As It Is in Heaven

1

That morning Stephen left at ten o’clock and drove the yellow car from his father’s house in Dublin to return to the west once more. He did not tell his father any more than he had already revealed in the chess game, but as he drove out the Templeogue Road, having waved goodbye, he had the strange sensation of having shared secrecies.

The moment his son had left, Philip had hurried upstairs and taken out his green Harris tweed, white shirt, and thick brown trousers. When he put on the trousers, he was pleased to discover that the material did not cling or bunch about the knees but fell cleanly to his feet. The line of the trousers was critical to a man’s well-being. How often he had seen customers in Clery’s with sagging and baggy trousers, miscut and misshapen, drawn by machines for men that did not exist and worn with a grey pathos, as if declaring how the wearer knew that nothing in the world ever measured up. When the knee pressed the trouser leg the line was lost, a man walked as if he were pushing a wheelbarrow, and shortly life provided him one. If the seat was tight, so too was the life, and soon no button or zip would restrain the pressure. It was a simple philosophy, the metaphysics of tailoring, and Philip Griffin applied to his own clothes everything that thirty years in Clery’s had taught him about humanity. In his bedroom was a full-length mirror, not for the pleasure of his vanity, but because it was only when he was looking at himself in his clothes that he could appreciate the condition of his own health. So when he saw the line of the trousers in the mirror he was relieved; he was still the same distance from the ground as a year previously. None of the raised hemming that was the first sign of certain death was needed, and he began to think that the intrusion of the cancer might not be as far progressed as he had imagined. Then he put on the white shirt. It was cotton. Cotton is a cloth full of forgiveness, and even as Philip buttoned it over the small upturned bowl of his stomach he could feel the innocence in the material. When he had it closed under his chin he was in the morning of his own First Communion and was his father’s hands doing the buttons under his seven-year-old chin. It smelled clean as grace; the buttons were just so, neither slipping back through the holes like those of inveterate gamblers nor resisting going through, like the shirts of bridegrooms. He ran his hands down the sides of his torso and delighted briefly in the smooth and simple elegance of a white shirt. Then he chose a tie; only three in a hundred men knew how to knot a tie. He had proven the figure once with young Dempsey, counting the inept nooses that choked the greater portion of their customers and suggesting it was among the critical wisdoms a father could pass to his son: how to knot a tie. He passed his hand across his face doing his, as if it were a blessing, and then took his jacket from the wardrobe. A tweed; you have to be a certain age to wear tweed, to have the woven strands of your own life reflected in the griefs, hardships, and pleasures of the cloth, and not lost within them like an overcoat. The green Harris was a jacket Philip Griffin had worn for fifteen years; the moment he put his arm through the sleeve he could feel its cool lining like a second skin. The comfort he felt in the jacket was a testimony to his own life, the weight of it, the roughness of the cloth that had diminished now to a rubbed softness; he wore it like evidence of himself, and once he had put it on looked in the mirror to see if he still looked the same.

He did.

“The cancer hasn’t shrunk you yet,” he told himself.

He took the keys to his car and went downstairs. The urgency of what he must do struck him once more as he confirmed the direness of Stephen’s heart by a glance at the chessboard in the sitting room. In the daylight it was more alarming than ever, and a moment later he was driving quickly into the city in the car that held like a stubborn memory the scent of white lilies. He drove as quickly as he could in the impossible knot of the morning traffic. The sky was pasty and mottled, holding away the light above the gathered clouds like a resentment, and preparing the lunchtime rain. Dublin barely moved in the early morning; rather, from the ringed estates of new houses that had taken away the mountains, cars hurtled a quarter of a mile and then slowed abruptly into the swollen and choked arteries of the city, where they inched like thick oil towards the heart. Philip Griffin drove a half metre behind the backside of a bus. He had not been in traffic since he had retired and felt with a small fall of his heart how the city had grown without him. We are smaller and more insignificant than we ever imagine, he told his wife. But then the scent of the lilies reached him again and he felt only the significance and urgency of his own role in the plot of his son’s loving. He rolled down the window and waved his arm at the young driver in the car next to him.

“Emergency!” he cried out, and pulled the car into the outer lane.

It was half an hour later when he arrived in the waiting room of Dr. Tim Magrath. He had no appointment, but told the receptionist he needed to know how long he had to live and would wait to find out. He opened the button of his jacket and sat down. He took his fresh handkerchief and dabbed the top of his head. His head was damp and his lips were dry, but otherwise he showed no signs of a fatal illness, and for a moment considered the remote possibility that in fact he was not carrying a cancer after all. From the morning he had diagnosed himself he had never sought any medical confirmation; he had been more certain of his condition than any test could prove. The cancer was his companion, and on wet mornings in early summer he could sometimes feel it invade a new region of his bowel, moving like a dark liquid or a shadow in the undetected privacies of his organs. He read its evidence in a dozen different ways: in the slowness of his movements when he sat on the toilet, in the taste of chewed chalk that prevailed on his palate when he ate beef, in the interminable bouts of his gas, the sudden exhaustion in mid-afternoon, and the pain that was like passing marbles when he urinated. And of very many, these were only a few. Until the moment he sat in the doctor’s waiting room he had not considered for one minute that he could be wrong. But now, briefly, within the inviolable comfort of the Harris tweed, and desperate for a stay of death to help his son, Philip wished heartily that he was. Or at least he wished that death was not so close, that the latest rumblings and squelchings he heard below his stomach in the early morning were not the telltale signs of the further progress of the disease. If I can live for another while, he thought. If I can live long enough to see Stephen through the far side of this. He swallowed the sadness that rose in his throat at the thought of his son, but it kept coming, and he had to tilt his head back and pretend to admire the ceiling.

An hour passed. Philip studied the backs of his hands, where he knew all manner of signs were made visible, and that the freckles and sunspots of early vitality became there the bumps and splotches, scaliness, discoloration, and moles in which every organ speaks. The more time passed, the more ill he felt himself becoming. It was too warm in the bright room; there was a cramping sensation in his left thigh, the toes of his right foot were going numb. He was breathing shallowly. He asked for a glass of water, but was even more alarmed when he drank it and realized it tasted of bitter lemons.

When the last patient had left the waiting room, Philip Griffin stood up, felt his heart racing, and quietly began to say the Our Father. It was not something he was accustomed to doing, and he began it slowly and carefully, feeling with each phrase the discernible slowing of his heart rate and the evanescence of his panic. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as …

“Philip.”

Tim Magrath was standing in the doorway.

The doctor looked like his own grandfather. Since his wife had died he had suffered what was once called nerves, and was in fact the collapse of his soul. The subsequent vacuum in his chest had reduced his shirt size by four inches, and his head of hair seemed dusted with the white talcum makeup of a theatrical ghost. His eyes floated in sunken bags of skin and were caught in fine nets of blood vessels that looked on the point of bursting. Tim Magrath held his hands while he stood. There was no discernible line to his lips, as if he had sucked them in and mutely gnawed on his grief until only the thin gap remained. When he spoke, his voice was a whispery remnant of a voice.

“Philip, how are you? Please come in.”

Although the man had changed, the room had not. Philip sat in the same seat as before, looked across at the bare trees of the square, and then made an announcement.

“I’m not a man who believes in medicine,” he said.

Tim Magrath sat down. He held his hands still and made the slightest quivering in the muscles of his mouth.

“I’m not here for miracles, Doctor,” Philip Griffin added.

“Tim.” It was less than a whisper.

“I’m not here for miracles, Tim. I’ve cancer. I’ve had it for years. It’s moving into the final stages now and I want to know how much longer I have.” He paused and looked across at the doctor, who had slid like a shadow into a seat by the wall. “It’s not fear,” he said, “it’s not that I want to cancel it out, it’s just a question of how long, do you get me? I need a delay in it. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How long have you been …”

The whisper died, the lipless mouth dried the words into an ashen silence, and Tim Magrath raised the fingers of his right hand to see if he could find them.

“I was never checked. I know it myself. It’s here.” He patted his stomach and below. “And here. Spreading. A pain in the morning like I’ve swallowed knives. There’s an aching round the back, and this, see.” He stuck out the wedge of his tongue. “That’s not right, is it?” He had closed his mouth again before the doctor had even risen to look.

Tim Magrath did not know what to say; he himself looked more like death than the majority of his patients. He could outnumber the ailments of any of them and had already moved into that company of men whose gatherings in the clubhouse were dominated by discourse of disease and the dropped dead. He had weekly funerals to go to, and eyed the mourners with the small comfort of knowing that at least some of them would be at his. Now he lowered the grey head of his hair and looked at the fine carpet on the floor. He felt the disconsolate, irredeemable sense of dread in his soul, the feeling he had experienced daily since the death of his wife that he was in fact an impostor, that he had dressed himself in a fine suit and sat with patients for thirty-six years in a room where he wrote prescriptions for drugs that merely masked and postponed the true pain of life. That medicine cannot stop illness or death but merely divert it was a truth he had denied daily. To fifty patients a week there was little Tim Magrath could say, and even as his doubts in the efficacy of medicines grew, he was unable to sit by the bedside and say there is no cure for this condition we live in, and instead felt the gratitude and hope of the sick swim over him when he said, Take three of these every morning noon and night.

But Philip Griffin was different: he didn’t want curing, he wanted time, and in the moments while Tim Magrath stared at the carpet he gathered in himself the resolve to speak the truth and not offer the bald man the bottle of tablets. When he looked up the patient was looking directly at him.

“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

2

And so, like medieval knights bound on a ceaseless quest for an obscure and chivalrous honour, for the defence of an unattainable ideal with which they themselves had only the briefest acquaintance but whose threatened extinction provoked in each of them the deepest resolve, for the victory of Love over Death, Tim Magrath and Philip Griffin plotted into the afternoon how they would slow down the cancer. The first thing to find out was the size and age and speed of the enemy. Philip needed tests. The earliest available appointment with Carthy, the specialist, was two and a half months later, February 1.

“By then you could be dead,” Tim told him.

“I could,” Philip agreed.

They sat on the moment and felt the November light dying behind them. Cars were moving outside with the illusion of progress, but the clock was almost standing still. February seemed several years away, and the fear of the winter ahead crept in their skin like age. The weathers of wind and rain, of chill, frost, and hail, blew in imagination at the backs of the old men’s necks as they sat wondering how they would outwit Time. The stilled air was grey between them, and they held their hands between their knees and their heads bowed while the icy weight of the word “winter” lodged on their spirits like a sentence.

Then Tim Magrath spoke.

“Fall down,” he said. “Go on, fall down, cry out.”

There was a half-second, a moment it took for the complicity to register, and then, as if his seat had suddenly been thickly oiled, Philip Griffin slid down onto the carpet at the doctor’s feet. His first cry was smaller than a bird’s.

“Louder,” the doctor whispered over him. “Scream it out, and keep doing it until you are in a hospital bed.”

Philip opened his mouth wide and screamed. He astonished himself with his own sound, and looked into the space in front of him as if he could see the twisted shape of agony. He looked at the doctor standing over him and saw the urgency in the other man’s eyes, the need he had to make this medicine work and see the patient carried out of his surgery to hospital; he saw it and he screamed on, raising and lowering the cries as Tim Magrath rushed out to his receptionist and ordered an ambulance, turning on his side and crying out the long cry that drained him like a sewer of the gathered and broken debris of his life, crying for himself, for the miseries and disappointments of his own childhood, the terrible fearfulness of the world that grew inside him, the timidity he had carried until the moment he met Anne Nolan and she blew it from him like a cobweb, the loss, the inestimable loss that was born out of knowing that he had missed so many opportunities to express love while his wife and daughter were alive, the death of loveliness, and the wounded bafflement of his son, for all of it Philip Griffin screamed on the floor, until he was howling out of an emptiness and grief that constituted a pain more real than the pain of cancer.

He cried out and wept until the sorrow exhausted him and he was lying in a hospital bed with a white sheet tucked tightly like a bandage across his chest. He had been given something for pain, he was told, and lay there in the soft pillowy mountains and valleys of his half-consciousness, waiting to be investigated. When he saw the doctor coming, it was as if from a very long distance, and his white coat shone like the illumined raiment of an angel.

3

Stephen drove west with Vivaldi playing in his head and the face of Gabriella Castoldi lingering between him and the windscreen. He saw her more clearly than he saw the road, and only a small miracle brought him round the bend in Kinnegad. He did not know yet the dimensions of his own heart or that love developed like a geometric progression and could increase rapidly in the shortest of time, without seeing or hearing or touching the other person at all. Neither did he consider yet that his life was changed entirely now and that while the turbulence of emotions churned within him he could not return to the ordinary life of teaching. He imagined it was something which would subside. But still he saw her face. All across the country as he drove she was there before him. He saw the angle of her head as she turned to the violin, the sharpness of her elbow where it bent below the fingerboard, the taut contracted muscles of her shoulder when she bowed the sharp fierce notes of “Winter.” Crossing Westmeath he touched that shoulder with his mind and was surprised only that it did not stop the music in his head.

And all the time the progression was tumbling on, doubling, trebling in intensity within him as the car moved westward.

The west was a vast and soft wetness as he entered it. It was midday. The towns he drove through arose on the road after miles of greenery, their small clusters of Massgoers hastening along with newspapers over their heads against the drizzle, or standing in against the shop window and watching the strange car pass. There was a soft grey complacency everywhere, as if the people were resolute in being undisturbed and guarded a kind of holy faith in mute sufferance and the continuing ordinariness of their lives. They were towns scheduled for by-pass.

