As It Is in Heaven (18 page)

It was raining heavily now, and darkness was descending rapidly into the afternoon.

Philip’s face was wet when he turned to walk back to his car, defeated. He had thought that if he walked into the centre of
the city his footsteps would be guided to the person who was in need of his help. But nothing had happened. There was a woman
sitting on the ground begging, not far from the top of Dawson Street. Another was across the way at the gates to the Green,
and a child with a cardboard begging tray was beyond. What was he supposed to do? When he reached his car he had still not
resolved it. He carried the load of his ungiven goodness like a burden of treasure. I am unused to people, he thought. I don’t
have the faintest idea how to approach anyone. He leaned against the top of his car. It was cold, and city grime soiled his
face.

Then, abruptly and without further thought, he took out his wallet, drew out all the notes that were inside it, and walked
over to the park railings of Stephen’s Green.

He glanced around to see who was looking at him. But he needn’t have. Men and women passed without noticing, and Philip Griffin
was able to take all the money he had, place it on the ground under the bushes inside the bottom of the railing, and walk
away.

It is not much, he thought, but it is something. Let God direct whoever He wants to find it.

The following day he did the same thing. Only this time he chose a different railing.

That evening, while “O mio babbino caro” played loudly in the sitting room, Philip Griffin counted his money. He had been
a prudent man. He had modest savings and investments, and lived his quiet life without show. The money he had saved had been
put aside for a future that never arrived. Ultimately it would have been Stephen’s, but now he reasoned that the sale of the
house would be enough. Besides, obscurely, it was all for Stephen, the given-away money being the acts of goodness which would
buy Philip the time on earth to help Stephen through the breaking of his heart.

He calculated the figures in a jotter with his reading glasses halfway down his nose, poring over them into the night like
God’s accountant, balancing the books of good deeds against the rest of his life. How many more weeks did he need, and how
much per week, per day, did that require? His wife was beside him while he did the calculations, doing the figures as if budgeting
the time and money for a holiday together.

They could be together in heaven in less than a year, he figured. “Is that all right, love?” he whispered in the lamplight.
In a year Stephen would have survived and be returned to his ordinary life once more. In a year Philip could have given away
all the money, arriving at a zero balance like a cleansed soul and hearing the trumpets coming to get him. He would be doing
it for Stephen, doing it out of that most potent mixture of love and regret, as if he could now and here make recompense for
the innumerable small failures of his fatherhood, the doomed and islanded silence in which he had left his son for so long,
repairing in small measure the great gap that he had let grow between them.

Philip did not want to calculate the exact day, for he supposed that was a vanity and taking the control from God. It was
enough, he thought, to know the rough time, and that when he had exhausted the wallet of goodness God Himself would not be
long arriving to keep up His end of the pact. That night he went to sleep with the painkiller tasting like almonds in his
mouth and the prospect of the year ahead brightened with visions of giving. He lay in the blankets and felt Christmas coming.
He placed his hands on his stomach and sensed their heat travelling like a minor army to meet the cancer. He had named it
Prendergast for the despised, low-sized, and sly figure of his first boss—a tailor at Clery’s who had routinely ripped out
Philip Griffin’s stitches, saying butchers could do better, and had forced him to work long evenings on repairs when he should
have been courting Anne Nolan. Prendergast was a bastard. But as the tablets took action he was masked and made invisible,
erased until three o’clock in the morning, when he would come as fire in the old man’s insides and reawaken the world to the
certainty of suffering and woe.

The following day Philip Griffin drove to his bank on Merrion Square and withdrew £5,000. When the teller heard the amount
he hesitated and disappeared. An assistant arrived, and Philip Griffin was drawn down the counter and asked what he wanted
the money for.

“To give away,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“To get rid of, to give away,” the old man said, “not that it’s your business. It’s my money”

“Yes, sir, only that …”

“What?” He shot the word so quickly and with such pointed indignation that the assistant manager withdrew. “I’ll get you a
draft, sir,” he said.

“Cash. It must be cash.”

There was a flat, beaten moment between them.

“Five thousand pounds? In cash?”

“Correct.” The old tailor looked the other man directly in the eyes. How difficult is goodness, he thought, everything blocks
it. And deep within him, Prendergast turned like a knife.

It was half an hour before he got the money. It lay neatly in a long envelope, and when he walked out the doors of the bank
it conferred on Philip Griffin a sudden power of joy. He was exuberant with possibility. His small eyes flickered at the city,
as if seeing everywhere now the chance to touch another’s life. And, in a moment of beatific vision as he passed a bus queue,
he wondered if many others were not secretly engaged in doing the same.

This time he did not wait to get the car, but walked directly towards Stephen’s Green. It was, he had decided, the appropriate
place, and would remind God of the reason for their pact, Stephen, Stephen’s green. He smiled to himself at the small joke,
although in fact the banknotes were less green and more the colour of bruises.

As Philip neared the park once more, he reached inside the envelope and took a clutch of twenty-pound notes. He kept them
in his hand and walked on. Sweat gathered in the brim of his hat and he felt his trouser catch at the back of his knee. Three
hours had passed since he had taken his morning painkiller, and now he was emerging from it like from a tunnel into the bright
searing of the pain. God, help me. The money was wet in his hand inside his pocket, the railings made him dizzy, and he had
to stop and lean and wait for a small group of schoolchildren and their teacher to pass by. Then, once they had passed, he
took £480 and quickly slipped it down onto the ground between the railings.

