As It Is in Heaven

1

It was Christmas Eve when Stephen drove across the country once more to the house of his father. A misting rain was falling and the still unrepaired rubber of his windscreen wipers smeared it on the glass like fingers at the blood of a wound. He peered forward, but drove into unseeable country, his heart leaking the disconsolate acid of lost love. Three times he was stopped at Garda checkpoints, where big-shouldered men wore the rain like a stain on their backs and dripped it from the brims of their caps, leaning down to check the Christmas drivers for drunkenness. Stephen told one of them he did not drink, but his words came out warped with emotion and he was Breathalyzed all the same. When he was closer to the city, driving down the last part of the motorway into the four o'clock darkness, he almost crashed, as in a disturbed dream, into the white flanks of a wild horse.

In all, there were nine of them, galloping like a bizarre vision across the thrown lights of the cars and taking off down the motorway ahead of him. They flashed across the darkness, charging before the headlights into Dublin. For a mile the horses kept to the motorway. They trotted past the lights that changed green before they got there and disappeared, like ghosts of themselves, into the places where had once been fields.

Stephen drove the first car behind the horses and thought of Gabriella. He had already realized without shock that when you give yourself completely to someone else you see the world through their eyes, and easily imagined her own delight at the strange wildness of the scene. But then, when the horses took off to gallop to the left along the toll road to the airport, he turned right and felt the leaving of Gabriella like phantom pain in a lost limb.

When he arrived, the house lights were on. He found his key and walked across the wet lawn and was on the point of opening the door when Philip Griffin did it before him.

“Stephen,” he said, briefly looking into the space where the woman was not with him and, with the strange awkwardness of those facing unfamiliar mechanics, reaching suddenly forward to embrace his son.

Together, after ham sandwiches and Mr. Kipling's mince pies, Philip and Stephen Griffin drove to Midnight Mass, which was at ten o'clock. Earlier that afternoon, on the numbing tide of his third painkiller, Philip had slipped £600 between the railings of Stephen's Green, and had gone home hoping to see in his son's expression something of the fair justice of God. He had now deposited £5,387 in the green place of the city centre. He had never put the money in the same place twice, nor had he ever gone back to see if it was gone.

The Griffins drove into the city beneath the lights of Christmas. They did not speak, but instead passed small comments on the lights, the traffic, or the rain, making use of that ancient code like spies burdened with the secret vulnerability of the world. They arrived at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament and hurried across the black weather into the organ music and the rising hum of the Rosary. They knelt and said nothing. They were two men missing women, and until the priest arrived they stayed on their knees and were, like everyone else, lost in the privacies of their own personal longing and beseeching, silent voices ascending to unknowable heaven.

The Mass began. The priest was an old man. He had said Christmas Mass in eighteen parishes, including three in Africa, and, like Philip Griffin, fully expected this to be his last. He said the prayers slowly, as if journeying back on each one into the memories of the past. And when he came to the small stand of the pulpit for the sermon, he looked down at the faces of the congregation with the serene and beatific expression of a man who has at last made peace with himself.

“I wish each of you a happy and joyful Christmas,” he said, and then swallowed his breath and lost the rest of his sermon, realizing he had reached the tranquil and easeful end of words, saying nothing, just holding out his hands for a long moment in front of him, as if passing to everyone an invisible gift of joy.

To the surprise of his heart Stephen Griffin received it. He felt a strange and spreading lightness, and by the time he was sitting and watching his father go to receive Communion, he discovered he had somehow been gifted a piece of white linenlike optimism. He rose and passed his father coming back along the aisle. He took the host in his mouth for the first time in years and felt it taste like the memory of goodness. He returned and knelt down and prayed for his mother and his sister in the prayers he did not know were the echoes of his father's. Then the Mass was over and the old priest left the altar a last time. The Griffins stood up at the same time, moving from the church with the melted Communion still lingering like grace and their spirits joined with something rare and fragile as faith.

Things could still work out. Believe it.

Stephen put his hand on his father's back, and when they reached the church door he raised an umbrella over the old man as they walked out beneath the dark and starless heavens that spilled with rain.

When they returned home, it was half past eleven. Inside the house, where all his Christmases had been, Stephen made tea while his father sat in the front room and put on “E Lucevan le stelle.” The music travelled through the house like an old guest and became, in the metamorphic magic of notes and rhythm, the true expression of those two men. It contained the full and varied complexity of their separate longings, and when they sat to have their tea, they did not speak across it. It was only when the disc had ended that Stephen picked up the opened letter that had been put by the side table for him to find. It was the angry missive from Eileen Waters, a slightly less bitter replica of the three others which Stephen had found inside his front door when he had returned to Miltown Malbay. It was school holidays and he had driven directly to Dublin without going near the principal. Now he read the letter she had sent to his father demanding to know where he was, and across the faint humming of the stilled music player, he said, “You know I was in Kenmare?”

“Yes. I got the card,” his father said. The old man raised his small face to pass his son only the slightest encouragement to talk on.

Stephen was looking away. The rain sounded on the windows and made a muffled dullness of the distant ringing of churchbells.

“I mentioned bringing a friend,” Stephen said, and paused and sighed and breathed the scent of lilies that was expiring from the pores on his neck.

“Oh yes, I was wondering.”

“She plays the violin.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. Her name is Gabriella Castoldi. She is from Venice.”