Stephen drove in a semi-trance. He did not turn on the radio but listened instead to the concert that was now inside him. He tried to think of history, of Italy in the time of Vivaldi, of the city-state of Venice and the boats in the lagoon, the long and troubled fable of the Doge, and the fragments he knew of Venetian wars, conspiracies, and betrayal. If he could think of the history, if he could turn the pages of time and find in himself the dust of the past, he could make it home; if he could refind the dry and ash-laden language of the dead, he could refind himself and escape the sweating in his palms on the steering wheel, the throbbing in the left side of his temple, and the ceaseless drying of his lips. He wet them a thousand times between Ballinasloe and Loughrea, and for all the dampness of the grey air outside, the wet face of the day that kept sticking to the windscreen and would not be wiped away, his lips dried in an instant and then stung as if kissed by nettles. He tried desperately to think of the history of Venice. What did he know of it? He shut tight his eyes to concentrate, and opened them to swerve the car back onto the road. Venice, Venice. He couldn’t remember. He slowed the car to thirty and held the wheel with his left hand, licking his lips and fingering with his right hand a place above his right eye, as if looking for the switch that would return the past and free him from thinking of the woman. He was two miles outside Loughrea. The mist was thickening into rain, and the car slowed until it was barely quicker than walking pace. The rain fell in a hush. Stephen let out a small cry and the car stopped altogether in the middle of the road.

There was a tremendous green quietness. When he rolled down the window he could hear the rain falling in the old grass of November. No bird was singing. He opened the window for air, but found none. Then he opened the driver’s door, lowering his head as if to vomit and seeing in the rainwater pattern of the tarred road the squiggled shape of his own journey to understanding. A life cannot go backward forever, and as he raised his head Stephen Griffin knew that he could not escape what had already happened.

“I can’t remember, I can’t remember the books,” he said. He said it without excitement or panic, said it matter-of-factly, as if cataloguing a comical loss that had already happened. He waited and wet his lips again. “What’s the name of the history book for fifth years’?”

A pause; then he answered: “I don’t know, can’t remember. Book for third years’?” he asked, and then began to laugh. He laughed until his shoulders were shaking.

The dimension of his defeat was enormous, as his father might have told him the previous evening studying the chess game. When something of great size moves into the heart, it dislodges all else, in just the same way that the forward movement of the queen reshapes the board. So, with the arrival of Gabriella Castoldi in his heart, Stephen Griffin had lost history, dates, facts and figures that he had built his life around and that now on the wet road to Gort slipped from his mind and vanished in the air. He knew nothing of history now.

It was an hour before he could drive on. Or at least so it seemed, for although no car came or went on the black wet ribbon of the tar, time might have stopped for love. When Stephen drove on into Gort and across into Clare, he carried in the cage of his chest the ease of accepting love, and felt it lightly there like a white bird of promise and hope. It was the most ordinary thing, after all. It was the fulcrum of life, and if the years he had spent studying history had shown him that the world turned not on love but on hatred and greed, then this was the new unwritten history of the marvellous, of which he himself could be the author. The bird fluttered around the car as he drove; he was in love. It was all right. Love exists, he thought, and drove with his head out the window of the car, banishing for the time being the multiple improbabilities of courtship or requital, shaking the lank black strands of his hair in the rain and shouting a single long wavering vocable of hope as he sped on homeward to the sea.

When he arrived, the bird was still flying inside him. He parked the car and walked immediately round the back of the house and down the slope of the black rocks to the small shore. It was late afternoon. The tide was withdrawing towards the failing light on the horizon, and gulls blew up like newspaper over the fields’ edge. Stephen walked on the wet rocks, and for the first time in his life did not study his footsteps but moved with the sure inviolability of the lover, briefly certain that the world would not trip him. With the tide out he could walk all the way around the rocky edge and arrive on the long beach of Spanish Point. The sand when he stepped onto it was clean of footprints. The winter tide had erased the past, and Stephen Griffin, walking in a long coat, his face wet with rain and sea spray, was the first and only of a new tribe. He set off down the extravagant beach, where the roaring of the Atlantic was a ceaseless accompaniment and even the soft plashing of his shoes on the shallow pools raised no sound. The sea was majestic in its tumbling and crashing, the size, the energy of it. Stephen imagined he had never seen it before and walked with his head turned sideways, bursting out laughing at the riotous boisterousness as the white surf was combed and ebbed in the froth of fulfillment. Rain ran down his face. He drank the saltiness on his lips and skipped two steps, not quite dancing, but moving in a growing giddiness along the sand beneath the enormous sky.

“I’m in love,” he said. But the wind took his voice away.

“I’m in love with that woman,” he called out louder, feeling the terrible release of the words like a pain that was part of healing. “I’m in love with her!” he cried again, only then discovering that the emotion was such that it would gather constantly inside him and hurt like an ulcer until he cured it with confessions.

He had reached the far end of the beach when the rain stopped. Evening was drawing swiftly across the sky, and the seabirds had vanished inland. In half an hour it would be darker than ink; already the line of the rocks was smudged into the sea and sky, and Stephen would have to walk home around by the road. But he did not. He felt the bird flying in his chest and the dazzlement of love making him lighter and brighter than nightfall. For the first time in his life he felt the radiance of a pure and visionary faith. He was bright with enlightenment. It felt like a reckless surge of invincibility. He opened his coat and took it off. Then he pushed off his shoes. Soon he was standing in his underpants in the dark on the beach at Spanish Point, with the wind blowing off the sea cold against his skin. He walked forward into the frozen waves.

4

When the young Dr. Hadja Bannerje sat on the edge of the bed and told Philip Griffin that he had advanced cancer in his left lung and that the disease had spread into his bone marrow, the tailor received the news with no surprise and simply leaned forward to ask how long.

“How long have I to live, Doctor?”

The Indian was unsure Philip had understood.

“It is widespread,” he said. “It is growing all the time.”

“How long? Tell me.”

“We can’t tell the time precisely. It is not exact.” He paused; the patient was waiting for more. “There is no science, Mr. Griffin, for the passing of a spirit.”

“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

Dr. Bannerje looked at the old man and saw the watery signs of illness in his eyes.

“We’ll do more tests,” he said. “You can consider radiation, but in your case …”

“Will I have six months?”

“You must have terrible pain. There are many with less than your condition who are dead.”

“Will I have six months?”

The young Indian did not answer at once. He was twenty-nine years old and had come to Dublin from Bombay. The second son, he was the one chosen to be the doctor, while his brother had taken over the small family shop. He had a stillness like white linen folded inside him. But when he heard in the man’s tone the desperate beseeching for life, Hadja Bannerje felt the grief rumple him like an illness of the stomach and acknowledged in himself the awfulness of reaching this place at the end of medicine. This, he thought, is beyond the last page of all the books I have studied. This is a place further than prescription.

And yet it was familiar to him. His dark eyes turned to the thin curtain about the bed, and for a moment he was not seeing it. He was a twelve-year-old boy seeing his mother when she was dying in the small bed in the back room with the candles lit beside her. His father had moved out into the tiny bedroom of his sons and transformed what had once been the untidy room of his marriage into the ordered and serene place of the dying. The old man had carried lotus and jasmine from the market in his arms and filled bowls, jugs, and vases about the room so that the scent in the air was more heavy and beautiful than sorrow. He had told Hadja death was coming, and the young boy had sat by the bedside waiting for it daily. His mother had lost speech, but lay in the bed weeping and moaning continuously until the medication daily slipped her through the door of oblivion and settled a small peace. When she awoke, two hours before she was allowed the next injection of the morphine, she opened her eyes to see Hadja sitting there and began weeping at once. She could move her hands only in hopeless wavering gestures that fell away from what they reached. Within minutes of her waking, the pain would burn through her again, and she would cry and groan with it. He had thought she was trying to tell him something, and time and again leaned down to moisten her dry and flaked lips and place his ear next to her mouth. But the message never came, she could make no words. Day after day she lingered in that place between living and dying. His father threw out the flowers onto a growing heap in the back yard and brought new ones, sitting through the night in that room where the pain kept coming back and death did not arrive. He held her hand as he would a child’s crossing the road, but no crossing happened, only the agony inside her and the cries they could not cure. She endured for five weeks and two days, and in that time Hadja, who had already been nominated a future doctor by his father and his teacher, sat beside her bed and understood in her eyes that the beseeching was not for death but for life. She could not let go despite the pain, and the waves of it that rode her body could not wash away that final resolve to cling. His father had thought there was something she wanted to say to them, and had assembled the two boys, an aunt, and two uncles by her bedside. The heat outside fell on Bombay like hell’s blanket, and the little group stood around the dying woman waiting. Hadja’s father held a copybook and pencil to note down the slightest sounds that might have been curled-up words. But there was only moaning and the human evidence of anguish. Sweat dripped off them, and the perfume of the flowers made their heads swim. She might be trying to say goodbye to us, his father had said. But Hadja knew it was not that, and when, after elaborate and suggestive goodbyes, the aunt and uncles had gone, he stayed by the bedside and watched his mother’s milky eyes flash with the desperate longing for him to help her. She did not want to die, and threw her head backward and forward on the feather pillow, crying out in terror when she saw the spirits in the room waiting to take her.

Dr. Hadja Bannerje remembered his mother in the thin white curtain about the hospital bed, and then turned to Philip Griffin.

“We have no science to say how long,” he said. “We die when we die, Mr. Griffin. We treat the body, not the spirit, but sometimes it is the spirit that is sick. No medicine for the body cures the spirit.” He paused and looked at the tailor, who was leaning forward in the bed as if for some hope in the doctor’s tone, which was soft as the word “India.”

“This is not what Mr. Higgins, the oncologist, will say to you. It is my own foolishness perhaps, and you will forgive me for saying it. But there is nothing here for you. Mr. Higgins will say you will die when the disease shuts down the vital organs.”

“Soon?” Philip wet his lips. “Tell me.”

The Indian nodded. “Mr. Higgins will say so,” he said.

Philip Griffin slipped back into the clutch of the blankets. He felt suddenly more ill than he had ever felt in his life, and imagined he could see each of his vital organs struggling under the duress of the cancer. His heart seemed to be racing, his breath was shallow, as if all the air of the world were swiftly being sucked away from him.

Dr. Bannerje watched the news age the patient. “Is there somebody I can call for you?” he said.

“No. No, thank you.”

“I will come back and talk to you again,” said Hadja Bannerje, turning slowly to draw back the white curtain from around the bed and walk out of the ward, the weight of failure on his slim shoulders and the smell of smoke about him as he saw his father on the evening of his mother’s death setting fire to the great mound of dead flowers in the back yard in Bombay, the glitter of the stars, and the ashes of love spiralling upward and then falling and alighting in his hair.

After the doctor had gone, Philip Griffin lay in the thin air left to him at the edge of the world. The illness was increasing so rapidly, he imagined, that he could be dead by evening. Already he felt the cotton of his pyjamas loosening from the wastage of his body and feared that when he stood to go to the bathroom he would have to grab a handful of the material at his waist. He looked across the ward at two other men who were sleeping like corpses in the deep dream of their medication. Oh God, he thought, he will be destroyed if I die now. I can’t die now.

He turned to his side and wept into the pillow. He smelled the smell of hospitals, in which there was no season or life, and was stricken with a new terror that he might never leave the ward again. In the big window a thin rain was blurring the view of Dublin like an overwashed water-colour, and sharp short gusts of wind blew, weakening the resolve of the sick to get better and be outside. But not Philip Griffin: I have to stop it, just delay it. Oh, please, God. If I die on him now I’ll have done nothing but bring him grief all his life.

Where no one could see him, and while he was turned on his side towards the gloom of the November afternoon, he raised his right hand slowly to his forehead and blessed himself. He did not know if he believed that God could help, for He had not helped Anne or Mary.

Still, he prayed. He said the Our Father five times. Then, in the beginning of the sixth, he stopped. The pain was sharp in his chest and he clutched himself.

“Shaggit!”

He waited a moment. In his mind he saw the cancer moving like a shadow into a new, still healthy corner of his organs. The room darkened. The sky outside fell like the sea in thickened grey waves, as if the world was spinning upside down and the air was flooded and the light was lost. It was like night in daytime.

I don’t know if you are there, Philip Griffin said in a silent voice. I don’t know if you can hear me. But please let me live for another while. For my son.

He paused and hugged himself against the pain. Then added: If you let me live, I will try and do …

He couldn’t find the word.

I will try and do some … some act of goodness each day.

Philip Griffin waited, but nothing happened. The pain continued like a fierce storm that November afternoon, pain like rain, falling like a cold monsoon on the head of Dr. Hadja Bannerje in the car park of St. Vincent’s, where he missed his mother and promised himself to return to his father in Bombay at the end of his final residency, pain falling out of the grey heavens in a deluge of despondency and loss, until at last Nurse Grainne Mangan came into the ward and turned on all the lights, and Philip Griffin did not tell her to turn them off.

5

The icy grip of the Atlantic cracked Stephen like thin glass, and his cries flew as shards into the air. He was breathless as the dead and saw the night sky disappear into the foam of a wave passing over him. Underwater he was borne towards the shore, and at last stood up in the rolling tumble of the tide and screamed. He screamed as evidence of his own durability, trying to outcry the noise of the waves and to free his jaw from the frozen fingers of death. His hands shook wildly, and then, as the wind caught him, his knees did the same, convulsing him in tremors until he was a blurry out-of-focus figure on the sand and had to kneel down and put his hands out like a man trying to hold on to the spinning of the world.

It was an hour before he had dressed himself, drawing the clothes over his wet and sand-stuck body, and walking gingerly up from the sea onto the roadside like a new arrival on the planet. When he reached home he sat and played the Vivaldi disc, this time not resisting the image of the woman playing the violin, and wondering only how he was going to see her again.

The following morning Stephen went to school and made an appointment with Carol Blake, the secretary, to see the principal at the end of the day. At once Carol noticed a difference in him, and from the magazines in which she read widely was able to interpret all aspects of men’s motives and behaviour.

“Something up with him all right,” she told Eileen Waters later during their tea break.

“Really?”

“Oh yes,” said Carol, dunking her biscuit. “I’d say he’s in love.”

