As It Is in Heaven (34 page)

“This is Gabriella,” Stephen said.

“Yes. Yes,” said Moran, looking at the tall figure of the fool. This woman was too beautiful for him. Could it be that she
was not with him for his looks? He leaned on the polished wood of the counter, but did not invite them to enter. Moran was
a man of a time, and it was a constant irritation to him that it was not this one. In his view, the situation was compromised
by the presence of the woman.

Stephen told him of the money that he expected to arrive. Moran pressed his two hands on the counter. He asked Stephen approximately
how much money were they talking about.

“More than ten thousand?”

“Yes.”

“More than twenty?”

“More than a hundred.”

“I see.” There was a pause. “A good deal of money then,” Moran said, and waited, and raised and lowered his hands on the countertop
lightly as if playing the slow chords of the third movement of Disaster. “You need to come in sometime yourself,” he said,
“and we can have a talk about it, what best to do and so on. Sometime when you have a minute, when you can come in when em
…” He stopped and nodded a tight smile. He could not say what he wanted to. He could not say: Come in when this woman is not
with you. He could not say: This is a matter between men, though he thought it and tried in vain to let his expression say
so. Moran offered Stephen the form to sign to open the account in his name, and winced inwardly, watching the fellow push
it over to the woman for her to sign, too. The assistant manager looked at her with a pained smile. He endured her with a
thin tightness in his lips and harsh judgement in his eyes. He would tell Mrs. Moran about her in the evening. He would reaffirm
the main lesson life had taught him: money comes to the coarse and undeserving, and it was his unlucky lot in life ceaselessly
to serve and assist those more wealthy than he. He nodded at the two of them. All the greatest fools in the known world, he
told himself as he returned to his office, are ruled by the heart and not the head. For them there should be no such thing
as money, they don't deserve it.

Martin Moran was not the only one who let himself be haunted by their visit. Mickey Hayes, standing in his Wellingtons in
the queue at the counter, saw the way the assistant manager had leant over to talk to them. He could see the look of pound
notes in Moran's eyes, and craned his neck and allowed the gambling addiction of his lifetime to make him think he overheard
what he most feared: another's fortune. “They've won the fucken' lotto,” he said in a cracked voice too far above a whisper
for Maggie Saunders not to hear it and turn at once to watch Stephen and Gabriella walking contentedly out the door.

From that moment the word travelled like an airborne virus, so that it seemed to move and arrive in every house and business
in the town as quickly as human greed. Mickey Hayes carried it to three pubs. He allowed the bitterness that life had long
ago lodged in his bloodstream to inflate the terrible tale of the two, not even married, flaunting their fortune in the streets
of Kenmare. Narrow-eyed and with Guinness froth moustaching him like a banderillero, he described them as walking mockeries.
He said they had hidden it from everybody. They must have won the fucken' thing weeks ago and hidden themselves up in that
house. Not even one drink on the house anywhere had the feckers bought, not the steam off their piss were they thinking of
donating to anyone.

“That's nice carry-on, isn't it?” he asked Donal Mungovan on the stool next to him.

“Christ, but it is,” said Donal, and shook his head in slow wonder at what the hell God was up to, letting the likes of them
win instead of him.

Even before Stephen and Gabriella had passed Cox's butchers midway up the town, Helena had heard. She was still bruised on
her left cheek from the business in the post office and was unsure yet that her cosmetic covered it sufficiently. She stayed
indoors upstairs and received callers. When Maggie Saunders told her, her heart sank. Love
and
money, she thought, and had to tilt her head back to stop the involuntary spasm of her tears from streaking across the covered
bruise. There was a silence bitter and heavy and thick in her sitting room, where women's magazines were scattered gaudily
like unfulfilled promise in an empty heart.

Then Maggie Saunders said, “Well, all can't be well in paradise.” She nodded and half-closed her eye, cocking her head at
the invisible lovers. “They're not married. There's no ring.”

This seemed to console Helena Cox slightly. She went to the window and looked out across the street, to where Stephen and
Gabriella were talking to Nelly Grant at the stall of cabbages. In the tender spring light even she could see the love glowing
from them; it smote her like a cold iron and made her think of Francie downstairs at the butcher stall, with his dumb brutish
kind of passion that subsided into nothing. With Maggie behind her, she bit on her cherry-painted lip. “I have to tell some
people,” she said. “Father Dempsey will want to know.” Then she turned and walked away, lighter and suddenly eased with the
plan of spreading her sourness.

By evening everyone in the town had heard. It was talk with a life of its own. By the fall of darkness people who told the
tale of the lottery win could not even remember whom they first heard it from. It was a fact. New details emerged in each
telling and clung to the tale like wasps in flowers. Just so came the story of how Stephen had first tried to hide the fortune
from the people of Clare, how he had failed to tell his principal and simply disappeared, pretending all kinds of elaborate
ruses, even inventing his own father's death, so that no one would discover the money. Gabriella was no better. She was carrying
some Italian fellow's child. She had dumped him and gone off and come back only when she heard, and was now pretending the
child was Stephen's. The fellow was such a fool, his own greed was so thick that he could not even see hers.