He could not tell it without half-smiling now. He said her name and felt wings opening in his chest. Then at last he told his father all. He spoke without pause and began by saying the three words “I love her,” and then spinning out the tale of his loving across the midnight of Christmas like the newest fable in the oldest book of stories, telling the remarkableness of his own emotions as if they were so entirely unexpected and even unimaginable gifts that unknown friends had dropped at his door, telling the sunshine and the cloudlessness, and making his father smile away wet smiles towards the window, where the narrative of love was the certain and indisputable proof of the listening ear of God.

When Stephen had told him everything, silence fell like snow. It gathered about their ankles and rose slowly. When it was threatening to leave them frozen on the opposite sides of love, Philip Griffin raised his hand and pointed to the old chess game. Despite the sharp ending of the tale, he was not discouraged by what he had heard: goodness had travelled to his son, only it was clear now that Philip needed to do more.

“Do you …?”

Stephen joined his father's eyes on the chessboard.

“It's a mess,” he said. “I …”

“No no,” said Philip, pushing the board into place between them, “I thought that, but no, your position isn't so hopeless at all. One move changes the game.”

2

On Christmas morning Stephen awoke to find the suit his father had made him. He did not put it on until late morning, after he had already given Philip Griffin the new discs of three Puccini operas and four of the violin concerti by Vivaldi which were playing constantly in his head. When, later, he appeared downstairs in the suit, he looked like a newer version of himself. The cut of the cloth was so perfectly made that for the first time in his life he experienced the naturalness of clothes and wore them with confidence. His father in the downstairs hall eyed him with a scrupulous air of self-examination, and then nodded, acknowledging that transforming moment in which the son passes the father like opposite but identical travellers on the up-and-down elevators of life. Stephen was going on, Philip thought, and renewed in himself the difficult faith that after so much that was ineffective and muddled and wasted in his life, this much was going to be right. He saw his son with his wife's eyes and felt her pride in him, too, and then led Stephen out the door of Christmas morning to drive together to the graveside.

In the days that followed, Stephen stayed in Dublin and visited Venice in his mind. When the bookshops reopened, he drove across the glitterfrost of the New Year and bought a life of Vivaldi and three histories of Venice. He came home, and while his father paced on the creak of the upstairs bedroom floor and wondered what God would want him to do next, he sat in the front room and read. He read the shadowy insubstantial version of the life of the composer, of his birth in Venice in the bleak March of 1678 in the sestiere of Castello, his father a barber who gifted his son the red hair which was startling enough to name Vivaldi later as the Red Priest of Venice, when he was already teaching violin to orphaned girls at the Ospedale della Pietà and earning in the autumn of 1703 a salary of five ducats a month. He was Maestro di Violino, the priest who did not say Mass, who left the altar with chest pains and said he could not return to it, who lived his entire life as a priest, but whose only sacrament was music, writing notes quick-handed on roughened parchment, as if taking dictation from God.

Stephen sat in Dublin in the frozen first days of January and read himself into Vivaldi's Venice. There, in fragments and hints, oblique suggestions, was the composer's relationship with the singer Annina Giro, the daughter of a French wigmaker, for whom he wrote now forgotten operas, and the all but vanished music for a voice none but he thought was so fine. Stephen played the discs he had bought his father and then read hour after hour the gilded and glorious fable that was the history of Venice, of its flamboyant past made of silks and cloths of gold, of spices and scents, of galleons and golden gondolas, the palace and power of the Doge and the ever-lapping green waters of the lagoon across which came, like rightfully returned sisters, the potent and influential magic of Arabia and China. When Stephen read of Venice, he read of Gabriella. Like every lost lover, he sought in the large room of her absence the smallest continual reminders, the dust of her presence. It did not matter that Gabriella herself had left Venice and preferred the mountains of Kerry to the bridged and watery maze of the city where she was born, when Stephen's eyes travelled the pages and read the names of streets and squares, the calles and campos that gathered like excitement in the long S of the Canal Grande, he was closer to her.

When in the evenings he played a halfhearted and uninspired chess with his father, he played with a map of Venice at his feet.

“Here.”

Philip Griffin was standing inside the door of the front room, having just returned from the city. He had business to attend to, he had told Stephen, leaving his son in the diminished dream that was his condition in the first cold days of January and which his father saw with increasing panic was each day undoing the good of December. He had gone into Dublin with a new withdrawal, and telling God that it was just this once, he bypassed the park railings and went instead into the travel agency of Jimmy Galvin, a man who had played soccer for Ireland and once bought from Philip Griffin four suits of blue green purple and grey tweed with specifically tailored elephantine flared trouser legs and twenty-nine-inch waists. Jimmy Galvin did not remember him. He bought his clothes off the rack now and wore them with a thoughtless monotony that reflected his life since glory. He had three girls working for him at the counter and sat in the back room behind a window, where he lived on the phone, untying the knots of foreign agencies, commissions, and airport pickups, and all but forgetting the moments only his legs remembered when he had scored twice against Spain.

Philip watched the top of his head and wondered if Jimmy would recognize him. He didn't, and a small loss smarted in the tailor like a sudden discovery in the death notices. He held out his money to the girl at the counter and paid in cash for a ticket and a hotel room. Then he drove to the hospital and spoke with Hadja Bannerje.

Finally, he arrived home with the envelopes in his pocket, like the folded certificates of his fatherhood. He stood inside the door and gasped as the pain roiled and made his eyebrows rise involuntarily, as if making room in his face for new suffering.

“Here,” he said, and held out the envelopes.

The first one Stephen opened was the headed notepaper of Dr. Hadja Bannerje and the declaration in slanted blue ink that Stephen Griffin was currently the patient of the undersigned and that he could not return to work at the present time, for his condition necessitated monitoring under the care of yours sincerely, Dr. Hadja Bannerje.

