As It Is in Heaven

1

Gabriella returned to Kenmare on Saint Brigid's Day at the beginning of February. She travelled by bus from Dublin in slow stages, and arrived on the road through the mountains as the darkness fell over them. In the headlights the road gleamed and vanished like an eel, the way ahead and the way behind only briefly present as the bus plunged on, its three passengers clutching the waywardness of their unsteady bags as if they were straying children. When the bus arrived in Kenmare, the brakes hissed and sighed and the driver, Mike Mahony, turned an uneven grin backward to the ones who had survived with him another day. God was good, his face implied, and hadn't toppled us into death yet. With true but brief pride he watched the few souls get off, as if he knew that he had delivered love back into the town.

If he had, it was well hidden. Gabriella was sick. The journey had been wrenching; the sorrow of leaving Maria Feri in the apartment in Venice where the bird sang dementedly and had to be cloaked like a funeral all day and night had left Gabriella filled with the emptiness of new loss. She travelled with the infinite introspection of uncertain lovers, and by the time she had reached Dublin, the oily mixture of regret and hope had spread. Now nausea floated to her face like a sourness rising off her soul. The hair at her forehead was dripping a cool trickle, and when she touched her cheek the flesh was damp and unforgiving like the underside of a cold tart. A chill made puppet shudders of her shoulders, and as she stepped back into the town where her new life was to begin, she almost fell over with the weight of expectation.

It was seven o'clock in the evening. Kenmare was stilled as a town in a bottle. Shops had shut, only the small supermarket that was the glorified Honan's grocery threw light out the door onto the street. Gabriella stopped and leaned on a car and breathed the mountain air. She breathed the sweet familiarity of that timeless scent that was the smell of the trees in the darkness, the primal air tangled with the invisible presence of all the innumerable and nameless streams that ran forever down those westerly mountains, the scent of water over rock and under trees that filled into the night town. She breathed it and welcomed it like encouragement, then spewed her anxiety and the anxiety of the child within her out over the front of Paudi O'Dwyer's car.

“Gabriella, is it you? Here, let me help you.”

A hand touched her shoulder and held it firmly. And when Gabriella Castoldi turned about on the street of Kenmare she saw the face of Nelly Grant.

“I knew you would come back,” Nelly said. She was whispering to the air and had the glad expression of a reader who looks up and smiles, having re-encountered a favourite character deep into the book. “Easy now, just lift your head a little and breathe. That's it,” she said, “breathe.” She supported Gabriella's head until it faced the heavens, then announced: “It's a baby. Of course. Nelly Grant, you old fool.” She shook the wild wool of her head at the plotting of the stars, then led Gabriella across the street to her shop. “Everything will be all right now,” she said, in a tone which Gabriella could not decide was either predicting the future or warning God.

The arrival could not have been better timed. For a week Nelly Grant had been studying the energy of the new year. Years earlier she had chosen to live in Kenmare for the purity of its air and the translucent quality of the light through the passes of the Kerry mountains, for the feeling of arrival she had felt the first moment she came down through Moll's Gap. But more than this was the certainty of her belief that such places were the last sanctuaries of an ancient spirituality. She had read widely books of Celtic folklore, studied the uses of all the indigenous plants, eaten wild haws and sipped sloe wine, learned to read Old Irish texts, and recite prayers, enchantments, and spells that addressed the souls of woods trees and rivers, until at last she had grown to believe that in the mountains and valleys of west Kerry there existed a kind of spirit world contemporaneous with this one. It was beside us all the time. No corner of Kerry was without its ruined cottages, roofless stone places where the dead had left their names, where O'Connell's Crossroads existed one hundred years after the last O'Connell died, and where the presence of the vanished lingered like an after-scent in the great emptiness of the landscape. The spirits, Nelly knew, were there all along. They had no inclination to leave and coexisted in the brambles and ditches, living through all seasons without remorse or age but taking from winter and spring alike the same joy in the turning rhythms of the world, living as it might have been intended without the regret of time passing. The spirits lived on like the mountains and the streams, and by the time Nelly Grant had passed her fiftieth birthday, she had begun to feel in Kenmare the comfort of their acquaintance.

Saint Brigid's Day, she told Gabriella, when she had settled her in the humpy couch and knocked alive the low sods of turf in the hearth of her house, was the beginning of springtime in the old Irish year. It was the feast day of the favoured saint who was patroness of cattle and livestock, who had promised fine weather and the bounty of a good season. It was not her saintliness that Nelly loved, she explained, but the real woman whose presence she felt beyond the veils of legend. That first Brigid, who was a woman so in tune with female energy, she imagined, that the earth itself had responded to her and released the first larks of early Irish spring in premature excitement. Brigid was a kind of pagan figure; she was in the moon's rhythm and felt the ripeness of the soil underfoot for the fall of seeds. She was good tidings, and the fact that Gabriella had arrived on her feast day was interpreted by the herbalist as an indication of the goodness ahead.

“It's a juncture, a doorway today. It means,” Nelly told Gabriella, “that we have come through the winter and now have a little feast of thanks.”

In the low light of her cottage and the burning of scented candles Nelly cut into a thick cake made of carrots, seeds, and raisins and served her visitor.

“There is this little prayer,” she said, “Teighidh ar bhur nglunaibh, agus fosclaidh bhur sula agus leigidh Brid isteach. Go on your knees, open your eyes, and let Brigid in.” She paused; her eyes glinted with the candles as if seeing visions of the Holy Ghost. “I think it's lovely. Let Brigid in. What it can mean, do you know?”

“Yes,” Gabriella said weakly, and the Englishwoman and the Italian said together the fragment of ancient Irish. They ate the cake and drank strong herbal tea. Nelly scattered pieces outside the front door for the passing spirits and the ones that took the form of birds.

Gabriella slept that night in the house of Nelly Grant and in the brittle frosted starlight was revisited by dreams of the dead. Her mother was pregnant as a moon. She lay on the bed with the blankets pulled down and the doctor listening to the white orb of her belly for the secrets of the unborn's future. He was tapping on her skin with pink fingers whose fleshy tips betrayed the richness of his asparagus risotto diet and made a softened, muffled popping with each tap. His stethoscope he removed and clipped about his neck, raising his chin and then lowering it at the odd angle of a violinist, until his ear touched the moon belly and he listened. He told la senora Castoldi to breathe deeply and then hold her air like some inflated cartoon, so that he could hear nothing but the secret life of the child inside her. He tapped. He tapped quavers in quick time, he tapped in diminuendo, and then switched rhythms until he was pulsing with his fingers the flurried notes of a new allegro.

“What are you playing at, Doctor?” la senora asked him.

“Vivaldi's ‘Summer,’” he said, and tapped on, his face against the creamy smell of her skin and his ear listening on the other side of where Gabriella was hearing that first music and flicking about her tiny body in response.

“Play music in the room, you might save this one,” said the doctor when he stood up at last. “Her spirit dances.”

He walked out of the dream from where Gabriella saw him in the womb, and she thrashed in the blankets and hummed broken music, until at last she stopped and heard it playing, and it was her father playing his fingers on her mother like a bow on strings, making a music both harmonious and discordant in turns, a music that rose and filled Gabriella's sleeping until she dreamt she could feel the child inside her dancing to it.

In the morning Gabriella awoke to the tender February light with a new feeling of calm. She had told Nelly the night before that she felt she could never know the reality of true love or the certainty of goodness sometimes given to the sainted or the insane. There was no answer to that, Nelly Grant had told her, but she herself had learned slowly, stubbornly, and with the deepest resistance that at last we must trust the energy of things, to wait and feel the tug of the planet as it swings round and carries us all relentlessly forward.

“Everything,” she said, “is not up to us. The thing is, Gabriella, to care for the child, Yes?” she said, and sounded almost in echo of Maria Feri as she pressed her warm palm on the woman's stomach.

Now in the new day Gabriella sat in the kitchen, where the door was open to the view of the mountains and the birds came and went across the dew-silvered grass. The air was fresher than in Venice, and the pale blue of the sky seemed the colour of mercy. The calm Gabriella felt was like the furled bud of the season, and for the first time that morning she dared to imagine it flowering. Imagine, she thought, imagine just for a moment it could be perfect.

She opened the case of her violin and, as if for many children, born and unborn, she played her music out the cottage door.

2

There was a small congregation at the funeral of Philip Griffin. Snow flurried in the air. The roads were iced and the limbs of the trees beseeching. A little cluster of old men in well-cut coats and felt hats stood at the graveside like last sentries, watching the disappearance underground of another of their world and time. The son of Tobias Madigan was there. He gripped Stephen's hand with gloved fingers and held his eyes with his as if he glimpsed there the retreating figure of Philip Griffin skating away across the immaculate ice of the heavens. Then he released the hand and said, “He was a good man. A lot of good men are gone now.”

One man was not wearing a long overcoat. Hadja Bannerje was muffled in wool hat and scarf and a thick anorak. He stepped forward only when the others had gone.

“I know you very well,” he said. “I am so very very sorry, Stephen.” The snow fell across them. He held out a hand and Stephen took it, and in that moment Hadja Bannerje felt he understood something of the mystery of our connectedness, of how the old man's life had longed for some redemption, for the passing to his son of an immeasurable and secret grace, which now, at that moment, by the crazy mechanism of the world through which one person's life touches anothers, Hadja Bannerje himself was empowered to bestow.

“I must tell you how your father loved you,” he said simply.

The light snow flew about. Stephen looked down at the fresh earth and felt the loss grow huge inside him. The last time he had seen his father was when he left for the airport in the blue suit. “He wanted you to be happy,” said the Indian. “It is what all fathers want. You should not be sad.”

Stephen stood there. He looked up into the snow sky and felt the pieces of it fall into his eyes.

“I am sorry I did not come to see him,” he said quietly. “I did not even know.”

“Don't regret it. He saw you,” said Hadja. “He saw you in Venice, he told me so in the hospital. It was better you did not come. He died a happy man.”

Later, they returned to the house, and the Indian doctor sat in the room where the last chess game was still apparent. Stephen brought him tea as if Hadja were his father, and was astonished to find that since he had last played, his position in the game had been greatly improved.

“Your father played your moves,” said Hadja. “I am afraid I played his.”

Stephen sat in his usual chair, and while the clock ticked in the hallway, the tears fell down his face. They fell in the dead stillness of the early afternoon in that suburban house where a long, ordinary everyday tale of grief and longing and regret had finally ended, where the last shadow seemed to have fallen. The queen's knight's pawn, which had been unremarkable and forlorn, was now moved forward, until it arrived at the seventh rank of the board, threatening to transform defeat into victory.

“He kept on moving that white pawn,” said the doctor. “I was distracted from it. Now it is hopeless for Black.” He smiled and tapped the palms of his hands softly beneath his chin.

The afternoon died away, but Stephen Griffin did not turn on the light. The companionship of the other man touched him in a way he had not experienced in his adult life. The silence was soothing, like the deep blankets of a morning bed. And in the dying half-light of the snowy afternoon, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the figure of the other man across the chessboard became the figure of Philip Griffin, as it became, too, for Hadja Bannerje, the figure of his father, whom he had heard from his brother in Bombay was dying now from a slow disease in his bloodstream.

And in that time, that grey and easeful afternoon while the two men sat after the funeral in the old armchairs and said almost nothing, there was something like peace shared between them. The pawn at the seventh rank did not need to be moved forward. The board faded into the dimness and floated away, and the snow fell. It fell forever out of the Dublin nighttime, and was falling still when at last Hadja Bannerje stood up and shook Stephen's hand again and said goodbye and that they must see each other again. And Stephen agreed and said that he would like that very much, and then opened the door and watched the muffled doctor print his footsteps out the driveway and away, vanishing into the blown and falling flurries of the snow, and (although Hadja did not know it yet) out of Stephen Griffin's life forever, as, three days later, Hadja would leave Dublin to return to his father in India.

3

In the days that followed, Stephen lived in the house and journeyed through the places of regret and loss, until he became aware that he was gradually feeling more love than grief. The face of Gabriella appeared in his mind, and he knew now that the loving of her was centrally connected to the meaning of his world. The air lightened. He opened all the windows, and the house whistled with a steady music. The clarity of the notes was remarkable, and as the wind rose and fell in the giddy and capricious games of early spring, the spirits of the dead Griffins danced. All the memories of the house nudged Stephen as he came and went on the stairs and in the hallway, carrying boxes of books and papers. He paused a half dozen times on each journey, bewildered, until slowly he became accustomed to the presence of the reunited family, the strange harmonious sense of them all together there in the house. He remembered more than he remembered he had forgotten, then discovered for himself the truth that nothing of life vanishes completely but can be recovered whole from the past. It was like memories of kisses on the skin. So, in three bright, wind-polished days of early February, when light snow came and went on the air and the music of Puccini played without being switched on, Stephen was joined in the house by Mary his sister, Anne his mother, and Philip his father. The many persons of himself were there, too. He was himself at age four watching his father in the hallway on the evening his parents were going out to the Rathmines Opera. His father wore a black suit and a scent of sweet oil as he hummed an air to the hall mirror. His mother's shoes came down the stairs, slipping slightly on the carpet, they were so light and thin and silvery. He was himself at eight looking at his sister sleeping; he was ten and at the kitchen table while his mother served skinless white boiled potatoes and peas alongside slivers of roast beef that were islands in gravy; he was hearing the first cello notes from Mary's quarter-sized cello in the front room, where the wallpaper was the same still and where the family had smiled watching her, and he had passed jealousy and rivalry and felt simply the visit of a communal happiness. All of himself was there in the house, and all of the others, too. And the more they were present, the lighter was the burden of grief, until it lifted up and floated away altogether, disappearing down the road like a noxious yellow cloud, to be blown into another household, visiting it like a sour priest and smelling of bitter lemons.

4

Two days later Stephen left the house. He took his father's car. He put the Puccini in the boot and the folded-up, faded chessboard with the little box of pieces.

For a week the snow had dusted upon the windows of the house, but when Stephen came out and walked down the garden beneath the chestnut tree there was no whiteness on the ground. For a moment he thought it might be some weird meteorological condition and that the snow was falling only about their own house, but then realized that the snow was falling only, it was not alighting. It lived in the air and vanished into the ground, like a spirit.

Stephen drove away from Dublin a last time and headed west on the road where already he was thinking of Gabriella and where the air was too warm for snow. He drove the Galway road towards a bright sky, and in the early afternoon turned off at Loughrea to head down into Clare. Past noon the day had begun to leak a little of its brilliance, the colour thinning and the line between land and air blurred. Bits of sky had fallen on the fields. And by two o'clock on the road out of Loughrea there were low white spumes of mist scattered here and there inside the stone walls. In that sleeping landscape Stephen thought of Gabriella and in his mind played a passage he remembered of the Vivaldi “Summer.” By the time he passed the sign that welcomed visitors to County Clare, the interior of the car was deeply perfumed once more with the scent of lilies.

