As It Is in Heaven (15 page)

Dr. Hadja Bannerje remembered his mother in the thin white curtain about the hospital bed, and then turned to Philip Griffin.

“We have no science to say how long,” he said. “We die when we die, Mr. Griffin. We treat the body, not the spirit, but sometimes
it is the spirit that is sick. No medicine for the body cures the spirit.” He paused and looked at the tailor, who was leaning
forward in the bed as if for some hope in the doctor’s tone, which was soft as the word “India.”

“This is not what Mr. Higgins, the oncologist, will say to you. It is my own foolishness perhaps, and you will forgive me
for saying it. But there is nothing here for you. Mr. Higgins will say you will die when the disease shuts down the vital
organs.”

“Soon?” Philip wet his lips. “Tell me.”

The Indian nodded. “Mr. Higgins will say so,” he said.

Philip Griffin slipped back into the clutch of the blankets. He felt suddenly more ill than he had ever felt in his life,
and imagined he could see each of his vital organs struggling under the duress of the cancer. His heart seemed to be racing,
his breath was shallow, as if all the air of the world were swiftly being sucked away from him.

Dr. Bannerje watched the news age the patient. “Is there somebody I can call for you?” he said.

“No. No, thank you.”

“I will come back and talk to you again,” said Hadja Bannerje, turning slowly to draw back the white curtain from around the
bed and walk out of the ward, the weight of failure on his slim shoulders and the smell of smoke about him as he saw his father
on the evening of his mother’s death setting fire to the great mound of dead flowers in the back yard in Bombay, the glitter
of the stars, and the ashes of love spiralling upward and then falling and alighting in his hair.

After the doctor had gone, Philip Griffin lay in the thin air left to him at the edge of the world. The illness was increasing
so rapidly, he imagined, that he could be dead by evening. Already he felt the cotton of his pyjamas loosening from the wastage
of his body and feared that when he stood to go to the bathroom he would have to grab a handful of the material at his waist.
He looked across the ward at two other men who were sleeping like corpses in the deep dream of their medication. Oh God, he
thought, he will be destroyed if I die now. I can’t die now.

He turned to his side and wept into the pillow. He smelled the smell of hospitals, in which there was no season or life, and
was stricken with a new terror that he might never leave the ward again. In the big window a thin rain was blurring the view
of Dublin like an overwashed water-colour, and sharp short gusts of wind blew, weakening the resolve of the sick to get better
and be outside. But not Philip Griffin: I have to stop it, just delay it. Oh, please, God. If I die on him now I’ll have done
nothing but bring him grief all his life.

Where no one could see him, and while he was turned on his side towards the gloom of the November afternoon, he raised his
right hand slowly to his forehead and blessed himself. He did not know if he believed that God could help, for He had not
helped Anne or Mary.

Still, he prayed. He said the Our Father five times. Then, in the beginning of the sixth, he stopped. The pain was sharp in
his chest and he clutched himself.

“Shaggit!”

He waited a moment. In his mind he saw the cancer moving like a shadow into a new, still healthy corner of his organs. The
room darkened. The sky outside fell like the sea in thickened grey waves, as if the world was spinning upside down and the
air was flooded and the light was lost. It was like night in daytime.

I don’t know if you are there, Philip Griffin said in a silent voice. I don’t know if you can hear me. But please let me live
for another while. For my son.

He paused and hugged himself against the pain. Then added: If you let me live, I will try and do …

He couldn’t find the word.

I will try and do some … some act of goodness each day.

Philip Griffin waited, but nothing happened. The pain continued like a fierce storm that November afternoon, pain like rain,
falling like a cold monsoon on the head of Dr. Hadja Bannerje in the car park of St. Vincent’s, where he missed his mother
and promised himself to return to his father in Bombay at the end of his final residency, pain falling out of the grey heavens
in a deluge of despondency and loss, until at last Nurse Grainne Mangan came into the ward and turned on all the lights, and
Philip Griffin did not tell her to turn them off.

  The icy grip of the Atlantic cracked Stephen like thin glass, and his cries flew as shards into the air. He was breathless
as the dead and saw the night sky disappear into the foam of a wave passing over him. Underwater he was borne towards the
shore, and at last stood up in the rolling tumble of the tide and screamed. He screamed as evidence of his own durability,
trying to outcry the noise of the waves and to free his jaw from the frozen fingers of death. His hands shook wildly, and
then, as the wind caught him, his knees did the same, convulsing him in tremors until he was a blurry out-of-focus figure
on the sand and had to kneel down and put his hands out like a man trying to hold on to the spinning of the world.

It was an hour before he had dressed himself, drawing the clothes over his wet and sand-stuck body, and walking gingerly up
from the sea onto the roadside like a new arrival on the planet. When he reached home he sat and played the Vivaldi disc,
this time not resisting the image of the woman playing the violin, and wondering only how he was going to see her again.

The following morning Stephen went to school and made an appointment with Carol Blake, the secretary, to see the principal
at the end of the day. At once Carol noticed a difference in him, and from the magazines in which she read widely was able
to interpret all aspects of men’s motives and behaviour.

“Something up with him all right,” she told Eileen Waters later during their tea break.

“Really?”

“Oh yes,” said Carol, dunking her biscuit. “I’d say he’s in love.”

“Mr. Griffin? I hardly think so. With whom, for goodness’ sake?” asked Mrs. Waters, relishing the unexpected foray into the
wildly improbable.

“Some man, I’d say.”

