As It Is in Heaven (4 page)

  Stephen Griffin had first seen Gabriella Castoldi playing violin in a concert in the thick-curtained upstairs room of the
Old Ground Hotel in Ennis in County Clare. He had not intended to be there and marvelled often afterwards how one moment leads
to the next, until the pattern of our lives seems inevitable. He worked as a history teacher in a grey school by the sea at
Spanish Point twenty miles away and lived in a house with no curtains, where the Atlantic sprayed his windows and whispered
like a mystery in every room. He had lived there for three years since taking the job. The day he came for the interview he
drove west until he met the coastline and knew at once not that he wanted the position but that he wanted to be there in the
west, for that sense of arrival in reaching the edge of the country. He had searched for the house for the same reason, finding
a place that was small and damp but, unlike so many of the other old cottages, turned outward to the sea. Its front-room window
looked out over a small slope of burnt grass that fell away in a sharp cliff into the alarming pounding of the tide. When
he sat in the front room and looked westward into the slow movement of the swollen waters, he did not know it but he was the
mirror of his father sitting in Dublin.

“History is disappearing,” the principal, Mrs. Waters, told him at the interview. “Nobody wants to do history anymore. It’s
a terrible shame.” The students preferred computers, she said with a tone of derision. “History is long and difficult, Mr.
Griffin; there’s a lot of reading in it,” said Mrs. Waters. “That’s the reason. They don’t like reading. They’re too lazy.
Your classes will be small. But maybe you’ll be able to change all that.” It was a little threat. Mrs. Waters was a big woman
with a small mouth; she seemed to know that the smallness of her mouth betrayed some lack of feeling and had overpainted her
lips, which she pursed constantly to reassure herself. She sat across the table from Stephen and wondered would he do. It
wasn’t everybody who could stick it out, the west was bleak in the winter, and between the broken Atlantic skies and the rough
sea, few souls not born to it endured. So Mrs. Waters imagined, sitting in the neatness of her principal’s office and priding
herself on the rigid indestructibility of her own person.

“You think you might like it here?” she asked Stephen.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The future has no history. We can’t know anything of tomorrow, can we?”

Mrs. Waters stared at him; it was an outlandish remark, and she had to pause a moment to decide if she was being insulted.

“I think I will, that’s why I’m here. But I don’t know.” Stephen looked directly at her. “I’d like the chance to work here,
I know that.”

It was not exactly what Mrs. Waters wanted to hear. But she nodded and pursed her lips.

“You’d teach all classes?”

“Yes.”

“We believe in discipline here. We have school rules.”

Stephen said nothing, he simply looked back at her, and Eileen Waters could not tell if he was agreeing or not. She was a
good judge of men; she often said so. She had judged her husband, Eamon, at forty-three and married at last, congratulating
herself on not surrendering to any number of brutish fellows and finding in the assistant librarian in Ennis the quietest
man in Clare. He had not disappointed her. She was a good judge. But with Stephen Griffin she was lost. It was a feeling to
which she was not accustomed, and to escape the discomfort, she decided on him. He was the best of the three applicants by
far, she told herself. That he was the only man and the other two women candidates had both seemed powerful, competent figures
who might have challenged her was beside the point. No, this fellow is the best. It was only when Eileen Waters stood up to
congratulate Stephen on getting the job that the thought occurred to her that he might be a dreadful teacher. It was only
a passing impression, and she drove it, like everything else, resolutely out of her mind by shaking Stephen’s hand forcefully
and telling him three times how wonderful it was all going to be.

In the years before he arrived at the concert in Ennis that Friday evening, time had stopped for Stephen Griffin. He had found
the house and moved into it, taken the job at the school, and fit his life into the routine of both of them, paring down his
days until they had arrived at a still and unbroken sameness.

Then time stopped altogether.

He was the teacher who lived in the house. He was a quiet and shy man. He didn’t go to the pubs at night, nor join the little
golf club on the dunes at Spanish Point. The Clancys, who lived in the small cottage down the road, hardly saw him; the word
in Marrinan’s shop was that he was writing a book and wanted to be left alone. And so he was. He taught his classes, he lived
in the house by the sea and visited his father in Dublin once every month. He felt himself grow old.

Then one day he was asked to buy a ticket for Michael Mooney’s concert.

  He was called Moses Mooney. He had a great fluff of white beard and walked down the streets of Miltown Malbay with his head
held backward to let it flow. He had two coats and wore them both in winter, one on top of the other, so the fullness of his
figure as he came towards you seemed a statement of intent. His eyes were blue gimlets. He had sailed the seas of the world
for many years, and three times died and lived again according to his own tales. Each encounter with God had left him with
the remarkable blueness of his eyes made brighter and the rosiness of his cheeks proof of the health-enhancing properties
of resurrection. He was an extraordinary man. Moses Mooney had grown up in a house of music, the notes were in his ears when
he was born, for his father, Thomas, was rumoured to have fiddle calluses on his fingers when he arrived in the world and
his mother was the singer Angela Duff, who had made men weep in the kitchen when she sang “Spancil Hill.” He had grown up
with the music and then left for England and the sea. It was on the third of his meetings with God, when he was fifty-two
years old, that Moses Mooney realized what he was to do with his life and returned from the shores of Brazil to Miltown Malbay
with the project of building an opera house by the sea.

