As It Is in Heaven (7 page)

“
Grazie,
” she said, and began the slow wet journey back down the mountain.

The following day Nelly Grant knew that Gabriella did not need the ruby grapefruit and offered her instead the fortification
of bananas. Bananas ensure us against the suddenness of violent emotions, she told the Italian woman, and put two in her bag
with a conspiratorial smile. Gabriella was carrying her violin case, and when Nelly asked her was she going to play, Gabriella
said, “I need a lot of practising.”

That afternoon she played Vivaldi in the small clearing among the trees where she had met the deer. She did not expect him
to return, and he did not—at least not so that she could see him—but she played nonetheless, making the notes move through
the changeless frozen time of that beautiful place where only the air and the trees listened. It soothed Gabriella to play.
She played for an hour; she played with a flowing motion in her bow and heard the music reach a point so near to perfection
that even she could not find the smallest flaw. Above the treetops the broken pieces of the pale sky glistened like glass.
No clouds were moving. The air was scented with pine, and the stillness of that secret place shimmered with the music.

When Gabriella had stopped playing and returned down the mountainside, she had decided she was going to stay and live in Kenmare.
She did not yet know how or for how long, but as she walked along the black road back to the town and felt the rain coming
in her face, she knew the decision was irreversible.

It was three days before she got a job in the vegetable shop of Nelly Grant. By the time the summer arrived and her skill
on the violin had been discovered, she was invited to play three evenings a week before the great fireplace in the mustard-coloured
lounge of The Falls Hotel. It was there that Isabella Curta, junior secretary of the Italian embassy, had discovered her,
and been so moved by her playing that she had written down the name Gabriella Castoldi, and was able to recall it two years
later when Vittorio Mazza fled back to Italy.

  On the first Friday of November, Stephen Griffin did not know that his life was about to change. He had long given up the
vanity of supposing that life was something you could plan, or that wishes and desires could be achieved. For years he had
lived in a kind of ghostly nowhere, a place of continuing days and nights whose only feature was its own unremarkableness.
He expected nothing, and opened his eyes each morning in the back bedroom of the small house by the sea, uncertain as to whether
he was among the living or the dead.

This was nothing new. He had a facility for living with ghosts. As he grew up in the house of his father, he had grown used
to encountering his mother and his sister in the shadowy corners of the past. It did not frighten him, and he soon understood
that the treasured moments of his family’s loving remained undiminished and unvanquished despite the passing of time. Indeed,
it was the sweetest of sorrows, and when he was alone in the house as a young man and startled himself with the sudden vividness
of a certain moment—his sister, Mary, coming down the stairs with the doll Philomena—he discovered that the grief was assuaged
by the understanding that for some things time does not pass, it recycles.

Life in that house in Dublin had taught him to cherish the company of the invisible. When he went to university and began
to study history, it was the now familiar presence of the disappeared that attracted him. He sat in the glass-fronted room
of the library and lost himself with the ghosts of the previous three hundred years. He kept his head down and his eyes moving
on the pages, but his mind took flight, and soon even his body was elsewhere, a fact noticed only by old Murtagh, the ancient
librarian assistant, who himself had long ago vanished into the books of Thomas Hardy. The power of language was a conjuring
magic, it magicked doors in castles and courtyards, and through them Stephen entered. He was the student humped over in the
library, reading the books until the night porter came round clearing the tables and sending him home. When he rose and walked
out into the glitter frost and million stars of the Dublin night, he was walking with others in a different place. He had
abstracted himself from the world so thoroughly that by the age of twenty-one, when he was in his final year, he hardly needed
the book to be open for him to slip into the past.

He was a quiet fellow. He did not go to the dances on Friday nights, nor heed his father’s urging to go down and sit with
the others in the students’ bar. So solitary was his life that Philip Griffin grew fearful that his son had been overprotected
since the trauma of the tragedy and would never emerge in the plain daylight of the world. He sat downstairs and worried,
while Stephen lay in the bedroom overhead with a book propped on his chest. It did not bother Stephen that no other student
was like him. He passed the summer exams, and within two years had read every university book of merit on the subject of European
history at the turn of the century. His face grew pale as paper; his eyes had the peering expression of the myopic, and his
lips thinned and grew light-coloured, as if they had never tasted fruit.

He lived in books, and by the time he was ready to graduate with honours from the history department of University College,
Dublin, his complexion was delicate and radiated the grey light of imminent illness. In May of his final year he stood in
the doorway of his tutor’s room, and Dr. Margaret McCormack realized that he was almost lost to life. She had seen students
almost devoured by the study of history before, but it had always been temporary. Usually they reached a point—often in April—when
the sudden sweetness of the sensual world swept over them. Their books became weighty and dry in the perfumed air that spun
and dazzled and was blown about with almond blossom.