Then, by the bad bend at Crusheen, Stephen misjudged the sharpness of the curve and briefly threatened to hit the wall of the bridge at speed. At the last moment he managed to save himself, just. He pulled the car over beneath the hedgerows. His face glistened, and he brought his hands up over it to cover his eyes, where briefly he was seeing the vision of his father and mother and sister in the backseat behind him. Philip Griffin had his arm on his wife, guarding her around the bad bend. It was the briefest moment, and gone by the time Stephen had palmed the cold sweat from his forehead, but it broke like a dawn inside him, nonetheless, and made him fully understand a simple truth about his father: Philip Griffin had loved Anne with his life; he had loved her so entirely with himself that when she died, there was little left of him, only the corner he had kept alive for his son. She was everything to him. She was the figure behind all that music that rang out and sang through the little house in her absence, she was behind each of those infinitesimally aching arias that Philip Griffin listened to year after year with his head back and his eyes shut and his hands holding the armrests, as if taking off after her into the heavens.

And with that understanding Stephen drove from Crusheen and left the grief behind him, and felt newly the resolve of life that for him was the loving of Gabriella Castoldi.

5

Eileen Waters was warned by her secretary when Stephen arrived in the carpark. She looked out and saw him alight from his father's car and come quickly up the driveway. What she did not see was the zeal in his eyes or the sense of mission that carried him forward and bounding up the school steps.

“Tell him to wait when he comes,” Mrs. Waters said. “Tell him I'm on the phone, I'm busy.” She went back inside her office and examined her face. She moved the files into neater piles that they might establish more clearly her power. She pared two pencils and placed them lead upright in the green beaker before her. Then she looked across at the timetable on the wall opposite her, to remind herself of all the staff that were under her, the numbers enrolled, the size of the building, and the full and varied dimensions of her power. She waited fifteen minutes. Finally, she brought the largeness of her soft self forward so that no vulnerable space existed between her and the desk, and then placed her two pink hands together in a mime of tranquil forbearance.

“Carol.”

Carol Blake opened the door.

“Will you bring me in the attendance book for 3A?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Waters, Mr. Griffin is here to see you.”

“Really?” She enjoyed that, and said it louder to be sure he heard. “Really, Mr. Griffin?” She said his name as if it were an antiquated appellation from the Old Testament.

“Will I bring him in?”

“Do.”

Outside, the class bell sounded and the corridors of the school echoed with the jostle and rush of the students.

“You are back with us again,” Eileen Waters said to Stephen as he came in the door. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “I had thought … I had thought you might have been back last week. Or even the week before. I had thought — while of course a family bereavement is — I had thought, a week, a week or ten days tops.” The pink hands floated up before her and palmed the underside of the air, as if fondling amorphous bosoms of power. She weighed them like moralities and looked gravely. “I have to tell you, Mr. Griffin,” she said, “you put me in a very difficult position. I have been forced to make allowances again, and some of the other members of the staff …”

“Mrs. Waters.”

The principal was vexed to stop mid-sentence. It was not even the end of her paragraph. She opened her mouth and shrank three inches smaller. Her eyes were blurry with unease.

“I didn't come to hear your lecture,” Stephen said. “I want to say something.”

“If you think a brief apology …”

“I have nothing to apologize for. Mrs. Waters, I'm not here for apology.” Stephen looked directly at her and saw the fright freeze her expression. “I'm here because I've reached the end of this life, I'm not going to be back here anymore, I'm stopping teaching.”

Mrs. Waters's face dropped; it fell on the desk with the powdery softness of marshmallow. It was a moment before she could recover it.

“Well,” she said, having no idea what to say next.

“I'll tell you the truth: I'm not really a teacher anyway, I don't care enough about codes of discipline, acceptable standards of uniform, punctuality, all that.” He waved his hand as if clearing a desk. His eyes were burning. “I care about the history and the few who want to learn it. But what I have discovered is this: it's not my life. It's someone else's life that I'm living, that I just fell into, the way people take wrong turns and don't know it and just keep going because it's too hard and frightening not to, and then they find themselves years later in some place they never wanted to be, with the regrets eating them up like cancers.”

The air in the room throbbed. Stephen's words came quickly and the passionate fluency of his expression flooded the small world of the woman and drowned the minor armies of her objections. She could not imagine this was happening. She could not imagine such rashness.

“Someone else's history is the coming and going from here every day,” Stephen said, “not mine. Staff meetings and test results and …” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, where he knew his family were watching him. “Anyway, it's over. Thank you for giving me the job, but it was a mistake. I won't be coming back.”

Stephen stood up. He was a different man from the one Eileen Waters had reprimanded earlier. He was already un-stooped and taller, and met her eyes with the strange defiance of those who imagine they have suddenly seen the plot of the world. She stared at him as if he were visiting from another planet. Her blood pressure pounded along the hardening arteries of her heart, her eyelashes felt cakey and weighted with the falling dust of years.

“What are you going to do?” she said. Her voice was as faint and whispery as the turning of pages in an old copybook.

Stephen raised his two hands into the air, and then he smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile. It became a small laugh, and then he said; “I don't have the slightest idea.” The smile kept circling around his lips and made glisten his eyes. “I'm in love,” he said, saying those simple words there in that office and not even realizing that they sounded to Eileen Waters strangely childish and unreal, as if they belonged to some outmoded and tarnished notion of romance that no longer had any place in the country she lived in, which by the end of that millennium had been hardened by a thousand revelations of abuse and corruption and greed, until the very notion of a man declaring such a thing out loud in an office seemed as farfetched as a fairy tale.

“There is a woman, she's in Kerry, she …” He stopped. He seemed to be seeing someone else in the room. “Well, goodbye,” he said then, and walked out of the office, never to return, leaving Eileen Waters stunned and wordless and diminished as she watched the empty space after him and tried to repair and close the chasm that had opened between the life she was living and the one Stephen Griffin had briefly shown her.

6

The following afternoon he headed south into Kerry. The stillness of the landscape did not mirror his heart. The fields were like the fields painted on a plate. Thin light glistened on the hedgerows and made the first yellow blossoms of the gorse luminescent with the re-emergence of springtime. The hidden verb of life pulsed in secret, and the countryside was made gentle with obscured sunshine. Winter was over, and the precarious existence of bulb and root beneath the soil was made easier now; it was that kind of afternoon. The cattle nosed the wire that kept them from the spring grass. They smelled the alluring and sweet sticky scent of regeneration and moaned softly with the satisfaction of a favoured dream.

The light held for a time. Even before Killarney he could smell the trees and the mountains; the smells returned to him like visions of Gabriella, and by the time he passed the silver lakes, the air in the car was sharp with impossible yearning. Upon her rested his life's happiness; it was as clear as that, and if, once, the enormity of risk might have fractured his resolve and turned him around on the road, it was no longer so. He blinked at the light that came through the mountains, and drove on into them, feeling only the central most basic and human emotion that makes meaning of all our days: the urgency to love.

(He did not know yet the counter-balancing necessity of allowing himself to be loved in return, which would require a more difficult faith, and the passage of time.)

He drove the car into Kenmare and out to the house of Mary White. Both car windows were wide open now, and the scent of loving escaped everywhere and announced his return even to those who did not know his name.

Mary White was at home. She received Stephen with a brief pleasant rise of her thin eyebrows and brought her two hands together before her to clutch the happiness.

“Welcome,” she said, “welcome,” she said again, beaming a great contentment and nodding, as if she saw spirits entering with Stephen and was delighted with such elevated company. “You're back with us again,” she said, saying “us” even though she lived alone.

“If it's all right?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I was so hoping we'd have you back.” She paused and looked at him, and felt the way people do when a corner of the jigsaw has come together. “Now come on,” she said, “I have your room ready.”

And so Stephen followed her back into the room where he had dreamt so vividly of Gabriella that the presence of her was still in the corners of the ceiling. He felt it was right and proper to begin again; there was something fitting about returning to that house, as though life moves in spiralling circles and we arise along invisible tracks that were laid in the air. He felt the sense of it without knowing why, for it was not until he sat to tea with Mary White and told her about the death of his father in Dublin that she asked him if he was the son of Anne, who had died in the crash years ago and with whom Mary White had once been in school.

7

When Stephen awoke the world spoke with birdsong and the buzzing of spring flies. He smelled the sweet tang of the garden's annual resurrection, the slow stirring and secret life of the flowers not yet opened but breathing nonetheless in the open bedroom window. It was the morning of the declaration of love. When he opened his eyes, he caught the tonic air of wild rhubarb and was sharpened in his awareness that this was to be the beginning of new life. He would give himself to Gabriella and the child, and if she would not marry him, he would take any job he could get and live near her and be whatever he could to her for the rest of his days. He was filled that morning with such innocence. That morning, while he lay in the bed breathing the spring, he had a view of a world beautiful in its simplicity: that we act on our hearts and follow the things that move us. That it was outlandish and naïve and impractical, that it was the kind of thinking once expected of a child up to the age of twelve, then ten, but now, in our days, no more than the age of eight, that innocence had diminished so and the world become so old and weary that belief in such things had all but vanished did not bother Stephen Griffin. He lay on his bed on the outskirts of that town in Kerry and dreamed like a saint of a selfless loving.

When he rose he saw Mary White hanging clothes on the line in the garden. The soft wind billowed the white sheets.

Down in Kenmare that morning the streets were lively with men and beasts. Cattle trailers and wagons moved slowly, and the trapped cattle bellowed and stomped in the traffic. People watched them passing on their way to the spring mart and took the soured air of the dung and urine as another emblem of the new season, the countryside awakening and descending on the town. Wisps of straw litter were about the place, and there were children late going to school who had been drovers at dawn, leading cattle with hose-pipe sticks to the loading. There was a buzz of excitement, the noise of engines and the salutes and waves and cries of those leaning forward in their tractor cabs to call down to a neighbour some news of animal or man.

Into this throbbing Stephen walked. The streets of the country town were alive about him. Before he had reached the corner where Nelly Grant kept her shop, he knew that his footsteps were bringing him to the doorway of his new life. He sensed the enormity of it with the freshness of a child facing First Communion, and by the time he had arrived at the fruit and vegetable stalls outside the shop, he had begun to shake inside his clothes. He took a moment to master himself. He raised his head, opened his mouth, and swallowed full the host of redemption. Then he stepped into the shop and saw Nelly Grant raise her eyebrows.

“Stephen!”

She was holding two Seville oranges, and with them in her hands came forward and embraced him.

“She's here,” she whispered as she held on to him, taking the opportunity to smell the uncertain blended aroma of his hope, anxiety, and love. “You have a new radiance,” she said, and stood back to admire his aura.

“Gabriella!” she called out before Stephen had even said a word to her.

And then, through the beaded curtain that separated the shop from the small back office, where the geranium oil was burning and choral music playing, Gabriella stepped out.

“Stefano,” she said. She said it like a whisper. “Oh, Stefano.” She brought her hands to her mouth as if to hold in a cry.

8

And in his bed that morning, quietly, while the rain that first seemed to fall only in Clare and then only in Miltown Malbay spilled down through the broken roof of his cottage and pooled on the floor and made the cats come from the cupboard to the shiplike dryness and comfort of his bed, while the water was filling so steadily across the flagstone floor that he laughed to think the nearby hurley stick might be his oar and his bed once more a sailing schooner off the distant shores of Peru, easily then, like moorings loosened at last or notes rising in that supernatural music that rose from the throat of Maria Callas, Moses Mooney closed his blind eyes in the falling spills of weather inside his house and saw the lovers Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi and knew what he knew and wept like rain, and softly died.

9

“I cannot marry you, Stephen. I cannot.”

They had left the shop of Nelly Grant and, like people carrying heavy burdens, walked mutely from the town. They had taken the Killarney road towards the mountains instinctively, as if the bigness of their emotions demanded the otherworldly landscape of rock and wood silvered now with the torrents of the season. Water was everywhere running and made a noise louder than the birds. Stephen and Gabriella did not touch. They walked two feet apart up the slow incline, and by the time they had left the close cattle smells of the town behind, the air was thin and blue and clean as pine. The bread van passed and stopped and offered them a lift to Killarney, but they waved it on, not meeting each other's eyes but moving like figures in a romantic painting, as if to a prearranged spot in the vastness of that green wilderness.

There was no such spot; a car with four swearing singing bachelor footballers raced past them on their way home from the night, and Stephen stepped into the verge and slipped and almost twisted his ankle, but caught against Gabriella. Her face was white. “I'm sick,” she said.

“Oh God, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say?”

They sat down on a ledge of rock, the mountain behind them.

And for a moment, nothing.

They breathed and looked away. The valley was below, and deep within it the thin morning smoke of three houses rose and vanished in the air.

“Are you all right?”

“It passes.”

“Here, do you want my jacket?”

“No no, keep it.”

Stephen looked at himself for something to offer. He was suffused with a desire for giving to Gabriella, and was only just understanding that singular characteristic of love, that the impulse to do something for the other reached a point of such immediacy that it almost erased him entirely and left only the urgency. He looked at the side of her face with a dizzy desire to put the palm of his hand against it.

“I am so glad you came back,” he said.

“I wasn't sure I would,” said Gabriella, “not when I left. And it's not because of the child.”

“I know.”

“I wanted …” She stopped, and her face briefly frowned, a frown that travelled down from her forehead to her mouth like a wind rumple in a sheet and flowed on then into Stephen. “I wanted to know. I want my life to be, you know, to find a kind of certainty, it's stupid, I know, but just not to fall into things, you know, to feel that …”

“I love you.”

She turned her face towards him, and he saw the pain he had put in her eyes.

“I know that, Stephen. Oh, I know.”

“I want to take care of you. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

She lowered her head until her chin rested low on her fists. A car travelled slowly up the hill and stopped five yards away from them to look down at what the driver imagined the two people must be looking at. It was not until the two tourists had looked all around for the spectacular view they couldn't find that they got back in the car and drove past. They waved at the tall man and the woman sitting on the rock, but no greeting was returned. Gabriella's brown hair fell forward across her cheeks, the pink whorl at the top of her ear appeared through the strands. Stephen held on to his knees. He looked down as if from a precipice at the life he wanted to plunge into. He looked at Gabriella's clothes, her walking boots, the corded wine trousers, the thick woollen coat, and like a demented disciple, he loved them, too. If she had taken off her coat he would have hugged it to him and breathed its scent.

“Gabriella?”

She turned to him. “There's no need to say anything, Stephen,” she said. “I know I know I know” She touched his face and felt the emotion buckle him. “I am terrible,” she said. “I am mean and hard.”

He had turned his mouth to kiss her hand where it touched him.

“Please,” he said.

“Don't.”

“Please.”

