As It Is in Heaven Read Online Free Page B

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.

6
      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