Stephen finished reading it and looked at where the grey slump of his father was leaning against the door.

“Well?” said Philip Griffin with a breathy inhale. “That's, her complaints fecked. We'll send that off to the old bitch tomorrow. Open the next one.” The father nodded, he touched his tongue to wet his lips and half-grinned half-grimaced at the madcap and wild plan, its rash and foolhardy nature that was not in his character, that was the reversal of his previous position, but to which he had given himself with a kind of sweet and feckless madness that made him imagine, against all the evidence of his life and amidst the broken and long-smouldering ruins of his own heart, that here now, at last, for his son, he could play the angel of love.

Stephen opened the second envelope and found the ticket to Venice.

“Go,” his father said, and did not move, speaking with that purity of motive that makes men saints, and hearing himself say the words he wanted said to him and which instead, for another while at least, stayed suspended in the lonely silence of his eyes.

“Go,” he said. “Go and find her.”

3

By the time Gabriella Castoldi had arrived back in Venice, she knew she was carrying Stephen Griffin's child, and bore it with sour bouts of illness up and down the steps of the Rialto and through the fish-fumed air of the narrow streets to the house of her spinster cousin, Maria, in the Calle dei Botteri. Maria Feri was fifty years old and still worked in the papeterie in the Calle Piovan where she had first earned wages as a girl. She welcomed Gabriella on the day before Christmas, when the grey dampness seeped through the air of the city like the cloths of drowned ghosts, and the seasonal efforts of the inhabitants to hold off melancholia was mostly manifest in the quickened movements down the alleyways and across the bridges, a hastening towards the year's end, urgent with shopping and the little clusters of families hurrying to and from visits with unbearable relatives.

Maria Feri had prepared for Christmas alone, but the unexpected arrival of her cousin visited her like a secret blessing. Her heart fluttered, roses shot out in the pale powders on her cheeks. She sat Gabriella in her only comfortable chair and tapped the cage of Goldoni, the yellow-feathered bird she had named with an endearing lack of originality, who was her truest companion and could, she said, flushing with shyness, sing finer than Pavarotti. While Gabriella sat with the bird, Maria made more welcoming the guest room where no guest had ever stayed; she carried through the sitting room extra blankets, a jug of fresh water, two apples, and the potted lemon plant which was dying in the kitchen, all the time struggling to keep the deep joy of her visitor's arrival from showing beneath it a half century of loneliness.

Gabriella sat with Goldoni. Sickness came in waves, and when she went to the window for air, the familiar mildly bitter scent of the canal water turned her insides with a swift churn. She gasped and held on to the rail, feeling both the illness of her pregnancy and the stronger, older malady that was the returning loss and disappointment of her childhood. She caught the air and gagged as if it were brown water. There she was, herself at nine years of age going to the window as if it were a portal of escape from the sharp censure of her father, who sat at the table asking questions of geography and knuckling her brothers' heads when they failed to answer correctly. Gabriella had only just slunk back into the armchair when the angular face of her cousin reappeared through the doorway. Maria saw the pallor of the other woman and supposed it to be sisterly shock at the news of Giovanni. She sat down on the hard chair opposite Gabriella and gave her a glass of mineral water.

“They arrested him last Tuesday,” she said.

She was a thin yet strong woman, whose bones might have been made of an assemblage of the wooden handles of farm tools with skin drawn over them. Her lips were so used to tightness they held her expressions unfreed in a clamp which dared not release the yearning for all the unlived love her life had missed.

“I didn't think it was right,” she said, “Christmas.”

Gabriella smiled a half-grimace. She had not known and took the news like the latest in a long line of defeats above which the ghost of her father was laughing bitterly.

“They said Giovanni had done terrible things. He has been implicated in …” Maria stopped when she saw the wound open in her cousin's expression.

“I cannot help him,” said Gabriella, “it is his own life. I don't know what I could do.” She raised her hands and let them fall with uselessness.

“No, of course,” said Maria Feri, and reached with the large fingers of her hand to touch Gabriella's knee. “You must be tired. Will you come and see if the room is all right? I can change anything you don't like.”

And then it was Christmas in Venice. Rain that was falling in Dublin fell, too, into the Canal Grande and emptied the narrow streets, bathing them in a flowing melancholy until they seemed sometimes awash with the waters of sadness. The buildings perched lofty and aloof from each other, as if they could ignore entirely their lower beginnings and the certainty of their sinking to the victor of Time. The city closed in on itself, and in the sitting room of the house of Maria Feri the two women sat on either side of despair. Gabriella had not told her cousin of her pregnancy. She had given her as a Christmas gift the two bottles of bath powders that Nelly Grant had concocted as a complement to love, but Maria had put them safely away in a dry press, where all her treasured things awaited the arrival of happiness. She sat and made coffee and read long novels and fussed over her visitor. She fed Goldoni French biscottes and carried his cage away from the draught of the window when she realized he had not sung in three days.

Gabriella did not know what she was doing there. She did not know yet that she could not repair the past, and so her mind brooded on the failed pregnancies of her mother, the miscarried sisters who, like some treasured but lost luggage, had never appeared, and left her gaping at a revolving emptiness. Gabriella questioned herself with the rigour of her father. She interrogated Love until it could not answer and broke down in choked-up confusion that could only mean there was none: she did not love Stephen Griffin. Time and again, she sat under the glare of examination and, while her cousin whistled at the bars of the caged bird, she turned over in her head the impossible questions. What should she do? How could she be in love with that man? He did not love her either, did he? He loved her violin. He loved the idea of her, and had fallen in love with his own imagination.