“Stephen.” She brought up her other hand and was holding his wet face. “I cannot marry you,” she said. “It wouldn't … I would always feel that I had forced you.” She stopped and held back her head to face the sky. “I love you, Stephen Griffin. I do. But I am not in love with you. I cannot marry you.”

“Don't, then. Don't,” he said, and now held on to her hands at his face and did not let them go. “Don't marry me, but just let me …” He ran out of words and let the pleading rush from his eyes with the force that runs rivers into seas.

“You are the best man,” Gabriella said, and shook her head in disbelief that such a man existed, and then she reached forward and pressed herself against him with such force it might have been for healing or to be healed, and then she kissed his face and then his mouth that was salty like the sea.

10

Nelly Grant knew when she saw them return into the town of Kenmare. She read their aurae like an ancient book whose pages have worn and yellowed from the feverish finger grease of a thousand readers. When they re-entered her shop and Stephen knocked against the Granny Smiths and sent four tumbling green globes onto the floor, Nelly could read the aftershocks in him and feel the trembling that had not yet subsided and that had brought the strange clamour from the birds in the yet unleaved sycamores behind Sugrue's. Gabriella stooped to pick up the apples at the same moment as Stephen. They are like twin clocks, Nelly thought, but do not realize it. She smiled and said nothing and watched them replace the fruit. The relationship is so unbalanced, she told herself, he loves her so much, that at any moment things might fall off shelves, spark, combust. Watching them standing in the small free space of the shop was like watching springtime in fast forward.

“Well?” said Nelly, and smiled. She watched the light from them radiate across the ceiling. Then Gabriella stepped forward and embraced her.

It was one of the qualities of Nelly Grant that she could become different people at different moments; and in that embrace on the shop floor, she was briefly the mother Gabriella had wished for. She was wise and knowing. Her body in a chunky blue sweater felt like a lifetime's bulk of warmth and hope, and Gabriella held on to it. While she did, Nelly Grant winked at Stephen and almost toppled him. She took Gabriella's thanks with soft protest, and when the younger woman told her she was moving back into the house she had left before Christmas, Nelly clapped three small claps for this minor victory of love and then went to fill a fruit bag for the two of them. While she circled the stalls, drawing oranges and grapes and a sweet pineapple, she watched out of the corner of her eye where Stephen's hand dangled dangerously in the air, charged with the imploding desire to reach and take Gabriella's fingers. He did not do it.

“Take these with you,” Nelly said then, coming forward quickly with the fruit, before anything else could happen, and standing so close to Gabriella that the younger woman had to step backward and brush into the chest of Stephen. His hands landed like large birds on her shoulders, and the relief softened the line of his mouth. “And a little of this,” said Nelly, bringing them a small bottle of a kind of milk made from the flour drawn from roots of the early purple orchids and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. “It is good for everything,” she told them, “especially to keep resolve of the spirit.” Then she placed her hand on Gabriella's head and let her go. “Call to see me.”

“I will.”

“We will,” said Stephen.

The lovers walked out of the shop, and fruit rolled off the shelves. Everything is energy, thought Nelly, and laughed to watch the bananas twirl on the S hooks.

That afternoon, while the farmers slowly returned from the mart and the money began to surface on polished counters in all the pubs of the town, Gabriella moved back into the house she had left before Christmas. And whether it was the burgeoning spring, the relief of animals sold, the excitement of animals bought, or the radiant spirit of loving returned, by early evening the town was singing and smoking and swallowing pints in that strange mixture of celebration and hope and reminiscence that is the true hallmark of the end of winter.

In the house on the hill, when darkness had fallen, Gabriella sat on the floor before the fire and Stephen sat in the chair to the side of her. Their music was not the music of the town below them. It was a recording of Puccini's Tosca that Stephen had brought from his car and played for Gabriella when he told her of his father's death and that this was the music his father had listened to for thirty years. While the sweetest arias played they did not speak. They ate the fruit Nelly Grant had given them and listened, and it was not until the third act that Gabriella lifted her head and raised her hand and met Stephen's fingers and drew him so swiftly down to her on the floor that the turf smoke billowed out over them in a cloud. And in that moment, while the town below them was singing and the heavens above were thronged with spirits and stars, while the diva sang “Vissi d'arte” and made the small room one with others in different places and different times, Gabriella Castoldi kissed the man who loved her and took his head and touched his wet eyes and held her fingers upon his lips.

“Why am I so difficult?” she said beneath the singing, shaking her head as if to escape her father's knuckling fists landing upon her.

And for once Stephen did not remain quiet, but in a low voice answered her and said, “Let go, just try and let it go.”

And in the simple, brief, and yet momentous way in which a life is decided, in which the hold of the past is released and the future arrives like new skin, Gabriella closed her eyes and at last surrendered to that impulse that was as timeless, inevitable, and relentless as spring itself, and was the subject of all the songs the men were singing in the town below.

11

Stephen stayed that night, and the one after that, and after that again. He brought his things from Mary White's, who bade him goodbye once more, this time with the gentlest of smiles and a wave of her hand, telling him he was welcome always and holding herself in her thin arms as if embracing some of the loving that glowed off him.

The easterly winds that were the harbingers of March and were nightly forecast did not arrive in Kenmare. The season was mild and the earth became tender. The soil moistened as it unfroze and released a sweet scent everyone seemed to have forgotten from the year before. Old women warned that good weather should not be trusted and wore their thick coats into the town with the sour wisdom of life's disillusioned. They stood at butcher counters ordering the cheapest cuts of meat, and when the new season potatoes arrived from Israel they looked at them with scornful downturned mouths and went home to enjoy the thick-skinned bitter gnarled potatoes that God had spared them in the shed since last July. But for others the softness of the beginning of March came as a blessing, not a curse. The worst winds that were sent from Finland whispered and diminished over north Tipperary and did not reach the Kerry mountains. The sun rose in clear skies. Among the lifted spirits of the town Stephen bought the groceries and things for the house. That he had no skill for carpentry or repair-work did not stop him buying hammer and nails and screwdriver and gazing fixedly at the closely packed shelves in Donoghue's hardware shop, wondering but not asking what things were. He returned to the house, where Gabriella was writing a letter to her cousin, and with a determined kind of manliness, he hammered lumps out of the doorjamb that was loose, and screwed crookedly new screws into the mirror frame that was falling forward out of the dressing table, and now only toppled backward.

He had moved into Gabriella's life like a kind of deferential giant; he wanted to be useful for her. He wanted to make her life easier, and in everything he did he thought first of what she would like. In that way in the mild spring days and nights of that year Stephen Griffin made vanish his own will, and instead shaped his life like a suit of clothes that would fit and shield Gabriella Castoldi from the brute vicissitudes of life. He fell in love with the idea of being her hero. He imagined that in all her life she had never come across anyone like him, that the men she had known were a selfish crowd of louts who had only deepened her grief and furthered the belief that men were weak spirits who sought nothing in women but the banishment of loneliness and a reflected proof of their own power. I am not like them, he told himself. He looked at the grey shadows underneath Gabriella's eyes and each day renewed his vow to make her happy. When she awoke he brought her tea in bed, and not coffee; he lit the turf fire downstairs and turned on the music. When she stayed in the bed and did not get up, he brought her soapy plates of stiff pasta with a jar of tomato sauce poured over it. He cooked fried eggs flecked with bits of shell and mistimed the toast so that the butter would not melt.

He had told her of the money he would inherit from his father and that he was not returning to teaching. But he did not tell her his work was there in the house about her, for even he feared that incredible declaration, and instead stood by her bedside and smiled the uncertain half-smile of those who are just beginning to trust in enduring goodness.

Meanwhile, Gabriella slowly moved beyond the time of morning sickness. In the soft and tender weather the child grew within her and lent her a deep and sensuous laziness. She lay in wide bed and felt Stephen wrap around her through the night, and in the mornings after he had risen she walked her legs into the warmth he had left in the sheets and kept her eyes closed so that she might linger there forever in the glowing afterheat that was the small proof of a comforting humanity. She had swift sudden fits of gaiety and high spirits. Noontimes, when the sun flowed as a stream through the window and Stephen peeped around the door to see if she wanted lunch, she saw the white moon of his face and burst out laughing.

“What is it?” he asked her, stepping a half-step inside the door and smiling like a man who does not see the bucket falling on his head.

But Gabriella could not answer; she giggled and turned her face into the pillow, laughing, laughing in relief and disbelief, with the first gradual easing of the tightness in her spirit.

“What is it? tell me,” Stephen said, emboldened by the laughter and the sunlight, and coming forward to the bed to grab on to her where she was wriggling and he was already tickling her.

“Nothing! Nothing! Stop, o grido! Ahhh!”

It became one of the things she loved about him: how she could erase the terrible seriousness of his face, how the pale earnestness of his expression inspired her to sudden small acts of rebellion. He could not tell the difference yet between her real and her fake reactions, and as if she was compelled to continually test the strength and limits of his love, she delighted in teasing him. She watched the instant and deep furrowing of his brow when she told him she had a pain, and only when he had come to her side to ask her where, did she giggle and point to different parts of her body, moving her hand across herself in the bed and drawing up her nightgown until her giggling was wilder and Stephen was travelling her with kisses. She was amazed by him. She did not tell him again that she would not marry him, but the boundaries of the relationship were always there nonetheless, and in those bright and hope-filled days at the beginning of spring Gabriella danced along them. She asked for ice cream when he brought her breakfast, then lay back on the pillow and listened to the ignited car engine as a metaphor of love, while Stephen drove hurriedly into the town for three kinds of ice cream cornettos. In the afternoons she did not rise, but rolled softly from the bed, believing that the carrying of the child to the sitting room was work enough for one day and, in thick red jumper and elasticized sweatpants, sat with Stephen to watch one of the many video films he brought her from Kenmare.

“Do you think it's any good?” he asked her.

“No.”

He stopped the machine and stood up. “I'll go get another one.”

“No, don't.”

“I will. I don't mind.”

“Stephen.”

“I'd be back in ten minutes.”

“I could have killed myself by then.”

“What?”

“Yes. You better not leave me. Ten minutes and I could have …” She mimed an elaborate knife across her throat and rolled her eyes.

“Gabriella!”

“Or perhaps.” She put her forefinger into her mouth and cocked back her thumb to make a gun. “Bang!” She flopped her head dead. Then from the side she opened her eyes and looked at him. When she spoke her voice was soft: “Don't, Stefano. Don't go. I don't need another one now. They are all such rubbish, I shouldn't even watch them, but”—she paused and smiled at how indolent she was allowing herself to be—“I like to sit here on the couch with you, passing the afternoon. Is it so terrible?”

Stephen stood there, and gratitude warmed him like red wine. “No.” He shook his head. “It's not.”

One afternoon, from the small collection of his things, he brought out the chess set.

“Oh,” said Gabriella, sitting up like a child, “you are going to teach me.”

And so he did. Through the rest of the days of March they lived in the house above the town of Kenmare, dwelling like people on a private island whose hours are not dictated by the weariness and drudgery of work or the dread exhaustion of spirit in the tedium of life. They existed as if in another country. They did not hear the news, they did not listen to stories on the radio or television, of corrupted government or the revealed brutalities of Christian Brothers, of elderly women knocked down the stairs for the fifteen pounds in their purses, or the scandals and court cases and tribunals that were ceaselessly unpeeling the skin of the country like a rotten fruit. Instead, Stephen and Gabriella loved and lived in a sweet innocence and ate their meals and listened to music and played chess. Even when the post office in Kenmare was robbed in daylight and Helena Cox was struck on the face by a man with a gun as she protested at the counter, the news seemed never to actually arrive in the stopped time of their world.

12

By the beginning of April all but the ash trees were leafed; the wildflowers and berry bushes in the hedgerows moved towards early blossom and lent the air a seasonal gaiety. Big skies opened and let the light of the high heavens fall down on the town. Gardens were dug over and seeded. Men got their hair cut and drove in their tractor cabs with the scalped, white-necked look of plucked fowl. The landscape buzzed. Birds flew down out of the shelter of the trees and shat on the cars beneath the telephone wires a bright confetti, celebrating the return of April.

At last, after some persuasion, Gabriella agreed to leave the house and go shopping in the town with Stephen. In the comfort of the bedroom she had grown slightly fearful of the outside. She distrusted her own happiness and imagined that at any moment the world would crush it. How perfect it was in their own place beneath the mountains. Whatever guilt she felt in seeing Stephen do everything — washing shopping and cooking — was absolved in the evenings when she took him inside her arms, loving him more carefully and tenderly now, with the kind of kisses the rescued bestow upon the rescuer. In their weeks together Gabriella had grown accustomed to this strange rhythm of their relationship. She had allowed Stephen to take over, and banished for the time being all thoughts of what their future might be. She was, she even admitted, almost happy. Why change anything? Then, that third day of April, when Stephen told her he was leaving her briefly to buy the fresh rhubarb Nelly Grant said she would have set aside for them, Gabriella said she did not want him to leave her.

“I won't be long.”

“No, please, Stefano.”

“What is it?”

“Don't go.”

She was sitting on the bed in her nightdress. Her body seemed smaller as her pregnancy grew. She was strangely more frail the larger she became, as if the part of her that was herself was each day subtracted from and was added instead to the child. Her face was flushed.

“What is it? What's the matter?”

“I don't know I am foolish,” she said. “But sometimes …”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I feel that it won't last. That something is waiting to happen.”

He sat down on the bed beside her. The brilliance of the April noon was at his back, letting the light fall like infinite pity into her eyes. She was briefly blinded. Though he asked her what exactly she feared he did not need to. He, too, had felt the fragile quality of each day and knew the awful expectation of loss that was the most enduring and reliable trait of his thirty-two years. The difference now was that since the death of his father and his own return to Kenmare, Stephen had begun to feel he was in a new life. He felt blessed. So when Gabriella curled on the bed and could not quite explain her fear, Stephen Griffin already understood and imagined, like some delirious saint, that the blessing that had fallen on him would now protect her, too. He leaned down and stroked her head softly like a grandfather.

“Come with me,” he said. “Come on out. Come down to the town.”

And so she did. They arrived in the town that had already been speaking about them. Gabriella walked linked on Stephen's arm, her green coat open and the child just visible ahead of both of them. It was not so bad. The sun was warm and welcoming. The first tourists had already arrived at the wool and tweed shops at the top of the street, and a constant jig and reel music was blaring out from the loudspeaker set above the shop in a broadcast of authenticity. Beneath the music Germans were buying bargain sweaters from Michael O'Keefe in his one black suit. He nodded across his dealing at Gabriella and Stephen. “Morning to you.” His eye caught the curve of the child. “Beautiful today,” he said, and turned back to the Germans.

Stephen and Gabriella went to the bank. The money that he had been willed by his father had not arrived yet. Stephen had little idea how much it would be after duties and fees, but knew that the sum was substantial. He was living on his savings from his teacher's salary and needed to transfer his account from Clare and tell the manager the funds would be coming.

