As It Is in Heaven (38 page)

  Finally, the builders arrived in the hillocky field and began to dig out the foundations as the hares darted about into the
dunes. To relieve herself of the overattentiveness of Stephen, Gabriella insisted he go each day to see what was happening
and walk back along the seashore before coming to tell her. It gave her an hour on her own. For in the nearness of the birth
she was revisited by visions of her mother's miscarriages, and although she was safely beyond miscarriage, she fretted about
the possibility of an invisible curse moving in her bloodline. She sat in the deep armchair that looked out on the sea and
tried to breathe with the focussed concentration she had when about to play extraordinary music.

Stephen stood, she sat in the chair.

“You'll stay there?” he said.

“Of course I will.”

He put on a disc of Vivaldi's concertos. “I'll be back before it's over,” he said.

“I know you will.”

He went out the door. She stayed in the chair.

The music played.

Five minutes later she had risen with a sudden impatience. She saw the bitter face of her pregnant mother standing scouring
the sink in the kitchen of their house in the Calle Visciga. She saw it. She saw the fist of steelwool circling, and she cried
out. She stood up and crossed to turn the music up louder. She moved the volume until the notes were huge and full and pulsing
through the cottage.

Then the pain lanced through her and she slid to the floor.

“O mio Dio.”

She reached for the counter, but her fingers clenched in spasmic fists and hit against the wood. The sharpness of the pain
was so severe that her back arched and her mouth opened wide with a soundless cry. She lay on the cold tiles and banged against
them with the back of her head, sucking and blowing as if drowning in the tide of life. A minute seemed endless. The pain
had a narrowness of point so exquisite that it seemed to find her deeply and then rip upwards. The floor pooled with a little
blood and water. Gabriella screamed into the Vivaldi and banged her head again. She screamed so loudly through the music that
the blackbirds rose off the roof and flew in the air about the house with the strange and morbid excitement of funeral-goers.
They hung around. They mirrored her woe with a beakish crying that upset the cats who lay in the shadow of the plants in the
garden and made them come to the windowsill, where the saucer was empty of milk. Time stopped. There was nothing but the waves
of pain in the throbbing music, the urgent and relentless hurting that was the pain of sorrow and loss and doomed love and
expectant tragedy, and was the pain of the beginning of life, too.

Oh God, Gabriella thought, we are going to die. Then the air seemed rung with muffled hornlike sounds and thickened with floating
pinpricks of dusted light that were the onrush of a violent dizziness. And then, blackout.

  Moira Fitzgibbon found her lying on the floor.

There had been no answer to the doorbell, and when Moira let herself in through the back door she caught at once the queer
whiff of disaster. The atmosphere was weirdly aslant, like the grin on a misbehaved child when the crime is as monstrous as
he imagines. The molecules themselves seemed disordered, as though the world had been bumped against and some secret and perfect
order was discovered enormously flawed. Moira came in slowly, she called and heard no answer. The music player had stopped
and was buzzing with the loud volume of emptiness.

Then Moira heard the breathing and, like a finger held upon a wound and now releasing, time rushed like blood. Gabriella was
still alive, the child was not yet born. Moira Fitzgibbon made bloodprints with her feet and rang the mid-wife and the doctor
and opened the door and called for Stephen in a voice the seawind whipped away. She hurried and ran water and got towels and
lifted Gabriella's head and told her not to die, talked to her in a long and seamless stream of urgings that were the confession
of her own longing for the child to be born and for the music lessons and the school and the dream of their life by the sea
that she told Gabriella was proof of something, and which offered Moira, when she lay in the dark, the single best example
of something good and true and beautiful.

  On the beach Stephen walked beneath the crying of the seabirds. A breeze was gathering from somewhere out in mid-ocean, and
the gulls came before it like grey prophecies across the cloudless sky. The wind was salted and dry. Stephen carried his shoes
and walked in the wet sand, where the waves painted his turned-up trouser legs. He walked in the place where once he had thought
his life was going to end. Now, on that afternoon beach, he walked to re-encounter that earlier self and renew his gratitude
for so much that was given to him. The music school had been started, Gabriella was in their house where the garden was begun.
He believed newly in God and felt the simplicity of grace.

He tried not to think that the music school might be a folly, that it might be built beside the sea and open and find no pupils.
That within a year it might be an empty shell whistling the long, unhappy note of doomed dreams. That Gabriella might change
her heart and want to leave. He did not want to think of such things and kept a waferlike belief in goodness balanced on his
soul. He walked the long beach until he was past the cliffs and out almost to the broken rocks, where his figure was too small
to be seen by those searching for him along the sand.