But now the child, the child was not imaginary, she heard her father chide her: “It's irresponsible and stupid. You're a fool like your brothers. There are laws, there are rules for living and we follow them,” he said, “whether we like them or not.” He stood across the room from her and leaned his disgust against the wall. He held his head angled backward to aim the shot of his anger like spit.

“Andiamo a pranzo?” Maria Feri asked, and at once he vanished.

Under a black umbrella then, they went through the grey and green wateriness of the city for lunch. The air blew cold. Many places were closed, and they had to make do with the brasserie-birreria of Antonio Renato, who had opened for the few tourists and to escape the madness that was his family upstairs. He served the cousins a pizza primavera with a small nod and a kind of quiet and restrained decorum, as if attempting to make himself invisible. He polished the counter and gazed regretfully at the street outside.

“Will you be staying for long?” Maria Feri dared at last to ask her cousin, and then flushed with embarrassment. “Of course you are welcome for as … I mean, well, I am very glad.”

“And you are very kind.”

Maria smiled and looked down at her lunch, hoping that her schooled air of politeness concealed her desperation for Gabriella to stay.

“I don't know exactly. I have to decide some things. I would like to stay a few weeks if I could.”

“Oh, a few weeks, yes. Of course.” The older woman lifted her glass of wine with a shaking hand and held it tight against her lip, lest it show her disappointment.

While the rest of the city greeted the New Year with a mixed response of religion and carnival, the cousins lived with the quietness of convalescents and waited for the cold rain to lift. Gabriella played the violin for herself, and in the other room Maria listened and experienced the astonished awe that those with undiscovered talent sometimes feel for the gifted. The music was played not with sweetness but with a sharp and quickened intensity that even Goldoni the bird recognized was the playing of the heart. Gabriella played it for herself; she played it in the city where her music had begun, and in the playing revisited the rooms of her home; she played it for the child not yet born, and for the thousand unanswerable questions of its future. She played the music for its own order, for the pleasure of its form, which was in itself the one perfect thing in her life. And when she had finished, and the door of her cousin's room creaked and the bird began to sing, she lay on the bed in the kind of exhaustion that makes do for peace.

It rained on. When the rain lifted, the mist clung in the sleeves of the streets. Venice dripped into itself. Short damp days passed moments after they had begun. Gabriella awoke with the door closing behind her cousin going out to work. Then she turned over in the deep blankets of the bed and it was afternoon and the grey light of another day was sliding softly into the waters. She rose and walked around the apartment in her nightgown. She watched from the window, throwing a cloth over the birdcage when the manic gaiety of his chirping stitched like a needle along the soft rim of her brain. Gabriella returned to her bed. With her hands on her unborn child, she turned into the pillow and became her mother. She became the woman giving birth to grief, to loss, and to the failure of hope. Sweat ran down her face, her hair matted in wild short ropes, her mouth dried, and her tongue wore a white fur. She cried without tears, and, in that room in Venice, felt pressing down on her the terrible loneliness of those who seek like saints to know and do the right thing. Oh God, she thought, closing her eyes for clearer vision and looking in the darkness for a sign, Oh, God, what am I to do?

4

When Philip Griffin waved Stephen goodbye from the edge of the front garden, he felt a weight lifting in his spirit and looked down to see that his shoes were still touching the ground. It was the day after the Feast of the Epiphany. There was a sense of slow waking in the drizzling air, as if Christmas like a reluctant guest was only now leaving the suburbs; the streets were drowsy with aftermath.

Knowing that Stephen was leaving for Venice, both men had woken up mute and spent breakfast with the studied concentration of wordless monks. Stephen wore his father's suit, with the tickets and his passport next to his breast. The bigness of his feelings kept colliding within him. The round enormity of his gratitude rose in his gorge like a ball cock. He could say nothing. His fingers twisted in knots of yearning that kept coming apart beneath the table and leaving him feeling the emptiness of air with a free-falling panic. He thought of Gabriella vanished into Venice and, in the suit of Philip Griffin, was briefly courageous, balanced on a thin and heroic belief like some latter-day Icarus moments before he chanced the waxen wings and leapt into the air. I will find her, he thought. I'm sure I will. He gulped his tea. The sweat ran off his shoulder blades into the small channel of his back. He took leave of his father with the delicate and mismatched embrace of a crane above a small building, then walked out across the weather to his car.

Philip watched him drive away. He watched the emptiness after the car had gone and then let the wordlessness of his morning escape in a low groan. He opened his mouth to let his relief float out and followed it immediately with the quick prayer: “Oh God, Anne, I hope it works out.” Then he went back inside the house, where he climbed the stairs to his bedroom slowly, gripping the bannister like the nearness of his last days, ascending, going to take out the bank book, where he could recheck the balance of his account and calculate anew the cost of living.

5

Beneath the powders with which she tried to smooth away some of the wrinkles of her life, Maria Feri's face bloomed crimson. Her cousin was pregnant. Gabriella was sitting in the dim light in such a fallen torpor that Maria had to disguise her delight when she was told, and she turned instead to Goldoni in his cage. She tapped him the news until his heart was fluttering. She wanted to share with him the extraordinary vision of it: a child, a child could be born here, right here. And in the vastness of her loneliness a pure joy flew, white as a dove. Maria did not think of the father, of the missing man; she had lived her life in the company of that absence, moving from the days of promise, when any moment he might appear, to a slow, sad reckoning that was like the slow and unannounced fall of petals from last week's flowers; she did not think to ask Gabriella. Instead, she turned her back momentarily and tapped the birdcage to see if Goldoni could sing her mood. Her cousin had come to live with her and now was going to have a baby. For Maria Feri it seemed as if everything in her life might have been waiting for this; it was the arrival of significance. Here was a meaning that washed clean the smudge of ordinary days, weeks, and years. Here, after all, was discovered purpose; she was to be the child's other mother. Goldoni sang. Maria regained the composure that was her learned manner with the world and turned to her cousin.