The teller asked Stephen his name.

“Just a minute so, Mr. and Mrs. Griffin.”

Moran, the assistant manager, was called from his desk to the counter to meet them.

“Well,” he said, “good morning to ye.” He beamed and reached out a pumiced pink hand. “Mr. Griffin, Mrs.…”

In a moment he noticed the absence of a wedding ring and took a sideways glance away to show that he had not been looking. “Yes yes. Now, Stephen, isn't it? That's right.”

Moran had, he knew, the gift of weighing situations, and when money was concerned, the balances were never even. There were always hidden weights, obscured feelings, fears and motives. The pregnant woman without a ring caused him to reweigh the situation swiftly and temper his approach. So, with his most liberal expression and a face that declared the only and absolute value in life was hard currency, he took the hand Gabriella offered and shook it once as if it were a wet fish.

“This is Gabriella,” Stephen said.

“Yes. Yes,” said Moran, looking at the tall figure of the fool. This woman was too beautiful for him. Could it be that she was not with him for his looks? He leaned on the polished wood of the counter, but did not invite them to enter. Moran was a man of a time, and it was a constant irritation to him that it was not this one. In his view, the situation was compromised by the presence of the woman.

Stephen told him of the money that he expected to arrive. Moran pressed his two hands on the counter. He asked Stephen approximately how much money were they talking about.

“More than ten thousand?”

“Yes.”

“More than twenty?”

“More than a hundred.”

“I see.” There was a pause. “A good deal of money then,” Moran said, and waited, and raised and lowered his hands on the countertop lightly as if playing the slow chords of the third movement of Disaster. “You need to come in sometime yourself,” he said, “and we can have a talk about it, what best to do and so on. Sometime when you have a minute, when you can come in when em …” He stopped and nodded a tight smile. He could not say what he wanted to. He could not say: Come in when this woman is not with you. He could not say: This is a matter between men, though he thought it and tried in vain to let his expression say so. Moran offered Stephen the form to sign to open the account in his name, and winced inwardly, watching the fellow push it over to the woman for her to sign, too. The assistant manager looked at her with a pained smile. He endured her with a thin tightness in his lips and harsh judgement in his eyes. He would tell Mrs. Moran about her in the evening. He would reaffirm the main lesson life had taught him: money comes to the coarse and undeserving, and it was his unlucky lot in life ceaselessly to serve and assist those more wealthy than he. He nodded at the two of them. All the greatest fools in the known world, he told himself as he returned to his office, are ruled by the heart and not the head. For them there should be no such thing as money, they don't deserve it.

Martin Moran was not the only one who let himself be haunted by their visit. Mickey Hayes, standing in his Wellingtons in the queue at the counter, saw the way the assistant manager had leant over to talk to them. He could see the look of pound notes in Moran's eyes, and craned his neck and allowed the gambling addiction of his lifetime to make him think he overheard what he most feared: another's fortune. “They've won the fucken' lotto,” he said in a cracked voice too far above a whisper for Maggie Saunders not to hear it and turn at once to watch Stephen and Gabriella walking contentedly out the door.

From that moment the word travelled like an airborne virus, so that it seemed to move and arrive in every house and business in the town as quickly as human greed. Mickey Hayes carried it to three pubs. He allowed the bitterness that life had long ago lodged in his bloodstream to inflate the terrible tale of the two, not even married, flaunting their fortune in the streets of Kenmare. Narrow-eyed and with Guinness froth moustaching him like a banderillero, he described them as walking mockeries. He said they had hidden it from everybody. They must have won the fucken' thing weeks ago and hidden themselves up in that house. Not even one drink on the house anywhere had the feckers bought, not the steam off their piss were they thinking of donating to anyone.

“That's nice carry-on, isn't it?” he asked Donal Mungovan on the stool next to him.

“Christ, but it is,” said Donal, and shook his head in slow wonder at what the hell God was up to, letting the likes of them win instead of him.

Even before Stephen and Gabriella had passed Cox's butchers midway up the town, Helena had heard. She was still bruised on her left cheek from the business in the post office and was unsure yet that her cosmetic covered it sufficiently. She stayed indoors upstairs and received callers. When Maggie Saunders told her, her heart sank. Love and money, she thought, and had to tilt her head back to stop the involuntary spasm of her tears from streaking across the covered bruise. There was a silence bitter and heavy and thick in her sitting room, where women's magazines were scattered gaudily like unfulfilled promise in an empty heart.

Then Maggie Saunders said, “Well, all can't be well in paradise.” She nodded and half-closed her eye, cocking her head at the invisible lovers. “They're not married. There's no ring.”

This seemed to console Helena Cox slightly. She went to the window and looked out across the street, to where Stephen and Gabriella were talking to Nelly Grant at the stall of cabbages. In the tender spring light even she could see the love glowing from them; it smote her like a cold iron and made her think of Francie downstairs at the butcher stall, with his dumb brutish kind of passion that subsided into nothing. With Maggie behind her, she bit on her cherry-painted lip. “I have to tell some people,” she said. “Father Dempsey will want to know.” Then she turned and walked away, lighter and suddenly eased with the plan of spreading her sourness.

By evening everyone in the town had heard. It was talk with a life of its own. By the fall of darkness people who told the tale of the lottery win could not even remember whom they first heard it from. It was a fact. New details emerged in each telling and clung to the tale like wasps in flowers. Just so came the story of how Stephen had first tried to hide the fortune from the people of Clare, how he had failed to tell his principal and simply disappeared, pretending all kinds of elaborate ruses, even inventing his own father's death, so that no one would discover the money. Gabriella was no better. She was carrying some Italian fellow's child. She had dumped him and gone off and come back only when she heard, and was now pretending the child was Stephen's. The fellow was such a fool, his own greed was so thick that he could not even see hers.

Not everyone in the town that night was bitter with envy. The German silversmith laughed and clapped; he loved to see fairy tales in Ireland, he told Helena, and his blue eyes twinkled above the mass of his beard like cloudless azure. Nolan and McCarthy & Son, undertakers and builders, took the news as a sign of the nearness of luck and bought double scratchcards; the two O'Connells, solicitors, shrugged indifference and beeped the automatic alarms of their Rovers. There were others, too, to whom the news when it reached them had the quality of grim fable, and so slipped into their lives only as a chastening reminder of how terrible money can be.

Nonetheless, from the few the sickness of greed grew. And by the time the light died on that April evening, the story of Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi had spun a kind of thick yellowish brume out of the window of O'Loughlin's and Coughlan's, and O'Siochru's pub, too, and the air was so heavily scented with the exhaled bitterness and envy that it choked the lungs and browned the stars and half obscured the moon itself, so that it hung over the town like a gouged eye.

13

The following morning brown rain was falling. As if some malignancy were weeping, the water seeped off the sky from early dawn. It fell steadily and screened the mountains and made the town seem small and miserable. In his morning sermon at ten o'clock Mass, Father Dempsey scowled at the small gathering of weekday Massgoers and told them sometimes we have to feel God's Own Disapproval. Helena Cox had already told him of the illicit lovers and their fortune, and the news had arrived like acid in his stomach in the middle of his breakfast fry; why must the ways of the Unjust prosper, O Lord? he asked, and had taken some comfort when he walked out into the deluge.

And still the rain fell. It fell heavily, like regret, and flooded gutters and drains that by mid-morning were spilling over like the eyes of new widows beyond consolation. The streets of the town were awash in brown water. That the suddenness of the deluge was part of the capriciousness of west Kerry springtime was briefly overlooked, and in half a dozen shops old men and women were already gloomily discussing the vanishing of seasons and the nearness of the end of Time.

It rained. It sheeted down all that day, and the next, and the one after that, too. It rained so hard that television cameras appeared on the streets of Kenmare to film it. It rained on the rivers that were the streets of the town and which coursed along now at the speed in which a heart can change its feelings. It rained relentlessly, until the falling of the drops themselves seemed redolent with meaning and were interpreted variously on the radio and television programmes that mushroomed on the airwaves. But none of the callers who phoned in read the gloom of the weather as Gabriella did. None of them saw it as a colder vision of Venice, as the nightmarish return of murky uncertainty and the washing away of love.

While the rain fell Gabriella stayed in her bed and suffered a new form of her old despair. Her pregnancy now brought her so low in her spirit that she had not the energy to get up. She had seen the disapproval in the face of Moran when he looked at her, and knew it to be the look of her own father, too. When two men called in Wellingtons to tell Stephen at the front door that they had heard of his lottery win and wouldn't he like to donate something to the football club, Gabriella knew at once that the town must be speaking of them and that the islanded paradise of their house was destroyed now.

“There'll be no peace for us here,” she said.

It did not matter that there were hundreds of others living around the town who, when they heard of the imagined lottery win or saw the ringless hand of Gabriella and the curve of her belly, thought nothing of it and understood and accepted that even their country was in a constant flux of change and that those notions of transgression which had made sinners of all in the past were faded now to the easier morality of only the endeavour of human goodness. To Gabriella it did not matter. The rain beat down. She could not sleep. She lost concentration and threw the chess pieces at the curtains. When Stephen tried to comfort her, she lowered her head and hit her fist into the side cushion of the couch, and hit the memories of her father in the house in the Calle Visciga, the sharp cold air of intolerance and judgment.

Stephen brought her cocoa. He was stunned and wordless, and as the wet evening deepened into drowned night, his face expressed a mute horror. He put turf on the fire. He sat in the armchair across from Gabriella by the ruined chess game and tried to tell her everything would be all right. But Gabriella just stared. And so he did not say any more. He sat in the chair, long and thin and defeated, and in the dim light that glowed from the flames watched his happiness burn away like fire.

An hour passed. The rain fell.

“I love you,” he said in a small voice, when the light in the room was too diminished for him to tell whether Gabriella was awake or asleep and when the telling of those three words seemed suddenly impotent. There was no answer. Eight feet away Gabriella lay motionless. Her eyes might have been closed. Stephen did not know; he said the words again and immediately wished he had not, for in the loneliness of no reply he faced the cold, undeniable truth that Gabriella's happiness was not in his power, nor could he change the world for her. He sat and listened and the rain fell. At last he moved over beside her and reached and stroked her hand, and was still not certain that she was not sleeping, until finally the smallest movement of her fingers curved onto his and held.

In the darkness at the end of that night, when it seemed the world's sourness had slipped beneath their door and made the house of loving frail and unprotected as a china doll, Gabriella moved her face close to Stephen's, and in a voice that held the ceaseless yearning of her own childhood to make real and lasting the existence of love, she whispered, “Stefano, take me away from here.”

14

It was the small hours of the morning. Rain was still beating against the windows when, with the tenderness of those who care for the wounded, Stephen took his arms from around Gabriella and rose from the couch where she was lying and began to pack. He did not discuss it. He did not explain his plans or try to reason with her or say that perhaps it was the rashness of her pregnancy speaking or a bright morning would see a change of heart. He rose and packed. Within an hour there was an assemblage of small boxes and vases, an Italian hilltown, inside the front door. When he opened the door to bring them to the car, the clatter of the rain made Gabriella stir on the couch. She raised her head slightly, the way sleepers do to look at dreams, and then lay back again.

Whether she was awake or not in his coming and going Stephen did not know. He gathered her clothes from the chairs and the end of the bed, where she had left them, and folded them into the brown case she had brought from Venice. Although there was space, he did not put his own clothes with hers. He took the case of her violin and the few books of sheet music she never travelled without, one of which had been given to her by Maestro Scaramuzza and was now like some yellowed covenant carried into the future. In his own case he packed the chess set, going around by the curtains on his hands and knees to gather up the pieces Gabriella had thrown aside.

At last he had packed everything that was theirs, except for the small black music player and Vivaldi, Puccini, and Mozart.

“Where are we going?” Gabriella whispered without moving. His long figure crossed the darkness to her.

“To make a home,” he said. “I am going to make you happy. I am.”

“Sssh,” she said, and raised a finger to quiet him. “Play the music, kill the rain.”

And so he did, and they lay in the last darkness as the rain fell in a world somewhere outside the otherworldly singing of Kiri Te Kanawa; Stephen and Gabriella held to each other and closed their eyes and escaped on the music away from the questions of tomorrow. They did not sleep. They drowsed on the disc that had been set to Repeat, and stirred on the fourth singing of “Dove sono” with paralyzing cramps and Gabriella's bladder bursting. Once she had rushed through the empty house, the mood was broken. She returned to where Stephen was hopping, trying to straighten the locked muscle of his thigh. He leaned on her shoulder. “My saviour,” she said as he hopped, and she smiled.

In ten minutes they were in the car. They drove into Kenmare in the dawn and saw the flooding waters of the street part to either side in the headlights. Gabriella wanted to leave word with Nelly Grant, and through the steady spilling of the rain she hurried up the small garden path while Stephen held an umbrella over her. She knocked twice, but there came no answer. She knew from her own nights in the cottage the deep dreams that Nelly Grant nightly explored and did not knock a third time; instead she wrote in pencil: “We had to leave. We will let you know. Thank you. Gabriella.” She did not add “Stephen,” nor see the small pain the absence of his name alongside hers caused him.

They drove out of Kenmare through empty streets and throttled the engine to climb into the mountains. Stephen told her they could go to Clare, and hurried the car as if to outrace the uncertainty of finding happiness there. They sped into Killarney and arrived in Tralee when only squat lorries and milk bulk tanks were travelling the road. The rain was still pouring down as the dawn came up, so that the grey light and water mixed to make the day the colour of despondency. In the emptiness of the long north Kerry road Stephen and Gabriella said almost nothing. Gabriella watched the landscape flattening out in pale greens towards the Shannon and wondered if the dry scent caught in the car was cardboard boxes or desperation. They arrived at the ferry dock in Tarbert a full hour before the first sailing, and waited and watched the morning struggle to separate from the dark waters of the river. When at last they drove onto the ferry, Tom Blake, the ticket collector, came and looked in at them across the falling rain. When he saw the collection of their belongings packed into the car, he knew they were not tourists and was at once disconcerted by the impression that they were people taking flight. As the boat pulled away, he watched the road down to the pier as if expecting pursuit.

But there was none he could see. For what they were fleeing was not visible; it was the condition of their own disbelief, a long, enduring, and dogged sense of defeat so deeply buried in the spirit that sometimes no love nor hope nor faith can seem to outrace it. It was the feeling that blows would always fall, that the state of happiness was somehow unnatural and would, by necessity, be brief, perishing under the persistence by which Time arrives and passes. It was that they were fleeing, but Tom Blake did not know it. He imagined when he saw them get out of the car and cross the rain-swept deck to climb the iron steps and look out at the grey-green lump of Clare that they were estimating how long the crossing would take, and how long it would be before the enemy was after them. And there was something — in the way the long man leaned to the small woman, in the shape of her, was that a child she was carrying inside the raincoat? in the blown-about crazy scent of lilies that could not be lilies — that made him change his view and nod and decide that he hoped they made it.