This news hit Mrs. Waters like two fists in the generosity of her stomach.

“A man?” she said.

“You can tell,” said Carol Blake. “I can tell, anyway.”

“Oh God.”

Eileen Waters leaned against her desk. News reports of sexual scandal and abuse in schools mottled in her mind, and she was
suddenly stricken with visions of infamy. She took to her office. She could not sit down, she paced about, she plucked up
her ruler like rectitude, and was still in a state hours later, when Carol Blake knocked on the door and introduced the figure
of Mr. Griffin. The principal turned on him like a gunship and saw at once the confirming evidence of her own fantasy.

“Thank you, Carol,” she said. “Close the door.”

From the delicate manner of Stephen’s sitting it was apparent to Eileen Waters that Carol Blake was correct, and how she had
not seen it before she did not know. In the moments before she spoke she chastened her own judgement severely and made a minute
shaking of her head at how devious the world had become. Then she pursed her lips at the teacher and narrowed her green eyes
to say:

“You have a problem, Mr. Griffin?”

“I want to take some personal time,” he said. His fingers were touching the desk, and his eyes were moving to the window.

Mrs. Waters moved her ruler forward an inch with both hands, tapping the two ends of it with her forefingers for the small
comfort of something solid in the world. She felt her anger reddening beneath her makeup.

“I realize it’s inconvenient.”

“Yes, it is,” she spat out.

“I’m sorry.”

Righteousness lodged like a boiled sweet in her throat, and she coughed it forward, letting go of the ruler on the desk and
seeing her right hand fly up before her.

“We are teachers. We are moral leaders in the community, Mr. Griffin. We have to think of the consequences of our actions.
We can’t simply behave the way everyone else does. I hope that’s not what you think, because that’s not what I want, that’s
not what I expect.” She paused and reloaded, drawing air through her nostrils, and was delivering what she hoped was the full
broadside of her gaze when Stephen said:

“It’s because of my father. He’s dying.”

There was a stunned moment, a flattened instant of time during which the mind of Eileen Waters faltered and fell through the
gape of her mouth onto the desk in front of her. There was a soft plop just barely audible to Carol Blake listening at the
door outside, and then nothing. The principal could not speak, the top button of her blouse was too tight. She was looking
down at her desk, which was swimming like wreckage on the watery uncertainty of the moment. She opened her small lips and
tried to smile.

“I’m very sorry,” she whispered, and held on to the desk with her right hand. She was still grasping it a moment later when
Stephen stood and left, walking out of the office and down the cool emptiness of the school’s corridors, an inch taller than
he was before, the line of his trousers falling perfectly, not rumpled, and the slap of his shoes crisp with resolve.

  An hour after school, in the falling darkness, Stephen called at the front door of Moira Fitzgibbon’s house. A small girl
of about eight opened the door five inches and looked at him. When he asked for her mother, the girl stood motionless, as
if she was looking at some strange colour radiating about the visitor. Then Moira Fitzgibbon was standing behind her, opening
the door.

How one person’s life touches upon the edge of another’s and moves it like a wheel was a small mystery Moira had learned to
accept since first hearing the story of Moses Mooney and his dream of a concert hall. So when Stephen Griffin appeared at
her doorstep she sensed the role she was to play before she knew it and was not surprised when he asked her, please, to help
him. Her husband was in the sitting room watching television. Cait, her daughter, was still standing in the hallway, gazing
past her at the stranger, and Ciara was in the kitchen sprawled over the careful homework of six-year-olds. Like a set bomb,
there would be ten seconds before one of them would call her, and so Moira did not invite Stephen in. She stepped forward
and drew the door nearly closed behind her.

“I want to know where I can find her,” Stephen said. “The woman who played the violin. Gabriella Castoldi, her name is.”

“Who’s there, Cait? Who’s at the door?” Tom Fitzgibbon was calling from the sitting room. Cait’s face was pressed like a mask
against the opaque glass of the door. “A man, Daddy,” she shouted.

Already Tom Fitzgibbon was rising in his chair.

“I don’t know,” Moira whispered quickly. “I don’t know where she is. I’ll …”

Her husband’s hand was on the door lock.

“I’ll try and find out,” she said and, motioning Stephen backward with her head, added in a louder voice, “Thank you now,
goodbye,” before turning back to meet her husband coming out the door. “Some business of the Development Association,” she
said, and went back inside.

At ten o’clock that evening Stephen was sitting in the front room of his house awaiting the inevitability of fate. When he
saw the headlights move in an arc across the far wall, he did not need to turn around and look out the window, but knew that
it was Moira Fitzgibbon and that the plot of his life was moving now in swift grand strokes that made little of great difficulty
and certainty out of the improbable. He opened the front door as she was about to knock. The wind shouldered past him like
a sea lord and banged the doors of the two rooms.

“I won’t come in,” Moira said. Her words were blowing back into the town along the road where Moses Mooney was listening for
them. The car’s engine was running, and its lights had been left on as if to illumine the murky turning of the plot and make
clear the way ahead, for Moira Fitzgibbon was not sure why she had come, why the intensely burning figure of the man at her
door had moved her so, or what it was in the disconsolate beseeching of his eyes that made her slip upstairs to her bedroom
and go through the letters and papers she had until she found a mention of Gabriella Castoldi playing a residency in a hotel
in Kenmare; she did not know why, other than that it was the response of her heart, which, like the purest of souls, felt
the grief of another like the grief of herself, and by healing it could heal the world.