As It Is in Heaven (27 page)

The world hung and swayed in the sunlight. The old tailor slid down the railing to the ground.

  To his later regret, Stephen did not call his father when he returned to Ireland. He could not face the disappointment he
would bring him, and so instead slipped into Dublin, took his car from where he had left it at the airport, and drove across
the country to Clare. In the cottage by the sea he lay on the bed, with no music playing, and waited for his flu to pass.
He lived in the hollow emptiness of the lost and did nothing. When, after a week, he was able to move around without betraying
too blatantly the evidence of heartbreak, he drove to the school and asked if he could return to teaching.

Eileen Waters was astonished. She did not believe his excuses; she eyed him distrustfully, like the vision of her own misjudgement,
and was not prepared to be caught off guard again. She kept the interview going longer than necessary, leaving Stephen in
the office and visiting her bathroom where she took time to examine her facial expressions for signs of weakness. Only when
she was convinced that she looked severe, that she was not a woman to be trifled with, did she return to the interview.

“Your condition,” she said, “the one this doctor referred to, is it passed?”

Stephen looked at her across the emptiness of the world. “Yes,” he whispered.

Eileen Waters paused. “Probation,” she said then. “I can take you back on probation.” She fixed her eyes on him like grappling
hooks and tried to hoist herself up inside the shadowy mystery of him. What the hell was this man's problem? What was he hiding
from her?

“I've had to take your classes myself,” she said. “We couldn't get a sub. We've all had to cover. A situation like this is
hard on all the staff.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yes. Well.” She paused and stopped herself from going on. It was a trick she had learned: use pauses. Silence is a strong
weapon. Let him feel my silence now, she thought, and turned her tongue along the front of her teeth.

“Well?” Stephen said.

“I was very … very …” She paused again. She released her hands from each other and placed them flatly on the table, as if
just keeping it from floating upward. “Very disappointed.”

Stephen just sat, slouched in his father's suit, his spirit too low to make a stronger case. He felt he was deep in ashes.
When he moved the slightest muscle, they blew up into his eyes.

“As it happens,” Eileen Waters told him, “it would not be possible to replace you for the remainder of the school year, in
any case. So you can be on probation until June. I will expect full attendance until that time.” She announced rather than
spoke, obscuring the weakness of her character with performance.

Secretly she longed for Stephen to break down, to slide onto his knees and weep, to confess and reveal to her there in the
office exactly where he had been and what terrible turbulence had left him like this now. She wanted to be the rock he clung
to and, despite herself, turned her most compassionate gaze on him as he stood up to leave.

“It has been unfortunate,” she said. “But it is now behind you.” She held the doorknob but did not turn it. For a brief moment
the hope crossed her eyes and she imagined one last time that he might stop and truly speak to her. But it passed and she
composed herself, readjusting the face of consternation as she drew open the door and let the ashen figure leave.

And so Stephen's life resumed. He taught classes in history. He walked the beach with the great weight of nothing pressing
his footsteps deep into the sand. He had lost love and accepted the harshness of the winter storms as if they were a personal
judgement. On his first day back in the school he waited for an eruption among the boys, but it did not come. It was as if
the pallor of his complexion, the tone of his voice, or the general aspect of his demeanour all broadcast the same message:
Here is a broken man, leave him alone.

He went home in the last light of the afternoon and was lying on his bed fifteen minutes after finishing work. He lay in the
suit that was coming apart a little more every day. He did not know yet that his father had been robbed of his life-time's
savings or that he had told the doctors his son was unreachable in Venice and was spending days in hospital while Puccini
played on in the empty house without him.

Stephen did not know the half of it; he did not know that Gabriella Castoldi lay like him on a bed of diminished hope, that
she waited for a sign that did not come, and balanced on the edge of new life unable to move. For the plots of love and death
had stopped altogether. It was a time when nothing happened. A cold, strange, wind-and-rain-beaten season of its own. It arrived
in off the Atlantic and smashed on the rocks with destructive gladness. Hail fell out of the night skies into the churned-up
waves. People hurried from their houses to their cars; they held their complaints closed on their chests and then gasped with
released curses and coughs when they stepped inside shelter. A brutal weather held the towns of the west captive, and in it
nothing grew. Gorse and white-thorn bushes slanted eastward and the cattle huddled beneath them. Caps blew off. Puddle-mirrors
loomed in the yellowing grass, and everything waited.