Not everyone in the town that night was bitter with envy. The German silversmith laughed and clapped; he loved to see fairy
tales in Ireland, he told Helena, and his blue eyes twinkled above the mass of his beard like cloudless azure. Nolan and McCarthy
& Son, undertakers and builders, took the news as a sign of the nearness of luck and bought double scratchcards; the two O'Connells,
solicitors, shrugged indifference and beeped the automatic alarms of their Rovers. There were others, too, to whom the news
when it reached them had the quality of grim fable, and so slipped into their lives only as a chastening reminder of how terrible
money can be.

Nonetheless, from the few the sickness of greed grew. And by the time the light died on that April evening, the story of Stephen
Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi had spun a kind of thick yellowish brume out of the window of O'Loughlin's and Coughlan's,
and O'Siochru's pub, too, and the air was so heavily scented with the exhaled bitterness and envy that it choked the lungs
and browned the stars and half obscured the moon itself, so that it hung over the town like a gouged eye.

  The following morning brown rain was falling. As if some malignancy were weeping, the water seeped off the sky from early
dawn. It fell steadily and screened the mountains and made the town seem small and miserable. In his morning sermon at ten
o'clock Mass, Father Dempsey scowled at the small gathering of weekday Massgoers and told them sometimes we have to feel God's
Own Disapproval. Helena Cox had already told him of the illicit lovers and their fortune, and the news had arrived like acid
in his stomach in the middle of his breakfast fry; why must the ways of the Unjust prosper, O Lord? he asked, and had taken
some comfort when he walked out into the deluge.

And still the rain fell. It fell heavily, like regret, and flooded gutters and drains that by mid-morning were spilling over
like the eyes of new widows beyond consolation. The streets of the town were awash in brown water. That the suddenness of
the deluge was part of the capriciousness of west Kerry springtime was briefly overlooked, and in half a dozen shops old men
and women were already gloomily discussing the vanishing of seasons and the nearness of the end of Time.

It rained. It sheeted down all that day, and the next, and the one after that, too. It rained so hard that television cameras
appeared on the streets of Kenmare to film it. It rained on the rivers that were the streets of the town and which coursed
along now at the speed in which a heart can change its feelings. It rained relentlessly, until the falling of the drops themselves
seemed redolent with meaning and were interpreted variously on the radio and television programmes that mushroomed on the
airwaves. But none of the callers who phoned in read the gloom of the weather as Gabriella did. None of them saw it as a colder
vision of Venice, as the nightmarish return of murky uncertainty and the washing away of love.

While the rain fell Gabriella stayed in her bed and suffered a new form of her old despair. Her pregnancy now brought her
so low in her spirit that she had not the energy to get up. She had seen the disapproval in the face of Moran when he looked
at her, and knew it to be the look of her own father, too. When two men called in Wellingtons to tell Stephen at the front
door that they had heard of his lottery win and wouldn't he like to donate something to the football club, Gabriella knew
at once that the town must be speaking of them and that the islanded paradise of their house was destroyed now.

“There'll be no peace for us here,” she said.

It did not matter that there were hundreds of others living around the town who, when they heard of the imagined lottery win
or saw the ringless hand of Gabriella and the curve of her belly, thought nothing of it and understood and accepted that even
their country was in a constant flux of change and that those notions of transgression which had made sinners of all in the
past were faded now to the easier morality of only the endeavour of human goodness. To Gabriella it did not matter. The rain
beat down. She could not sleep. She lost concentration and threw the chess pieces at the curtains. When Stephen tried to comfort
her, she lowered her head and hit her fist into the side cushion of the couch, and hit the memories of her father in the house
in the Calle Visciga, the sharp cold air of intolerance and judgment.

Stephen brought her cocoa. He was stunned and wordless, and as the wet evening deepened into drowned night, his face expressed
a mute horror. He put turf on the fire. He sat in the armchair across from Gabriella by the ruined chess game and tried to
tell her everything would be all right. But Gabriella just stared. And so he did not say any more. He sat in the chair, long
and thin and defeated, and in the dim light that glowed from the flames watched his happiness burn away like fire.

An hour passed. The rain fell.

“I love you,” he said in a small voice, when the light in the room was too diminished for him to tell whether Gabriella was
awake or asleep and when the telling of those three words seemed suddenly impotent. There was no answer. Eight feet away Gabriella
lay motionless. Her eyes might have been closed. Stephen did not know; he said the words again and immediately wished he had
not, for in the loneliness of no reply he faced the cold, undeniable truth that Gabriella's happiness was not in his power,
nor could he change the world for her. He sat and listened and the rain fell. At last he moved over beside her and reached
and stroked her hand, and was still not certain that she was not sleeping, until finally the smallest movement of her fingers
curved onto his and held.

In the darkness at the end of that night, when it seemed the world's sourness had slipped beneath their door and made the
house of loving frail and unprotected as a china doll, Gabriella moved her face close to Stephen's, and in a voice that held
the ceaseless yearning of her own childhood to make real and lasting the existence of love, she whispered, “Stefano, take
me away from here.”

  It was the small hours of the morning. Rain was still beating against the windows when, with the tenderness of those who care
for the wounded, Stephen took his arms from around Gabriella and rose from the couch where she was lying and began to pack.
He did not discuss it. He did not explain his plans or try to reason with her or say that perhaps it was the rashness of her
pregnancy speaking or a bright morning would see a change of heart. He rose and packed. Within an hour there was an assemblage
of small boxes and vases, an Italian hilltown, inside the front door. When he opened the door to bring them to the car, the
clatter of the rain made Gabriella stir on the couch. She raised her head slightly, the way sleepers do to look at dreams,
and then lay back again.