At first, of course, it was not an opera house. He told the people who would listen to him in bemused amazement in Clancy’s
bar that it was a concert hall. That the sides would be removeable to see the sea, and that in summertime they would lift
off to let the roaring of the ocean meet the playing of the music in the fabulous symphony of Man and God. He was perfectly
clear about it. Everything about him seemed convincing, and for as long as his vision remained the wildest and least probable
of all dreams, the people indulged his fantasy and bought him drinks. Moses Mooney was a figure around the town, that was
all. He did not tell anyone yet that the building was to be an opera house, nor that the music he had heard in God’s company
was not like any other and that only later when he had arrived back on the shores of Brazil and heard on an old radio the
singing of Maria Callas did he recognize that that was the music of God.

How he intended to build the opera house was not at first clear to him either. All he knew was that he had to come home to
Clare, that his travelling days were over, and that this project was what he had to pursue until the day that he died. When
he arrived back at his home cottage, the roof had fallen in. There were two cats living in the parlour in a clump of old thatch,
and when Moses stood in the doorway, they came to him with such gentleness and affection that he told his neighbour he would
name them after his parents. It took him three months to get the house partially repaired. He had money saved from his sailoring,
and before he had declared his full intentions, he used what he had left to buy an acre of ground next to the golf course
at Spanish Point.

And there it remained. The west Clare opera house. Grass grew within the barbed-wire boundaries of the field, while all about
it were the fairways and greens of the golfers. Every day Moses would walk across the field and imagine the dimensions of
the building shaping around him; from the whispering of the sea winds he dreamed the singing of the future, the magnificent
music that was as yet unheard by everyone but himself.

Other than this vision, Moses Mooney showed few signs of oddity in his behaviour. He was a churchgoing man and kept himself
comfortably once he had repaired the cottage. He was the owner of a thousand tales and could tell them with such conviction
that two priests, three bankers, and one insurance man were among his regular company in the late-evening sessions in Clancy’s.
He had gone out into the world and brought more than his share of it back with him, and when he told of unknown tribes in
Chile, the bizarre habits of the male cockatoo, or the weird majesty of a communal dream shared by each of eighty sailors
one night after a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, no one walked away. He finished a story and sat back, palming his great
beard gently, and then sipping his stout as if chastened by the things he had lived to see.

It was two years after he had bought the field that the idea of the concerts came to him. When he first dreamed the opera
house into the space where the tufts of grass blew in the wind, he did not think of how the money would be raised. It was
only afterwards, when the emptiness of the field began to spread in his mind like an ache, that he wondered if there was not
a serious flaw in God’s vision, or if perhaps he had resurfaced too soon in the southern Atlantic before getting the entire
message. With the childlike innocence of the visionary, he had supposed that once he announced his intentions the money would
be forthcoming. When it wasn’t and nobody stopped him on the street with the offer of finances, he decided that information
was the problem, and stayed awake all the following night making three bright posters with red and yellow crayons, announcing
the number of the bank account he had opened and telling the good people that he was going to donate his field and all his
personal savings to the cause of building a place for music of the sea. He hung the posters the following day before dawn.
The town was asleep and only a brisk salty wind passed along the street. Thomas and Angela, the two cats, had followed him
from the house and stood together beneath the lamppost while he pressed home the thumbtacks. When he had done all three, he
walked down the empty town with a pure and clear pride glistening inside himself; he was as clean-souled as after Communion,
and turned to look back at the announcements with such a blaze of joy that they might have told of the coming of Christ Himself.
Moses Mooney walked home and went to bed. He slept with the two cats at his feet and dreamed the town was waking up and seeing
the notices, an infection of delight enveloping the people at the whimsical originality, the daring and wonder of the plan,
and the queues spreading from Bank Place down to Clancy’s.

When he awoke he was like a new man, and had the flushed rapture of those who know they are about to see their dreams realized.
He imagined the money adding up, he totted the imaginary figures and was able to elaborate the plans for the opera house,
extending the balcony and adding a small restaurant, where chamber music could be played in the summertime. He laughed at
the miracle of it all, the simplicity of how things happen in the world, of how his seagoing days and nights, the endless
blue journey towards the limit of all horizons, had arrived at this, the meaning of his life. He did not go out that day.
Nor the next. He let the dreams bank up like snow. It was three days later when he at last allowed himself to go out, to walk
down to the town and find out what had happened. He arrived at the bank just before closing and asked to check the balance
in the account.

It was exactly the same amount he had started with.

He had to lean on the counter to keep from falling. The teller did not look at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the blue light
of the terminal screen. Moses heard the water gurgling in his ears like laughter and kept staring at the figures on the docket
until he could no longer hear or see anything. The vanity of hope and the mockery of all enterprise flooded through the sluice
gates of his brain, bringing with them the hopeless realization that he was utterly alone and carrying away in a single instant
any possibility of help. He gripped the counter he could no longer see, he felt his throat tighten and gag him, and then he
fell to the floor with a soft thump.