  When Gabriella Castoldi awoke in the dawn light on the morning of the last day of January, she smelled smoke. She rose from
her bed and opened the window to be sure it was not a fire in her dreams. It was not. The sky above the red rooftops wore
a grey smudge and the air of Venice smelled bitter with grief.

It was half an hour before she discovered what had happened. She dressed quickly, prompted by a sudden sense of urgency. When
she stepped into the street, the disappointed light of the January morning met her like a returned memory from childhood.
She drew her green coat across her chest and walked toward the smoke. When she was crossing the Campo Manin, she already feared
what had happened. Others were walking talking in the same direction, hurrying along like blood to a bruise.

They crossed the Campo San Angelo and were stopped by
polizia.

They stood, the gathering excited crowd, and heard the truth of their fears confirmed. The Teatro la Fenice, one of the most
spectacular opera houses in the world—the building, it was said, was like being inside a diamond—had been burned to the ground
again.

Gabriella heard it in disbelief.
“Non si credo.”
She gasped a shallow breath and felt the blood rush to her face.
“O mio Dio.”
She looked away and back again at the billowing smoke and thought she would fall down. The vision struck her forcibly like
the phantasms of nightmare, and her heart raced with the distress of it. She wanted to cry out and run away, but stood with
the others staring at the dark swirls rising and smudging the sky. She watched, and though she could not see the
teatro
itself, she felt the loveliness burn, she felt the stage she had stood on crackle with the licking flames and herself falling
through it, downward into the darkness. And in that moment of freefall, even while she was standing there in the bitter fume-soured
air of the Calle Caotorta and seeing burn so much more than the
teatro,
seeing the burning of all her yesterdays in that city, Gabriella thought suddenly of Stephen and knew that to go forward
she had to go back to Kerry, and that the puzzle of love was that the pieces did not seem to fit but lay in the palm of your
hand like some insoluble cipher, until at last you let them go and saw them fall, gradually, into place.

  When Philip Griffin opened his eyes he did not see the face of God.

He saw the round, mobile face of Michael Farrell like a placid moon hovering beside his hospital bed.

There was more of Michael Farrell than God intended. He sat beside the bed in a chair that did not fit him. He wore an expanse
of grey cloth with a white shirt and a yellow tie. He was immaculately groomed and kept his hands on the great globes of his
knees. The absurd smallness of his shoes squeaked on the polished floor like minor jokes.

“Well,” he said.

“Well well well,” he said. “There you are now.” He leaned forward, the chair drew breath. “You don't know me, of course.”
He blinked his eyes together. “I work for Fitzgerald & Carey. The solicitors,” he added, struck as he always was that the
name brought no recognition and that as a large man his junior capacity diminished him. He brought the very tip of his tongue
peeping out between his lips and kept it pressed briefly, stoppering further announcement.

He looked down at the small broken figure of the tailor in the bed and thought that the lack of reaction was perhaps nothing
but fear. So, withdrawing his tongue, he threw up the eyebrows to say, “No no, there's no trouble. Nothing wrong. We sent
you a couple of letters, Mr. Griffin. They're at your house waiting. In any case, we learned about your misfortune, and well,
I live across from the hospital here and I thought I'd check up on you myself …”

He waited a moment to see if any light dawned on Philip Griffin's face. But it did not. The old man just watched him with
a kind of frozen bewilderment.

“Yes indeed,” he said. “Well, you know the late Dr. Tim Magrath?”

Philip Griffin made no gesture or expression. He lay motionless in the deep confusion and abandonment of those who feel God
has not heard their calling.

Michael Farrell paused a final time, took a white handkerchief from inside his jacket, and dabbed at the damp leakage all
over his face. “Well,” he said, “it's Mr. Considine who will tell you, but Dr. Magrath had no family as such, and well, you've
been named prominently in his will.” He paused. “Very prominently,” he added, and then leaned forward to pat a huge hand on
the tailor's shoulder, saying, “Now, isn't that good news?”

  From the moment Gabriella returned to the apartment, Maria Feri knew that her dream of being the twin mother of the child
had burst. Gabriella would not stay in Venice. When she walked in the door there were ashes in her hair, her eyes burned with
a kind of wild indignation as she paced in the living room and would not sit down. The bird flew about in his cage.