He had to hold on for breath. He could have changed his mind and reached in and withdrawn the money. But he did not. He knew
that it could be taken by dogs, eaten by rats, or befouled in any number of ways, that it could be found by the avaricious
or the mean-spirited, any number of the evil or selfish undeserving as easily as by the needy. But that did not matter to
him. For he trusted in God, and knew that the puzzle of His ways is beyond us, and only vanity leads us ever to imagine that
there is more than only the smallest corner of the jigsaw perceivable at any time. No, the money would go where it was to
go, Philip reasoned. His job was only to drop it off there, like a deposit of good energy given back into the universe. He
watched the winter sky as if light might suddenly break through the heavy blankets of the cloud. But nothing changed, and
he walked on. The city of Dublin trundled past, and the small man in the felt hat was lost in the crowds.

(It was only later, when he was back in the sitting room, looking at the set-up chess game on the small table and listening
to the music of
Madama Butterfly
with the painkiller blurry in his stomach that Philip Griffin could sigh and think of Stephen and wonder if the love affair
was progressing now, if a father could touch his son on the other side of the country, if goodness travelled through the air
like luck or love and could arrive unexpected and simple as a blue sky over Stephen’s head two hundred miles away in the west.)

  During the night the mist withdrew like an artist’s drapery and in the morning revealed that the mountains had moved closer
to Kenmare. It was a John Hinde postcard sky, a blue so intense that it seemed the unreal season of childhood memory. Summer
had arrived in Kerry in time for Christmas, and while Stephen sat to the softly boiled egg Mary White had prepared for him,
he heard birds singing in the garden. Mary came and went like moments of kindness. She brought him more toast, a fresh pot
of tea, entering the room from where she sat for her own tea in the kitchen with the raised eyebrows and pursed mouth of gentle
apology, moving around the guest in her own house with the air of being herself an unfortunate interruption. She did not enquire
what Stephen was doing in Kenmare, nor did she hover in the room about him while he ate. When he told her after breakfast
that he would like to stay until after the weekend, she said only one word, “Lovely,” and allowed herself to smile at the
simplicity of this small joy as she hugged with thin arms the long-felt loss inside her.

For Stephen there was almost a week to wait. He did not know whether Gabriella Castoldi had returned yet to Kenmare. The fear
of actually meeting her tied the knots of his stomach. But finally, when Mary White knocked softer than a knock on his door
and asked if she might tidy his room now, Stephen walked outside into the sunshine. When he reached the town he did not know
where to go. He walked around the lampposts like a man looking for his dog. The morning sunshine saddled his shoulders. By
half past eleven he had toured the triangle of the streets seven times and had already been noticed by all the shopkeepers.
(Mick Cahill on the door at the bank had decided he could be up to no good and must have come over the mountain from Limerick
or somewhere to rob them. Veronica Hehir up at the bookshop considered he was a renegade priest, exactly like the one in the
book she was reading. When she told Kathleen O’Sullivan, Kathleen replied that he was the eighth that week alone. What was
it in Kenmare that drew them?)

“You brought the weather with you.”

Nelly Grant stopped him from her doorway. She had sensed the energy of his restlessness arriving in the town fifteen minutes
before she saw him and had kept an eye over the shoulders of her customers for the confirming vision of him loping down the
street.

“I’m sorry?”

“The weather.”

“Oh yes,” he said weakly, and then added, “Thank you.”

“We get that here sometimes. Balmy as summer. Makes you think somebody has been looking through the books and decided we’re
due a few more good days before the year’s end.” She watched how he stood there, the mute tightened presence of him that bespoke
imbalance and combustion at the same time. “How did you like the plums?” she asked him.

“Very well. Thank you.”

His politeness barely contains him, she thought, like a paper cup of scalding water.

“Come in for more.”

She was abrupt and jovial in the same moment, generous and insistent, and for the second time Stephen Griffin entered the
fruit and vegetable shop to be given the plums of balance. Within five minutes Nelly had drawn from him that he was going
to stay for the rest of the week, and while she weighed the plums on the old-fashioned scale on the side of the counter, she
decided that he was in love. It was the gift of her character that she could be pointed without wounding, and when she told
Stephen that he should visit Sonny Sugrue, the barber across the street, she was able to make it seem not a comment on his
looks but a prescription for the health of his spirit.

“The growing of hair,” she told him, “can steal our energy. Visit Sonny, and come back for your plums,” she said, and raised
her hands to relieve him of his coat before he was aware of it.

Sonny Sugrue was waiting. He was reading a newspaper in the spin-around red-leather chair of his customers and following closely
the case of a murder trial in California. He was a man of mostly stomach. That and his hairless head gave him a double roundness
that he imagined were comment enough on his pleasure at the world. He had been a barber in Manchester, New York, and Chicago
before the arrival of muffled speech like cottonwool in his ears signalled the beginning of his deafness and forced him to
return to Kenmare, where he did not need to hear his customers’ requirements. His left ear heard nothing, and his right caught
the distinctions of instructions only when his hearing aid was at full volume, something he considered an unnecessary waste
of its battery. Sonny cut hair short, or off. When Stephen Griffin appeared in the doorway before him, he looked up from knife
murder in California and smiled. There was cutting in this one, he thought.

Half an hour later Stephen’s hair lay on the floor, and he looked with surprise at the mirror to discover that the centre
of his pate was almost entirely bald. When he raised his head he saw the curved limit of himself like a passing moon and was
aghast.