As It Is in Heaven (23 page)
It was a season of love in the afternoon; of slow time and long caresses, of strawberries (that had been flown from Africa
and bought in a market in Cork) passing from mouth to mouth like the wet ripe and softly bruised essence of pleasure itself.
It was a season of nothing else; the world had been made small and sunny. Everything else had been lopped away, had in a single
kiss been rendered meaningless, and while the days passed by, Stephen did not think of returning to Clare. He did not think
of the letter that he must have known would come (and did) from Eileen Waters, the threat she did not quite have the authority
to make that unless she heard from him at once he would be dismissed from the school, and that further, he would not get work
from the department again; he did not consider tomorrow nor the diminishing funds from which he paid Mary White as Christmas
approached. But neither did he hear the voice that whispers insistently beneath the surface of all our happiness, that urges
you to gather each moment like a small stone and store it in the deep pockets of your soul, that knows what lies ahead and
offers only the wisdom of living fully and cherishing like the briefest dream this season of loving, for these are the instants
of passion which will later become those diamonds of memory that will cry out: Here, there, look, in these moments I lived
and knew a boundless joy, I loved.
Stephen did not hear it. He did not think, A day will come when this will end, when I will sit in a room and turn over these
moments like the story of another man's life. But rather, in those three weeks before Christmas, he awoke and loved and listened
to music and clung to the thin belief that the things of the heart endured and mattered and were the secret magic which could
entangle the varied and ingenious knots of life like the fingers of an ancient mariner. At thirty-two years of age, in love
for the first time, Stephen was an early model of romance. He withdrew money from the bank and bought flowers from Mary Mungovan's
shop on the lower street, which specialized in wreaths and funeral accessories. He carried the chrysanthemums in the crook
of his arm like an infant and brought them to Gabriella as a lesser declaration of the inexpressible. It was in the character
of his love that he could not describe it and tried instead to deliver it through an entire inventory of small gifts and gestures:
he made her thick, undrinkable coffee every morning and brought it to her in her bed, he washed her dishes, he tidied the
clothes it was her habit to leave on the floor, he brought her the Cadbury's chocolate bars she said she loved, leaving them
in half-hidden places about the cottage, and telling her she was beautiful when she stood before the mirror and mockingly
said he was fattening her into a Madonna; he wrote her small notes, he bought books and left them by her bed, he emptied Nelly
Grant's shelves, buying every kind of fruit and fresh juice, carrying bottles of elderberry wine up the hill to the cottage
in a string bag that Gabriella had brought from Venice.
Stephen did not suffer greatly from the fact that Gabriella Castoldi did not tell him that she loved him. He had the visionary
blindness of a saint and wanted only for her to let him love her. He did not expect nor even imagine that she might requite
his love. Life had imbued him with a deep humility and then nourished it with a Catholic sense of his own unworthiness. He
was the lesser for not being beautiful, for possessing no gift, and for the flawed understanding with which he had grown up
that fate had chosen him for misfortune. He was dazzled by her, and did not care how he appeared to anyone in the town, carrying
her groceries, bringing her flowers, hanging her strawberry-stained sheets on the line. It was enough for Stephen Griffin
that the great airy burden of love he had discovered inside himself could be given to Gabriella. He felt she was the saddest
woman he had ever met, and wanted to heal her, to caress her, and to remake the world around her with tenderness in that earliest
and most redeeming of our instincts that is the deep-felt and inexplicable longing to make another happy.
They took walks in the December mountains. They told each other's lives like stories. She dared him a dozen dares and he took
them on for her, taking off his clothes and sitting screaming in the icy stream while she laughed and clapped, rushing to
him with their blanket and drying him gently like some astonishing new proof of God. He jumped off rocks and climbed trees,
clambering slippingly among the wet branches, losing his footing, cutting his chin, triple-scratching the top of his head,
and arriving forty feet above her, where at last he could answer her question and tell her what the view was like from up
there. Neither did he mention his fear of heights, nor the swimming world below him, where her face seemed to bob and waver
like a watery moon.
A season of tests and provings. To Gabriella Castoldi it was the unlikeliest thing; her experience of passion had taught her
mistrust, and as she did not believe that she was beautiful or truly gifted, she first imagined Stephen Griffin's loving as
something with the tender insubstantiality of a dream. It would pass in its own time. But when the days ran on and the strange
sweetness of his presence lingered longer, Gabriella found herself waiting for the moment when he arrived at the door. He
had left his kisses in her imagination, and they lived like exotic roses, blooming wild.
Five days before Christmas, when the people of the town had begun complaining that the sunny weather had robbed the season
of its spirit, Gabriella lay across the body of Stephen and decided she had to break the back of love.