“Mr. Griffin? I hardly think so. With whom, for goodness’ sake?” asked Mrs. Waters, relishing the unexpected foray into the wildly improbable.

“Some man, I’d say.”

This news hit Mrs. Waters like two fists in the generosity of her stomach.

“A man?” she said.

“You can tell,” said Carol Blake. “I can tell, anyway.”

“Oh God.”

Eileen Waters leaned against her desk. News reports of sexual scandal and abuse in schools mottled in her mind, and she was suddenly stricken with visions of infamy. She took to her office. She could not sit down, she paced about, she plucked up her ruler like rectitude, and was still in a state hours later, when Carol Blake knocked on the door and introduced the figure of Mr. Griffin. The principal turned on him like a gunship and saw at once the confirming evidence of her own fantasy.

“Thank you, Carol,” she said. “Close the door.”

From the delicate manner of Stephen’s sitting it was apparent to Eileen Waters that Carol Blake was correct, and how she had not seen it before she did not know. In the moments before she spoke she chastened her own judgement severely and made a minute shaking of her head at how devious the world had become. Then she pursed her lips at the teacher and narrowed her green eyes to say:

“You have a problem, Mr. Griffin?”

“I want to take some personal time,” he said. His fingers were touching the desk, and his eyes were moving to the window.

Mrs. Waters moved her ruler forward an inch with both hands, tapping the two ends of it with her forefingers for the small comfort of something solid in the world. She felt her anger reddening beneath her makeup.

“I realize it’s inconvenient.”

“Yes, it is,” she spat out.

“I’m sorry.”

Righteousness lodged like a boiled sweet in her throat, and she coughed it forward, letting go of the ruler on the desk and seeing her right hand fly up before her.

“We are teachers. We are moral leaders in the community, Mr. Griffin. We have to think of the consequences of our actions. We can’t simply behave the way everyone else does. I hope that’s not what you think, because that’s not what I want, that’s not what I expect.” She paused and reloaded, drawing air through her nostrils, and was delivering what she hoped was the full broadside of her gaze when Stephen said:

“It’s because of my father. He’s dying.”

There was a stunned moment, a flattened instant of time during which the mind of Eileen Waters faltered and fell through the gape of her mouth onto the desk in front of her. There was a soft plop just barely audible to Carol Blake listening at the door outside, and then nothing. The principal could not speak, the top button of her blouse was too tight. She was looking down at her desk, which was swimming like wreckage on the watery uncertainty of the moment. She opened her small lips and tried to smile.

“I’m very sorry,” she whispered, and held on to the desk with her right hand. She was still grasping it a moment later when Stephen stood and left, walking out of the office and down the cool emptiness of the school’s corridors, an inch taller than he was before, the line of his trousers falling perfectly, not rumpled, and the slap of his shoes crisp with resolve.

6

An hour after school, in the falling darkness, Stephen called at the front door of Moira Fitzgibbon’s house. A small girl of about eight opened the door five inches and looked at him. When he asked for her mother, the girl stood motionless, as if she was looking at some strange colour radiating about the visitor. Then Moira Fitzgibbon was standing behind her, opening the door.

How one person’s life touches upon the edge of another’s and moves it like a wheel was a small mystery Moira had learned to accept since first hearing the story of Moses Mooney and his dream of a concert hall. So when Stephen Griffin appeared at her doorstep she sensed the role she was to play before she knew it and was not surprised when he asked her, please, to help him. Her husband was in the sitting room watching television. Cait, her daughter, was still standing in the hallway, gazing past her at the stranger, and Ciara was in the kitchen sprawled over the careful homework of six-year-olds. Like a set bomb, there would be ten seconds before one of them would call her, and so Moira did not invite Stephen in. She stepped forward and drew the door nearly closed behind her.

“I want to know where I can find her,” Stephen said. “The woman who played the violin. Gabriella Castoldi, her name is.”

“Who’s there, Cait? Who’s at the door?” Tom Fitzgibbon was calling from the sitting room. Cait’s face was pressed like a mask against the opaque glass of the door. “A man, Daddy,” she shouted.

Already Tom Fitzgibbon was rising in his chair.

“I don’t know,” Moira whispered quickly. “I don’t know where she is. I’ll …”

Her husband’s hand was on the door lock.

“I’ll try and find out,” she said and, motioning Stephen backward with her head, added in a louder voice, “Thank you now, goodbye,” before turning back to meet her husband coming out the door. “Some business of the Development Association,” she said, and went back inside.

At ten o’clock that evening Stephen was sitting in the front room of his house awaiting the inevitability of fate. When he saw the headlights move in an arc across the far wall, he did not need to turn around and look out the window, but knew that it was Moira Fitzgibbon and that the plot of his life was moving now in swift grand strokes that made little of great difficulty and certainty out of the improbable. He opened the front door as she was about to knock. The wind shouldered past him like a sea lord and banged the doors of the two rooms.

“I won’t come in,” Moira said. Her words were blowing back into the town along the road where Moses Mooney was listening for them. The car’s engine was running, and its lights had been left on as if to illumine the murky turning of the plot and make clear the way ahead, for Moira Fitzgibbon was not sure why she had come, why the intensely burning figure of the man at her door had moved her so, or what it was in the disconsolate beseeching of his eyes that made her slip upstairs to her bedroom and go through the letters and papers she had until she found a mention of Gabriella Castoldi playing a residency in a hotel in Kenmare; she did not know why, other than that it was the response of her heart, which, like the purest of souls, felt the grief of another like the grief of herself, and by healing it could heal the world.

“I won’t come in,” she called again into the wind, for the door was still held wide open and the weather was running through the house like a party of drunken ghosts. “I found something,” she said. “Maybe she’s not there now, I don’t know.”

“Where?”

She held up a pamphlet that the wind-ghosts almost took.

“Kenmare,” she said, “in Kerry. She plays there. Or did, anyway.”

The teacher took the paper and looked at her. “Thank you,” he said.

She looked at him, and then could not look at him, as if his vulnerability and innocence in dreaming of love were a sweetness so easily shattered that she dared not imagine it for long. “I have to go, Mr. Griffin,” she said.

He reached to touch her shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said.

And she was gone.

Stephen brought the piece of paper inside. He sat where the wind had been sitting in the low chair by the fireless chimney and greedily read the words until he found her name. Gabriella Castoldi. What it was to read her name. What it felt like to see the figuration in print and allow himself to imagine her now in the small gatherings of those letters. He touched them, traced them, he sounded the name slowly, Gabriella, and then quickly, calling it softly at first and then getting up and walking through each room and calling it, Gabriella, as if summoning her there at the very moment that she was just leaving each room, as if her name was the first part of her that he could claim in the privacy of that house by the sea and the saying of it was a kind of company that admitted without rejection his outrageous declaring of love. Gabriella.

He read aloud: “Gabriella Castoldi was a member of the Orchestra de la Teatro de la Fenice in Venice until recently moving to Kenmare in County Kerry. She frequently performs in evenings of chamber music at The Falls Hotel.”

He read it and felt lighter, imagining the hotel and the evenings of chamber music deep in Kerry. He took the piece of paper to his bedroom and lay down. He did not undress; he put his hands behind his great head and said Gabriella Castoldi, like a whisper to the wind. He said it like a message. He said it like a signal and a code, as if the sounding of the words might reach her wherever she was and that she might stop and turn her neck to the side, as if with the violin, and hear in the night air the soft beating of wings that was the incipient approach of his spirit. Gabriella. He said it over and over, clinging to it like the almost drowned, so that even Mick Clancy, his neighbour across the fields, heard it in mutated form in his dream and awoke to tell his wife, Nora, that the Angel Gabriel had announced something in Italian in his head.

7

The following morning Stephen drove the yellow car onto the flat-bottomed Killimer ferry to cross the river to Kerry. The old boat tugged at the grey sleeve of the Shannon. Stephen got out of his car and climbed up onto the viewing deck. Seabirds swung in the air overhead. As if by a conjuror’s trick, Kerry in front looked no different from Clare behind. As if the ferry was forever to cross between two reflections, neither of them as frighteningly real as the places of the homeless and murdered on the radio. Green fields sloped sleepily to the grey river. It was late November. There were no tourists on the ferry, only a milk tanker and the washed cars of a couple of salesmen who were talking on telephones in the middle of the river. The crossing took thirty minutes, but seemed longer. Away from school, Stephen felt the slow energy of the countryside seeping into him like a potion. There was a gentle easiness, an unhurried ordinariness in the waving of the ferryman as he directed the cars off on the other side. Even the little line of their traffic moved into Kerry with the slow grace of wanderers, not business people. In the small town of Tarbert women were stopped and talking. A butcher stood at his doorway. Stephen slowed down. He had awoken that morning with the urgency of arriving in Kenmare, but now, when he had moved beyond the habitual perimeters of his own life, he felt the wonderful ordinariness of the market towns he drove through: the shopping and talking, the women who slipped like breezes from the church after weekday Mass, the buying of carrots from parked vans, the saluting of friends, nods and laughter, gossip, deals, and the talk of funerals that moved the world along. By the time he had driven fifty miles into Kerry, Stephen Griffin had begun to learn the small history of life, the unchronicled plain fable of the everyday in which until that morning he had not taken part.

When he stopped the car for petrol at a small station on the side of the road, a short man in a suit and hat came out to serve him. He was sixty years old, and the absence of any teeth gave his smile the air of a deflated football.

“Lovely weather,” he mouthed, taking the pump.

Stephen looked up; it was not raining, but the sky was broken.

“Oh, it’s coming,” said the man, and moistened his sunken lips at the prospect. “Nice as summer this week coming.”

“I see.”

“Not yet you don’t, but you will.” He paused and grinned a gaping toothlessness at the sky. “I’m not wrong,” he added cheerfully. “You’ll be coming back this way?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Well. I mean, yes, I will.”

“You stop in and tell me if I wasn’t right. Lovely weather.” He turned his head at a slight angle to himself as if hearing an inaudible broadcast, and then resumed pumping the petrol.

The petrol gagged at the tank, and the old man stopped and hung up the pump.

“I’m Martin O’Sullivan. You never heard of me, I suppose?”

Stephen said nothing. The man smiled at the vastness of the world and the decreasing smallness of himself in it.

“No,” he said, “you did not.” And he left it at that, taking the fifteen pounds for the petrol and adding nothing of his own story, the fading fable of how once he had held the world record for holding his breath and imagined that the vast populations of everywhere admired him for it.

He waved off the car and watched it go into Killarney and the mountains. Then he walked back to the small seat inside the door of the shop, to watch the world becoming smaller and the wonderful weather arriving in the sky.

It was late afternoon by the time Stephen drove the winding road out of Killarney past the lakes and into the mountains. Here was a road with no shop or houses, a rising thread of grey through the thickening greenery and the rock. Streams ran across the roadway and fell farther towards the mirrors of the lakes below. It was a road in fairyland. A timeless way out of the pages of children’s tales. It wound like a spell, climbing all the time through a green hush that was older than Aesop. That November afternoon there were no cars ahead of Stephen or behind him. He was driving so slowly that arrival seemed to move ahead of him uncertainly. He rolled down the window and felt the cool air like a damp lusciousness enter the car. It was as if he were moving barefoot in deep undergrowth, and the smell of pine had cleared his mind to a serene vision of Gabriella playing the violin. He did not know that he was driving now in the places where she had walked, or that sometimes she had played the violin high among the trees on the sides of those mountains. He did not know it, but heard nonetheless in the thin purity of the air the notes that she had left.

In that verdant and ancient loveliness the yellow car crawled on, moving through a place where it was less difficult to believe there was a spirit that loved the world.

At half past four in the afternoon Stephen arrived in Kenmare. He drove down off the mountains with a falling mist closing in behind him. By the time he arrived at the top corner of the triangular town, the mountains themselves had disappeared, like the toys of God. Drifts of soft drizzle moved in the air, dampened the pink faces of the townspeople, and made their radios crackle. He had no idea exactly where to go. He walked along the footpath, past the shops, his heart fluttering with the bird within him. He tried to amble, to walk with pretend interest along the street, while all the time anxiety roiled his stomach. It was only when he was already out of the car and walking in Kenmare that the possibility of meeting Gabriella on the street dawned on him. He stopped and tried to swallow the sharp pieces of his panic; he thought of retreating, acting a small pantomime of forgetting something and urgently running back along the path. Having driven a hundred miles, he was suddenly terrified to meet her. What if she was there in front of him, walking her shopping home? An appalling sense of the outlandishness of it froze him to the ground; of seeing a woman play a violin and then dropping everything, abandoning a life and driving off like a latter-day Lancelot into the mountains to see her again. He had a surging sense of the absurd anachronism of romance, of its implausible and obsolete currency in the world, as though it belonged to ancient history and, along with words like Valour and Honour and Truth, was credible only in fables. His black hair fell down in front of his eyes as he studied around his feet the running rain stains that looked like maps of lost countries. He stood there in his thick coat and told himself again that he was not there to speak with her, that he had come because he wanted to hear her play again, because he wanted to watch her, and in that watching was a kind of healing he could not explain. He reasoned it in a slow argument like a practising solicitor and tried to climb the specious rungs of logic until it did not seem absurd.

He was standing, arguing the case of himself, when Nelly Grant saw him from the vegetable market across the street. When he moved off the wet space he had been standing in and walked down the path again, she saw the strange hesitation in his manner, the way he shuffled along half-turned from the people coming against him, and was at once suspicious of his contorted energy.

A man like that, she thought, needs plums.

It was another twenty minutes before he arrived back up the other side of the street to her shop. Later, Stephen would tell himself that he had stepped in the door because it was open and not because he wanted fruit. But the moment he appeared before her Nelly Grant already recognized in the twisted shambles of his body the jangling and unaccommodated condition of his spirit. All his organs are in deep stress, she thought, and smiled at him as he fingered an apple on the side of the stack.

