As It Is in Heaven (40 page)

What happened after that occurred in the vague uncertain way that time has decided traditional
seisiúns
should begin; whether Francie Golden spoke first, told anyone, or simply carried his fiddle everywhere, whether there was
an imperceptible signal, a nod or wink, or whether it was the moment the warming of the French wine in his blood reached the
point of inspiring action, there was an instant when the crowd were clapping for Gabriella, and then it was Francie Golden
who was playing “Upstairs in a Tent” and grinning sideways in the terrible pleasure of his own devilment. Like Gabriella he
flowed one tune into the next, and for the first time in that building made the air dance to a jig. There was clapping along
and toe-tapping and little waves of quick encouragements: “Good man, Francie,” “That's it, boy,” “Now ye're playin,” and a
few plain whoops of wordless gaiety.

The moment Francie finished, faces turned to Gabriella, as if she might disapprove of that simple old jaunty music that was
theirs. But at once she caught the violin under her chin and said, “Like this?” and played the same tune back to Francie Golden,
who laughed and joined her, and led her on another tune in which she followed him and then another. Then Gabriella played
Schubert, and Francie was urged to try his fist at it, and did; and the twin O'Gormans, who had been there and gone home for
their instruments, arrived back and joined in on two flutes. And Moira Fitzgibbon called Frawley's from the car phone of the
councillor and ordered all the hot food they had to be brought up to the school in Dempsey's van, and the four Keoghs went
for stout and came back with it with Micky Killeen, the box player, and Johnsie Kelly, the pipe-playing tiler from Kilmurry.
And though the rain beat on outside and the car park puddled deeply beneath the bruised sky, none in Miltown Malbay that day
gave it a care, for the music was like a long and intricate spell, and transformed grief and worry to laughter and delight
in the very same way it had done for centuries. The walls rang with it. Men took off their jackets and danced the Clare set
with their wives. They battered with toes and heels on the carpeted floor, as if it were flagstone, and spun in giddying quick
circles that returned them to the moments of their childhoods, when the magic of dancing first saw them leap and spin on kitchen
floors. They danced and the music played on. More people arrived, and soon the crush of the crowd made some spin off down
the corridors and dance in each of the rooms of that pentagonal building, dancing even beyond the hearing of the music, and
making steps and keeping time to the music that was already inside them. Gabriella put down her violin and danced with Stephen
and Alannah in a bumping, uneven jigtime. Stephen danced like a man who had been given wooden legs. They flew out in sharp
angles and measured space like a pair of pincers. He kept his head bolt upright, where it perched above Gabriella's and caught
the swirling perfume of lilies as it rose off her hair. He felt the smallness of her back beneath his hand and pressed there
to draw her to him, so that she might feel his happiness and love and never leave that moment. And she was laughing while
she danced. And while they flew through the other couples (passing the thrown-back head of Eileen Waters where she abandoned
herself to the rhythm coming through the wine and danced Eamon with a particular and memorable vivacity), cars started to
arrive from Mullagh and Quilty and Cree and Doonbeg, and the space inside those walls had to expand and defy laws of science
to accommodate all the ghosts and musicians and dancers of those and other parishes, and that, although they did not know
it, the music they were playing was already transforming, and becoming ever so slightly something new, something which absorbed,
which was both of that place and others, and allowed the classical to speak to it and would become in time the music of the
new millennium. It did not matter. They played and danced on and were like a sea, changing moods like tides, now bright and
quick, now slow with airs of sorrow. And while the moon was lost beneath the coverings of thick cloud and the stars were put
out in the western sky, the party continued. It continued all that starless, moonless night, while the rain fell and the wind
blew and none cared, for it was as if in those moments of music and dance each man and woman was seized with the knowledge
of the boundless hardship and injustice of life and knew that this night in the pentagonal building of the music school in
Moses Mooney's field was one they would look back on from the edge of life and realize that yes, there they had come as close
as they ever had to true happiness.

  By All Souls' Day the school had thirty-five pupils. Gertie Morrisey taught piano, Martin Hosey the silver flute, and Seamus
Cooney the traditional timber flute, while Gabriella and Sonny Mungovan divided the violin and fiddle. It was a school that
broke all rules of musical education, that defied the strict classification of training practices and existed instead in a
free-flowing river of styles and traditions, with the only aim being to foster the pleasure of playing. From the beginning
Gabriella had decided that the school would enter no pupils for examinations, that those who wished could do so, but that
no time or effort would be given towards the preparation of children to play for the judgement of others. In this Stephen
was in complete accord and marvelled at how the very students who had trudged to school now came to the glass building with
the enlivened air of children arriving at a swimming pool. His own function in the school was not clearly defined. Moira was
its manager and showed a surprising capability for keeping timetables, organizing classes, and advertising. While Gabriella
took classes in the five hours that followed schooltime, Stephen played with his daughter. He carried and wheeled her along
the corridor that ran all the way around the pentagon, listening to the different musics escaping each room, telling Alannah
what they were and watching how already she knew which playing was her mothers.

It was during those evenings while minding Alannah that he first brought the chess set there. While the baby slept he sat
in a corner of the room and played against himself. Within two weeks he had a few regular opponents, the waiting parents of
the children, and the chess and music became so entwined during that winter that sometimes Stephen stopped in mid-game and
felt the spirit of Philip Griffin beside him.