“You are run down,” she said. “We must take good care of you. Of course you should have told me sooner. My bed is much more comfortable. I will move you in there tonight.”

“No, please.”

“Yes.” She touched a fallen ash-grey hair back from her eye and had the brief dizzy sensation of feeling pregnant herself. “Mia cara cugina. Gabriella. You are my guest here. Please let me make you welcome. It is my happiness.”

She left the room and went to the kitchen, from where she could still hear the bird singing. Then she cooked the first of several meals that were her prescription to enrich the iron in her cousin's blood. The scent of liver with onions and polenta travelled the house like an upbraiding nanny.

Gabriella had told Maria only when the weight of her uncertainty threatened a kind of madness. She had told her she was pregnant to explain the discourtesy of not wanting to go out to hear concerts or visit relations. She had told her in desperation, not with shame or upset, but with the calm resignation of those who have no idea what is supposed to happen next. While the pots were clattering and the onions sizzling in oil, Gabriella lay back in the armchair and drifted in a half-dream of Kenmare. How unreal it seemed now. The days and nights of loving blended in a blue memory. What had happened? She turned to the long, narrow window that looked across the street at the ochre wall of the Passinettis' and tried to see there the face of Stephen. Then she shut her eyes and held her lips tight together, as if one kissed the other.

And there he was. He was that long white figure standing by her bedside. He was the man she had reached out to in the morning and who had come onto the bed and been careful to keep his shoes sticking out in the air not soiling the covers. He was the man who shook like tin foil when she touched him. Gabriella's heart opened with memories of him: how he looked at her with disbelief, how he reached across the space between them each time, as if the journey of his fingers towards her skin were the sailing of some intrepid armada voyaging towards a dream continent. She lay back in soft memories all afternoon, until darkness fell, and then, for no reason other than that it was the learned habit of years, her mind sliced into them like a knife: she diced them into nothings. Love wears off like cheap perfume, she heard her father say. A child, marriage, a life together, these were different things from a passion in the Irish mountains. Gabriella heard her father, she heard the harshness of his voice and saw the vanquished look of his eyes, and then with a sudden chill understood that his voice was her own. It was she who was unable to believe in love. She had been able to sustain no relationship in her life thus far; there was some flaw in her, she believed, some fracture that ran deep below the surface of her soul and made the reality of loving seem a fairy tale. Stephen loved her, she knew that, and knew, too, that she had loved him in Kenmare. But in the dull melancholic weathers of Venice, trapped in the dry rooms of the apartment of Maria Feri, Gabriella lost belief in the future.

A return to Ireland seemed suddenly impossible. She could not imagine herself a mother, and fell into naps feverish with nightmares of miscarriage and blood. Her hair matted and her eyes burning, she woke in the dawn with pressure on her soul and banged on the birdcage to get Goldoni to stop singing.

6

When Stephen arrived off the airport bus in the Piazzale Roma, he had no idea where to go. The afternoon was chill and grey and empty. He had less than fifteen phrases in Italian and had never been out of Ireland before, and yet with the blind innocence of lovers, imagined he would find his way to Gabriella. He did not have an address for her or the slightest clue other than the name of her old music teacher, Scaramuzza, who he knew might be dead. He stood in the piazzale with his bag and waited until he could sense the unseen canal to his left, and then he crossed to the floating platform to await the vaporetto.

Venice on that January afternoon was unlike the pictures of itself. When the vaporetto came and took him in a steady tugging round the bends of the Canal Grande, Stephen saw the palazzi grimly shuttered against the winter and had a sense of the city turning its back on the progress of time. Greenly brown watermarks lined the lower walls of the buildings; the colour of everything was faded, there was a worn air of enormous fatigue in that winter afternoon, as if some long and brutal enemy had been exhaustively endured and barely defeated, leaving the stonework of the city itself cracked and dismayed in a way that to the summer tourists would seem antique and elegant with grandeur. Still, it was Venice. It was like nowhere else, and as the vaporetto moved down the green waters of the canal, the very frailty of the city, its watery divisions and myriad narrowly bridged islands, struck Stephen as being clearly the city of Gabriella. He could imagine her there. He could imagine the childhood she had described to him in those narrow ochre buildings that rose from the waters. He could see her as a girl and felt in the foolish hopeful way of the romantic that in some way he could heal her past by coming. He leaned on the side rail of the boat and watched the slender street-ways they passed as if he would suddenly see her.

He got off at the Ponte Accademia and found his way with the small tourist map in his guidebook to the Hotel San Stefano. His father had chosen it with the same purpose he had chosen Stephens Green: to remind God to keep an eye on his son.

After Stephen had settled in his narrow room and opened the shutters that looked out on the Campo San Stefano, he got a phonebook and checked the listings under Castoldi. He knew that Gabriella's parents were dead, but imagined that he might find one of her brothers or relations and learn where she was. On a small piece of paper he had written down the phrases he needed.

“Mi scusi, sto cercando Gabriella Castoldi.”

He rang seven different numbers and grew familiar with the exasperated tones of Venetian voices telling him he was calling a wrong number.

“Ha spagliato numero.”

“Gabriella Castoldi.”

“Chi e? Non I'ho mai sentita.”

By the following midday he had called them all.

There was no violin teacher Scaramuzza either.