When they drove off into County Clare, the light was still pale and the rain falling. Tom Blake waved them off. “Good luck now,” he said, as if it were an innocent salute. They arrived up the sloped roadway at the café and souvenir shop, which was on the point of opening.

“Wait,” said Gabriella. Stephen stopped the car short. “Tea,” she said, “and a ring.”

He looked at her.

“It does not mean I am marrying you,” she said, raising an eyebrow and holding a half-smile, then turning away and looking at the rain that was not so heavy now, and waiting while the astonished man got out and crossed into the shop for the improbable purchase.

When he returned her heart lifted.

“Here,” he said. “I do not take thee to be my wife,” and placed it on her wedding finger. There was a moment, an instant in which she glanced at it and the awful resolve — her disbelief in her own ability to sustain love — might have eased, but the child moved inside her and she looked away.

“Here's your first cup of Clare tea,” Stephen said.

And that was it, the smallest ceremony, the ordinary moment that memory would return to and crystallize and turn into the small preciousness that Stephen Griffin would carry everywhere. The ring on the road to Clare, the ring that was not for sacrament but for protection against the spite of others, but which from the moment Gabriella put it on became a kind of sacrament, nonetheless, and was a promise beyond their saying, a mute and fragile daring that perhaps something imperishable existed. They drove away. They travelled from Killimer along the apparent aimlessness of a quiet road that wound past the bird-heavy hedgerows of spring.

Gabriella watched everything. She had the sense of arriving in Stephen's landscape, and read its soft hills and white-thorn hedgerows like secret messages. This was not the lush and verdant paradise of Kenmare. This was nothing like that. What she saw was a desolate windburnt beauty, an endurance of the spirit in the face of hardship, a stone-walled resistance to the battering of the Atlantic air. A place where the trees stiffened in the long arthritis of brutal weathering and yet did not die, but grew sideways, like the severely backcombed heads of stern aunts who softened once a year and gave sweets in May like white blossoms. Gabriella saw it, and then saw the sea. She let out a little cry, and Stephen looked over at her.

“It's something, isn't it?” he said. But she did not reply. She was looking at the waves crashing in the mid-distance, the great shooting spume of white wind brushed into the air like a game for the gulls. She began to smile, smiling more and more as the car followed the sea road around by the beach at Spanish Point and the sandy field and the fallen-down house of Moses Mooney. Stephen slowed the car before the empty curve of sand.

“So this is your beach?” Gabriella said.

“This is it.”

“Can we stop? It's so beautiful.”

“We have nowhere else to go,” Stephen said. “My house is over there.”

And so they walked down onto the sand, and while the school buses were converging on the school, and cars and coaches and lorries were moving in the ordinariness of everyday, they instead felt the dimensions of freedom that blew in from the breaking waves of the sea. They walked across the wet sand of the foreshore with sunken steps and hopped from the waves in the place where Stephen had once almost drowned. Gabriella took his hand.

“If I died now I'd be happy,” she said, but the wind took her words and he did not hear her.

15

They slept that night in Stephen's house by the sea. The wind made a creaking music in every window and door, and for hours Gabriella lay wide-eyed in a sleepless dream of happiness. The morning and afternoon had unpacked them into the house, and in the putting out of each thing — the herbal remedies of Nelly Grant, the music books from Venice — was another of the infinitesimal gestures of trust through which we make our covenant with the world. By six o'clock the rooms had begun to look like the rooms in Kenmare, and Gabriella became aware of how simply rooms could resemble a relationship. It was only the first of many such moments. She understood that in the afternoon's unpacking was a sense of more than mere geographical arrival. As each moment passed and she moved from one room to the next, she felt the physical ease of the child inside her. Stephen had set up the music player, and in the small island of the house his father's music sounded triumphant, heralding the heartsongs of ages while he came and went with the boxes.

All of this flew back through Gabriella's mind as she lay sleepless in bed. She fingered the ring and held it out in the starlight as if it belonged to another. Then suddenly she thought of Maria Feri, whose ringless hand in Venice she remembered when it touched the bars of the cage where the bird sang. She saw her cousin sitting in the evening that had just passed, she saw the stillness of the house and the courteous, diffident manner of the older woman who was more still than aged dust and more sorrowful than failed summer, and in that moment, lying on the bed beside Stephen in that first evening in west Clare, Gabriella saw the tragedy of wasted life and the uselessness of losing days in attending dreams. She heard the bird singing in the cage, and in the wind-creaking bedroom heard the singing as it grew louder and louder, until its notes transformed into another music and was the playing of violins, bowing a joy that made her smile in the darkness. It was imagined and not remembered music. It was the music she had dreamt of playing by the sea in Venice when she was a child, before she had ever mastered the violin. It was the perfect music that plays in visions and makes the world shake with possibilities when we are young and feel our souls limitless. It was the music of inspiration, the kind that plays in the heart and makes a child want to pick up an instrument for the first time. Gabriella heard it in the darkness and remembered. Then_ she turned and rocked Stephen's shoulder, and when he raised his head swiftly to ask her what was wrong, she told him, “Nothing is wrong.”

Then she touched his face and said, “Stefano, I want to start a music school.”

16

In the morning when Gabriella awoke, she had the luminous radiance of purpose. Where the idea of the music school came from was unclear, but did not matter. She did not quite compute the complex formula that music had been the saviour of her own childhood and relate that to the child she carried inside her. She thought only that it was right, and felt the zeal of those who discover in midlife the meaning of their lives. Over breakfast she looked out the window that gave onto the sea and began to plan with Stephen.

The extravagance of her idea, its wild improbability — a classical music school on the west coast of Clare, and beside a town with a legendary reputation for traditional players — did not disturb him in the slightest, and he sat opposite her at the table with that lit expression of love and belief that saw all things as possible. He did not think for a moment that this was her pregnancy speaking again, that it was the whimsical fantasy of a moment, or that in three days, maybe four, she would be returned to the lassitude of her bed. Instead, he sat and listened. He heard her tell him again with the visionary excitement of the night before how, on that desolately beautiful coastline where he had chosen to live, she could imagine a building where music played, where children came with their instruments and walked out afterwards into the big sky and crashing sea. Her cheeks were roses while she spoke, her eyes widened to see the wonder of the future, and her words tumbled like the streams of April. The quickened heartbeat of the season beat through her, and Stephen sat there that morning witnessing her rapture with passionate gratitude.

This, he thought, is my happiness, to be given this chance to make her happy.

While Gabriella elaborated on how the teachers were to be enlisted, where the pupils might come from, what instruments, Stephen had risen from the chair and paced about. Soon he was finishing the sentences she started. They were unable to speak quickly enough, telling of the different studios there could be, of the long panels of glass that would view the sea, of rooms, too, where parents could wait and listen to anything from a full library of discs, how there could be special morning classes for the retired or the unemployed, how the school itself could have guest rooms where visiting musicians might come and stay, and would, too, because there would be no charge but the sharing of their musicianship, and in that place where they made this building, somewhere right there by the sea, music would be celebrated and made alive and reach out into the lives of people. “And we,” said Gabriella, “can make that…”

“…happen,” said Stephen, “Yes.”

He stood in the kitchen with his hands prayerlike beneath his chin. “O God,” he said, seeing the shape of his life and hers, and finding in that almost surreal vision the answers to many questions. It was a moment when he glimpsed where all the tortuous plotting of his days had been leading; it included the music of his father, the buying of the ticket to first hear Gabriella play, the journeys to find her, the money he was to inherit, and the flight out of Kerry to the cottage where, like some agonizingly slow healing of all the griefs from childhood to disappointed adulthood, Gabriella had dreamt the music school.

* * *

They drove into Miltown Malbay, unaware that a pale white scent was following them and spreading like a sweet contagion through the town the instant they arrived. Stephen went to the bank. Gabriella walked up the street to find rhubarb and honey, whose conflicting tastes are the antidotes to the sudden giddiness suffered by those who are airy with dreams.

She was crossing the street when Moira Fitzgibbon saw her. At first Moira did not believe it could be the same woman. She had fallen into a season of doubt and lost the conviction that had once seemed to visit her like an angel with a sword. Her hopes had been dulled; the death of Moses Mooney had taken her by surprise, and in its aftermath she had woken each morning with the sour berries of blame in her mouth. She could not spit them out, and for a time was a half sister of herself looking in at the empty tedium of a life drying out in the salt wind. She despised the hopes she had, and protected herself with a tone of mockery her teachers had taught her. She muttered names at herself alone at the sink and did not respond when the calendar reminded her she should make new appeals to raise funds for the Mooney Memorial Hall. Before the spring she let the days go by. She took her daughters to school, collected them, had their meals ready, made another for her husband, and lived on, letting yesterday's hopes slip like a bandaged corpse into the cold sea. Who did you think you were? her face said to her, and she could make no reply. Then she saw Gabriella Castoldi on the street in Miltown Malbay. When she saw her features she was startled — it was an apparition, a ghost rising out of her conscience, and she thought of what she had done to that poor man Griffin in giving him the false hope of her address. (Often since she had considered it, and on Friday nights, when the late TV movie had finished some time after the Late Late Show and Tom was snoring on the couch like a gored beast, Moira chided herself on holding even the thinnest illusion that such romance existed, that somehow the long teacher might have found her, and they might have been happy together. It belonged in girls' comics, she had told herself, and pushed Tom on the back to tell his startled, slack-jawed face it was time for bed.)

The apparition walked towards her, and Moira touched her fingers on the glass of Casey the auctioneer's window. Its cold reaffirmed her, and in those astonished moments in which a mind reverses itself and discovers that its lies were truths, Moira saw the shape of the child and dared to imagine it might be Stephen's.

She moved a step from the window. Her eyes were quicker than her mouth. In an instant, they had alighted on the ring and saw the happiness of the woman; the shock of new reality surged through Moira like a charge that explodes blossoms on the trees. She stepped forward and held out an uncertain hand.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I'm sorry I…”

Gabriella was standing beside her. She smiled. “Yes?”

“Is it, are you? … I'm sorry, I'm a terrible fool, I never know what to, I just blurt. You won't remember me, but I … You are …?”

“I remember you. Yes, I do. You are the woman here, in Ennis. The concert. Yes.” Gabriella took her hand and held it. She did not know then that she was part of the fulfillment of Moira Fitzgibbon's hopes, that her arrival in Mil-town Malbay was like the return of a long-sent messenger upon whose news a whole city of dreams had been waiting, and for whose return hope had finally been surrendered. She did not know when she held Moira's hand that she was holding the hand of the future manager of the music school, or that she could have met no one else in that town who would help her make it a reality. Gabriella knew only that it was a good sign and waited in that astonished moment for the shock to pass. It took Moira another minute before she could approach the question of who Gabriella's husband might be, and then she saw Stephen Griffin walking up the street and she laughed out loud.

Stephen wore his bashfulness like a confirmation suit, and stood next to the two smiling women. “It was Mrs. Fitzgibbon who sold me the ticket to come and hear you,” he said, nodding the flashing pate of his head towards Moira.

“Otherwise you would not have come,” Gabriella teased him, and turned to Moira. “So, you are Cupid.”

“Well, I don't know.”

“Yes, you are,” Stephen said. And there was a brief moment of quiet acknowledgement in which Moira Fitzgibbon felt her spirits lift and fly about. They were still in the air when, like a tireless conjuror outdoing each extraordinary trick with another, Stephen announced: “We are going to build a music school. Here, out by the sea.”

17

Within half an hour Moira Fitzgibbon was getting out of Stephen's car and leading the two of them up the grassy pathway to the ruined cottage of Moses Mooney. On the short journey from the town Moira had reminded Stephen and told Gabriella the story of the old man.

“I know it was mad, and it was, it was mad, mad altogether,” she said, walking them to the door. “I mean, he had notions, wild mad notions, and to look at him you would think he was for the canaries, the big beard, the look he had when he went blind, like he was seeing something all the time somewhere else and, oh, I don't know, but there was something made me think of him, you know, that he had this one dream of the music, and well, he had no hope in the earthly world of making it happen, and maybe that was it, maybe that was what clicked with me. Anyway …”

She stopped and opened the front door. They peered inside.

“He bought the field over,” Moira said, “for his concert hall. It's mostly hares.”

They looked in at the purple shadows of the old man's life, until at last the prompting of the sun on their backs turned them around and they saw the startling view of the sea. The light on the water made the sea seem like sky and the horizon infinitely in the distance.

“I think we should buy it,” Stephen said. “Gabriella, it can be here.”

She took his hand and held it, and was stilled with the knowledge of how much he wanted to give her. “I don't know. Do you think?”

“Yes,” he said, and already it was decided. Already, within the space of less than twenty-four hours since their arrival in Clare, they had mapped out a life and found the place to begin building it. With the force of will and single-mindedness that sometimes belongs to those called simple, they saw the music school rise in the hillocky green field next to the house of Moses Mooney, they saw the money arriving from Dublin to Miltown Malbay and their hasty spending of it to secure first the field and then the planning permission and then the builders and then the students. Nothing that April day seemed beyond the capacity of their imagining, for the measure of love was to be not words or air but blocks and mortar and timber and glass, and in the bigness of their hearts that day they carried whole walls, windows, and doors with no effort at all.

They walked away from the cottage back to the car. Moira Fitzgibbon could scarcely believe what was happening, and said she needed the bracing exercise of a good walk back to the town to reassure herself that she had in fact got out of bed. “Go on,” Moira said, shooing them off like hens, “you go away, I'll walk. I'll call up to the house tomorrow.”

And it was only when they had driven away, and Moira had turned one last time to look back at the old man's cottage and whisper to him that maybe his dream was going to happen, that she saw three black cats coming from the cottage and tumbling on the wild long grass of the lawn.

18

The progress of dreams is in fits and starts. Time hastens and slows and makes of the clock of desire not minutes and hours but fevers, flushes, and languid long eternities. So in one day everything happened, and after it almost nothing at all.

Money does not travel quickly, and the more of it there is, the more leisurely its pace, Stephen learned. He imagined Moran, the assistant manager in Kenmare, reading with tight small eyes the request for the transfer of funds, and delaying it with a kind of exquisite spite that is the triumph of the small-minded. Nothing happened, no money arrived. Mr. MacNamara, a small man who came in a large exhausted car, told Stephen and Gabriella he was the auctioneer for the Mooney property. He laughed into his fist, as if holding a small microphone, and said yes yes yes in constant repetition, replying to some question no one could hear but himself. He looked at them and said yes yes yes; he looked at the window and did the same. When Stephen told him they were only waiting on the money to arrive, Mr. MacNamara gave his triple affirmative and added a wink, running his tongue about the inside of his mouth so it appeared he was chasing a lozenge and not a sale. He left abruptly after that, but returned the next day as if he had forgotten that he had ever been there. He stood in the doorway and said yes yes yes when Stephen told him he had no news. In the following two weeks he made six appearances, sometimes standing in the sitting room with his hands lost behind his back under the flaps of his jacket and looking about him for a clue as to his purpose.

