As It Is in Heaven (10 page)

Then the music began.

It began with pace and rhythm. It swept into the air like a bird with four wings, as the four musicians bowed their strings
and released the notes that had been gathering within them all evening. The music flew through the room and filled it with
a kind of sweet breathing that rose and fell in the breasts of the audience. They were mesmerized at once. The musicians played
beyond themselves, and within instants of beginning they knew it was a concert they were to remember years later. They dared
brief glances at each other; Paolo Mistra looked up from the cello into the face of Gabriella Castoldi and saw the light gleaming
from it. They were playing Scarlatti’s Quartet in C minor, and by the time they had reached the allegro the warm air of the
long room seemed to be dancing in white shapes above them. The room grew warmer each minute. (Kiaran Breen startled himself
by standing up in the middle of the audience to look towards the window and see if it was not in fact morning and the sun
was coming up.) In the middle of the third piece the audience started taking off their coats. Briefly they jostled in their
seats and then lay the coats across their laps, so that from the front of the room their bright blouses and blue and white
shirts looked like spring in Italy. The music transported them. Every man and woman was already in some Italy of the mind,
and the storm of the November night blew outside with all the fruitlessness and ineffect of a government warning. When they
had finished playing the Vivaldi, the people swept to their feet and let their coats fall to the floor. They applauded loudly
and with such frantic joy that Piero Motte felt tears spring up in his eyes. With the applause ringing in the high chandeliers
above them, the musicians looked at each other in bewilderment. The room was balmy with delight. And when the people sat again
for the slow and romantic melancholy of the Puccini, they were pillowed on a deep and heartfelt gladness. Eamon Waters took
the plump and warm fingers of his Eileen’s right hand and held them in his lap. Smelling the deepening scent of her perfume
rising in the heat of the room, Jack Nolan at fifty-seven kissed Margaret Mungovan on the side of her neck and only barely
kept himself from telling her he was ready to marry again. (It did not matter, for she knew it already, and when the music
began once more, she allowed her head to lean against his shoulder and let him know in the silent language of perfume that
she wanted his arms around her.)

In the back row, Stephen Griffin held his face in his hands and stared at the woman playing the violin. He, too, had been
taken from himself by the music; the music offered an invisible opening to another place, and through it, like a secret river,
flowed the frustrations, sorrows, and ceaseless longings of everyone there. For each of them, it became the music of themselves.

By the time the Puccini was being played, Stephen found himself looking at no one but the slender figure of Gabriella Castoldi.
Even when she was playing the quick fluttered notes of the Vivaldi allegro her expression remained one of frowning intensity.
The bow flew back and forth across the strings like a sweet yet almost unendurable torture. Stephen looked at the woman whose
name he did not yet know and his heart raced. The air in the room wavered with warmth. Men and women closed their eyes and,
in the minor pause between notes, swallowed hard the emotions that rose within them.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

The last note was played and the music stopped. There was a pause, a long beat in which that Venice of the mind lingered in
the hot humid room of the Old Ground Hotel. There was a held moment of nothing, of silence, as if no one who sat there wished
to embark on the home journey, to emerge once more in the November rain. Nobody moved. (Later, Piero Motte would swear that
when he looked down at them, every single man and woman had wet faces and suntans. He would tell his aged father in the
pasticceria
in Burano that in the old music they had revealed a new invention that night, a kind of heart travel, he would say, that
took them all,
tutti,
to the place of Vivaldi—which is not Venice but Vivaldi himself. They did not applaud, he would tell his father. They could
not.)

And how long passed before the first hands clapped could not be measured in time. It was a slow awakening, full of reluctance
and dawning amazement, like sleepers rising from the most sensuous dream. Men raised their hands to clap and felt the dampness
under their armpits and across the shirts on their backs. They stood and noticed they were in their stockings, and had slipped
off their shoes earlier, in the mistaken certainty that they were sitting by the waterside. The women clapped their hands
beneath their chins and felt their own air fanning them back from dizziness. Councillor O’Rourke, who had slipped out at the
beginning of the concert to attend to mobile-phone calls, now stepped back in the door on the wave of applause. He smiled,
raised his head to show his throat, and held up his hands to applaud so that Moira Fitzgibbon could see him clearly.

The possibility of an encore vanished in the wave of people spilling forward towards the small stage. Stephen did not move;
he stood applauding and lost sight of the musicians as the crowd swelled about them. He angled his head to see the woman better,
but she had stepped off the podium and was lost to him amidst the jostle of the Miltown Malbay people. His mouth was dry,
his eyes burned. In his chest his lungs seemed to have collapsed. He could not breathe. He felt as if he had been struck in
the throat. There was a moment when he thought he would fall down; then he looked up and blinked at the chandeliers and was
able to move quickly from the room.

Once he made the doorway, he could move faster, and took the red carpeted stairs three at a time, hurrying down into the lobby
like a man escaping a fire.