It rained coldly. He had come ill prepared for the weather and wore a sweater beneath the blue suit his father had made for him while he walked through the chill city looking for her. He began after breakfast. He crossed the empty square of San Stefano, where no pigeons flew, and took different sestieri each time, walking through the labyrinthine alleyways, stopping to read carefully the posters of concert performances, and then pacing on while his symptoms of flu worsened. His nose streamed. The cold made his ears burn and his eyes water. Within five days of pursuit through the puzzle of the city, he was a shattered, wild-looking shell of himself. He imagined the awfulness of chance lurked everywhere, that he might miss the opportunity of meeting her if he stopped somewhere for lunch, that if he rested for the afternoon she might be that very day passing by the hotel. It was the madness of the unrequited, and in the city of Venice for ten days that January Stephen Griffin succumbed to it, walking from morning until night the twisted street system, where the sudden turns and blind alleys might have been invented for avoidance and secrecy.

For ten days Stephen searched for Gabriella. He asked for her and said her name at shops and fish stalls, and then, in desperation, visited damp candlelit churches, where he prayed that he might find her, until at last, his coughs choking in his chest and his body releasing a kind of rheumy film of sweat and anguish, he surrendered, took the vaporetto back up the canal, and returned to Ireland.

7

On the twenty-third of January Philip Griffin awoke with no pain. The morning was brilliantly lit. It was as if spring was being previewed, and so when he got out of bed he chose the light fabric of his green trousers with the blue blazer that he had worn in the summertime. He breakfasted with Puccini. He played the music so loud that down the little street Mrs. Flynn and Mrs. Hehir listened while they cleaned their windows and hummed the airs without knowing them. (The music slipped inside their minds like birds in trees, and within two days both of them had bought discs of Turandot.) Philip left the music player on Repeat and polished his shoes to the infinite sweetness of “In questa reggia.” When he had finished, he looked at himself in the mirror and was suddenly himself forty years younger, looking at the fresh face of his youth before going to meet Anne for the first time.

The music soared through the rooms. He almost wept with happiness. His pain had died away. At last, he thought. At last. Stephen was in Venice. And Philip had given him the ticket, had urged him to go. If it wasn't for me he mightn't have gone. But now he will be all right. He will be there and have met her, and she must love him, after all. He shook his head with the surge of gratitude he felt, that his son's life would turn out well in the end, that Stephen would not be left abandoned again, and that God had been listening, after all. Suddenly the logical formula of his life was made clear: while love progressed in Venice, the cancer grew in Dublin. The fact that that morning he felt no pain meant that there was nowhere else for the cancer to go, his healthy tissue had been eaten up. This he took to be a good sign. Now is the time, I must be ready to meet her now.

He walked out the door, leaving Puccini playing as the best defense against the daylight thieves that robbed the houses on the street in numerical sequence. He took his car and drove to the bank with the excitement of a youth on his first date. He called for the manager and withdrew everything he had left in his account, taking the cash and putting it in a plastic shopping bag before heading for Stephen's Green.

The morning had a soft quality that Philip Griffin imagined had been prepared for him like a bed. Sunlight danced across the windows of buses. The perfumes of spring were awakened and mingled beneath the leafless trees of Stephen's Green, catching the moving crowds and teasing them with a sense of rebirth. At the first railings he came to, Philip stopped and reached in the bag. He let his fingers clutch the money blindly and looked up at the blue sky, as if he could see there the face of lost love. The brim of his hat dribbled a small sweat. With only a half glance about him, he took a fistful of twenty-pound notes and stuffed them quickly into the bushes at the muddy bottom of the railing. Then he walked on. He didn't hurry. He had a lot to get rid of, and knew that when the last of his lifetime's savings had been given away, he would have exhausted his source of good acts and at last death would arrive. He would fall down in the street, and his wife would be there.

He had no pain. The sun pressed its palms on the back of his blazer. He smiled, thinking of Stephen in Venice, and wondered if that was where the weather had come from. He stopped and leaned against the railings, letting the city pass him for a few moments. Then he reached into the shopping bag and drew out another thousand pounds. He was about to make the second down payment and had turned to put the money through the railings when a blow struck his head.

His hat fell forward onto his face. A man wrenched his arm backward. He cried out, but his cry was short and went downward instead of up, so that the sound was lost. There were two men. They were not men, they were youths, he thought. He was expecting angels. A woman walking past was looking at them. “Hey,” she said. And the second blow landed in Philip's stomach, and his head fell down and he vomited on himself. For an instant he clung backhandedly to the railing behind him as he was swaying over, holding an instant as if there was still some chance the world was reparable and he could catch the ship of death.

“Hey, stop that!” the woman called from another world. This brought another blow, hasty, more urgent. Any moment there might be rescue, he thought. Help me, please. Still, Philip did not let go of the bag. Not until he felt teeth biting into his hand. They grated on his bone and a searing pain ran through him, so he screamed and let go. Then the men were running away, and the money was gone.

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm sorry.”

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

“Well?” Stephen said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

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

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

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

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

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

10

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

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

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

“Well,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

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

“They have burned down La Fenice,” she said.

“Santo cielo. Oh, Gabriella, be calm. Calm yourself. Sit down.”

“No, I can't. I don't want to. I feel like …”

She thumped the back of the armchair hard. The acrid smell of destruction rose in the air, and the ashes spun from her head in a pale beam of sunlight. She could not be still, and while her cousin leaned against the press that displayed the serene blue glass of Murano, Gabriella kept moving back and forth across the light, twisting like a fish on a grim hook.