While the plans for the building were in stasis, other aspects of the music school were not. Gabriella struck up a friendship with Moira Fitzgibbon, and in morning meetings over the strong tea which Stephen made in the kitchen they planned together how the word might be spread. Gabriella grew bigger almost by the moment. She sat at the table and bloomed, as if the hope in her spirit grew the child more quickly now and warmed the air in the room with incipient life. Moria Fitzgibbon gave her tips and counselled sea walks on the noon shore; she recounted the adventures of her own pregnancies, and through the simple means of her own personality gave Gabriella Castoldi the gift of being grounded. So while the talks began in air and music, they ended in the earthed practicalities of house heating, plumbing, and a place for the cot. After Moira's third visit, Gabriella had redrawn the inside of the cottage; as Stephen watched with a kind of fearful astonishment, she showed him where they should break out the roof and add skylights, where the extra bedroom needed to be made off their own, where the central heating pipes could run and the bathroom replace the hose-like shower that hung over a discoloured draining sink.

So, in those light blustery days at the end of April, when the sun appeared in the sky above the sea like a promise delivered, builders arrived at the cottage and broke holes in the slate for the skylights. Corry & Son & Nephew opened the roof like a great wound, pushing aside a thickly woven web of time and watching spiders fall down and scurry to new hiding across the floor below. Because Gabriella loved the idea of them so, Stephen doubled the order to four skylights and watched as the series of squares were cut away from the roof, making the house suddenly appear absurdly vulnerable and exciting at the same time, as if it were a giggling and intrepid centenarian going across the sunlit grass in the nude. Birds flew in and out of the house and bats arrived in the twilight, flickering across the starred heavens to alight inside the high ceilings in a sign Tom Clancy said guaranteed good fortune. For three days the house breathed through its top while Corry & Son & Nephew climbed the ladders and sat on the roof and smoked Woodbines, looking out at the fine view of the ocean; Corry said sometimes you wouldn't think it stretched all the way to America and watched the waves from that high position with a kind of grieven mesmerism that only Son knew betrayed he was thinking of Son Two, who was that noontime waking to work in Duggan's Bar in Brooklyn. The Corrys took their time; they threw down the old slates, which Son said were as crisp as cream crackers, and when Stephen at last broke through his diffidence and asked if the windows would be in soon because he feared a change in the weather, the father shouted down to him that he had it on several counts — the frog spawn, the movements of the heron, and the cloud formations reported over Mount Brandon — that the dry spell would continue for weeks. Nephew concurred. He had it from Sky News Long Range, he said, and looked up at the blue heavens as if towards a satellite God.

19

In a house of birds, bats, and spiders, then, Gabriella and Stephen lived within the breathing of the sea. Little by little word of their arrival had reached every house in the town and beyond. But there was something in that parish — perhaps it was the notion of its own broadmindedness, the influence of summer continentals, or the whole bizarre history of life which had finally exhausted the parish imagination and capacity for being surprised — that meant the news of Stephen and Gabriella did not raise an eyebrow, not even when the story of their proposed music school reached the bars at Considine's and Clancy's and circulated with the strange scent of apple blossom.

In the first days of May a letter came announcing that the money had arrived in Miltown Malbay.

There was £267,000.

That the figure was astonishingly high, and arrived now at the moment they needed it, did not strike Stephen as strongly as it might, for he believed that it came from his father, that it was evidence of his spirit watching over him and making easier the way ahead.

Mr. MacNamara was in the house on one of his visits when the news arrived, and saying yes yes yes to Corry & Son & Nephew, looking down through the skylights on the roof above him. When Stephen told him he was ready to pay for the Mooney land, Mr. MacNamara looked sincerely surprised, as if it was a remarkable coincidence that there might be some business to be done. “That's grand,” he said, and scratched his left temple to recall who Mooney was. The following day Moira Fitzgibbon arrived in the olive-carpeted sitting room of Councillor O'Rourke and told him they would be seeking planning permission. She told him of the importance of the school, the need for the permission to be hurried, and knew enough to make the case seem impossible unless he was able to help them. She puffed a despairing sigh and watched it cross the room to arrive in the magnanimous heart of the councillor. He paused, and then like an emperor nodded a single nod.

Maytime blossomed. In the deep calm of mid-morning Stephen and Gabriella took walks into the west Clare countryside. They did not go far. Ten minutes outside the town they walked along roads where the hedgerows of blackthorn were deeply tangled with wild blackberry. Birds flew before them and sang the songs of summer in the blue air. Dung flies buzzed where the cows had passed and formed into diamond-shaped gauzes as the walkers came upon them. The sound of tractors travelled everywhere, and was so steadily part of those walks that it became one with the landscape and was as if the throttling of those engines was the action of a supernatural sewing machine, going back and forth, stitching into being the patchwork of the fields. The noise itself was reassuring, and lent the walks the indolent pleasure of summer-afternoon sleeps while the lawn mower mows.

It was perfect. For Gabriella had arrived that May in a mood of quiet ease. The mid-wife had told her the pregnancy was going well, and by the time the first plans for the music school had been tacked up on the wall of the kitchen, she was feeling the absence of regret for the first time in her life. She sang notes in her bed in the morning while Stephen brought her herbal teas. She allowed her anxieties and the rigour of her self-criticism to slip gradually away, and instead adopted the new life in that cottage by the sea as if it were she and not the child that was being born.

In the afternoons she played the violin. When Stephen wanted to sit in the room listening, she told him it was not a public performance and laughed, saying, “Well, perhaps it is, for one member of the public.” So he sat outside the door and listened; he heard her playing her way back into the first rooms of her childhood, heard the first music Scaramuzza had taught her returning now like a new season for the child she was carrying. She played the infant beginner's tunes with such feeling that even outside the door Stephen could imagine her weeping as she played. She played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and then slid from the simple notes into a series of variations which grew ever more ornate and intricate, until they were the music of ineffable hope and longing, the music that contained the boundless dreams of mothers for their children's happiness. Gabriella played for an hour each afternoon, and Stephen did not disturb her. When she came out of the room she wore a rosy bloom and pretended she had not heard Stephen hurry away from the door.

“You have been doing great work out here,” she said when she came across him in the kitchen.

“Oh yes.” He turned to run a cloth across the sink. She stood beside him. “Feel,” she said, and took his hand and put it on the place where the child was moving like a swimmer in a sea. “It's the music.” They stood, innocent and hopeful, by the kitchen sink, and imagined the possibility that life could after all be that simple, that nothing would come and threaten that easeful and tender living by the sea, and that God was merciful and good and redeemed all grief in the end. They stood there, wordless, and felt the child. Looking on the slope of grass that ran down towards the fall to the sea, Gabriella said, “Could we have a garden?”

The following day Stephen bought a shovel and pitchfork. He returned from McInerney's in Miltown Malbay with the white wooden handles sticking out the car window and carried the tools onto the grassy space with the set jaw of a Wild West pioneer. He went to foot the shovel into the ground, but the old tufted grass resisted and the shovel made a slow fall to the side. Stephen was not to be outdone. He spat somewhat carefully on his hands and walked over the ground where during the evening Gabriella had imagined out loud a perennial border. The grass was tall and wild and was like a long-enduring and hairy demon upon whom the shovel struck but made no impact. Stephen drove the blade again and again as a moon row of blisters opened in his palms. His long back curved into it. He had never dug a day in his life, and now in the breeze that came up from the sea he hacked and jabbed at the ground for the beginnings of a dream garden. His sweat fell in grey droplets. He watched the embrowned flaps of the blisters open and fingered them back into place like a child imagining damage repaired. The white handles of the shovel and fork grew smeared with the dull colour of labour.

That afternoon he worked on while the birds gathered. The following day and the next, though he woke with his body stiffly locked like a coffin, he did the same. He stretched his fingers and sat while Gabriella poured olive oil on them. He opened the ground for a vegetable garden, for a herbal border, and the curved shape where he imagined flowers would bloom for Gabriella and his child. He worked in silence to the whispering collapse of the sea, the crown of his head burning a red corona until Tom Clancy, admiring the work from the stone wall that surrounded it, brought Stephen a straw hat that made him look like a gondolier.

20

The following day they bought the plants. Gabriella had a book with colour plates of poker-headed kniphofia, bright yellow achilleas, and crimson rosa moyesii, and with the childlike fantasy of a first gardener imagined them growing in the brown ground outside the window. In Miltown Malbay the selection of plants was too narrow for such dreams, and so they drove into north Clare to the hidden nursery of Mick Kinsella. He was a tall, ponytailed figure in jeans who had for fifteen years pretended to be an accountant in Dublin, until the morning he realized that he could not remember the smell of roses. Since then he had run the nursery in the hills of north Clare and with his wife, Maggie, reared three wild-looking girls among the tangle of flowers that were his garden. He sat inside the gateway in a small wooden hut, where he used his laptop computer to browse among the world's exotic plant catalogues. When Stephen and Gabriella arrived he told them he had just found a new terrestrial orchid from New Zealand and ordered three dozen of them. Then he walked them through the heavily scented grass path into the garden proper, pushing aside the flowerheads.

“We have a garden dug out,” Gabriella told him.

Mick Kinsella looked at them. “It's your first?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Here, take a chair,” he told Gabriella, and sat her in the garden, where she could watch while he and Stephen walked back and forth picking out the plants that were not the ones in the book but were the ones Mick Kinsella said would grow. Stephen and Gabriella brought them home, packed into the back of the car like children going on summer holidays. That evening they placed them out in the garden that faced the sea, and sat and watched them until the light died away.

And so the summer rolled in. Somewhere out in the Atlantic a dazzling blue formed and stilled the winds and made the sea warm and gentle and inviting, lapping all the way to the shores of Clare. The sun shone like Spain. Sombreros appeared like strange blooms, and the smell of almond oil hung in the air above the salmon-skinned and the freckled. Miltown Malbay sold out of electric fans. The evening the schoolchildren were released for the summer, the sea at Spanish Point was thronged with leaping white bodies, beating winglike arms against the waves that collapsed across their thighs. All through June the soft blue filled the sky. The tenderness of the days was a blessing which some called a curse and said the end of the world was beginning with a drought. But in the garden behind the house of Stephen and Gabriella the plants of Mick Kinsella grew. Stephen watered them three times a day. He fed them no fertilizer but, when Tom Clancy suggested it, he barrowed cow dung down the road and made a kind of manure dressing which stunk the air and kept the cats away for three days.

In the cool of the stone house Gabriella hid from the sun. The moment she appeared in the daylight, the sweat gathered beneath the heaviness of her breasts and ran cold rivers down her stomach. The heat made her heavier, and so instead, she sat in the lie-out chair-bed inside the house with the fan oscillating across her while she played the violin to the unborn. She wrote three short letters to Maria Feri, telling her in discreet language the progress of love, and then wrote another to Nelly Grant explaining the strange mixture of marvel and terror that was alternating through her spirit. No reply arrived from either woman.

Still, the days were delivered like polished gems. Gabriella said she woke and saw the sea and thought she was in Italy. Stephen opened all the skylights, and the house slept like that, with arched eyebrows, where the moon was reflected in quadruple. By the end of July Gabriella found it impossible to sleep during the nights. She lay on the bed beside the exhausted figure of Stephen and tapped his shoulder when his snoring sounded like pain. He woke with a suddenness, as if his world were a rolling glass globe, and shot out his hands to catch it in the dark. But she was all right. Sometimes she wanted to talk, sometimes she didn't. He brought her cocoa and herbal teas and water and chocolate. She told him he was too good for her, and sometimes the very act of him coming through the door with the mug made tears start in her eyes. “You are a saint,” she said.

“No, I'm not.”

“But I think you are. I am in bed with a saint.” She said it and looked at him and smiled, and then she told the child and lay there in the grey starlight, where her face was lost and none could read the gratitude and prayer in her eyes.

Often in those dead hours between the sunset and the four o'clock dawn they talked of the music school. It added another meaning to their days, though it still existed more solidly in words than in stone. They talked it into happening. They lay with their faces to the open skylight and told how it would be, as if telling the heavens to prepare the way. There was comfort in the company of that dream, and so almost like an incantation Stephen told Gabriella what it would be like, how the lessons would be, and the pupils, and the concerts they could have on the grass between the school and the sea. He told her until at last she asked him no more and he supposed she was sleeping. But she was not. She was closing her eyes and watching beneath her eyelids the extraordinary edifice of love built in solid air. And it was only in those moments, in that strange starry stillness when the world seemed to sleep without her, that she truly dared to believe it might happen.

21

Finally, the builders arrived in the hillocky field and began to dig out the foundations as the hares darted about into the dunes. To relieve herself of the overattentiveness of Stephen, Gabriella insisted he go each day to see what was happening and walk back along the seashore before coming to tell her. It gave her an hour on her own. For in the nearness of the birth she was revisited by visions of her mother's miscarriages, and although she was safely beyond miscarriage, she fretted about the possibility of an invisible curse moving in her bloodline. She sat in the deep armchair that looked out on the sea and tried to breathe with the focussed concentration she had when about to play extraordinary music.

Stephen stood, she sat in the chair.

“You'll stay there?” he said.

“Of course I will.”

He put on a disc of Vivaldi's concertos. “I'll be back before it's over,” he said.

“I know you will.”

He went out the door. She stayed in the chair.

The music played.

Five minutes later she had risen with a sudden impatience. She saw the bitter face of her pregnant mother standing scouring the sink in the kitchen of their house in the Calle Visciga. She saw it. She saw the fist of steelwool circling, and she cried out. She stood up and crossed to turn the music up louder. She moved the volume until the notes were huge and full and pulsing through the cottage.

Then the pain lanced through her and she slid to the floor.

“O mio Dio.”

She reached for the counter, but her fingers clenched in spasmic fists and hit against the wood. The sharpness of the pain was so severe that her back arched and her mouth opened wide with a soundless cry. She lay on the cold tiles and banged against them with the back of her head, sucking and blowing as if drowning in the tide of life. A minute seemed endless. The pain had a narrowness of point so exquisite that it seemed to find her deeply and then rip upwards. The floor pooled with a little blood and water. Gabriella screamed into the Vivaldi and banged her head again. She screamed so loudly through the music that the blackbirds rose off the roof and flew in the air about the house with the strange and morbid excitement of funeral-goers. They hung around. They mirrored her woe with a beakish crying that upset the cats who lay in the shadow of the plants in the garden and made them come to the windowsill, where the saucer was empty of milk. Time stopped. There was nothing but the waves of pain in the throbbing music, the urgent and relentless hurting that was the pain of sorrow and loss and doomed love and expectant tragedy, and was the pain of the beginning of life, too.