If it would break.
Nothing that is good in the world can last long, she believed, and the sweetness of those days and nights in the cottage had
brought her to a frightening vulnerability.
She lay where Stephen could not see her face and she told him that he must go back to Clare.
“You must go back to your job,” she said.
He said nothing. He touched the top of her head and stroked her hair.
“I have no job,” he said.
“You have. You will get it back.” She was still not looking at him. “Then you will be going to your father for Christmas.”
“I have sent him a card. I told him I was going to ask you to come.”
“I won't,” she said, and then, while moving her right hand slowly across the pale softness of his belly in a gesture that
would lodge in the underwater sand of his memory, she took a firm blow at love and said, “I am leaving. I am going back to
Venice.”
Silence. Her back was to him. When Stephen spoke, his voice cracked like glass in the blind air behind her.
“How long will you be … Will you be …” He didn't want to say coming back, he wanted the small room hope needs to survive.
“I don't know,” said Gabriella, “I have to go. For now. I have to,” she said, weeping onto his skin, kissing it gently like
a farewell, and wondering why she felt the brutal necessity of testing love, of bending its back towards breaking, and trying
to bring on before time the grief she imagined was inevitable.
Slowly she ran her hands down the length of his legs in last caresses. Then she turned over and saw the vanquished ruin of
his face, and without telling him that she already suspected that she was pregnant, or that she could not herself dare to
imagine as true and durable the love he was offering her, she reached out and touched his wet cheek and said, “Stefano, make
love to me.”
It was Christmas Eve when Stephen drove across the country once more to the house of his father. A misting rain was falling
and the still unrepaired rubber of his windscreen wipers smeared it on the glass like fingers at the blood of a wound. He
peered forward, but drove into unseeable country, his heart leaking the disconsolate acid of lost love. Three times he was
stopped at Garda checkpoints, where big-shouldered men wore the rain like a stain on their backs and dripped it from the brims
of their caps, leaning down to check the Christmas drivers for drunkenness. Stephen told one of them he did not drink, but
his words came out warped with emotion and he was Breathalyzed all the same. When he was closer to the city, driving down
the last part of the motorway into the four o'clock darkness, he almost crashed, as in a disturbed dream, into the white flanks
of a wild horse.
In all, there were nine of them, galloping like a bizarre vision across the thrown lights of the cars and taking off down
the motorway ahead of him. They flashed across the darkness, charging before the headlights into Dublin. For a mile the horses
kept to the motorway. They trotted past the lights that changed green before they got there and disappeared, like ghosts of
themselves, into the places where had once been fields.
Stephen drove the first car behind the horses and thought of Gabriella. He had already realized without shock that when you
give yourself completely to someone else you see the world through their eyes, and easily imagined her own delight at the
strange wildness of the scene. But then, when the horses took off to gallop to the left along the toll road to the airport,
he turned right and felt the leaving of Gabriella like phantom pain in a lost limb.
When he arrived, the house lights were on. He found his key and walked across the wet lawn and was on the point of opening
the door when Philip Griffin did it before him.
“Stephen,” he said, briefly looking into the space where the woman was not with him and, with the strange awkwardness of those
facing unfamiliar mechanics, reaching suddenly forward to embrace his son.
Together, after ham sandwiches and Mr. Kipling's mince pies, Philip and Stephen Griffin drove to Midnight Mass, which was
at ten o'clock. Earlier that afternoon, on the numbing tide of his third painkiller, Philip had slipped £600 between the railings
of Stephen's Green, and had gone home hoping to see in his son's expression something of the fair justice of God. He had now
deposited £5,387 in the green place of the city centre. He had never put the money in the same place twice, nor had he ever
gone back to see if it was gone.
The Griffins drove into the city beneath the lights of Christmas. They did not speak, but instead passed small comments on
the lights, the traffic, or the rain, making use of that ancient code like spies burdened with the secret vulnerability of
the world. They arrived at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament and hurried across the black weather into the organ music and
the rising hum of the Rosary. They knelt and said nothing. They were two men missing women, and until the priest arrived they
stayed on their knees and were, like everyone else, lost in the privacies of their own personal longing and beseeching, silent
voices ascending to unknowable heaven.
The Mass began. The priest was an old man. He had said Christmas Mass in eighteen parishes, including three in Africa, and,
like Philip Griffin, fully expected this to be his last. He said the prayers slowly, as if journeying back on each one into
the memories of the past. And when he came to the small stand of the pulpit for the sermon, he looked down at the faces of
the congregation with the serene and beatific expression of a man who has at last made peace with himself.