As It Is in Heaven (17 page)

Stephen took the card and thanked her, then tried to repay the graciousness of the woman by going over to the nearest stall
and taking a bag of apples. Then a bag of oranges. Then a clutch of green bananas.

My God, thought Nelly as she watched him, he has hardly ever bought fruit. Plums, she knew, were the fruit for him, and she
tried to guide his body towards them with the energy of her mind. This man has no balance, and plums are the fruit of balance;
the softness of the flesh to the solidity of the stone hints at it, the perfect proportion of the stone to the fruit tells
it even more clearly. Peaches work in the same way for people of southern climates, but it is plums, thought Nelly Grant,
that balance the Irish. Pick a plum. Pick a plum.

She let the suggestion flow like a current to the back of Stephen’s head. But his body and spirit were too out of balance
to receive it, she decided, and so said, “I have a special on those plums this week.”

“Oh yes, thank you,” said Stephen, jostling the bags of apples and oranges against his chest, holding the bananas down with
his chin, and reaching toward the basket of plums. Nelly came forward. When she moved across the small shop the oils that
scented her body followed her through the air. She was able to fill the space like a large sound.

“I’ll take these,” she said, and unloaded the fruit bags and bananas, standing briefly next to the stranger so that the wholeness
of her energy and the scent of lavender might soothe his embarrassment. He was the most awkward man she had ever seen, but
that very awkwardness was attractive, too, for it broadcast an intensity of feeling. She watched him gather three more plums,
and then the two of them moved back to the register. As if she would not allow him to buy them, Nelly put the other fruits
to one side. She did not weigh the plums, but charged him two pounds.

Hurriedly Stephen reached inside his coat for coins. Even that, Nelly thought, reveals him.

“And the … em …” He looked over at where she had left the apples and oranges.

“These are very good,” she said, ignoring his gesture, looking directly at him with the green compassion of her eyes and patting
softly with her right hand the bag of plums.

“Oh yes, I’m sure,” he said. “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.” He nodded quickly, as if to an allegro, and then turned
towards the door.

“Come back again,” Nelly Grant said. “All my customers come back.”

“Yes; yes, I will.” He stopped at the door as if he had suddenly remembered something important to say to her. He turned.
She was looking at him.

“Em …”

Then he sighed, nodded, and was gone.

  Stephen stayed that night at the small clean guest house of Mary White, a woman of fifty-nine who had buried her husband and
lost her children to the invisible places where only telephones reached them. She was a slender woman with fine white curls
and thin legs who, since losing her left breast, had become a close friend of Nelly Grant’s and believed without hesitation
it was she who had helped her recover in the world. When she saw the man arriving at the front door with the bag of plums,
she knew where he had come from and brought him forward into the yellow bedroom that had once belonged to her eldest daughter.
Then she went and made him tea, calling him from the room with a gentleness he felt like a mother’s hand.

“Perhaps you’d like me to wash the plums?” she asked as he sat down in the living room, where the extraordinary green beauty
of her back garden rose before the window.

“Or just tea,” she added, “and some biscuits.” Then she left him alone there and went to warm fresh towels for his room. Mary
White was a slight woman, but knew the enormous goodness of giving comfort. That it might be given to her, that she might
deserve or need it, did not enter her mind. She warmed the towels, turned on the oven, and baked fresh scones and brown bread
for her visitor out of that simple and immeasurable force of goodness that moved within her. When he finished his tea she
brought him more, and asked him to tell her if there was anything he needed to feel comfortable.

That evening the mist came down into the streets of the town. A damp clothlike darkness fell, and when Stephen slipped out
of the house within it he could smell the pine trees in the mountains. He walked to the hotel, feigning casualness and calm.
His forehead shone beneath the yellow streetlights, and the moisture of the night glittered on his hair like a crown. By the
time he had arrived at the wide gateway and the illumined sign welcoming visitors, he was breathing so shallowly the thin
air of both fear and desire that he might have fallen down there on the pathway. He balled his fists inside his coat pockets,
as if squeezing the life of his own timidity, and then headed up into the bright lights of the hotel. The stone steps were
red-carpeted. A round-faced man in a black uniform and cap nodded to him as he entered and stood in the timbered hallway where
a wood fire was burning. Stephen didn’t know where to go. He had planned on getting to the hotel to see Gabriella play the
violin, but now that he was standing inside the door, he felt lost. He ran his hand up over his forehead and hair, and then
had to hide it momentarily in the collar of his jacket, until the drench of white sweat disappeared. The porter stepped over.

“Evening, sir.”

The man had a way of making the greeting seem like a question, a way of looking with round brown eyes that declared he had
seen the world in all its guises come through the doors of this hotel and now knew intimately, intimately, sir, the myriad
vagaries of the visitor in Kerry. He knew Stephen did not belong there. Or so Stephen imagined, holding like a lip-tremble
the impulse to hurry back out the door.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Stephen held his lower lip between his teeth.

“Sir?”

“For the em, for the music. I em was hoping to hear some music. Played.”

Maurice Harty studied him like a new text, reading in him the plot of a simple mystery novel and noting the clues with a small
satisfaction. “What music would that be, sir?”

“Here. I thought there was—a concert, of violin and …” Stephen looked away down the hallway towards a large lounge. Maurice
Harty touched his arm and was startled to feel its thinness.

“That would be Friday or Saturday night, sir,” he said, and watched Stephen Griffin’s spirit fall like a shadow.