“Quiet time of year for a visit,” she said across to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“Taking a small holiday? It’s a good time for it. Kenmare is too busy now in the summers. Though I shouldn’t be complaining, should I? But it’s nice and quiet now. You’ll get a nice few days if the mist lifts. Which it will too, I’d say.” She paused and looked at him. “Try a few plums,” she suggested lightly, and raised her eyebrows with her voice as if approaching a delicate bridge between them. “Try one, they’re lovely. Taste of autumn in them.”

And he did. He bit the plum, and lifted his head for the first time as the juice ran down his chin.

It’s worse still, thought Nelly Grant when she saw the egg-yolk hue of his tongue and the lifeless colour of his teeth. She had to turn for a moment to the shelf behind the counter where she kept the vitamin and mineral supplements. She moved two jars of A and E and recalled it was Tuesday last since she had checked her own tongue for the pinkness of her life force.

“I need …”

“Yes?” She turned, like luck.

Stephen scratched his forehead, and small skin cells flaked falling in the shop light. He looked to the right in a loop of hesitation, but Nelly Grant came forward and with her the affirming scent of cinnamon oil that was burning in pottery by the register.

The loop unknotted.

“I need someplace to stay.”

“Oh yes,” said Nelly. “Well, there’s still a few places that stay open all year round. I have a card here for …” She turned to the crowded noticeboard behind her, but stopped when the man behind her spoke.

“There’s a hotel here,” he said. His voice was skipping like a record and he had to swallow hard before he added quickly, “It’s called … The Falls, The Falls Hotel.”

“That’s right.” Nelly Grant turned and looked at him, detecting only now the burden of secrecy he carried.

“I don’t want to go there. Not stay there. I mean I just — It’s not far, is it?”

“Oh no. It’s just up the street,” she said.

“Right. That’s fine. Thank you. There’s em …” Stephen felt his transparency like a face blemish and half-turned towards the door while Nelly Grant blew the scent of the cinnamon softly forward once more. “There is, there are … em … concerts there sometimes?”

“Oh, there are,” she said.

“Good. Good.” He nodded and drew breath like the drowning, and it was a few moments before he realized that he was standing at a shop counter but had nothing to buy.

“Do you want this, it’s Mary White’s place. Very nice and comfortable,” said Nelly Grant, holding out the card. “It’s not far from the hotel,” she added, already a half-conspirator in the plot of his loving.

Stephen took the card and thanked her, then tried to repay the graciousness of the woman by going over to the nearest stall and taking a bag of apples. Then a bag of oranges. Then a clutch of green bananas.

My God, thought Nelly as she watched him, he has hardly ever bought fruit. Plums, she knew, were the fruit for him, and she tried to guide his body towards them with the energy of her mind. This man has no balance, and plums are the fruit of balance; the softness of the flesh to the solidity of the stone hints at it, the perfect proportion of the stone to the fruit tells it even more clearly. Peaches work in the same way for people of southern climates, but it is plums, thought Nelly Grant, that balance the Irish. Pick a plum. Pick a plum.

She let the suggestion flow like a current to the back of Stephen’s head. But his body and spirit were too out of balance to receive it, she decided, and so said, “I have a special on those plums this week.”

“Oh yes, thank you,” said Stephen, jostling the bags of apples and oranges against his chest, holding the bananas down with his chin, and reaching toward the basket of plums. Nelly came forward. When she moved across the small shop the oils that scented her body followed her through the air. She was able to fill the space like a large sound.

“I’ll take these,” she said, and unloaded the fruit bags and bananas, standing briefly next to the stranger so that the wholeness of her energy and the scent of lavender might soothe his embarrassment. He was the most awkward man she had ever seen, but that very awkwardness was attractive, too, for it broadcast an intensity of feeling. She watched him gather three more plums, and then the two of them moved back to the register. As if she would not allow him to buy them, Nelly put the other fruits to one side. She did not weigh the plums, but charged him two pounds.

Hurriedly Stephen reached inside his coat for coins. Even that, Nelly thought, reveals him.

“And the … em …” He looked over at where she had left the apples and oranges.

“These are very good,” she said, ignoring his gesture, looking directly at him with the green compassion of her eyes and patting softly with her right hand the bag of plums.

“Oh yes, I’m sure,” he said. “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.” He nodded quickly, as if to an allegro, and then turned towards the door.

“Come back again,” Nelly Grant said. “All my customers come back.”

“Yes; yes, I will.” He stopped at the door as if he had suddenly remembered something important to say to her. He turned. She was looking at him.

“Em …”

Then he sighed, nodded, and was gone.

8

Stephen stayed that night at the small clean guest house of Mary White, a woman of fifty-nine who had buried her husband and lost her children to the invisible places where only telephones reached them. She was a slender woman with fine white curls and thin legs who, since losing her left breast, had become a close friend of Nelly Grant’s and believed without hesitation it was she who had helped her recover in the world. When she saw the man arriving at the front door with the bag of plums, she knew where he had come from and brought him forward into the yellow bedroom that had once belonged to her eldest daughter. Then she went and made him tea, calling him from the room with a gentleness he felt like a mother’s hand.

“Perhaps you’d like me to wash the plums?” she asked as he sat down in the living room, where the extraordinary green beauty of her back garden rose before the window.

“Or just tea,” she added, “and some biscuits.” Then she left him alone there and went to warm fresh towels for his room. Mary White was a slight woman, but knew the enormous goodness of giving comfort. That it might be given to her, that she might deserve or need it, did not enter her mind. She warmed the towels, turned on the oven, and baked fresh scones and brown bread for her visitor out of that simple and immeasurable force of goodness that moved within her. When he finished his tea she brought him more, and asked him to tell her if there was anything he needed to feel comfortable.

That evening the mist came down into the streets of the town. A damp clothlike darkness fell, and when Stephen slipped out of the house within it he could smell the pine trees in the mountains. He walked to the hotel, feigning casualness and calm. His forehead shone beneath the yellow streetlights, and the moisture of the night glittered on his hair like a crown. By the time he had arrived at the wide gateway and the illumined sign welcoming visitors, he was breathing so shallowly the thin air of both fear and desire that he might have fallen down there on the pathway. He balled his fists inside his coat pockets, as if squeezing the life of his own timidity, and then headed up into the bright lights of the hotel. The stone steps were red-carpeted. A round-faced man in a black uniform and cap nodded to him as he entered and stood in the timbered hallway where a wood fire was burning. Stephen didn’t know where to go. He had planned on getting to the hotel to see Gabriella play the violin, but now that he was standing inside the door, he felt lost. He ran his hand up over his forehead and hair, and then had to hide it momentarily in the collar of his jacket, until the drench of white sweat disappeared. The porter stepped over.

“Evening, sir.”

The man had a way of making the greeting seem like a question, a way of looking with round brown eyes that declared he had seen the world in all its guises come through the doors of this hotel and now knew intimately, intimately, sir, the myriad vagaries of the visitor in Kerry. He knew Stephen did not belong there. Or so Stephen imagined, holding like a lip-tremble the impulse to hurry back out the door.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Stephen held his lower lip between his teeth.

“Sir?”

“For the em, for the music. I em was hoping to hear some music. Played.”

Maurice Harty studied him like a new text, reading in him the plot of a simple mystery novel and noting the clues with a small satisfaction. “What music would that be, sir?”

“Here. I thought there was — a concert, of violin and …” Stephen looked away down the hallway towards a large lounge. Maurice Harty touched his arm and was startled to feel its thinness.

“That would be Friday or Saturday night, sir,” he said, and watched Stephen Griffin’s spirit fall like a shadow.

“Friday?” It was a breathy sigh. As if the swimmer had closed his eyes and made a hundred strokes, only to open them and see the shoreline had receded even farther.

“Or Saturday, sir.”

Stephen did not move, he floated there on the harsh awareness that he was encumbered with some invisible baggage of misfortune which guaranteed the unease of his passage.

“You’re not a guest in the hotel, sir?” Maurice Harty thought the visitor might faint. “There’s tea served in the lounge if you’d care for it.”

But Stephen did not move or answer. He only nodded his head slowly, watching a place on the carpet, waiting, swallowing the bitterness, and then taking the decision not to be defeated, not to see as failure the dreamlike journey across the Shannon and through the mountains to see the woman who was not there, not to suppose these were signs or messages and that he should abandon everything and return to Clare. When he lifted his head and thanked Maurice Harty, he had regained some balance and, assuring the porter that he would return to hear the music on Friday, he walked out and down the steps of the hotel into the moist blackness of the night, returning to the yellow bedroom in the guesthouse of Mary White, to lie in his clothes on top of the blankets and eat slowly, one after the other, the dark and delicious fruit of the plums.

9

When Philip Griffin returned home from the hospital he wore the cancer like a suit of clothes two inches too tight in all measurements. His life was constricting about him, and although he played Puccini and left the lights burn through the night, he could not escape the feeling of things closing about him. He had three bottles of tablets, but only the white ones were painkillers. These he took three times a day, imagining them as timber ramparts against an advancing army of iron. Since he had been in the hospital the pain had increased enormously. Often when he was tailoring he had heard stories of men and women being opened in surgery and the doctors seeing the cancer almost growing in the exposure of the air and quickly stitching the patient closed again. Air makes it multiply was the given wisdom among the middle-aged men standing for their leg measurements, and Philip Griffin had believed them, taking the strange apposition of air and death as another of the mysteries of life and thinking on it no further. Until now. Now the pain that rode up his stomach into his heart seemed better for air, and he wondered if the ease of pain when he walked outside was in fact the approach of death.

Since he made the pact with God in the hospital, he had had little chance for good deeds. He had tried to do what the nurses told him, had eaten the mild-flavoured yogurt-like food that slid like wet paste in his throat, and not pressed the call button when Healy in the bed beside him stole his sleep by venting all night his repressed anger in urgent, snapping snores and bulbous farts. But Philip feared that this was not enough. It was when he was home again in the empty house behind the chestnut tree that he knew he must get under way a daily practice of goodness. What it might be, or how he might achieve it, he had no idea. Vaguely he supposed that it would be something to do with the people he would meet that he would see things in the course of an ordinary day, and that all that could be expected of him would be to react in as kind and generous a manner as he could.

On his third full day home he left the house in the afternoon with the painkiller still dissolving on his tongue and drove into the city centre. For the first time in years he did not drive the car with any impatience or haste, but motored instead through the begrimed streets like a Sunday driver in the pastoral quietude of a country lane. He waved like a mad uncle at passersby. He touched the brim of his hat at a mother and child on a pedestrian crossing, and allowed cars to pull out of side streets in front of him. While the painkiller made numb his inner organs, he smiled at Dublin and softly whistled “Dixie” when the car in front of him took the last space on Stephen’s Green. He wanted to park nowhere else, and so contented himself by driving around the green park repeatedly. When at last he found a space, it was the middle of the afternoon. Philip stepped out onto the path. Goodness, he thought. Acts of goodness. He moved along the path with pleasantness on his face. He prepared a kind of wordless greeting in his raised eyebrows and gave it continuously to the people coming against him, hoping that it was not misunderstood and that God was watching. When he had greeted a hundred Dubliners like this along the top of Stephen’s Green, he took their lack of acknowledgement as a judgement and headed down to the crush and hurry of Grafton Street with a growing awareness of how difficult goodness was going to be.

When he reached the traffic light at the top of the street, the wind pressed on his back and he had to hold on to his hat. In that instant the light changed and the people hurried across past him. He was left standing there, and felt the pulling away of life. He didn’t move, and the light changed again. It was a moment before another cluster of people gathered around him. He gave some of them small smiles and a parcel of nods, but they paid him — an odd little man holding his hat at the traffic lights — no attention. As the light changed once more, a woman with two young children was on the kerbside next to him. Philip Griffin offered a child his hand to cross the street, but the mother drew away the child at once and was gone.

Again he stood there and did not move. He watched the city, the city he was born in. He watched its grey relentless tide of forlorn faces, the figures of the windblown and harried, dispossessed of dreams, hastening along the street in the narrowness of shopping and getting home. He heard the noise of people and traffic and knew how each one was lost in the privacy of his own pursuit, not noticing one another. No hand reached out to touch him. The lights changed three times while he stood on the edge of Stephen’s Green. Courier cycles flew past. A taximan paused his cab and waved the old man to cross, but Philip Griffin declined. He was stilled on the point of an epiphany, and as the first spits of rain hit the crown of his head, he imagined that he saw only for the first time the vast monstrosity of selfishness and meanness that had become the world. Across the street he could read the headlines of the evening papers: TAKEAWAY KILLING. FATHER RAPIST. The city he was born in was now this, and Philip Griffin had to hold on to the traffic light for something solid.

It was raining heavily now, and darkness was descending rapidly into the afternoon.

Philip’s face was wet when he turned to walk back to his car, defeated. He had thought that if he walked into the centre of the city his footsteps would be guided to the person who was in need of his help. But nothing had happened. There was a woman sitting on the ground begging, not far from the top of Dawson Street. Another was across the way at the gates to the Green, and a child with a cardboard begging tray was beyond. What was he supposed to do? When he reached his car he had still not resolved it. He carried the load of his ungiven goodness like a burden of treasure. I am unused to people, he thought. I don’t have the faintest idea how to approach anyone. He leaned against the top of his car. It was cold, and city grime soiled his face.

Then, abruptly and without further thought, he took out his wallet, drew out all the notes that were inside it, and walked over to the park railings of Stephen’s Green.

He glanced around to see who was looking at him. But he needn’t have. Men and women passed without noticing, and Philip Griffin was able to take all the money he had, place it on the ground under the bushes inside the bottom of the railing, and walk away.

It is not much, he thought, but it is something. Let God direct whoever He wants to find it.

The following day he did the same thing. Only this time he chose a different railing.

