As It Is in Heaven (19 page)

“I’m bald,” he said.

Sonny Sugrue didn’t catch him. He was sweeping the hair into the corner.

“I look like a clown.”

Although he paused, Sonny missed the words as they passed him in the air, merely nodding the slow, wise nod of a man who had
handled the heads of ten thousand, seen the vanity of youth, the diminishing of beauty, and the horror of age as the customer
turned to the truth of the mirror. We are always a shock to ourselves.

“Five pounds, please,” he roared across the small shop.

It was a moment before Stephen moved; he was transfixed by the changed image of himself in the glass, and then gladly realized
that as he was unrecognizable to himself, he could walk the streets of the town with no fear of the woman knowing him. When
he reached the doorway he felt the warm day cool on the top of his head and stooped out beneath the jamb as if bearing eggs
on his crown. A small bubble of joy inflated in his stomach.

He went across to Nelly Grant. When she saw the white dome of his forehead coming, her heart lifted and she told him at once
that he looked much better, and remarked to herself the dark health of his eyebrows. “You’ll see,” she said aloud before he
reached her. “Walk in the sun this week now, and eat plums. You’ll see.” She paused in that moment before friendship, then
added, “I’m having a mug of tea, would you like some?”

She sat him in the small side room to the shop and poured a tea that was not Indian. It was green in colour and tasted like
the wildflower and grass teas of children playing house in the summertime. She had concocted it herself while he was in Sugrue’s
and now watched him drink. He has the embarrassment of those who feel deeply that they should not be alive at all, she thought,
those who have survived where others who were better, more gifted or beautiful or true, have perished into death.

Stephen’s face collapsed in a scowl at the dregs of the teacup.

“You don’t have to finish it,” she said. “But it will do you good. You’ll see.”

Nelly Grant filled a bag of plums and gave them to him. She took his money and then watched him walk out the door, telling
him she would have fresh supplies in by Friday.

And so Stephen began the week of his wait for Gabriella Castoldi in the town of Kenmare, where the sun shone like midsummer
and the farmers drove their tractors in shirtsleeves. Blue skies hung like canopies above the green mountains. The white flecks
of the winter sheep ran and kicked air like lambs as the pulse of a midwinter spring beat beneath the earth. Yellow blossoms
reappeared on the gorse bushes that week. The crown of Stephen’s head burned pink, and for it Nelly Grant gave him oil that
smelled like coconuts and induced the tropical dreams of warm seas and white sand that woke him with both eyes weeping saltily
on his pillow. The town was lifted with the weather, as if a holiday had been declared without tourists. Nelly sold salads
on the first of December, and fed Stephen Griffin the restorative fibrous lunch of raw carrots diced in muesli. Out of politeness
he gagged mouthfuls of what seemed like horse food and listened to her telling him how his complexion had improved. He had
begun to show a little of his life force, she told him. She had already detected that Gabriella Castoldi was the woman he
was waiting for, but she did not yet know the extent of their relationship and imagined that at least they had met. Each sun-bright
bedazzled day, while the flies buzzed back into Kenmare and the wild rhododendrons reglossed their leaves in the mountains,
Nelly Grant plotted the return of Stephen Griffin to health; and he submitted. He was a textbook case, she thought, not that
the characteristics of his symptoms bespoke a single remedy, but rather that the multiplicity of his ailments prompted Nelly
Grant to consider giving him everything in the textbook. She gave him zinc for his skin and made comfrey tea, and then diced
watercress in the salad sandwiches she made for him for his walks. For the anaemic condition which she feared was almost endemic
to his character she gave him garlic and sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts and almonds, and offered him a soup of soya beans when
he returned red-cheeked and pink-crowned from clambering all day in the lower slopes of the mountains. For the poorness of
his respiration, a complaint common in uncertain lovers, she made a carrageen blancmange from the moss which was still growing
in winter along the temperate shoreline of Parknasilla.

Four days was too short a time to change the habits of over thirty years, but Nelly was reaffirmed in her philosophy when
she saw the clear improvements in the patient. Love, she knew, was simply the energy that bound us to the earth; and for it
the energy of the earth needed to be administered. For love you need carrots, and Stephen Griffin collected four in a brown
paper bag every morning before walking his lovesickness out into the green air of the mountains.

And so, that warm and close week of waiting. It was a week that Stephen had taken out of his life, as though he had torn the
next page from a book and thrown the rest away, following the sentences down the page with no idea of what in the airy infinity
behind it came next. Endlessly as he moved out into the mountains and walked the lower hillsides he read down the page to
the end—how he had heard a woman playing in a concert, how it had moved him, how he could not stop thinking of her and had
come now to Kenmare to see her again; it read as simply as an infant’s text. But in the moment he reached the bottom of that
page the limitless possibilities beyond it made him ill with a sense of freefall and the notion that he was being absurd and
should drive on back to Clare.