“Friday?” It was a breathy sigh. As if the swimmer had closed his eyes and made a hundred strokes, only to open them and see
the shoreline had receded even farther.

“Or Saturday, sir.”

Stephen did not move, he floated there on the harsh awareness that he was encumbered with some invisible baggage of misfortune
which guaranteed the unease of his passage.

“You’re not a guest in the hotel, sir?” Maurice Harty thought the visitor might faint. “There’s tea served in the lounge if
you’d care for it.”

But Stephen did not move or answer. He only nodded his head slowly, watching a place on the carpet, waiting, swallowing the
bitterness, and then taking the decision not to be defeated, not to see as failure the dreamlike journey across the Shannon
and through the mountains to see the woman who was not there, not to suppose these were signs or messages and that he should
abandon everything and return to Clare. When he lifted his head and thanked Maurice Harty, he had regained some balance and,
assuring the porter that he would return to hear the music on Friday, he walked out and down the steps of the hotel into the
moist blackness of the night, returning to the yellow bedroom in the guesthouse of Mary White, to lie in his clothes on top
of the blankets and eat slowly, one after the other, the dark and delicious fruit of the plums.

  When Philip Griffin returned home from the hospital he wore the cancer like a suit of clothes two inches too tight in all
measurements. His life was constricting about him, and although he played Puccini and left the lights burn through the night,
he could not escape the feeling of things closing about him. He had three bottles of tablets, but only the white ones were
painkillers. These he took three times a day, imagining them as timber ramparts against an advancing army of iron. Since he
had been in the hospital the pain had increased enormously. Often when he was tailoring he had heard stories of men and women
being opened in surgery and the doctors seeing the cancer almost growing in the exposure of the air and quickly stitching
the patient closed again. Air makes it multiply was the given wisdom among the middle-aged men standing for their leg measurements,
and Philip Griffin had believed them, taking the strange apposition of air and death as another of the mysteries of life and
thinking on it no further. Until now. Now the pain that rode up his stomach into his heart seemed better for air, and he wondered
if the ease of pain when he walked outside was in fact the approach of death.

Since he made the pact with God in the hospital, he had had little chance for good deeds. He had tried to do what the nurses
told him, had eaten the mild-flavoured yogurt-like food that slid like wet paste in his throat, and not pressed the call button
when Healy in the bed beside him stole his sleep by venting all night his repressed anger in urgent, snapping snores and bulbous
farts. But Philip feared that this was not enough. It was when he was home again in the empty house behind the chestnut tree
that he knew he must get under way a daily practice of goodness. What it might be, or how he might achieve it, he had no idea.
Vaguely he supposed that it would be something to do with the people he would meet that he would see things in the course
of an ordinary day, and that all that could be expected of him would be to react in as kind and generous a manner as he could.

On his third full day home he left the house in the afternoon with the painkiller still dissolving on his tongue and drove
into the city centre. For the first time in years he did not drive the car with any impatience or haste, but motored instead
through the begrimed streets like a Sunday driver in the pastoral quietude of a country lane. He waved like a mad uncle at
passersby. He touched the brim of his hat at a mother and child on a pedestrian crossing, and allowed cars to pull out of
side streets in front of him. While the painkiller made numb his inner organs, he smiled at Dublin and softly whistled “Dixie”
when the car in front of him took the last space on Stephen’s Green. He wanted to park nowhere else, and so contented himself
by driving around the green park repeatedly. When at last he found a space, it was the middle of the afternoon. Philip stepped
out onto the path. Goodness, he thought. Acts of goodness. He moved along the path with pleasantness on his face. He prepared
a kind of wordless greeting in his raised eyebrows and gave it continuously to the people coming against him, hoping that
it was not misunderstood and that God was watching. When he had greeted a hundred Dubliners like this along the top of Stephen’s
Green, he took their lack of acknowledgement as a judgement and headed down to the crush and hurry of Grafton Street with
a growing awareness of how difficult goodness was going to be.

When he reached the traffic light at the top of the street, the wind pressed on his back and he had to hold on to his hat.
In that instant the light changed and the people hurried across past him. He was left standing there, and felt the pulling
away of life. He didn’t move, and the light changed again. It was a moment before another cluster of people gathered around
him. He gave some of them small smiles and a parcel of nods, but they paid him—an odd little man holding his hat at the traffic
lights—no attention. As the light changed once more, a woman with two young children was on the kerbside next to him. Philip
Griffin offered a child his hand to cross the street, but the mother drew away the child at once and was gone.

Again he stood there and did not move. He watched the city, the city he was born in. He watched its grey relentless tide of
forlorn faces, the figures of the windblown and harried, dispossessed of dreams, hastening along the street in the narrowness
of shopping and getting home. He heard the noise of people and traffic and knew how each one was lost in the privacy of his
own pursuit, not noticing one another. No hand reached out to touch him. The lights changed three times while he stood on
the edge of Stephen’s Green. Courier cycles flew past. A taximan paused his cab and waved the old man to cross, but Philip
Griffin declined. He was stilled on the point of an epiphany, and as the first spits of rain hit the crown of his head, he
imagined that he saw only for the first time the vast monstrosity of selfishness and meanness that had become the world. Across
the street he could read the headlines of the evening papers: TAKEAWAY KILLING. FATHER RAPIST. The city he was born in was
now this, and Philip Griffin had to hold on to the traffic light for something solid.