings years earlier. Throughout the first week they came and went like swaddling maternal tides, sliding in around the sleeping mother and child to breathe the thick warm smell of the newborn like an aromatherapeutic remedy, and nodding themselves into dreamy naps that were filled with the downy comfort of first blankets. At once Stephen understood that the birth did not belong to Gabriella and him alone. So he made tea and brought it to the ladies and did not show surprise or resentment when he sometimes opened the bedroom door and saw a half-dozen women over sixty sitting around the bed.

It was in the evenings when the visitors left that he lay with Alannah on the bed. He could not look at her without seeing God. He did not deserve her, he thought, and then held the child in his arms in the tenderest embrace while the stars rose in the skylight overhead.

She became the clock of the cottage. Her wakes and sleeps dictated the rhythms of their days and nights. She was dark-haired and seemed in Stephen's arms the impossible lightness of air. He carried her around the house like the smallest parcel of hope, and though her eyes could not see that far, he pointed out the garden and the sea and then played softly the aching music of Tosca while she fell asleep on his shoulder.

When Moira Fitzgibbon called, he hugged her in the doorway with that combination of awkwardness and sincere deep feeling that was the badge of his character. He cut her flowers from the garden and doubled his own blushes when he saw how she almost wept to receive them. Then, for Alannah's first trip outside the cottage, he urged Moira to join them and drove in his father's car along the western edge of Clare, where the fine summer was just beginning to fade and the yellow stubble of the mown fields was giving way to the last soft green. On the quiet backroads between Miltown Malbay and the sea Stephen stopped the car time and again, and taking one of four dozen packets he had bought in the town, he got out and scattered wildflower seeds in the ditches and beneath the hedgerows.

“These are for you,” he said. “These are for celebration.” Gabriella held Alannah to the window to see, and even Moira became giddy with the notion of the secret sowings and came out from the car and threw fistfuls of poppy, rudbeckia, rose campion, dianthus, and feverfew into the gaiety of the wind.

On the Friday evening at the end of Alannah's first week, Gabriella wrote newly to Maria Feri and Nelly Grant. When she sat in the kitchen before the white pages, the enormity of what had happened to her life rose before her. It was the most ordinary event in the world, the love affair, the birth of the child, but somehow when she thought of it — that she was living now in the west of Ireland with a daughter a week old in the cradle beside her — it took on the dimensions of dreams. She hummed an air and wrote. To Maria Feri she told the news that she was an aunt, and how Alannah showed the time she had spent in Venice by the outrageous exuberance of her giggle, which, Gabriella wrote, was not in the least Irish. She sent her cousin wishes and thanks and lifted the pen from the white space where she glimpsed the evening sorrow of that small apartment above the canal. To Nelly Grant she wrote a shorter message: I have a baby girl. Please come visit.

But it was Maria and not Nelly who responded. In two weeks a piece of white lacework arrived from Venice with a note in the small careful hand of her cousin. It was written on handmade paper in violet ink and had the formal tone of old family property, offering congratulations in a manner that some might consider coldhearted. But Gabriella knew better, and read beyond the tone. She took the lacework in her hand and breathed its scent and caught at once the bittersweet melancholia of Venice; then she placed it in the case of her violin, as if for company.

From Nelly Grant there came no word, and by the time the first rains of autumn had begun to sweep in against the back of the cottage, Gabriella had written her three letters with no reply. Then, in the way a person can fall through the narrowest cracks of our lives, she wrote no more and put aside the little hurt of the silence by supposing that Nelly was simply a woman who disliked writing.

When the rain came it came in sheets. It was as if a great chest had been discovered in the heavens and an array of grey clothes were flung out of it into the skies. It streamed down. The light was washed out of the days, and the field where the music school was now almost complete was scored with streaks of an ochre mud. The building was a low glass pentagon with piers of Liscannor flagstone. The builders marvelled at it. Once they were inside it, finishing the timberwork and plastering, they felt something of the extraordinary nature of the thing they had created. It was a unique space, and felt as if it had fallen from the sky or risen from the ground. The golfers in the dunes nearby looked at it with the puzzled expressions of those who cannot imagine the reality of fantasy. But through the rainy days of September the men worked on inside it with a gathering good humour. There was something about the light, of how the rooms' long windows let in the sea views and blended them into the sky, of how strangely playful the space seemed, that made the carpenters whistle and the plasterers hum until the experience of each day inside that building took on the spirit-lifting quality of a concert in Verona. Men sang tunes they hardly knew. They teased each other and then responded to taunts by singing another, singing songs they sang only when drunk, and marvelling at how the sounds of their own voices rang in the high roof spaces.