But for Stephen Griffin it was not like that. For three years he had sat in the lecture halls and quietly taken his notes
in longhand. He handed in his papers on time and worked through the brightening days of spring, barely lifting his head when
the brilliance of the May sunshine made his pages too white for reading. None but his father had told him to stop, and even
Philip Griffin surrendered, imagining that his son knew better than he what was needed for a university degree.

So, in the last weeks of his final year, Stephen stood in the doorway of his tutor’s room and told her he was hoping to be
accepted for the master’s degree, and then the doctorate. Dr. McCormack looked at him and then looked away. The sunlight flooded
into the room through the window behind her, she could feel its warmth pressing on her back.

“Doctorate?” she said. “I see.”

“Yes,” he said, hanging there in the doorway, his eyes gazing downward, as if he had just confessed a crime.

Dr. McCormack had to hold her breath. She had been teaching for twenty years in the second-floor room which was the reward
for her own schoolday acuity at history, a permanent office. And she despised it. But she was fit for nothing else; she knew
it, and knew that each day she moved further along the dull inevitability that had been her life since she came to college
to study history. There in the sunlight she looked at the pale man with the white face and thin black hair. He was transparent.
There was about him such a pitiful shrinking from life that it caused a lever to release in Margaret McCormack and the truth
of her own lifetime of withdrawal, timidity, and ungrasped opportunity to be unloaded with a crash upon her.

“The doctorate, yes,” she said, and touched the stilled flowers in subdued yellow that decorated her dress. The sun was two
warm hands on her back. She felt her own dust falling in the air.

“I’m hoping you’ll give me a recommendation,” said Stephen.

That’s not what you’re asking, thought Margaret McCormack. You’re asking for an escape, you’re asking to be allowed to slip
in here to one of these box rooms where you can gather books on the shelves and turn the pages of students’ essays until they
tap on your shoulder and say next year is your retirement.

Margaret did not answer him at once. She felt a varicose vein on the inside of her left leg begin to throb, and turned from
him and sat down.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said and, looking down at the coffee mug that held her pens, added, “I’ll certainly give it
my consideration.”

In fact, she had already decided. By the time Stephen was walking down the green carpeted corridor to the library once more,
Margaret McCormack had made up her mind that Stephen Griffin was to be saved from her own fate, and that the rejection he
would feel when the letter came telling him he had not been accepted into the program would in fact be the coded message of
her own mercy ushering him forward into the world. He was worse than she, she thought; he was a book. And only twenty-two
years old. She sat at her desk after he left and felt a sense of mission. It’s everything he wants, but only because he cannot
imagine facing the terrible realities of the world. He does not really want it, she thought, it is fear. She touched the small
drops of perspiration that had arrived on her top lip. She knew what it was like to have no gift for small talk and feel the
alarming sense of being the only person unable to relax into a fragment of conversation or idle a moment with a colleague
on the stairs. She had recognized herself so acutely in Stephen Griffin that she could not bear it.

She picked up her pen and wrote a letter to the head of the department outlining why she could not recommend Stephen Griffin
for the master’s program at this time. She finished the letter as the sun was moving from her window. Then she put her head
on the desk and softly cried.

By midsummer of that year, when Stephen had been turned down for the master’s program, he received an offer of a place for
the Diploma in Education course. He was so astonished by the rejection that he did not think clearly of the possibilities
of his life but enrolled with the narrowed vision of those who have lost confidence in their future. One year later, he emerged
from university a teacher. It was not a career he seemed suited for; at first he read from the textbook and lost the class,
and it was only when he stopped reading and looked down at the pupils that he suddenly realized he was building a wall between
them and himself. He stopped reading in class after that and began a new, risky tactic: talking the history out, telling it,
unwinding the moments as if they were the first slender threads of a long, deeply entwined rope that led, impossibly, all
the way back to that very moment in the classroom, the very instants of their breathing there in the school. And somehow it
worked. Somehow the seriousness of him, the undiminished intensity of his focus, won over the classes, and the brightest followed
him while the weakest looked away in dreams.

  Stephen Griffin had bought the ticket for the concert when Moira Fitzgibbon had brought them into the staff room at breaktime.
Every teacher had taken two, and although he had no intention of going himself, never mind the impossibility of bringing anyone,
he had taken a pair of tickets and put them in the pages of
Ireland since the Famine.
Half the staff were not intending to go either, and some of the men unknowingly mirrored the behaviour of the boys outside
by teasing each other about who would be interested in classical music. They threw the word “culture” at each other like dried
dung. Their laughter proved their distance from it. It was a thing for the women. But they bought the tickets anyway, to give
them to their wives or put them on the windowsill, for Moira Fitzgibbon had a forbidding sense of mission as she stood among
them. She was not slow to remind them of the sorry fate of Moses Mooney or to make them feel an uneasy guilt at how many of
them had singularly failed to teach her anything and how the failure of her Leaving Certificate examinations in six subjects
was the single most unmentioned achievement of the school in the past fifteen years.