But still, at the moment when he might sensibly have left, he stayed on, his resolve fuelled at crisis moments and his balance
restored by the hundred plums and the tropical summertime that had softened the air between the mountains of Kerry like a
pair of hands tossing a light pastry. He stayed on, waiting. Mary White brought him boiled eggs in the mornings, and when
he discovered her small tape recorder she joined him sometimes in the evenings when he listened to Vivaldi in the garden-looking
sitting room, where the saffron crocuses were already blooming. He listened to the music with his hands on his knees and his
head back on the armchair, his eyes closed. He wore a white shirt with the collar open that gleamed in the low light. By the
Thursday evening sleep had deserted him, and long after Mary White was lying in the familiar dream of her husband in the garden
with the straw hat on his head and their camellia in blossom; Stephen was lying wide-eyed on top of the covers, where the
moon spilled like mercury, aware only that his life had reached a precipice, and holding in his hands the yellow page that
announced the Friday-evening concert in the hotel, with Gabriella Castoldi on violin and Paul Sheils on piano.

  When Stephen Griffin walked in the doorway of The Falls Hotel on Friday evening, his breath scented with parsley and his head
clear from the chewing of lemon balm, Maurice Harty was not on the door. And neither was anyone else. The front hallway was
deserted and only a young girl clicked the keys of a computer at the reception desk. At first he thought he was early. He
had been waiting all week for this moment and now imagined that his watch had moved ahead of Time in rhythm with his mind
and that perhaps it was not yet eight o'clock. He walked over to where a wood fire was burning low and mimed the warming of
his warm hands to hold off for an instant his gathering sense of foolishness. Then he went to the receptionist and asked what
time it was. When she told him it was eight o'clock, he nodded as if in exact agreement with her. He was like a lost traveller,
having voyaged on long uncertain seas towards a land he presumed was there, but now, checking the coordinates, was vanished.
Nothing was happening. He was there, clean-shaven and freshly scented, his eyes already glossily enlivened with the week of
herbs and his head high, just above the sinking feeling of despair. But in a moment he might drown.

“I was wondering,” he said to the girl, his voice so low in his throat that the words were marshmallowy lumps of nothing,
“if there was …” He raised a large one with a small cough. “A concert here.” It was as though he had declared the New World
begins here and the men rushed to the side to see only the boundless watery horizon.

“Oh yes,” the girl sighed, “there is. That's why I'm not gone to the bingo. Don't say you haven't heard? It's with your Man
Who Releases the Balls, you know, on the lotto, on Ty he's here tonight, down in the hall. For the football team. They're
raising for a pitch.” And as if he could not already tell, she added, “It'll be brilliant.”

Stephen was trying to contain the shaking that had started in his legs.

“There is a concert, then.”

“Yes, in the O'Connell Room. Five pounds. I'd say it's just starting.”

He paid her the money with the butterflies of his hands and swallowed the air-apples that gagged him as he walked along the
carpeted hallway to where the New World was and
O'CONNELL ROOM
was written in gold leaf above an oak door.

It squeaked when he opened it. No music was playing yet, he was in time, and it was only when he had turned to close the door
that he felt the emptiness of the room at his back.

There were twenty-seven rows of chairs, fifteen chairs wide, and only seventeen people who had not gone to watch the Man Who
Releases the Balls.

He walked into the middle of the room and sat down. Then Peter Sheils and Gabriella Castoldi entered, took their places, and
began to play.

  She wore a green velvet dress.

They played a Boccherini minuet. There was a light above her and he watched where it glanced upon the angle of her neck. She
pressed the held notes and squeezed them for tenderness, her lips closed and her green eyes watching the invisible ghosts
of feelings that she freed into the air. Her right foot appeared beneath the dress, and he watched it through the fullness
of Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 17. She played Kreisler, Elgar, Schubert, and Brahms. While she played, nothing else mattered
in the world.

When the concert had finished, Stephen stood and applauded loudly, and was still standing there when the rest of the small
audience had filed past and Peter Sheils had closed the piano and walked away.

Gabriella stepped down from the small stage.

“Thank you, thank you for coming,” she said to him. She might have been about to walk past him, but she stopped, and Stephen
moved a foot closer.

He stooped down. She smelled like autumn below him. He wanted to eat her voice, and for a terrible gaping moment said nothing,
waiting for her to speak again. A driplet ran downward on his crown until he turned his head slantedly to the right.

“We appreciated your listening,” she said.

Appreciated.
It was like an Italian word when she said it, and he tasted it like a delicacy. He wanted to listen to her talk as he had
listened to her play, but the fear of his pause growing overlong made him speak.

“You are … you … I think you are …”

She looked at him. She looked in his eyes and she touched his arm.

“You are very kind,” she said. “I think I saw you before.”

“Yes. In Ennis,” he said. “And Galway” He wanted so to look at her face that he did not.

“The Interpreti Veneziani. Oh”—she stopped—“you are the man who nearly died.” She smiled when she said it, but even then,
he thought, there was sadness in her. Her hair smelled like autumn rain, and he stooped down deeper within it. “Only then
you had more hair.” Her face was lit with small laughter, and Stephen reached his hand to his bare crown as if covering the
revelation of some inner secret. “You must love music,” she said.

I have not listened to music for fifteen years, he wanted to say. I have been dead and woken up. I am shaking here in every
particle of my spirit because of you. Please stay. Please stay here talking to me, he wanted to say, but the idiot in control
of his body merely nodded at her, breathing parsley-breath on the single word: “Yes.”