That evening, while “O mio babbino caro” played loudly in the sitting room, Philip Griffin counted his money. He had been a prudent man. He had modest savings and investments, and lived his quiet life without show. The money he had saved had been put aside for a future that never arrived. Ultimately it would have been Stephen’s, but now he reasoned that the sale of the house would be enough. Besides, obscurely, it was all for Stephen, the given-away money being the acts of goodness which would buy Philip the time on earth to help Stephen through the breaking of his heart.

He calculated the figures in a jotter with his reading glasses halfway down his nose, poring over them into the night like God’s accountant, balancing the books of good deeds against the rest of his life. How many more weeks did he need, and how much per week, per day, did that require? His wife was beside him while he did the calculations, doing the figures as if budgeting the time and money for a holiday together.

They could be together in heaven in less than a year, he figured. “Is that all right, love?” he whispered in the lamplight. In a year Stephen would have survived and be returned to his ordinary life once more. In a year Philip could have given away all the money, arriving at a zero balance like a cleansed soul and hearing the trumpets coming to get him. He would be doing it for Stephen, doing it out of that most potent mixture of love and regret, as if he could now and here make recompense for the innumerable small failures of his fatherhood, the doomed and islanded silence in which he had left his son for so long, repairing in small measure the great gap that he had let grow between them.

Philip did not want to calculate the exact day, for he supposed that was a vanity and taking the control from God. It was enough, he thought, to know the rough time, and that when he had exhausted the wallet of goodness God Himself would not be long arriving to keep up His end of the pact. That night he went to sleep with the painkiller tasting like almonds in his mouth and the prospect of the year ahead brightened with visions of giving. He lay in the blankets and felt Christmas coming. He placed his hands on his stomach and sensed their heat travelling like a minor army to meet the cancer. He had named it Prendergast for the despised, low-sized, and sly figure of his first boss — a tailor at Clery’s who had routinely ripped out Philip Griffin’s stitches, saying butchers could do better, and had forced him to work long evenings on repairs when he should have been courting Anne Nolan. Prendergast was a bastard. But as the tablets took action he was masked and made invisible, erased until three o’clock in the morning, when he would come as fire in the old man’s insides and reawaken the world to the certainty of suffering and woe.

The following day Philip Griffin drove to his bank on Merrion Square and withdrew £5,000. When the teller heard the amount he hesitated and disappeared. An assistant arrived, and Philip Griffin was drawn down the counter and asked what he wanted the money for.

“To give away,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“To get rid of, to give away,” the old man said, “not that it’s your business. It’s my money”

“Yes, sir, only that …”

“What?” He shot the word so quickly and with such pointed indignation that the assistant manager withdrew. “I’ll get you a draft, sir,” he said.

“Cash. It must be cash.”

There was a flat, beaten moment between them.

“Five thousand pounds? In cash?”

“Correct.” The old tailor looked the other man directly in the eyes. How difficult is goodness, he thought, everything blocks it. And deep within him, Prendergast turned like a knife.

It was half an hour before he got the money. It lay neatly in a long envelope, and when he walked out the doors of the bank it conferred on Philip Griffin a sudden power of joy. He was exuberant with possibility. His small eyes flickered at the city, as if seeing everywhere now the chance to touch another’s life. And, in a moment of beatific vision as he passed a bus queue, he wondered if many others were not secretly engaged in doing the same.

This time he did not wait to get the car, but walked directly towards Stephen’s Green. It was, he had decided, the appropriate place, and would remind God of the reason for their pact, Stephen, Stephen’s green. He smiled to himself at the small joke, although in fact the banknotes were less green and more the colour of bruises.

As Philip neared the park once more, he reached inside the envelope and took a clutch of twenty-pound notes. He kept them in his hand and walked on. Sweat gathered in the brim of his hat and he felt his trouser catch at the back of his knee. Three hours had passed since he had taken his morning painkiller, and now he was emerging from it like from a tunnel into the bright searing of the pain. God, help me. The money was wet in his hand inside his pocket, the railings made him dizzy, and he had to stop and lean and wait for a small group of schoolchildren and their teacher to pass by. Then, once they had passed, he took £480 and quickly slipped it down onto the ground between the railings.

He had to hold on for breath. He could have changed his mind and reached in and withdrawn the money. But he did not. He knew that it could be taken by dogs, eaten by rats, or befouled in any number of ways, that it could be found by the avaricious or the mean-spirited, any number of the evil or selfish undeserving as easily as by the needy. But that did not matter to him. For he trusted in God, and knew that the puzzle of His ways is beyond us, and only vanity leads us ever to imagine that there is more than only the smallest corner of the jigsaw perceivable at any time. No, the money would go where it was to go, Philip reasoned. His job was only to drop it off there, like a deposit of good energy given back into the universe. He watched the winter sky as if light might suddenly break through the heavy blankets of the cloud. But nothing changed, and he walked on. The city of Dublin trundled past, and the small man in the felt hat was lost in the crowds.

(It was only later, when he was back in the sitting room, looking at the set-up chess game on the small table and listening to the music of Madama Butterfly with the painkiller blurry in his stomach that Philip Griffin could sigh and think of Stephen and wonder if the love affair was progressing now, if a father could touch his son on the other side of the country, if goodness travelled through the air like luck or love and could arrive unexpected and simple as a blue sky over Stephen’s head two hundred miles away in the west.)

10

During the night the mist withdrew like an artist’s drapery and in the morning revealed that the mountains had moved closer to Kenmare. It was a John Hinde postcard sky, a blue so intense that it seemed the unreal season of childhood memory. Summer had arrived in Kerry in time for Christmas, and while Stephen sat to the softly boiled egg Mary White had prepared for him, he heard birds singing in the garden. Mary came and went like moments of kindness. She brought him more toast, a fresh pot of tea, entering the room from where she sat for her own tea in the kitchen with the raised eyebrows and pursed mouth of gentle apology, moving around the guest in her own house with the air of being herself an unfortunate interruption. She did not enquire what Stephen was doing in Kenmare, nor did she hover in the room about him while he ate. When he told her after breakfast that he would like to stay until after the weekend, she said only one word, “Lovely,” and allowed herself to smile at the simplicity of this small joy as she hugged with thin arms the long-felt loss inside her.

For Stephen there was almost a week to wait. He did not know whether Gabriella Castoldi had returned yet to Kenmare. The fear of actually meeting her tied the knots of his stomach. But finally, when Mary White knocked softer than a knock on his door and asked if she might tidy his room now, Stephen walked outside into the sunshine. When he reached the town he did not know where to go. He walked around the lampposts like a man looking for his dog. The morning sunshine saddled his shoulders. By half past eleven he had toured the triangle of the streets seven times and had already been noticed by all the shopkeepers. (Mick Cahill on the door at the bank had decided he could be up to no good and must have come over the mountain from Limerick or somewhere to rob them. Veronica Hehir up at the bookshop considered he was a renegade priest, exactly like the one in the book she was reading. When she told Kathleen O’Sullivan, Kathleen replied that he was the eighth that week alone. What was it in Kenmare that drew them?)

“You brought the weather with you.”

Nelly Grant stopped him from her doorway. She had sensed the energy of his restlessness arriving in the town fifteen minutes before she saw him and had kept an eye over the shoulders of her customers for the confirming vision of him loping down the street.

“I’m sorry?”

“The weather.”

“Oh yes,” he said weakly, and then added, “Thank you.”

“We get that here sometimes. Balmy as summer. Makes you think somebody has been looking through the books and decided we’re due a few more good days before the year’s end.” She watched how he stood there, the mute tightened presence of him that bespoke imbalance and combustion at the same time. “How did you like the plums?” she asked him.

“Very well. Thank you.”

His politeness barely contains him, she thought, like a paper cup of scalding water.

“Come in for more.”

She was abrupt and jovial in the same moment, generous and insistent, and for the second time Stephen Griffin entered the fruit and vegetable shop to be given the plums of balance. Within five minutes Nelly had drawn from him that he was going to stay for the rest of the week, and while she weighed the plums on the old-fashioned scale on the side of the counter, she decided that he was in love. It was the gift of her character that she could be pointed without wounding, and when she told Stephen that he should visit Sonny Sugrue, the barber across the street, she was able to make it seem not a comment on his looks but a prescription for the health of his spirit.

“The growing of hair,” she told him, “can steal our energy. Visit Sonny, and come back for your plums,” she said, and raised her hands to relieve him of his coat before he was aware of it.

Sonny Sugrue was waiting. He was reading a newspaper in the spin-around red-leather chair of his customers and following closely the case of a murder trial in California. He was a man of mostly stomach. That and his hairless head gave him a double roundness that he imagined were comment enough on his pleasure at the world. He had been a barber in Manchester, New York, and Chicago before the arrival of muffled speech like cottonwool in his ears signalled the beginning of his deafness and forced him to return to Kenmare, where he did not need to hear his customers’ requirements. His left ear heard nothing, and his right caught the distinctions of instructions only when his hearing aid was at full volume, something he considered an unnecessary waste of its battery. Sonny cut hair short, or off. When Stephen Griffin appeared in the doorway before him, he looked up from knife murder in California and smiled. There was cutting in this one, he thought.

Half an hour later Stephen’s hair lay on the floor, and he looked with surprise at the mirror to discover that the centre of his pate was almost entirely bald. When he raised his head he saw the curved limit of himself like a passing moon and was aghast.

“I’m bald,” he said.

Sonny Sugrue didn’t catch him. He was sweeping the hair into the corner.

“I look like a clown.”

Although he paused, Sonny missed the words as they passed him in the air, merely nodding the slow, wise nod of a man who had handled the heads of ten thousand, seen the vanity of youth, the diminishing of beauty, and the horror of age as the customer turned to the truth of the mirror. We are always a shock to ourselves.

“Five pounds, please,” he roared across the small shop.

It was a moment before Stephen moved; he was transfixed by the changed image of himself in the glass, and then gladly realized that as he was unrecognizable to himself, he could walk the streets of the town with no fear of the woman knowing him. When he reached the doorway he felt the warm day cool on the top of his head and stooped out beneath the jamb as if bearing eggs on his crown. A small bubble of joy inflated in his stomach.

He went across to Nelly Grant. When she saw the white dome of his forehead coming, her heart lifted and she told him at once that he looked much better, and remarked to herself the dark health of his eyebrows. “You’ll see,” she said aloud before he reached her. “Walk in the sun this week now, and eat plums. You’ll see.” She paused in that moment before friendship, then added, “I’m having a mug of tea, would you like some?”

She sat him in the small side room to the shop and poured a tea that was not Indian. It was green in colour and tasted like the wildflower and grass teas of children playing house in the summertime. She had concocted it herself while he was in Sugrue’s and now watched him drink. He has the embarrassment of those who feel deeply that they should not be alive at all, she thought, those who have survived where others who were better, more gifted or beautiful or true, have perished into death.

Stephen’s face collapsed in a scowl at the dregs of the teacup.

“You don’t have to finish it,” she said. “But it will do you good. You’ll see.”

Nelly Grant filled a bag of plums and gave them to him. She took his money and then watched him walk out the door, telling him she would have fresh supplies in by Friday.

And so Stephen began the week of his wait for Gabriella Castoldi in the town of Kenmare, where the sun shone like midsummer and the farmers drove their tractors in shirtsleeves. Blue skies hung like canopies above the green mountains. The white flecks of the winter sheep ran and kicked air like lambs as the pulse of a midwinter spring beat beneath the earth. Yellow blossoms reappeared on the gorse bushes that week. The crown of Stephen’s head burned pink, and for it Nelly Grant gave him oil that smelled like coconuts and induced the tropical dreams of warm seas and white sand that woke him with both eyes weeping saltily on his pillow. The town was lifted with the weather, as if a holiday had been declared without tourists. Nelly sold salads on the first of December, and fed Stephen Griffin the restorative fibrous lunch of raw carrots diced in muesli. Out of politeness he gagged mouthfuls of what seemed like horse food and listened to her telling him how his complexion had improved. He had begun to show a little of his life force, she told him. She had already detected that Gabriella Castoldi was the woman he was waiting for, but she did not yet know the extent of their relationship and imagined that at least they had met. Each sun-bright bedazzled day, while the flies buzzed back into Kenmare and the wild rhododendrons reglossed their leaves in the mountains, Nelly Grant plotted the return of Stephen Griffin to health; and he submitted. He was a textbook case, she thought, not that the characteristics of his symptoms bespoke a single remedy, but rather that the multiplicity of his ailments prompted Nelly Grant to consider giving him everything in the textbook. She gave him zinc for his skin and made comfrey tea, and then diced watercress in the salad sandwiches she made for him for his walks. For the anaemic condition which she feared was almost endemic to his character she gave him garlic and sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts and almonds, and offered him a soup of soya beans when he returned red-cheeked and pink-crowned from clambering all day in the lower slopes of the mountains. For the poorness of his respiration, a complaint common in uncertain lovers, she made a carrageen blancmange from the moss which was still growing in winter along the temperate shoreline of Parknasilla.

Four days was too short a time to change the habits of over thirty years, but Nelly was reaffirmed in her philosophy when she saw the clear improvements in the patient. Love, she knew, was simply the energy that bound us to the earth; and for it the energy of the earth needed to be administered. For love you need carrots, and Stephen Griffin collected four in a brown paper bag every morning before walking his lovesickness out into the green air of the mountains.

And so, that warm and close week of waiting. It was a week that Stephen had taken out of his life, as though he had torn the next page from a book and thrown the rest away, following the sentences down the page with no idea of what in the airy infinity behind it came next. Endlessly as he moved out into the mountains and walked the lower hillsides he read down the page to the end — how he had heard a woman playing in a concert, how it had moved him, how he could not stop thinking of her and had come now to Kenmare to see her again; it read as simply as an infant’s text. But in the moment he reached the bottom of that page the limitless possibilities beyond it made him ill with a sense of freefall and the notion that he was being absurd and should drive on back to Clare.