Oh God, Gabriella thought, we are going to die. Then the air seemed rung with muffled hornlike sounds and thickened with floating pinpricks of dusted light that were the onrush of a violent dizziness. And then, blackout.

22

Moira Fitzgibbon found her lying on the floor.

There had been no answer to the doorbell, and when Moira let herself in through the back door she caught at once the queer whiff of disaster. The atmosphere was weirdly aslant, like the grin on a misbehaved child when the crime is as monstrous as he imagines. The molecules themselves seemed disordered, as though the world had been bumped against and some secret and perfect order was discovered enormously flawed. Moira came in slowly, she called and heard no answer. The music player had stopped and was buzzing with the loud volume of emptiness.

Then Moira heard the breathing and, like a finger held upon a wound and now releasing, time rushed like blood. Gabriella was still alive, the child was not yet born. Moira Fitzgibbon made bloodprints with her feet and rang the mid-wife and the doctor and opened the door and called for Stephen in a voice the seawind whipped away. She hurried and ran water and got towels and lifted Gabriella's head and told her not to die, talked to her in a long and seamless stream of urgings that were the confession of her own longing for the child to be born and for the music lessons and the school and the dream of their life by the sea that she told Gabriella was proof of something, and which offered Moira, when she lay in the dark, the single best example of something good and true and beautiful.

23

On the beach Stephen walked beneath the crying of the seabirds. A breeze was gathering from somewhere out in mid-ocean, and the gulls came before it like grey prophecies across the cloudless sky. The wind was salted and dry. Stephen carried his shoes and walked in the wet sand, where the waves painted his turned-up trouser legs. He walked in the place where once he had thought his life was going to end. Now, on that afternoon beach, he walked to re-encounter that earlier self and renew his gratitude for so much that was given to him. The music school had been started, Gabriella was in their house where the garden was begun. He believed newly in God and felt the simplicity of grace.

He tried not to think that the music school might be a folly, that it might be built beside the sea and open and find no pupils. That within a year it might be an empty shell whistling the long, unhappy note of doomed dreams. That Gabriella might change her heart and want to leave. He did not want to think of such things and kept a waferlike belief in goodness balanced on his soul. He walked the long beach until he was past the cliffs and out almost to the broken rocks, where his figure was too small to be seen by those searching for him along the sand.

When he reached the remote end, he turned, tossed a Stone in the water, and held back his head a moment until the brilliant light of the sky bathed his face.

He narrowed his eyes at the sun and did not hear the cries. The waves slapped. Gulls soared and screamed.

Then Stephen turned to see the three Coughlan children clambering over the rocks to tell him to come quickly, there was trouble.

His heart stopped. He imagined he was in a nightmare, for the journey back across the summer beach seemed to take place amidst the garish light and hollow cries of grim hallucination. Sunbathers sat up on their towels and watched him. He could not hurry quickly enough, and his long strides sank in the softened sand and gave him the jagged, uneven rhythm of a jogger suffering heart attack. His long neck angled forward, his arms pumped, and when his hat flew off he left it behind him on the water, running in a gasping horror, as if across his wide eyes there suddenly flashed the doomed future of all their loving, and upon his getting to the cottage depended one last chance for its rescue.

He came up the dunes on all fours. He saw the cars at the gateway to the cottage. Then he slowed down. His rib cage hurt, his arms were heavy. The blood in his legs felt like molten lead and swayed his walking, so that the Coughlans caught up with him and took his hands on either side, guiding him the last paces along the road to the cottage that he was now afraid to enter. He stopped at the gate. He stared at the house, and the children looked up at him. And for a moment he waited. His breath escaped in long sighs. And while he stood there, on that cusp of what he supposed to be unutterable loss, he begged God in a prayer for it not to be so.

Then he heard the baby cry.

24

Gabriella Castoldi did not die that afternoon in the hot July of the long summer but lived when her doctor said she should not have, and gave birth to a baby girl they called Alannah. A small, brown-eyed baby, she was born with a face that revealed neither her mother nor her father, though they each took turns to declare she was exactly like the other; as though they could not quite believe such tender beauty was their own.

For four days after Alannah was born, Gabriella did not move from her bed; she refused to travel to the hospital in Ennis and instead took the difficulties of the birth as a sign that within life was an inevitable force of goodness which flowed beyond our understanding. She relied upon the ancient knowledge of the mid-wife and summoned the healing energy of Nelly Grant to awaken within her. She wept and drowned the bed in water and milk, turning the bedroom air a pale creamy colour that was more filling than food and strangely without the scent of sourness. The near-tragedy brought company. When the word of what had happened reached the town, it had the double effect of raising anger by highlighting the absence of maternity facilities in Ennis and transforming Gabriella into a native of the parish. Visiting ladies brought Lucozade and chocolates and made soft noises above the baby. They relived the hard labour in vivid imaginations and revisited through the new mother their own birthings years earlier. Throughout the first week they came and went like swaddling maternal tides, sliding in around the sleeping mother and child to breathe the thick warm smell of the newborn like an aromatherapeutic remedy, and nodding themselves into dreamy naps that were filled with the downy comfort of first blankets. At once Stephen understood that the birth did not belong to Gabriella and him alone. So he made tea and brought it to the ladies and did not show surprise or resentment when he sometimes opened the bedroom door and saw a half-dozen women over sixty sitting around the bed.

It was in the evenings when the visitors left that he lay with Alannah on the bed. He could not look at her without seeing God. He did not deserve her, he thought, and then held the child in his arms in the tenderest embrace while the stars rose in the skylight overhead.

She became the clock of the cottage. Her wakes and sleeps dictated the rhythms of their days and nights. She was dark-haired and seemed in Stephen's arms the impossible lightness of air. He carried her around the house like the smallest parcel of hope, and though her eyes could not see that far, he pointed out the garden and the sea and then played softly the aching music of Tosca while she fell asleep on his shoulder.

When Moira Fitzgibbon called, he hugged her in the doorway with that combination of awkwardness and sincere deep feeling that was the badge of his character. He cut her flowers from the garden and doubled his own blushes when he saw how she almost wept to receive them. Then, for Alannah's first trip outside the cottage, he urged Moira to join them and drove in his father's car along the western edge of Clare, where the fine summer was just beginning to fade and the yellow stubble of the mown fields was giving way to the last soft green. On the quiet backroads between Miltown Malbay and the sea Stephen stopped the car time and again, and taking one of four dozen packets he had bought in the town, he got out and scattered wildflower seeds in the ditches and beneath the hedgerows.

“These are for you,” he said. “These are for celebration.” Gabriella held Alannah to the window to see, and even Moira became giddy with the notion of the secret sowings and came out from the car and threw fistfuls of poppy, rudbeckia, rose campion, dianthus, and feverfew into the gaiety of the wind.

On the Friday evening at the end of Alannah's first week, Gabriella wrote newly to Maria Feri and Nelly Grant. When she sat in the kitchen before the white pages, the enormity of what had happened to her life rose before her. It was the most ordinary event in the world, the love affair, the birth of the child, but somehow when she thought of it — that she was living now in the west of Ireland with a daughter a week old in the cradle beside her — it took on the dimensions of dreams. She hummed an air and wrote. To Maria Feri she told the news that she was an aunt, and how Alannah showed the time she had spent in Venice by the outrageous exuberance of her giggle, which, Gabriella wrote, was not in the least Irish. She sent her cousin wishes and thanks and lifted the pen from the white space where she glimpsed the evening sorrow of that small apartment above the canal. To Nelly Grant she wrote a shorter message: I have a baby girl. Please come visit.

But it was Maria and not Nelly who responded. In two weeks a piece of white lacework arrived from Venice with a note in the small careful hand of her cousin. It was written on handmade paper in violet ink and had the formal tone of old family property, offering congratulations in a manner that some might consider coldhearted. But Gabriella knew better, and read beyond the tone. She took the lacework in her hand and breathed its scent and caught at once the bittersweet melancholia of Venice; then she placed it in the case of her violin, as if for company.

From Nelly Grant there came no word, and by the time the first rains of autumn had begun to sweep in against the back of the cottage, Gabriella had written her three letters with no reply. Then, in the way a person can fall through the narrowest cracks of our lives, she wrote no more and put aside the little hurt of the silence by supposing that Nelly was simply a woman who disliked writing.

25

When the rain came it came in sheets. It was as if a great chest had been discovered in the heavens and an array of grey clothes were flung out of it into the skies. It streamed down. The light was washed out of the days, and the field where the music school was now almost complete was scored with streaks of an ochre mud. The building was a low glass pentagon with piers of Liscannor flagstone. The builders marvelled at it. Once they were inside it, finishing the timberwork and plastering, they felt something of the extraordinary nature of the thing they had created. It was a unique space, and felt as if it had fallen from the sky or risen from the ground. The golfers in the dunes nearby looked at it with the puzzled expressions of those who cannot imagine the reality of fantasy. But through the rainy days of September the men worked on inside it with a gathering good humour. There was something about the light, of how the rooms' long windows let in the sea views and blended them into the sky, of how strangely playful the space seemed, that made the carpenters whistle and the plasterers hum until the experience of each day inside that building took on the spirit-lifting quality of a concert in Verona. Men sang tunes they hardly knew. They teased each other and then responded to taunts by singing another, singing songs they sang only when drunk, and marvelling at how the sounds of their own voices rang in the high roof spaces.

Every day Stephen visited the building. The closer it came to being completed, the more uncertain he became that they would find the pupils to fill it. In the colder weather the population of the town shrunk. The whole landscape took on the air of a child crouching before a blow. And the rain swept on. Cold squalls blew in off the watery horizon, they lashed the coast of Clare, but according to the evening news on the television, seemed to have blown out and vanished long before they reached Dublin.

By the end of September Gabriella had returned to the violin with renewed energy. She played for Alannah, then played some more when the child was sleeping. Somewhere in the time she had spent away from it her style had changed. She had lost the sharp, edgy quality that was characteristic of her previous intensity. Now instead, she created a fuller and rounder sound and made a music that to Stephen seemed to echo his own feelings of grace. The two Fitzgibbon girls came for lessons. And one evening while Ciara, who was seven, was waiting in the sitting room, Stephen saw her looking at the chess set.

“Would you like to learn?” he asked her.

“Is it very hard?”

“Not for a girl who can play the violin.”

And so they began. He taught her how to play while the rain whipped against the windows and her sister bowed “Song of the Wind” on the violin. He showed her the moves and watched her innocence and astonishment at the bizarre secrets of the game, how the knight could jump and the king castle, and as he lifted the pieces and spoke of them, he had to pause three times in mid-sentence, for in the timbre of his own voice he heard the unmistakable speech of Philip Griffin teaching him the same game so many years before. He moved the bishop and looked at his own hand holding it and, seeing the wrinkling he had not noticed before, realized how he had become his father.

* * *

On Saturday, the fifth of October, Stephen and Gabriella opened the music school in the pentagonal building of glass and stone in Mooney's field on the west coast of Clare. It was a day of wild weathers, and the beginning of that long season of flu, head colds, and chest coughs that were to mark that year's winter like overdue payment for a good summer. It was the predicted gloom that made happy the misfortunate. The wind came in broken, sudden breaths, as if the lungs of the year had collapsed inwards, and a momentary stillness was followed by forceful gasping. Rain was spat out and then vanished, then clattered again on the glass.

For a week the school had been advertised. Moira had made posters. She had spoken to the people at the Clare Champion and been promised an article, which did not appear. She had mentioned the virtuosity of Gabriella Castoldi, the great progress on the violin her own daughters were making, the opportunity of the school. She had even let slip the name of Moses Mooney and used it like a touchstone to remind those who did not wish to remember that he was a blind old man who had died disappointed. Moira had campaigned for the school tirelessly, but on the morning of the fifth of October she awoke with the terrible unease of those who are about to be ill. The weather was a bad omen. Perhaps no one will come, she thought. And for a final time in her life returned to the old doubt in herself: Perhaps behind my back they are laughing, thinking, Who does she think she is, she who failed more exams than anyone in the parish. Moira had stood at the rain window and cursed. Then said, God forgive me.

By ten o'clock she had arrived at the new building, where Stephen and Gabriella and the baby were waiting for her. The air in the school smelled of painted colours. Inside the front hall there was a music system softly playing Vivaldi's Concerto in G major for violoncello, strings, and basso continuo; there was a table with cheese and wine, and another with leaflets and admission forms overhung by the green and yellow paper ribbons that Moira had saved since the last World Cup. At half past ten Councillor O'Rourke arrived. He held his head at such a high angle that it was impossible to tell whether it was in disdain or approval (and in fact he himself was undecided and would wait for confirmation one way or the other when his constituents arrived); he studied the building carefully to avoid conversation and looked at his watch with the practised air of a man who must always seem to be urgently needed elsewhere.

Gabriella paced with the baby, and Stephen made small circles in the front hallway behind her. He was wearing the repaired suit made by his father. His eyes followed the floor. He walked and stopped abruptly, listening intently into the wind for the sound of cars and then hurrying on when there was none. Whenever he arrived close to Gabriella, he tried to tell her it would be all right. But by the fourth time he gave up and used only his eyes to give her the calm he did not possess.

It did not work. Gabriella glistened with perspiration. Alannah, picking up the high-frequency signal of her mother's fear, fretted and made a low moaning sound that wavered as Gabriella rocked her in her arms.

They walked around the hallway. They tried not to look out the long windows that showed the road where no cars were coming. The rain fell, and to protect the terrible vulnerability of their dream, Moira turned the music up loud, then took the councillor on a tour through the empty rooms.

It was eleven o'clock, half an hour past the advertised opening. At last, as if she had finally paced all the way to the far end of hope, Gabriella stopped in the middle of the hallway. She paused a moment for her spirit to break. Then Stephen told her, “There are two cars.”

It was a moment typical of their life together, for within it was a kind of desperate yearning, an outrageous dreaming that belonged to a more innocent world than this, and which appeared to be always on the point of crashing headlong into the chill reality of failure, but then was rescued. As if God were juggling glass-ball moments with mischievous riskiness, letting them hurtle towards the ground and then defying the odds to pull off once more the little miracle of salvation.

There were two cars, the Kennys' and the O'Connells'. Then there were three more, The Mulvihills', Mangans', and Greenes'. They came in with the low-chinned circumspection of those who enter new rooms for the first time. They had come from the Lahiffe funeral, they explained over the Vivaldi, draining the councillor's face when he realized he had missed it. They smiled and shook hands and did not seem to resist the sudden switch from the mood of the graveside to the bright triumphant joy of the music. Others were coming along, Joe Kenny said. But the traffic was all caught up in Miltown Malbay. He took the wine Moira offered him and drank it back in a shot, then looked up at the bare walls as if at paintings.