The disaster of the opera house spoke to her personally, like a moral fable; and it was less than an hour before she had discovered the sharpness of its meaning inside her: we cannot remake the past nor build a new life on the ruins of the old.

It was so obvious, and painful. The city was spoiled for her now, and even though it was long before she heard the faintest rumours that her brother Antonio had in some way been involved in the fire, that Giovanni had laughed in his cell so loudly when he heard, that the jailors had gagged him, Gabriella knew that she would leave Venice for good. She couldn't fathom the murky depth of that evil, to destroy the glittering place of music.

“I can't believe it,” she said, and struck at the wing of the chair.

Maria felt the glasses tremble in the press behind her and saw anew how one grief impacts on another. She raised the sharp angle of her nose as a precaution against tears and held on to the press with pale, hidden hands. The bird watched her and did not sing.

“It is barbarous. It is, you know. It is …”

“It is very sad,” said Maria from the shadowed side of the room, her voice low as a sigh in an ancient chair as her spirit subsided into it.

“It was like a jewel, La Fenice.”

“Yes.”

Gabriella lost her words. She leaned on the window, and at once the full force of man's stupidity, meanness, and malevolence caught up with her and crushed the energy of her rage. She could say nothing. The two women stood in the room silently apart and the light diminished. They could not speak. It was as if the room were flooded to the very rims of their lips with the despair of mankind and to utter another sound could only drown them. Maria Feri felt her own frailty and the great sudden pressure of the world. She told herself to concentrate. She made a mental ladder of prayers and thought of her favourite story of Venice, of how once, when the city had a plague, the population had prayed so fervently that their prayers became a wind that reached Mary in heaven, and how when the plague had passed, they had built her an impossible church on water. It was her favourite story, for Maria knew intimately the quality of that beseeching and could easily imagine the force of yearning transformed into something elemental. While Gabriella looked out on the smudge of man on the Venetian sky, Maria Feri held herself stiffly against the press and longed for what she already knew was impossible.

Then perhaps time passed the two of them by. The light was lost in clouds of smoke. Gabriella and Maria sat there silently, with the strange unity of people waking together to the disappointed endings of their separate dreams. At last Maria spoke.

“It is not the city,” she said with the sudden bravery of the vanquished.

“What?”

“It is a sad thing, but that is not the pain in your heart.” She stepped away from the press towards her cousin. Goldoni flitted onto the high bar in the cage. Maria reached the place where the shallow bar of light fell, and almost at once the things she had come forward to say were unsayable, were swiftly rendered mute and unnecessary as Gabriella turned towards her.

“Oh God,” Gabriella said. Instantly her hands flew like birds to her lower lip, and in that strange way that one tragedy trapezes to the next, she was torn apart by the terrible uncertainty of her ability to sustain love.

“Oh God, Maria,” she said, “what am I to do?”

And in that moment, as Maria Feri approached to put her arms around her cousin, becoming briefly the mother of the child, and held her with strength and tenderness in the nourishing faith that mothers know, Gabriella Castoldi changed her life and surrendered to that embrace, and wept. Her face flowed, the way water might flow from a rock. In Maria's arms her ferocity was gone and she allowed herself to be gently guided into the big armchair.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

“Stop. Please, Gabriella.”

Maria knelt down beside the armchair and stroked her cousin's hair.

“Do you love him?” Maria said.

“Oh God. Oh God Oh God Oh God.”

“Gabriella, tell me.” Maria could not see her face. She stroked her hair. She drew a scented paper tissue from the sleeve of her beige cardigan, but Gabriella did not take it.

“Gabriella?”

“How can I know? I can't. I might. I think I do. I don't know.” She raised her wet face and swollen eyes. “I don't know.”

“Does he love you?”

Gabriella brought her fingers to her cheeks; she touched them as if she were another.

“He thinks he does. If I go back, if I tell him I have his child, he will tell me he loves me, he will marry me. He is a good man. His goodness will love me.”

“And what is wrong with that?”

In the cage the bird sang six notes in echo.

“Look at me, Gabriella,” Maria said. “I missed my chances. I did not know. I waited. I waited, thinking, A day will come, Maria, and you will know. And do you know what? It did not. It did not come and he went away.”

“Maria.”

“Listen, Gabriella! I know. I have missed out. I have missed love because of pride, nothing else. It was my own fault. You think I don't know, I do. I know. I know what I am and how I am and how my life will be. I have given up thinking a day will come and I will know. For it will not come now. No matter how many prayers climb to heaven or how deeply my knees mark the floor. Please, Gabriella. I won't speak of it again. But please, don't wait to know. Go.”

Maria pressed on the armchair to raise herself from the floor. She walked away from Gabriella, put on her low-heeled brown shoes, and powdered over the pale face of sorrow with another that was rouged with hope. When she looked at herself in the mirror she was ten years older, but respectable with a reserve that was a finer mask that any made in Venice. She practised a thin smile. Then she left the house in her sensible shoes and entered the streets that smelled of the burned opera house, raising her chin from defeat and redeemed in the not small triumph of knowing herself so well.

She went on her way to work.

It was the middle of the morning.

12

Twelve hours later Gabriella phoned Stephen.

He was lying on top of his bed in the blue suit. When he stood in the moonless dark, the right sleeve of the jacket came loose and fell down his arm.

His phone had not rung in days. He had returned from Venice two weeks and had not yet called his father. He had imagined the disappointment the old man would feel and waited each day, hoping to find a way to tell him. Finally, he could wait no longer and decided he would drive to Dublin the following Saturday.

The phone rang. In the time it took him to cross the bedroom to answer it in the blind dark of the hallway, the certainty that it was bad news made his throat tight. He was stooped forward, guilt weighing his shoulders, and imagined even as his hand found the cold receiver that it was his father or, worse, news of him.