Soon it was clear it was to be a wretched winter. The sea grew high and wild and angry. Morning evening and night the wind
howled, until at last it was impossible to imagine a place far out in the Atlantic that was before the beginning of the wind.
The new slates that Corry & Son & Nephew had put on came off and shattered on the road outside. The air was full of salt.
Faces dried and cracked, and a general rheuminess ran through all the parishes of the western seaboard. In the garden that
faced the sea the plants burned, and Stephen watched them from the kitchen window with a sudden chill in his heart. In the
fierce winds of All Souls' Night whole shrubs were lifted out of the ground and tossed into Clancy's down the road. To Stephen
it felt like a portent. For three days he went outside in the gusting sea-winds and tried to secure the plants that remained.
He dressed them in sacking and staked them and bound them with yellow baler twine, until they resembled weird effigies of
the plants they had been in summer.

Despite the harshness of the season the music school prospered. Adults came for classes in the wild driven rain of the mornings,
and sat on in the small coffee shop Moira ran, where they listened to music they had never heard before and which nourished
them in their spirits and helped them endure the terrible vicissitudes of grief and loss that are the inheritance of all.

Gabriella was happy. She almost did not dare to admit it. When she held Alannah in her arms she felt the wonder of the child
and wept often, alarming Stephen into offering all kinds of remedies, which she turned down, telling him he was such a great
fool he did not know sorrow from joy. “This,” she said, with lemon-scented tears flowing down her cheekbones, “is joy.”

“Oh, right,” he said, and stood there, hopeless and inadequate to understand what was flowing between the mother and the child.

And so, even in the battering and scouring of that winter, a kind of healing occurred for Stephen and Gabriella. It was the
kind that comes when people are living side by side in a small house in a beautiful and desolate place, where little by little
the past vanishes and the present moment seems large enough to contain a whole life. It was the kind of healing that is made
of endless cups of tea, of changing nappies, of music playing, of books picked up and put down after three pages, of short
naps and long dreams, and of the deeply comfortable silences that grow between a man and a woman who come to know each other
so utterly that they breathe each other's breath and do not need many words. And in that winter, Stephen and Gabriella grew
together, while the leafless plants in the garden were bound and motionless outside. They knew each other's rhythms like clocks
in a jeweller's shop that chime at staggered midnights. Stephen began to learn Italian and walked through the cottage, at
first saying phrases from
Frasi Utili e Idiomi,
and then progressing to short passages learned from Dante's
Purgatorio
and
II Paradiso,
which had the double bonus of astonishing Alannah and making Gabriella laugh.

Gabriella knew how she could tease Stephen. She still loved to measure the sincerity of his feelings with countless tiny tests,
requesting that he change his habit of leaving the tea caddy open, leave down the toilet seat, allow the bedroom window to
be left open all night even in the fierce winds of November let the cats sleep in the kitchen, wash his feet before bed. To
all Stephen complied without hesitation. He saw them as a myriad of proofs of his own loving, and then recognized that each
time Gabriella asked him something it was also to tell him that she was preparing to live with him forever.

At no time did Stephen ask Gabriella again to marry him. Sometimes, in a fit of gloom, Gabriella would feel the absence of
space between them, the claustrophobia that weighs on lovers until they redefine each other's strangeness. Then she would
look up from a book and think to throw it at him, to hit out at the suddenly infuriating omnipresence of his affection. She
would make a demand: Did he not notice how the cooker was broken? how the gas kept shutting off and had to be fiddled to get
right?

“Do you not notice things like that?”

“I will look at it now.”

“No, it's too late. I don't mean you to do it now. It's just you don't …”

She would shake her head at herself and sit in the heavy silence, wondering why she felt the need to strike out at him. He
had the dissatisfying reality of saints. He knew nothing of the real world. He would not know the names of three politicians,
how to fill tax forms or fix the plumbing. But then, just as suddenly, the gloom would relent and she would look at him and
be astonished that she was living with such an extraordinary man.

Then, on the last evening of that November, they returned home from the school and found a letter from Nelly Grant waiting.
It was written in a rounded looping hand and told her own adventure, how she had shut the shop and left Kenmare two weeks
after them to follow her imagination to Italy; how she has spent six months there, arriving in Venice in the rain and travelling
the Adriatic coastline to Ravenna and Rimini, where she had stayed, eating a diet of every kind of shellfish, until she said
her dreams took on the warm and salty quality of that sea and left her experiencing the softness of life that we forget in
building our shells. She had learned new cures, and discovered her age was imaginary, for when she returned to Kenmare she
felt the bigness of the mountains like a child.

Stephen and Gabriella read the letter in turns, while the wind blew rain and sea foam against the windows and Alannah slept.
And when Stephen was reading it Gabriella looked at him and saw the gladness moving across his face. The light from the tasselled
lamp was beautiful upon him, and she understood with the sudden clarity of enlightenment that shows us the shape of the world.
And it was his stillness and peace that she felt, the loving that was deeper and wider than she could encompass. And she whispered:
“Stefano.”

He was startled and looked up quickly from the page.

“You know I love you,” she said.

He said nothing. The wind blew outside, the child slept.

“No matter how impossible I am.”

The letter quivered in his hand.

“No matter what I say, I do,” Gabriella said. “Please don't ever leave me.”

He had slipped across to her from his armchair and was crouched low beside her. Her hand touched his face.

“I won't,” he said. “I couldn't live. I love the impossible.”