Big Tom Lernihan came in the door. Then Josie Hassett, Nuala Normoyle, the three Looney girls, the Penders, the Reidys, the Mohallys, and six families of Ryans. Within half an hour the funeral had arrived at the music school. There were a hundred people in the hallway, and the mud of the graveyard slipped from their boots, and the heat of their bodies rose and filled the air with the smell of rain returning heavenward. The music played through the talking, the deep notes of the cello beating like rhythmic wings across the space above them all. Timmy Purtill said it was music like he'd never heard in his life and sat beside the speaker eating a cheese from Denmark. Mary Enright took the arm of Gabriella and told her she had a boy who wanted lessons. So did Maura Galvin. Then the barrel-chested Donie Cussen, who was called Casanova, smiled his full mouth of teeth at Gabriella and said, “Any chance of a tune for us?”

Then she was playing.

The disc was turned off, and while Stephen held the baby and the crowd hushed, Gabriella Castoldi played Fibich's aching “Poeme.” She played with slow and sweet melancholy, and stopped the hearts of those who heard her, so that their mouths opened and their spirits flowed out into that hallway to meet the soul of the woman with the violin. It was nothing less than that. For even from the first notes it was apparent to everyone that this was a woman communicating something rare and tender and profound, that the action of her bow on the strings was not simply the mechanics of music, but that between the instrument and her there was no distinction, and that the infinitesimal beauty of the high notes came like some ambrosial breath from within her. When Gabriella finished there was not a sound. There was only the astonished faces of those who had had no idea they could be so moved by such music.Casanova Cussen raised his big hands and crashed the air, but before the ovation could reach fullness Gabriella was playing again. “Party pieces,” she said, and swept into Kreisler and then Dvoák. She played as if she were dancing. She played out of relief and gratitude, out of an understanding that she was not alone and that in the rain of west Clare that day in October, with Stephen Griffin holding their child, was as much happiness as she dared accept from the world. She played Brahms's “Hungarian Dance” and Dvoák's “Humoresque,” and was pausing between pieces when she saw the tear-wet face of the woman who was Eileen Waters talking to Stephen and then taking his offered hand and slowly shaking it.

What happened after that occurred in the vague uncertain way that time has decided traditional seisiúns should begin; whether Francie Golden spoke first, told anyone, or simply carried his fiddle everywhere, whether there was an imperceptible signal, a nod or wink, or whether it was the moment the warming of the French wine in his blood reached the point of inspiring action, there was an instant when the crowd were clapping for Gabriella, and then it was Francie Golden who was playing “Upstairs in a Tent” and grinning sideways in the terrible pleasure of his own devilment. Like Gabriella he flowed one tune into the next, and for the first time in that building made the air dance to a jig. There was clapping along and toe-tapping and little waves of quick encouragements: “Good man, Francie,” “That's it, boy,” “Now ye're playin,” and a few plain whoops of wordless gaiety.

The moment Francie finished, faces turned to Gabriella, as if she might disapprove of that simple old jaunty music that was theirs. But at once she caught the violin under her chin and said, “Like this?” and played the same tune back to Francie Golden, who laughed and joined her, and led her on another tune in which she followed him and then another. Then Gabriella played Schubert, and Francie was urged to try his fist at it, and did; and the twin O'Gormans, who had been there and gone home for their instruments, arrived back and joined in on two flutes. And Moira Fitzgibbon called Frawley's from the car phone of the councillor and ordered all the hot food they had to be brought up to the school in Dempsey's van, and the four Keoghs went for stout and came back with it with Micky Killeen, the box player, and Johnsie Kelly, the pipe-playing tiler from Kilmurry. And though the rain beat on outside and the car park puddled deeply beneath the bruised sky, none in Miltown Malbay that day gave it a care, for the music was like a long and intricate spell, and transformed grief and worry to laughter and delight in the very same way it had done for centuries. The walls rang with it. Men took off their jackets and danced the Clare set with their wives. They battered with toes and heels on the carpeted floor, as if it were flagstone, and spun in giddying quick circles that returned them to the moments of their childhoods, when the magic of dancing first saw them leap and spin on kitchen floors. They danced and the music played on. More people arrived, and soon the crush of the crowd made some spin off down the corridors and dance in each of the rooms of that pentagonal building, dancing even beyond the hearing of the music, and making steps and keeping time to the music that was already inside them. Gabriella put down her violin and danced with Stephen and Alannah in a bumping, uneven jigtime. Stephen danced like a man who had been given wooden legs. They flew out in sharp angles and measured space like a pair of pincers. He kept his head bolt upright, where it perched above Gabriella's and caught the swirling perfume of lilies as it rose off her hair. He felt the smallness of her back beneath his hand and pressed there to draw her to him, so that she might feel his happiness and love and never leave that moment. And she was laughing while she danced. And while they flew through the other couples (passing the thrown-back head of Eileen Waters where she abandoned herself to the rhythm coming through the wine and danced Eamon with a particular and memorable vivacity), cars started to arrive from Mullagh and Quilty and Cree and Doonbeg, and the space inside those walls had to expand and defy laws of science to accommodate all the ghosts and musicians and dancers of those and other parishes, and that, although they did not know it, the music they were playing was already transforming, and becoming ever so slightly something new, something which absorbed, which was both of that place and others, and allowed the classical to speak to it and would become in time the music of the new millennium. It did not matter. They played and danced on and were like a sea, changing moods like tides, now bright and quick, now slow with airs of sorrow. And while the moon was lost beneath the coverings of thick cloud and the stars were put out in the western sky, the party continued. It continued all that starless, moonless night, while the rain fell and the wind blew and none cared, for it was as if in those moments of music and dance each man and woman was seized with the knowledge of the boundless hardship and injustice of life and knew that this night in the pentagonal building of the music school in Moses Mooney's field was one they would look back on from the edge of life and realize that yes, there they had come as close as they ever had to true happiness.

26

By All Souls' Day the school had thirty-five pupils. Gertie Morrisey taught piano, Martin Hosey the silver flute, and Seamus Cooney the traditional timber flute, while Gabriella and Sonny Mungovan divided the violin and fiddle. It was a school that broke all rules of musical education, that defied the strict classification of training practices and existed instead in a free-flowing river of styles and traditions, with the only aim being to foster the pleasure of playing. From the beginning Gabriella had decided that the school would enter no pupils for examinations, that those who wished could do so, but that no time or effort would be given towards the preparation of children to play for the judgement of others. In this Stephen was in complete accord and marvelled at how the very students who had trudged to school now came to the glass building with the enlivened air of children arriving at a swimming pool. His own function in the school was not clearly defined. Moira was its manager and showed a surprising capability for keeping timetables, organizing classes, and advertising. While Gabriella took classes in the five hours that followed schooltime, Stephen played with his daughter. He carried and wheeled her along the corridor that ran all the way around the pentagon, listening to the different musics escaping each room, telling Alannah what they were and watching how already she knew which playing was her mothers.

It was during those evenings while minding Alannah that he first brought the chess set there. While the baby slept he sat in a corner of the room and played against himself. Within two weeks he had a few regular opponents, the waiting parents of the children, and the chess and music became so entwined during that winter that sometimes Stephen stopped in mid-game and felt the spirit of Philip Griffin beside him.

Soon it was clear it was to be a wretched winter. The sea grew high and wild and angry. Morning evening and night the wind howled, until at last it was impossible to imagine a place far out in the Atlantic that was before the beginning of the wind. The new slates that Corry & Son & Nephew had put on came off and shattered on the road outside. The air was full of salt. Faces dried and cracked, and a general rheuminess ran through all the parishes of the western seaboard. In the garden that faced the sea the plants burned, and Stephen watched them from the kitchen window with a sudden chill in his heart. In the fierce winds of All Souls' Night whole shrubs were lifted out of the ground and tossed into Clancy's down the road. To Stephen it felt like a portent. For three days he went outside in the gusting sea-winds and tried to secure the plants that remained. He dressed them in sacking and staked them and bound them with yellow baler twine, until they resembled weird effigies of the plants they had been in summer.

Despite the harshness of the season the music school prospered. Adults came for classes in the wild driven rain of the mornings, and sat on in the small coffee shop Moira ran, where they listened to music they had never heard before and which nourished them in their spirits and helped them endure the terrible vicissitudes of grief and loss that are the inheritance of all.

Gabriella was happy. She almost did not dare to admit it. When she held Alannah in her arms she felt the wonder of the child and wept often, alarming Stephen into offering all kinds of remedies, which she turned down, telling him he was such a great fool he did not know sorrow from joy. “This,” she said, with lemon-scented tears flowing down her cheekbones, “is joy.”

“Oh, right,” he said, and stood there, hopeless and inadequate to understand what was flowing between the mother and the child.

And so, even in the battering and scouring of that winter, a kind of healing occurred for Stephen and Gabriella. It was the kind that comes when people are living side by side in a small house in a beautiful and desolate place, where little by little the past vanishes and the present moment seems large enough to contain a whole life. It was the kind of healing that is made of endless cups of tea, of changing nappies, of music playing, of books picked up and put down after three pages, of short naps and long dreams, and of the deeply comfortable silences that grow between a man and a woman who come to know each other so utterly that they breathe each other's breath and do not need many words. And in that winter, Stephen and Gabriella grew together, while the leafless plants in the garden were bound and motionless outside. They knew each other's rhythms like clocks in a jeweller's shop that chime at staggered midnights. Stephen began to learn Italian and walked through the cottage, at first saying phrases from Frasi Utili e Idiomi, and then progressing to short passages learned from Dante's Purgatorio and II Paradiso, which had the double bonus of astonishing Alannah and making Gabriella laugh.

Gabriella knew how she could tease Stephen. She still loved to measure the sincerity of his feelings with countless tiny tests, requesting that he change his habit of leaving the tea caddy open, leave down the toilet seat, allow the bedroom window to be left open all night even in the fierce winds of November let the cats sleep in the kitchen, wash his feet before bed. To all Stephen complied without hesitation. He saw them as a myriad of proofs of his own loving, and then recognized that each time Gabriella asked him something it was also to tell him that she was preparing to live with him forever.

At no time did Stephen ask Gabriella again to marry him. Sometimes, in a fit of gloom, Gabriella would feel the absence of space between them, the claustrophobia that weighs on lovers until they redefine each other's strangeness. Then she would look up from a book and think to throw it at him, to hit out at the suddenly infuriating omnipresence of his affection. She would make a demand: Did he not notice how the cooker was broken? how the gas kept shutting off and had to be fiddled to get right?

“Do you not notice things like that?”

“I will look at it now.”

“No, it's too late. I don't mean you to do it now. It's just you don't …”

She would shake her head at herself and sit in the heavy silence, wondering why she felt the need to strike out at him. He had the dissatisfying reality of saints. He knew nothing of the real world. He would not know the names of three politicians, how to fill tax forms or fix the plumbing. But then, just as suddenly, the gloom would relent and she would look at him and be astonished that she was living with such an extraordinary man.

Then, on the last evening of that November, they returned home from the school and found a letter from Nelly Grant waiting. It was written in a rounded looping hand and told her own adventure, how she had shut the shop and left Kenmare two weeks after them to follow her imagination to Italy; how she has spent six months there, arriving in Venice in the rain and travelling the Adriatic coastline to Ravenna and Rimini, where she had stayed, eating a diet of every kind of shellfish, until she said her dreams took on the warm and salty quality of that sea and left her experiencing the softness of life that we forget in building our shells. She had learned new cures, and discovered her age was imaginary, for when she returned to Kenmare she felt the bigness of the mountains like a child.

Stephen and Gabriella read the letter in turns, while the wind blew rain and sea foam against the windows and Alannah slept. And when Stephen was reading it Gabriella looked at him and saw the gladness moving across his face. The light from the tasselled lamp was beautiful upon him, and she understood with the sudden clarity of enlightenment that shows us the shape of the world. And it was his stillness and peace that she felt, the loving that was deeper and wider than she could encompass. And she whispered: “Stefano.”

He was startled and looked up quickly from the page.

“You know I love you,” she said.

He said nothing. The wind blew outside, the child slept.

“No matter how impossible I am.”

The letter quivered in his hand.

“No matter what I say, I do,” Gabriella said. “Please don't ever leave me.”

He had slipped across to her from his armchair and was crouched low beside her. Her hand touched his face.

“I won't,” he said. “I couldn't live. I love the impossible.”

27

They made love that night beneath the million drops of the rain running on the skylights above them like tears. They undressed each other by the turf fire, where the slowness of their movements was like the movements in a dance. There was no music playing, only the water falling out of the sky into the sea and the sea's slow churning in the ordinariness of time. With the small hollows of the palms of his hands Stephen pressed upon the warm skin of Gabriella and travelled the places of her body backward and forward in the endless sojourn of loving that finds no limit in the other's body but returns across the places caressed as if they were a New World discovered, warmed and scented like the tropics. They entwined each other, the small woman and the long man, sitting on the floor before the fire, where Gabriella held back her head so that he might kiss her neck and her breasts and so that she could hold his head against her in the dream of their being one.

The rain fell above them, and the sea sighed in thin chains of surf in the night outside. The cottage creaked like a ship, anchored at last in the known coordinates of Hope and Love, and secure in its own fastness. In the small hours Stephen and Gabriella lay by the low fire with a blanket pulled over them. They did not move. They slept like swimmers stilled in painted waters, one's arm around the other, leading towards the shore.

28

And there was a morning of brilliant light that came across the surface of the sea and arrived so brightly that at first it seemed the dazzlement of magic. The sky was cloudless and blue with the perfect weather of peaceful dreams. And into that morning Stephen dressed himself and was waking Gabriella and bringing her tea and carrying Alannah in his arms through the cottage to tell her mother how they could take the morning and drive into Ennis and buy a new cooker to replace the one that was broken. And he had to find the baby's cloth shoes and pack the bag with nappies and powder and cream and the bottle and the bibs, while Gabriella dressed in a burgundy dress and a black cardigan. And then they were driving into that brightness that was not the brightness of November. They were packed into the car, with Gabriella holding Alannah in her lap in the back seat and humming a tune for her and humming it over and over as the car drove on into Miltown Malbay and out the other side and on past all the watery fields where cattle watched across the strands of barbed wire for the coming of fodder and where none was coming, because there was nothing else on that road, no tractor or car, no man or woman, only the bright sunlight that was too bright and the polished surface of the puddles that looked like glassy tears or the fallen fragments of a cold heaven. And Stephen was driving and watching his hands turning the wheel and the road unspooling like a destiny before him as they sped onward, and he was able to look in the mirror at Gabriella and Alannah behind him and behind them the road they had come from and the fields flowing backward like a film blurring green and grey, and then there was suddenly the flooded bend by Inagh and the car flashing into it and across the water until it hit the stone wall and Stephen flew forward into the windscreen and felt the crash and the glass and the tremendous shattering and arrived in the terrible silence and the taste of blood and looked back and saw that Gabriella and Alannah were dead.