But still, at the moment when he might sensibly have left, he stayed on, his resolve fuelled at crisis moments and his balance restored by the hundred plums and the tropical summertime that had softened the air between the mountains of Kerry like a pair of hands tossing a light pastry. He stayed on, waiting. Mary White brought him boiled eggs in the mornings, and when he discovered her small tape recorder she joined him sometimes in the evenings when he listened to Vivaldi in the garden-looking sitting room, where the saffron crocuses were already blooming. He listened to the music with his hands on his knees and his head back on the armchair, his eyes closed. He wore a white shirt with the collar open that gleamed in the low light. By the Thursday evening sleep had deserted him, and long after Mary White was lying in the familiar dream of her husband in the garden with the straw hat on his head and their camellia in blossom; Stephen was lying wide-eyed on top of the covers, where the moon spilled like mercury, aware only that his life had reached a precipice, and holding in his hands the yellow page that announced the Friday-evening concert in the hotel, with Gabriella Castoldi on violin and Paul Sheils on piano.

11

When Stephen Griffin walked in the doorway of The Falls Hotel on Friday evening, his breath scented with parsley and his head clear from the chewing of lemon balm, Maurice Harty was not on the door. And neither was anyone else. The front hallway was deserted and only a young girl clicked the keys of a computer at the reception desk. At first he thought he was early. He had been waiting all week for this moment and now imagined that his watch had moved ahead of Time in rhythm with his mind and that perhaps it was not yet eight o'clock. He walked over to where a wood fire was burning low and mimed the warming of his warm hands to hold off for an instant his gathering sense of foolishness. Then he went to the receptionist and asked what time it was. When she told him it was eight o'clock, he nodded as if in exact agreement with her. He was like a lost traveller, having voyaged on long uncertain seas towards a land he presumed was there, but now, checking the coordinates, was vanished. Nothing was happening. He was there, clean-shaven and freshly scented, his eyes already glossily enlivened with the week of herbs and his head high, just above the sinking feeling of despair. But in a moment he might drown.

“I was wondering,” he said to the girl, his voice so low in his throat that the words were marshmallowy lumps of nothing, “if there was …” He raised a large one with a small cough. “A concert here.” It was as though he had declared the New World begins here and the men rushed to the side to see only the boundless watery horizon.

“Oh yes,” the girl sighed, “there is. That's why I'm not gone to the bingo. Don't say you haven't heard? It's with your Man Who Releases the Balls, you know, on the lotto, on Ty he's here tonight, down in the hall. For the football team. They're raising for a pitch.” And as if he could not already tell, she added, “It'll be brilliant.”

Stephen was trying to contain the shaking that had started in his legs.

“There is a concert, then.”

“Yes, in the O'Connell Room. Five pounds. I'd say it's just starting.”

He paid her the money with the butterflies of his hands and swallowed the air-apples that gagged him as he walked along the carpeted hallway to where the New World was and O'CONNELL ROOM was written in gold leaf above an oak door.

It squeaked when he opened it. No music was playing yet, he was in time, and it was only when he had turned to close the door that he felt the emptiness of the room at his back.

There were twenty-seven rows of chairs, fifteen chairs wide, and only seventeen people who had not gone to watch the Man Who Releases the Balls.

He walked into the middle of the room and sat down. Then Peter Sheils and Gabriella Castoldi entered, took their places, and began to play.

12

She wore a green velvet dress.

They played a Boccherini minuet. There was a light above her and he watched where it glanced upon the angle of her neck. She pressed the held notes and squeezed them for tenderness, her lips closed and her green eyes watching the invisible ghosts of feelings that she freed into the air. Her right foot appeared beneath the dress, and he watched it through the fullness of Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 17. She played Kreisler, Elgar, Schubert, and Brahms. While she played, nothing else mattered in the world.

When the concert had finished, Stephen stood and applauded loudly, and was still standing there when the rest of the small audience had filed past and Peter Sheils had closed the piano and walked away.

Gabriella stepped down from the small stage.

“Thank you, thank you for coming,” she said to him. She might have been about to walk past him, but she stopped, and Stephen moved a foot closer.

He stooped down. She smelled like autumn below him. He wanted to eat her voice, and for a terrible gaping moment said nothing, waiting for her to speak again. A driplet ran downward on his crown until he turned his head slantedly to the right.

“We appreciated your listening,” she said.

Appreciated. It was like an Italian word when she said it, and he tasted it like a delicacy. He wanted to listen to her talk as he had listened to her play, but the fear of his pause growing overlong made him speak.

“You are … you … I think you are …”

She looked at him. She looked in his eyes and she touched his arm.

“You are very kind,” she said. “I think I saw you before.”

“Yes. In Ennis,” he said. “And Galway” He wanted so to look at her face that he did not.

“The Interpreti Veneziani. Oh”—she stopped—“you are the man who nearly died.” She smiled when she said it, but even then, he thought, there was sadness in her. Her hair smelled like autumn rain, and he stooped down deeper within it. “Only then you had more hair.” Her face was lit with small laughter, and Stephen reached his hand to his bare crown as if covering the revelation of some inner secret. “You must love music,” she said.

I have not listened to music for fifteen years, he wanted to say. I have been dead and woken up. I am shaking here in every particle of my spirit because of you. Please stay. Please stay here talking to me, he wanted to say, but the idiot in control of his body merely nodded at her, breathing parsley-breath on the single word: “Yes.”

She stood there. She stood there in the green velvet dress, and he imagined he could sense the Adriatic and the sunlight in the skin of her shoulders. She was as different as Venice, and when she spoke again, giving him words like fruit in her rounded and softly bruised English, he had to try hard not to reach out and touch her.

“We play tomorrows,” she said. “There will be maybe more people.”

“I don't care.” The idiot was making his words into flurried, pauseless gasps now. “I mean I don't … if nobody comes I will be … You might prefer to play with more people … but I could pay more for … not that it's the money, you … But I …”

And there the words ran out and he was tongue-tied and trussed with a glittering crown of sweat falling from his forehead.

“No.” She touched his arm once more, as if she were a balm. “It doesn't matter. I like to play,” she said, moving a step back from him, this strange, anguished man with the stiffly bent wire of his emotions piercing his insides. “Bye-bye.”

She was already walking towards the door with her violin when the idiot freed him and Stephen could whisper after her, “I will be here,” closing his eyes and lifting his heart to repeat it louder, “I will be here,” and causing Gabriella Castoldi to stop at the doorway and look back at him one last time before she said bye-bye again and was gone.

13

She did not even know his name. And yet when Stephen rose from the bed he had not slept in the following morning and opened the window on the continuing blue-bright and balmy summer of the first day of December, he felt the force of goodness moving in the world. He sensed the sweet energy of regeneration and bloom, the tenderness of light, the majesty of birdsong, and all the rapturous gladness and wonder that were the familiar quick-pulsed delights of those who since time immemorial have fallen in love. He was the Hollywood version of himself, the more handsome, white-shirted, and well-proportioned man singing while he shaved and finding that the perfect clean lines of his blemishless skin revealed no cuts and only the immaculate smoothness of his own face. Everything was charged, loaded with a richness of sensation: the water he splashed on himself, the scent of the witch hazel and aloe vera in the lotion, the peppermint in the toothpaste. Music should have been playing. And was when he arrived in the small dining room, where Mary White was bringing him his breakfast.

It was a micro-season of happiness, a blissed-out moment of abandoned candlelight, and Stephen Griffin could sit at the table in the brief pleasure of knowing: This is joy, this is the richness of things, the brimming sense of the impossible becoming real, when the Hollywood version of himself might have danced about the table and taken Mary White in his arms, spinning her in loops of gaiety, fox-trotting and cha-cha-chaing out through the French doors and into the garden that even then exploded with fireworklike blossoms of orange and gold. There was tenderness in the sunlight and, in the gentleness of the air of that house that morning, a kind of clemency, as if the past had been swept softly with a horsehair brush and the lines of grief, disappointment, and failure were blurred now into the faded and waterpainted corners of the paper.

She had spoken to him.

Gabriella Castoldi had spoken to him, and for whatever came afterwards, whatever lay in the crisscrossed double-knotted stitching of the plot, and despite the reflex habitual expectation he had of everything in his life ending like a useless, lost thread that fitted nowhere in the fabric, Stephen Griffin was that morning briefly illumined with faith and calm in his heart, though he balanced precariously on the fast and silver needle of love.

He did not think of the way ahead. The morning gifted him with a blind optimism that was partly the confusion of his body following the sleepless moon-night, and he did not consider anything beyond that evening and seeing Gabriella play again. No thought of the following week lodged in his mind; Mrs. Waters and the school were not there, nor the enquiries she had already made about his father's health and the growing impatience and suspicion that were mounting in her mind, causing her to hear the morning news on the radio with the stiff cold porridge of dread in her mouth, certain that her history teacher would at any moment be covered in a bright red scandal and discovered in bed with another man. Neither this, nor any of the dull cautionary counsel of ordinary life that scorns and mocks romance, tells you you cannot leave your job and get in the car and go to Kerry to hear a woman play a violin, that you cannot walk out of your life like that on a whim, on a feeling, no, none of this did Stephen Griffin consider.

When he walked into Kenmare that morning, Nelly Grant sensed him coming. The town was in the sleepy aftermath of the party for the Man Who Releases the Balls and no custom had yet arrived for the Saturday traders at the top of the triangle. Stephen's stride was slaphappy and easy, and when he entered the shop he radiated the manic intensity that is shared by the hopelessly lost and the recently found. Nelly had known sometime in the night that his spirit was well, for the stillness of the moonlight foretold it, she believed, holding to the fairy credo that the energy of her principal clients was always reflected in the skies that they drew like children's paintings above them. It was an unproven but certain fact, she reckoned, that people make their own weather, that you could hold a grey cloud motionless in the air above you simply by the predisposition of your character towards the negative ions of depression. Look, she would say, at Connemara, and tell me it's not true.

When Stephen was three feet in front of her, he smelled like lilies, and this despite the aromatic display of oranges and lemons that filled the counter and the burning oil of rosewood in the dish beside the register. It was the scent of Gabriella Castoldi. And when Nelly caught it, opening her eyes wide as she drew it in, she knew the depth of feeling into which Stephen had alien and remarked silently to herself how she must sometime write down the wisdom of that mystery: how we come to smell of those we love and can carry them like the smallest ghosts in the infinity of our pores.

“You are well today,” she said, raising a lemon to her face and breathing the sharpness of its fragrance for clarity.

“You are a wonderful woman,” Stephen said. “I feel very well.”

“The concert was good?” She did not need to ask him, but wanted to hear in the timbre of his voice the inflection of the spirit.

“There was almost nobody there. Ha!” He laughed despite himself, thinking about it. “Well, she was. They both were. He played the piano, she …”

And the words were gone, vanished on the moment when he was about to speak of her and leaving him to fall into the whiteness of space, where his praise and yearning went, unsayable and vast. His Adam's apple, large as a Granny Smith, plunged and rose in the narrow and ropey confines of his gorge.

“Sit down in there. Drink this,” Nelly told him.

“What is it?” he asked her as she was stepping past him towards the ash-blond and supercilious figure of Helena Cox, the forty-five-year-old wife of the twenty-six-year-old butcher, Francie, who was just then entering the shop.

“Water. Good morning, Helena.”

“Isn't the weather so unpredictable?” said the butcher's wife, looking about for the disappeared man she knew was there. She had seen him come in all week from her window across the street and only now managed to arrive across in time before he left. Her face fell twelve years when she realized she had missed him.

“Like all of us,” said Nelly, taking with the smallest of smiles the net bag of Brussels sprouts that Helena held and which she knew were not the vegetable that the bound bowels of the Coxes needed. When the customer was gone, moving slowly with heavy weights of suspicion about the thickness of her ankles, Nelly Grant returned to Stephen in the backroom.

“She thinks you're having an affair with me,” she said, folding her arms on the warmth of herself and beaming at the man who was gulping the water and gazing on the air. “She senses love, though she doesn't know it. She has not found it with the butcher and is afraid somebody else might have found some.”

“I want something,” Stephen said. “I want something to help keep this, this.” He gestured at the air about himself as though there were visible a cloud.

“Strawberries,” she said. “Fruit of optimism.” And handed him a punnet she had bought at the morning market in Cork.

14

Darkness fell at four o'clock. It was the first day of December, and when the sunlight was thinned out like beaten metal in the mid-afternoon the fog floated in like fine wrapping. The air smelled of wool and herbs, and might have slipped the town into fairytale sleep had it not been for the iron clatter of Guinness barrels, the last delivery between the mountains, and the twin Keogh brothers carting crates of empties that cackled with remembered delight like false teeth come alive.

Meanwhile, the town readied itself for Saturday night; it held its breath and did the small jobs. It hurried around the yard, it checked the football scores and ate its bread and butter and its slice of curranty brack, hearing the nightly tragedies on the news with mute and impotent anger, before washing its face, putting on a clean shirt, and going to stand outside seven o'clock Mass. By the time Father Moriarty was giving out Communion to the variously odoured breaths of his congregation, the pulse of the town had quickened, and for the first of the escapees, who had drifted away on the last word of the Gospel, the porter was already filling pint glasses on mahogany counters.

When Stephen walked out into the night, it was like walking into a pillow. He had to hold his face upward towards the obscured moon to find air. Scarves of fog entwined the mountains. When he arrived at the hotel, Maurice Harty on the door gave him a nod like a movie spy; the same girl was at Reception, and while she gave him his ticket she told him with deep self-pity that the crack at the previous night's computer bingo had supposedly been Unreal.

There were forty people for the concert. He sat in the third row in the aisle seat and did not take his eyes off Gabriella from the moment she entered in a blue dress.