The cool dark dampness of the evening after rain was like a blanket thrown over him. Now he could breathe. He walked out of
the grounds of the hotel and past the pulling-away cars and the dazzling lights of the homeward bound. But he did not want
to go home, he wanted to walk, to keep moving until he could travel all the way back into the feeling of the concert. He walked
around the shut shops of Ennis and heard the music of Venice in his mind. Stephen Griffin walked, mute, beneath the moonless
sky. It was two o’clock in the morning and he was six miles out on the Inagh road. He had been walking for four hours and
not once lost sight of the face of Gabriella Castoldi.

  Stephen did not go home that night. He walked as far as his car and sat inside it, certain at first that the sensation he
felt when he got in was that of sinking. Rain had softened the world; the scar where the car had ploughed into the ground
was opened like wet lips. Stephen closed his eyes and expected slow decline into the sucking soft mouth of the bog. Soundlessly,
the lemon car eased to the right; he felt the gradual collapse and tender sighing like fire sizzling into water. Then it stopped
and the car sat there.

It was still sitting there at eight o’clock the following morning, when Patrick Mulvihill passed in his tractor, supposing
it to be the abandoned remains of some young lad’s drunken evening, until he saw the figure of the teacher sitting behind
the steering wheel.

It took Mulvihill six minutes to tow the car from the bog. It was Stephen’s second rescue.

“There is no such thing as stillness,” he said to Mulvihill, when the car had been pulled onto the road and the farmer had
come back to unhitch the rope. He was a short man in a thick coat, his grey face was a balled newspaper. His facial expressions
were so crumpled it was impossible to separate them more than: Wrinkled, or Very Wrinkled. He gave Stephen Very Wrinkled,
and amidst the lost, closed-in folds of his red face his green eyes glinted.

“She’s all right,” he said, smacking the bonnet of the yellow car and ignoring the driver. “You took her too fast round that
bend on the greasy road. Made terrible rain last night.”

“I’ve been sitting here all night wondering what to do,” Stephen said.

“The rain’s gone, but the road’s still greasy.”

“How do you know what to do? God, I don’t. I didn’t think that … I never expected. It’s not what you … well, maybe for some.
But I’m not that kind of man. I just …”

“You don’t notice it in a tractor, with the heaviness.”

“I want to see her again,” Stephen said.

“But in a light car like that. She could slide right off easy enough.”

“I have to. I have to see her again.”

Mulvihill paused; he made crinkled lips and raised his face to where the light was breaking on the far side of Ennis.

“That’s exactly right,” he said, and reached down to untie the tow rope. “That’s exactly right,” he repeated, and then walked
back to his tractor.

“Goodbye now,” Mulvihill said over his shoulder, climbing into the cab and throwing in the rope beside him, puttering off
down the road towards the dawn, disproving once again his brother’s belief that he needed a hearing aid, proud of his conversational
skills, and certain that the younger man had no idea he was deaf as a stone.

  Stephen’s life had already begun to change. It was too soon yet for him to know outright, he was a cautious man and too long
accustomed to his own unremarkable history to suppose his life could catch fire. He did not yet sense that the fluctuation
in his heart rate, the fuzziness of his hearing, and the sweetness of tart apples were the early signs of love. He was disturbed,
he was upset; he admitted that much, and knew too that it was because of the woman with the violin. But just as one day he
had accepted that no sleep was deep enough or dream powerful enough to bridge him to the next world and meet the lost half
of his family, so too Stephen Griffin had long accepted that he was to be alone. Imagining love is real makes life hard, and
so he had instead moved it beyond the history of his future, leaving it rolled up and put away like a scroll of fairy tales
in the farthest corner of his heart. Now, on the morning after the concert, it was not love he was thinking of. He was not
thinking he had to see Gabriella Castoldi again so that she might see his face or speak to him, find an attraction in the
timidity and melancholy of his character, that she might fall in love with him; it never entered his mind. Instead, he thought
that the desire that was running along the arteries of his arms, that was tingling in his fingers and making them beat softly
on the top of the steering wheel, was only the desire to hear her play the music again.

He drove into Ennis. The shops were not yet open, and the narrow streets had a desolate air of aftermath. The chip-bag and
beer-can litter of tawdry romance was strewn along the gutters of wet footpaths. Dogs roamed and sniffed the dead butts of
love talk and other promises and pissed the walls and moved on.

Stephen parked the car by the River Fergus, hurried across Parnell Street and down through the empty market to the Old Ground
Hotel. The wet air woke his face and gave him a polished rawness like a fruit thinly skinned. He walked in the front door
and past the reception, bounding up the stairs, as if some mission was balanced on the point of failure and his smallest of
worlds could only be saved by arriving on the first floor.

The doors to the concert room were closed, and when he held on to the cold metal of the handle, he was astonished by the heat
of himself. He stepped into the room; it had not yet been tidied, and the chairs, pushed back in lines slightly askew, spoke
more of the leaving than of the concert. Stephen moved to his own seat and sat down. He put his hands under his chin and stared
up at the empty space where the Italians had played. He closed his eyes and sought the image and the sound of them; he sat
there in the low susurrus of the muffled morning traffic, the distant clink of china and cutlery downstairs, the squeak in
the chambermaid’s trolley moving down the hall, the tramping of the hundred schoolchildren and the shopkeepers and their customers,
the steady unstoppable noise of the small town with lorries and vans and buses and cars, and in that galaxy of sounds he listened
for the music of yesterday.