When he reached the remote end, he turned, tossed a Stone in the water, and held back his head a moment until the brilliant
light of the sky bathed his face.

He narrowed his eyes at the sun and did not hear the cries. The waves slapped. Gulls soared and screamed.

Then Stephen turned to see the three Coughlan children clambering over the rocks to tell him to come quickly, there was trouble.

His heart stopped. He imagined he was in a nightmare, for the journey back across the summer beach seemed to take place amidst
the garish light and hollow cries of grim hallucination. Sunbathers sat up on their towels and watched him. He could not hurry
quickly enough, and his long strides sank in the softened sand and gave him the jagged, uneven rhythm of a jogger suffering
heart attack. His long neck angled forward, his arms pumped, and when his hat flew off he left it behind him on the water,
running in a gasping horror, as if across his wide eyes there suddenly flashed the doomed future of all their loving, and
upon his getting to the cottage depended one last chance for its rescue.

He came up the dunes on all fours. He saw the cars at the gateway to the cottage. Then he slowed down. His rib cage hurt,
his arms were heavy. The blood in his legs felt like molten lead and swayed his walking, so that the Coughlans caught up with
him and took his hands on either side, guiding him the last paces along the road to the cottage that he was now afraid to
enter. He stopped at the gate. He stared at the house, and the children looked up at him. And for a moment he waited. His
breath escaped in long sighs. And while he stood there, on that cusp of what he supposed to be unutterable loss, he begged
God in a prayer for it not to be so.

Then he heard the baby cry.

  Gabriella Castoldi did not die that afternoon in the hot July of the long summer but lived when her doctor said she should
not have, and gave birth to a baby girl they called Alannah. A small, brown-eyed baby, she was born with a face that revealed
neither her mother nor her father, though they each took turns to declare she was exactly like the other; as though they could
not quite believe such tender beauty was their own.

For four days after Alannah was born, Gabriella did not move from her bed; she refused to travel to the hospital in Ennis
and instead took the difficulties of the birth as a sign that within life was an inevitable force of goodness which flowed
beyond our understanding. She relied upon the ancient knowledge of the mid-wife and summoned the healing energy of Nelly Grant
to awaken within her. She wept and drowned the bed in water and milk, turning the bedroom air a pale creamy colour that was
more filling than food and strangely without the scent of sourness. The near-tragedy brought company. When the word of what
had happened reached the town, it had the double effect of raising anger by highlighting the absence of maternity facilities
in Ennis and transforming Gabriella into a native of the parish. Visiting ladies brought Lucozade and chocolates and made
soft noises above the baby. They relived the hard labour in vivid imaginations and revisited through the new mother their
own birthings years earlier. Throughout the first week they came and went like swaddling maternal tides, sliding in around
the sleeping mother and child to breathe the thick warm smell of the newborn like an aromatherapeutic remedy, and nodding
themselves into dreamy naps that were filled with the downy comfort of first blankets. At once Stephen understood that the
birth did not belong to Gabriella and him alone. So he made tea and brought it to the ladies and did not show surprise or
resentment when he sometimes opened the bedroom door and saw a half-dozen women over sixty sitting around the bed.

It was in the evenings when the visitors left that he lay with Alannah on the bed. He could not look at her without seeing
God. He did not deserve her, he thought, and then held the child in his arms in the tenderest embrace while the stars rose
in the skylight overhead.

She became the clock of the cottage. Her wakes and sleeps dictated the rhythms of their days and nights. She was dark-haired
and seemed in Stephen's arms the impossible lightness of air. He carried her around the house like the smallest parcel of
hope, and though her eyes could not see that far, he pointed out the garden and the sea and then played softly the aching
music of
Tosca
while she fell asleep on his shoulder.

When Moira Fitzgibbon called, he hugged her in the doorway with that combination of awkwardness and sincere deep feeling that
was the badge of his character. He cut her flowers from the garden and doubled his own blushes when he saw how she almost
wept to receive them. Then, for Alannah's first trip outside the cottage, he urged Moira to join them and drove in his father's
car along the western edge of Clare, where the fine summer was just beginning to fade and the yellow stubble of the mown fields
was giving way to the last soft green. On the quiet backroads between Miltown Malbay and the sea Stephen stopped the car time
and again, and taking one of four dozen packets he had bought in the town, he got out and scattered wildflower seeds in the
ditches and beneath the hedgerows.