While she bowed the thousand notes, she saw and heard nothing else, and neither the polite applause nor the coughing fit that took one of the elder Donoghue sisters moved her from the far country of the music. It was only between the pieces that she sometimes glanced down at the audience, turning the sheet music with her bow hand and looking briefly at the faces of those astonished to have found such a musician playing in the hotel. It was in those moments that she looked for the face of Stephen Griffin and found him there in the third row looking at her. She saw him and he looked away, and before she had drawn breath to begin the Kreisler, she was already moved by him. A quality of longing in his look pierced her, and as she pressed into her chin rest, she had to steady herself against the suddenness of feeling. (Although she did not know it yet, there was common ground between them, for Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of despair. Neither did she realize yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.) She did not think of this yet. She played the Kreisler. She played the Elgar after that, and did not look down at him again until the concert was over. Then, as unexpectedly as life, Gabriella Castoldi walked down amongst the chairs and the departing audience to Stephen Griffin and asked him if he would like to walk out into the fog with her.

15

When the salt-smelling letter of Eileen Waters arrived at his house, demanding to know the whereabouts of Stephen and stressing his responsibilities to his students, Philip Griffin realized the love affair must be progressing. He felt the pain less keenly that morning and thanked God for keeping their bargain while he skipped the first tablet of his day. By eleven o'clock the pain that was overdue had still not arrived in his insides, and he stood by the front window looking out on the tranquillity of the suburban street for a sign of anything changed in the world. But there was nothing. The chestnut tree was bare and hung its limbs in the still air above the green pentagon of lawn. A few women and old men walked by to the shops.

“Well,” he said at last to his wife. “This might go quicker than I thought, love.” And then, with a sudden but muddled enlightenment that perhaps Christmas was to be somehow significant, that patterns ancient as creation make meaning of our days, he added, “I'll go to Toby Madigan's for cloth. I'll make him a suit.”

And so that morning, without his painkiller, Philip drove into Dublin and left God the extra bonus of £345 behind the railings, before walking over to the brown dust-snowed premises of Tobias Madigan, & Son. It was Son he dealt with. Son was already a grandfather, but his son had decided to be the retail manager of a branch in a cheap clothing chain and the old shop had been left to fade into the line of other buildings that were the ragged endpieces of the street's memory moments before renovation took it away. Son answered the door when Philip knocked. He was all neck wattles and loose skin; he had an air of sagging, as if he were a cloth man or his bones had already preceded him into the next life. He knew Philip Griffin when he saw him and raised the shallow purses beneath his watery eyes as a greeting. “Ah, Phil,” he said, “long time.”

When the tailor told him what he wanted, Son drew him into the back room, where they walked across newspapers that Time had worked into the floor and reached the bolts of material that Son brushed left to right with a flimsy hand. He was famous once in Dublin for the quality of his cloth, in the vanished era when such things mattered.

“What about some of this?” he said, drawing out a yard of navy-blue material that was the fabric he had sold to his last customer, the minister, almost two years earlier and before his appearance at the first Tribunal.

Philip felt it for texture and made a few short tugs between thumb and forefinger, as if teasing the cloth for weakness, the way life does a man. He held the material sideways to the slant of low light that fell diffused through the grimy window and then said he would take it. When Son was measuring and cutting, Philip waited in the front room, which had once been busy enough to keep three salesmen when Prendergast had sent the young tailor across the river to buy more cloth. He stood where he had stood as a young man and felt the heaviness of the years. Then, as he took the cloth, folded in brown paper wrapping and tied with twine, he felt come on again the sharp pain of the cancer. He left the old shop quickly, saying goodbye to Tobias Madigan's son as if not wanting to delay the old man's imminent departure into ghosthood and squeezing gently the offered palm of his hand like a cool white handkerchief damp with tears.

The pain turned inside him as he walked back to his car. It seemed larger than his insides, in the same way that the immensity of our sorrows dwarfs the smallness of our hearts. His breathing was lumpy, his throat was swollen inwards, and he could not draw inside him the cool air of the December noon. He had to lean against a wall.

Oh God, he thought, not now. Not here. He saw his hand against the grey building, how it appeared like a freckled fallen bird, useless, trembling with last life. He turned and saw people walking past him. He imagined with brief cruelty against himself the thought of those who had found his money now passing by and his dying against the wall and falling on the cloth of Stephen's unmade suit. His faith wavered and buckled like thin metal in heat; was there no pact after all? Was nobody listening? He reached the knot of his tie with his left hand and pulled it back for air. His right hand clutched at his stomach. He was going to die right there, and then suddenly, like light breaking, the pain eased once more.

He made it to his car and drove home for his lunchtime painkiller.

In the afternoon, when the medication had twirled the air about him into a white fuzz like candy floss, Philip opened the cloth out onto the carpet in the front room. Then he lay down upon it. His son was nothing like himself, they were different as tweed and cotton, but in lying on the blue cloth the father could imagine its shape upon his son. He knew Stephen's dimensions chiefly in relation to his own and held out invisible extensions of his arms to the six extra inches in length that measured the unreachable hands of his son. He marked the cloth without use of a tape measure, turning over on the ground and bringing his face so close to the fabric that he could smell the shop forty years earlier, when he had gone there as an apprentice. To save his ruined muscles Philip rolled over to get up. This would be the last suit he would make, and in the silence of the empty house on that darkening December afternoon, he wished to make it better than any he had before. This was to be the last testament of his skill and craft, the final expression of the many years spent cutting and shaping cloth, suiting the city's men in the good-looking fabrics that not only dressed the body but, through some ancient magic of tailoring, bestowed grace, too. This was to be the last one, the last Philip Griffin, and he took the thirty-year-old scissors and slipped it like a surgeon into the thin veins of the cloth. He did not snip; he moved the scissors with an even confidence, making the first cuts with that quality of assurance that he knew transferred itself directly into the finished garment.

For Stephen, his father wanted the suit to be the shadow of himself. When he cut out the arms he wanted them to be his own and laid them in gestured embrace across the chest of the unmade jacket, hoping that the tenderness he felt in working on the cloth would become part of the suit and forever evident to his son, that the failings and remoteness of his fatherhood would be forgiven and redeemed in this tailoring that was to be his last gift to Stephen.

He switched on the light over his head and worked on while the headlamps of cars coming home arced across the window like searchlights for love. He worked on into the evening, lying down on his back when his knees locked and delivering a series of short blows to them with his two fists until they loosened and he could kneel like a priest to the work once more. He worked on until the pain knotted up again and he had to stop and wait for the tablet to work. It was while he was sitting there, feeling the now familiar dissolve inside him and the medication taking the pain to someplace beyond Dublin, that the doorbell rang.

Philip left the cloth on the ground and went to answer it. He was the kind of man who expected that only calamity could make the doorbell ring late in the evening, and was surprised when he saw the thin figure of Hadja Bannerje standing at the door.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said, “I was wondering how you were doing.”

The Indian was younger than Stephen. He had come from the hospital to find the dying man because he could not forget how the old patient had told him of his son being in love, and because the tailor had mentioned Dr. Tim Magrath. He had come, too, for reasons he did not yet understand, some part of that submerged algebra of our actions that makes obtuse and elaborate relation between X, the absence of his own father in India, and Y, the man wanting to live a little longer for his son. He came into the front room, where the cloth was cut out and the sewing machine had been uncased, and when Philip Griffin told him that he was making a suit for Stephen, Hadja Bannerje made a small bow, acknowledging the act as something true and correct in the unclear workings of the world. He sat down and saw the chess game laid out on the side table.

For a few moments the tailor said nothing. He sat in the chair across the room with the suit on the ground between them. He lowered his head and ran his hand up over it, as if smoothing the ghosts of his vanished hair. He was fearful for a while that the Indian had come to tell him the tests had revealed something new, and only when the silence had settled like old spirits between them did he look across the space. Hadja Bannerje was waiting.

“You have not heard the news of Dr. Magrath,” said the Indian.

Philip felt a chill on the back of his neck. Here it was, calamity after all.

“He died this afternoon.”

When I should have, thought Philip Griffin, when I was fallen against the wall and it passed over. Oh God.

Silence clotted the air with the unsayable sorrow. Philip Griffin was painted in a stained wash of guilt and put his hands beneath his chin to keep his head from falling. He felt the old unworthiness of those who survive and the loss of the man who had helped him.

“I am sorry, to tell you,” said Hadja. “I remember you mentioned his name.”

“Yes.”

“It was heart failure. He was dead in his home.”

Tim Magrath's heart had failed so long before, thought the tailor. He held his head like an iron weight and breathed the short, shallow breaths of upset, until his visitor asked him could he make him a cup of tea.

“No. No, thank you.” A small emptiness, and then, lifting his spirit with weary effort into the lightweight world of politeness, Philip asked, “Would you like one?”

“No. Not for me, thank you very much, Mr. Griffin.”

“Right.”

The two men sat still in the late evening. The doctor was wearing a pale green raincoat, and with his arms folded and his face restful, he dwelt in such apparent ease that it did not seem necessary to speak.

It was some time before the tailor noticed him looking over at the chess game.

“Do you play?” Philip asked him.

“This is a vulnerable position.”

“Yes.” He nodded to the truth. “My son is White. You can see what he is like. But he's a fine player most of the time.” Philip stood up and went over to the board. “Would you like to play a game?”

“This is not finished,” said the Indian. “You don't want to disturb it.”

But already the older man was taking the pieces and resetting them to begin. “I have it memorized,” he said, and lifted the suit cloth from the floor and laid it aside and drew his chair closer.

And so they played. It was past ten o'clock. A glittering cold was falling on the unwalked paths and stilled driveways of Dublin, where the windscreens of cars went blind with ice. Television light died away and families were curtained into sleep while the doctor and the tailor played a game of chess. Hadja was an accomplished player; he had been gifted with that quality of deep patience and forbearance which characterize the ultimately victorious, and which allowed him to suffer many losses without ever losing sight of his long-term goal. He took the capture of his king's knight without the slightest expression of sorrow, and neither did he rejoice when, almost an hour later, he won Philip Griffin's queen's bishop in a forked move on the king's side. It was the game and not the men that spoke. Positions and counter-positions of the pieces flowed between them as its own language, and in that exchange both men got to know each other in a way that would scarcely have been possible in the three hours the game lasted. In that playing each man revealed his own suffering and small triumphs; the chess game mirrored perfectly the pattern of life, and showed in the gradual dwindling of pieces the ceaseless exhausting of energy that is the action of time.

When Philip Griffin could see more board than pieces, it was already one o'clock in the morning. He was a slow player who did not believe in the constraints of a stop-clock. Although, by that hour, he was aware of the hopelessness of his position, he did not consider resigning. He liked the game played out to its end, for even the coming of the inevitable had a certain beauty. His only gesture at resistance was that, with the Indian about to checkmate him in four moves, he took longer and longer over his turn, gazing down at the checked timber forever, until at last Hadja Bannerje looked over at him and, seeing the transfixed expression of a dream, realized that his opponent was soundly asleep.

16

Gabriella Castoldi walked with Stephen Griffin into the night, unaware that it was the transforming moment of her life or that the farfetched and wildest happenstance could sometimes be the inevitable. She took his arm when they reached the night air. He is shaking like a tree on fire, she thought, and steadied herself against him, walking out through the grounds of the hotel to where a river waterfall was lit brilliant and white, the last expression of mountain streams as they jabbered in the swollen throat of the river running down into the free translation of the sea.

They were mismatched: his long legs and arms, the extra foot of his stride he had to keep shortening, the loom of his head over hers that made him seem craning, crooked, slowing and then towing her, all combined to make them seem oddly paired, a knee- and an ankle-sock out walking. The spray came up to meet them. Immediately their faces were wet.

“I love this,” she said and, letting go his arm, stepped towards the bank of the rushing water and opened her mouth wide to meet the spray. She was a slight figure in a grey wool coat. Her hair was pulled back and lost in the collar, and the light off the water found the vulnerable places above the angles of her cheekbones. She stood and he waited three feet behind her. He had no idea what to do. Gabriella looked back at him.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“That you are beautiful.”

She turned away from him.

“There is a walk down here,” she said, and stepped ahead.

She was still not sure why she had come, why she had invited him, or where one moment would lead the next. Gabriella Castoldi had abandoned the fantasy of true love; the rigour and perfectionism of her character, which had been gifted her by her father (a man whose ceaseless but muted anger at the world had found expression only in the three warts that ran in a line on the left side of his forehead), meant that she could not envision happiness for herself longer than an instant. So, as she stood by the river's edge in the late evening, where the falling fog smelled of the mountains, she did not think of love; she did not imagine that the awkward man with the long arms and bare head could have a long and lasting role in her life. She considered none of this. She was there with him simply because of the way he was, because of how he had listened to the music, because of that quality of intensity and seriousness in the white puzzle of his face that suggested a dumbfounded amazement and wonder at the same time as the long-suffering knowledge of woe.

Gabriella walked ahead of him down the gravelled path by the river. She heard his footsteps crunching unevenly behind her. It was dark and drizzling. They had moved beyond the reflected light of the floodlit waterfall into a place where the pine trees grew thickly and the scent of the night air was held low upon them by the overhanging branches. Gabriella stopped and Stephen came close to her.

“Shush. Listen,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

Nothing. Stillness. Their breaths slowed until the entangled sounds of the woods and the water rose like raised volume, those soft crashings and whisperings that were the life of the night, revealed and shared like a secret.

“I love this,” she said. “This is why I like to stay here, in Kenmare. In the mountains.”

They stood a time with nothing to say.