Then he heard her voice.

“Stefano?”

The sound came from so far away it might have been the next world. He could not believe it was his name in her mouth. He opened his lips to it in the darkness. The wind that came beneath the front door chilled his ankles. He held the receiver with two hands and listened deeply to the sound that was the sound of underneath the sea.

“Stefano, hello?”

His lips moved soundlessly and his eyebrows lowered as if he was concentrating on the most difficult puzzle in the world.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. Gabriella.”

He could say nothing else. The tenderness of her voice moved him. He felt he would fall down, and with the loose-sleeved arm, he reached to touch the wall.

“I had to talk to you. I have something to tell you,” said Gabriella.

She waited. The deep ocean of the darkness between them crackled down the telephone line. Stephen said nothing. He listened to her breath as if it were language.

“I am carrying your child,” she said, “and …”

And his breath went, as if someone else needed it and took it. He put his forehead against the wall to balance himself; life came pulsing through the darkness and lit him like a charge. He was exhilarated yet extinguishable. Gabriella was talking, but his ears were humming. He pressed his head against the wall.

“I love you,” he said.

“Stephen.”

“I love you.”

“I know. I know you do. But … Well, I mean this is different. It's a child, it's … I don't know what I feel. I don't know what I will feel tomorrow, the next day, the day after …”

“Please, Gabriella.” He said it like a demand. “I want you. I want to see you. I want to be with you. Oh God, Gabriella, I can't …” He stopped and thumped his forehead on the wall. His face was wet. “I love you.” He had nothing else to say and imagined for a moment if he repeated ceaselessly the three immemorial words, then the enchantment of language would bring her to him.

“You are kind and good. You are too good for me,” she said. “You love me even if …” She paused, as if a wave were rising, then said, “I don't know if I love you, Stephen.”

The one who had taken his breath now took his voice. The truth was like ice on him. Then Gabriella said, “I mean I do. I did. It's just me. I am so wretched. I … I don't know. Can I love anyone for my whole life? I don't know.”

And Stephen's voice returned: “I was in Venice.”

“What?”

“I came to find you. I …”

“Oh God, Stephen … Where did you, when did …?” And the questions fell away into nothingness, and the air hummed down the line between them.

Please, Stephen thought, please, God. And he closed his eyes tightly on that deeper darkness that was the darkness of all the disappointed days of his life, the darkness of that all but defeated spirit that skirted the shadowy edge of dreams with the expectation only of their failure. Then he heard her say:

“I will come back to Kerry.”

He wasn't sure he had heard her.

“I will come next week to Kenmare,” she said, as if she were telling herself to see how it sounded.

There was silence. Their lives hung in the baffled air; then Stephen said, “Play something.”

“What?”

“Play something, please.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn't. I haven't played since …”

“Gabriella.”

The sea rushed into the phone.

“Wait,” she said.

And while Stephen held the phone in the darkness, he imagined her crossing a living room in a building just across the Campo San Stefano from where he had looked out on Venice, and he joined her there in imagination as she found the case and opened it and rosined the bow and walked back across the hardwood floor, making the footsteps that he could hear approaching (as Maria Feri heard them, too, behind the shelter of her slightly ajar bedroom door). Then Gabriella was playing the violin beside the telephone, a passage from the A Minor Concerto of Antonio Vivaldi.

The music travelled, invisible as love, into the house by the sea. It returned, and was like some simple and ancient language between them, the one playing, the other listening. The quick notes in the upper octaves were the music of human ache and flurried down the phone the unsayable, timeless message of all our yearning, the never-ending, indefatigable, and desperate need to believe love like God's exists on earth. It was a message beyond telling. Yet it travelled the three hundred years from the Ospedale della Pietà, where Vivaldi had scored the music in black ink by waxen candlelight, all the way to that moonless night when Gabriella Castoldi played it to the shores of the Atlantic. It played and pierced Stephen Griffin like an arrow.

Then it stopped, and as if the natural closure of that playing was a coda of silence, the phone line hummed between them for a time. They said nothing, and then replaced the receivers.

As if he had just returned to the world, Stephen opened the front door. The loose sleeve of his jacket fell off and he caught it and put it on, patting it back in place like a plasticine limb and going along the gravelled pathway into the big blowing of the night wind.

“Gabriella,” he said softly, letting the gusts take her name like a bird and blow it down the road. Gabriella. Clouds blacked the stars. The sea was in the air and spat saltily at the back of the house, but Stephen did not care and walked down to where the land fell away to the rocks and the waves. His heart was racing. He felt as if, out of the infinite vastness of the unknown, a hand had reached for him, and he had been given new grace.

He walked down to the sea, because he felt she was nearer to him there. Though he faced west, he imagined her there before him in the water. His shoes sunk in the soft sand. The white of the waves greyed and vanished in the darkness and made the sea seem smaller than it was. Stephen felt a buoyant whiteness rise in his spirit, and remembered his father. He thought how Philip Griffin thought he was still in Venice, thought that he was with Gabriella walking the Fondamenta delle Zattere allo Spirito Santo and taking the air of the New Year like a blessing. He thought of it and thought his father's gift was not in vain, for she was coming now.

Stephen opened his arms wide and held back his head. And he sat in the wet sand and looked out. “Thank you,” he said to his father, who was just then passing him across the waves in a floating dream.

13

It was early the following morning when Stephen was awoken by the phone once again.

He walked into the hallway in the dismantled suit, and down the clearest line heard Hadja Bannerje tell him that his father had died during the night.