“The world is simple here, isn't it?” Gabriella said at last. She looked into the darkness of the river flowing past the trees. She looked at the outpouring and onrushing river that was the river of her own life and felt its sadness teem; here was her childhood in Venice, firstborn of the policeman Giovanni and Christa Castoldi, the child of their earliest loving, upon whom fell the unsaid yet subtly broadcast disappointment that she was not a son, and whom her father, Giovanni, could not hold for more than five minutes without passing her back like a strange fish netted in the murk of the lagoon; her mother, who was always pregnant and miscarrying, who passed to Gabriella the understanding that girls clean and cook, and who made her from age six the second in command of the narrow brown rooms of the house in the Calle Visciga, where already her two brothers were lords; how her duties mounted, and how frequently she stayed in the kitchen with the caged bird that did not sing to prepare the meals which might garner love in her returning father's quick praise as he gorged himself closer to death; how she had heard the violin teacher Scaramuzza when he moved into the apartment below them and managed to persuade her mother to let her take lessons; how there, too, was reinforced the already solidifying belief that nothing she could do would ever be good enough, and that the brutal music she made was a sorry and discordant insult to its composers; and yet how she had continued, playing only when her parents were out of the house, and then, when her mother, after six miscarriages, was taken to bed with the early stages of liver failure, gradually daring to bow the notes in diminuendo in the farthest room; how she had become the mother then, years before she had been a lover or known anything but the dreamt caresses that visited her sleep like the princes of fairy tales; the years of her father's pent-up and brooded-upon horror as his sons became vivid and frightful mockeries of his once most cherished machismo fantasy of the Castoldi boys, who were to be policemen like their father, cleansing the plaguey corruption that soured the air of Venice like grey spores, but who became instead the very same small villains with open shirts and silver chains whom he spent his life jailing; how Giovanni Castoldi did not get to retire, but whose spleen had ruptured and exploded inside him with hot rage in the police motor launch on the Canal Grande when he found himself chasing the slippery and evil shadow of himself that was Antonio Castoldi, who had fired three shots at the man he did not know was his father before crashing at full speed into the vaporetto station at the Ponte Accademia; how the music had taken over then for Gabriella; how the violin had become her father and her mother and her family; and how even Scaramuzza had admitted her progress, scratching the dryness of his right ear and clearing the wet cloud of his chest phlegm to acknowledge her with the single word bene; the years of her university then and the approach of those not yet men who saw in the cool remoteness of her playing something to be conquered, a woman too much in her own kingdom who they imagined needed bringing into the tight prisons of their smaller passions, and whose fumbling and filmy-sweated version of love left Gabriella Castoldi feeling there were no emotions as pure as those she played in the music; and then the poet Pollini, who arrived in her life with the surprising abruptness of grace, when beneath her eyes was already the colour of pale plums; the season of that happiness that then like everything else fell down and withered. And left her there in Kenmare.

She saw it in the night river. She saw it and felt the grief and loneliness of her world grow immense and cold inside her. She stood motionless, and Stephen stood behind her. There were no stars. The mountain fog lay on the treetops. Thin veils descended wetting their hair. Gabriella turned around.

“I don't know your name,” she said.

When he told her, she nodded, as if the sounds of it revealed something that she had already known.

“Stefano,” she said. “Hold me.”

17

Early the following morning Gabriella lay on the bed with the covers half across her and her feet hanging over in the cool air. She was midway between waking and sleep, and lingered in that warm place where time slows and holds still the not quite vanished dreamlike quality of the night. She was lying on her back and her hair fell to the right across the pillow. She kept her eyes closed and held behind them the astonished and rapturous kisses of the night, the white tremoring of Stephens body when he was undressed, and his loving that was first infinitely hesitant and slow, each touch like a terrifying adventure — this place on her bow arm, this firmness in her neck where her violin fit and where his mouth tasted her — until, in the clockless time of two bodies learning each other like a language, he had loved her more wildly, and they had rolled back and across the bedclothes in each other's held embrace, in a way that had sometimes seemed as if from the unseen and enormous tide of loss, grief, and despair, each was rescuing the other.

Gabriella was not in love. She was not ill or delirious for his presence, she did not feel she needed him to be able to get out of the bed and imagined she could live through the day without seeing him and have no balloon of longing inflate in her chest. She had nothing of the schoolgirl's flushed excitement and ran no fever. But the emotion she felt for Stephen Griffin was the baffled and uncertain beginnings of love nonetheless.

She lay in the bed and listened to the sounds of morning. Stephen had gone to the shops for milk for her coffee. When he returned with the milk and two punnets of strawberries, he entered her cottage with the deep hesitation of a man unsure if this was the place where he had left a dream. She stirred in the bedclothes, and he went to her kitchen, opening her presses like privacies and finding that she drank no tea, only coffee from grounds. He looked at the cups she had, at her sugar bowl and milk jug. He ran his hands on the countertop, as if fingering a hidden keyboard where there played the music of all her time there in Kenmare. He looked at everything that was hers, and then made a muddy coffee without a paper filter, carrying it in to her bedside and then sitting down in the chair beside the window like a visiting uncle, with his hands on his knees.

Gabriella sat up, and the bedclothes fell down. She looked at him and laughed.

“You are so sweet,” she said, smiling at his attendant heart sitting beside her and passing through another wave of her own disbelief that such a man existed. She held out her arms to him, and in his jacket, shirt, and trousers he stretched himself across; he did not reach for her with his hands, but closed his eyes as he craned forward like a finishing sprinter and was an instant there in that invisible place of long-imagined arrival, until her fingers touched his face and drew him toppling onto the bed. She was laughing. She drew him against her breasts and rose her body against him, caressing him with the fullness of her so his face travelled the length of her skin and tasted the perfume that was herself and did not come in bottles. He shook again in spasms. He clung to her as she moved now beneath now above him, now turning him over like a shipwreck in the churned-up waters of a passion that she could not fathom. She undressed him with a quick and flashing urgency, not thinking that her actions were like those of a saviour or that the dampness of her mouth finding his was the ageless, time-honoured way in which the world was resuscitated and gasped anew the miracle air. She thought nothing. She kissed the white and shaking wreckage of his body and swallowed his tears that spouted and rolled; he wept and tried to cling to her, embracing in this woman for the first time in his adult life the possibility of happiness and feeling at the same moment that the wave might crash, drowning him in that strange foreknowledge and expectancy of suffering which every day had taught him. He held her so tightly she arched and cried out, the breath squeezed from her in a thin red-and-yellow ribbon, and she was pressed onto him like a transparency. Their loving was thrown about; it rose up and fell down, it tumbled off the bed and arrived on the carpet among Gabriella's shoes. It squirmed and burned. She took handfuls of his skin and closed them tightly within her fingers, letting go and taking another even as he held hers. He hooped her, she enwrapped him. She rolled him over and shook him. She pressed his face hard to her breasts, she pulled his shoulders against her, as if the wholeness of himself might enter there; as if each of them had somehow forgotten their sex organs or forgone them as some hopelessly inadequate apparati of conjoinment, as if they wished not to be joined at all but to be one another, to blend. They wrestled and tumbled within each other in a way that sought transcendence and to make their bodies one as air or spirit.

“I love you,” Stephen said.

Gabriella touched the smooth moon of his bare head where he lay across her. But she did not say she loved him.

18

And so there was then a brief season before Christmas, a time which glimmered with the quality of fables and made for Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi the single most enduring memory of what happiness could be like on earth. The sun stayed between the mountains. When Gabriella told Stephen that the cold dampness of the weather in winter depressed her, he made the characteristically rash promise of the first-time lover that he would not let it rain on her. Within a few days, when the pine needles of the town's Christmas trees were drying and falling and the sun still warmed Kerry like Maytime, he began to believe, like a child, that love had more powers than he supposed and that the force of wishes sometimes made things true. His gift was one of pure sentimentality and he wanted so deeply for everything to turn out right that, in that brief season of sunlight, he imagined it would. He lived at Mary White's and visited Nelly Grant and carried to Gabriella's cottage the bags of fruit, honeys, and jams that fed pleasure and rapture. Sometimes she played for him. She stood beside the bed, and having bargained that he lie long and naked while he listen, she bowed a light quick music whose notes came like birds and sang through the cottage air. She played more easily than she had ever done, not yet knowing that the quality she had discovered was forgiveness and that in the secrecy of her spirit a healing had begun.

It was a season of love in the afternoon; of slow time and long caresses, of strawberries (that had been flown from Africa and bought in a market in Cork) passing from mouth to mouth like the wet ripe and softly bruised essence of pleasure itself. It was a season of nothing else; the world had been made small and sunny. Everything else had been lopped away, had in a single kiss been rendered meaningless, and while the days passed by, Stephen did not think of returning to Clare. He did not think of the letter that he must have known would come (and did) from Eileen Waters, the threat she did not quite have the authority to make that unless she heard from him at once he would be dismissed from the school, and that further, he would not get work from the department again; he did not consider tomorrow nor the diminishing funds from which he paid Mary White as Christmas approached. But neither did he hear the voice that whispers insistently beneath the surface of all our happiness, that urges you to gather each moment like a small stone and store it in the deep pockets of your soul, that knows what lies ahead and offers only the wisdom of living fully and cherishing like the briefest dream this season of loving, for these are the instants of passion which will later become those diamonds of memory that will cry out: Here, there, look, in these moments I lived and knew a boundless joy, I loved.

Stephen did not hear it. He did not think, A day will come when this will end, when I will sit in a room and turn over these moments like the story of another man's life. But rather, in those three weeks before Christmas, he awoke and loved and listened to music and clung to the thin belief that the things of the heart endured and mattered and were the secret magic which could entangle the varied and ingenious knots of life like the fingers of an ancient mariner. At thirty-two years of age, in love for the first time, Stephen was an early model of romance. He withdrew money from the bank and bought flowers from Mary Mungovan's shop on the lower street, which specialized in wreaths and funeral accessories. He carried the chrysanthemums in the crook of his arm like an infant and brought them to Gabriella as a lesser declaration of the inexpressible. It was in the character of his love that he could not describe it and tried instead to deliver it through an entire inventory of small gifts and gestures: he made her thick, undrinkable coffee every morning and brought it to her in her bed, he washed her dishes, he tidied the clothes it was her habit to leave on the floor, he brought her the Cadbury's chocolate bars she said she loved, leaving them in half-hidden places about the cottage, and telling her she was beautiful when she stood before the mirror and mockingly said he was fattening her into a Madonna; he wrote her small notes, he bought books and left them by her bed, he emptied Nelly Grant's shelves, buying every kind of fruit and fresh juice, carrying bottles of elderberry wine up the hill to the cottage in a string bag that Gabriella had brought from Venice.

Stephen did not suffer greatly from the fact that Gabriella Castoldi did not tell him that she loved him. He had the visionary blindness of a saint and wanted only for her to let him love her. He did not expect nor even imagine that she might requite his love. Life had imbued him with a deep humility and then nourished it with a Catholic sense of his own unworthiness. He was the lesser for not being beautiful, for possessing no gift, and for the flawed understanding with which he had grown up that fate had chosen him for misfortune. He was dazzled by her, and did not care how he appeared to anyone in the town, carrying her groceries, bringing her flowers, hanging her strawberry-stained sheets on the line. It was enough for Stephen Griffin that the great airy burden of love he had discovered inside himself could be given to Gabriella. He felt she was the saddest woman he had ever met, and wanted to heal her, to caress her, and to remake the world around her with tenderness in that earliest and most redeeming of our instincts that is the deep-felt and inexplicable longing to make another happy.

They took walks in the December mountains. They told each other's lives like stories. She dared him a dozen dares and he took them on for her, taking off his clothes and sitting screaming in the icy stream while she laughed and clapped, rushing to him with their blanket and drying him gently like some astonishing new proof of God. He jumped off rocks and climbed trees, clambering slippingly among the wet branches, losing his footing, cutting his chin, triple-scratching the top of his head, and arriving forty feet above her, where at last he could answer her question and tell her what the view was like from up there. Neither did he mention his fear of heights, nor the swimming world below him, where her face seemed to bob and waver like a watery moon.

A season of tests and provings. To Gabriella Castoldi it was the unlikeliest thing; her experience of passion had taught her mistrust, and as she did not believe that she was beautiful or truly gifted, she first imagined Stephen Griffin's loving as something with the tender insubstantiality of a dream. It would pass in its own time. But when the days ran on and the strange sweetness of his presence lingered longer, Gabriella found herself waiting for the moment when he arrived at the door. He had left his kisses in her imagination, and they lived like exotic roses, blooming wild.

Five days before Christmas, when the people of the town had begun complaining that the sunny weather had robbed the season of its spirit, Gabriella lay across the body of Stephen and decided she had to break the back of love.

If it would break.

Nothing that is good in the world can last long, she believed, and the sweetness of those days and nights in the cottage had brought her to a frightening vulnerability.

She lay where Stephen could not see her face and she told him that he must go back to Clare.

“You must go back to your job,” she said.

He said nothing. He touched the top of her head and stroked her hair.

“I have no job,” he said.

“You have. You will get it back.” She was still not looking at him. “Then you will be going to your father for Christmas.”

“I have sent him a card. I told him I was going to ask you to come.”

“I won't,” she said, and then, while moving her right hand slowly across the pale softness of his belly in a gesture that would lodge in the underwater sand of his memory, she took a firm blow at love and said, “I am leaving. I am going back to Venice.”

Silence. Her back was to him. When Stephen spoke, his voice cracked like glass in the blind air behind her.

“How long will you be … Will you be …” He didn't want to say coming back, he wanted the small room hope needs to survive.

“I don't know,” said Gabriella, “I have to go. For now. I have to,” she said, weeping onto his skin, kissing it gently like a farewell, and wondering why she felt the brutal necessity of testing love, of bending its back towards breaking, and trying to bring on before time the grief she imagined was inevitable.

Slowly she ran her hands down the length of his legs in last caresses. Then she turned over and saw the vanquished ruin of his face, and without telling him that she already suspected that she was pregnant, or that she could not herself dare to imagine as true and durable the love he was offering her, she reached out and touched his wet cheek and said, “Stefano, make love to me.”