15

  Life is not simple, nor love inevitable. Stephen sat with his hands on his knees and his head stooped over. The black thinning mop of his hair fell forward, and when he looked down he saw the thick mud on his shoes from when he had stepped out into the ditch. He moved them back beneath the seat as if they were evidence against him, obscure proof that he was a misfit. It was a common feeling for him. He didn’t quite fit and, knowing this, took it with an embarrassed acceptance, as if it were an unsuitable birthday gift that could not be returned. So he sat there waiting for the concert and kept his head low between his shoulders.

Then the music began.

It began with pace and rhythm. It swept into the air like a bird with four wings, as the four musicians bowed their strings and released the notes that had been gathering within them all evening. The music flew through the room and filled it with a kind of sweet breathing that rose and fell in the breasts of the audience. They were mesmerized at once. The musicians played beyond themselves, and within instants of beginning they knew it was a concert they were to remember years later. They dared brief glances at each other; Paolo Mistra looked up from the cello into the face of Gabriella Castoldi and saw the light gleaming from it. They were playing Scarlatti’s Quartet in C minor, and by the time they had reached the allegro the warm air of the long room seemed to be dancing in white shapes above them. The room grew warmer each minute. (Kiaran Breen startled himself by standing up in the middle of the audience to look towards the window and see if it was not in fact morning and the sun was coming up.) In the middle of the third piece the audience started taking off their coats. Briefly they jostled in their seats and then lay the coats across their laps, so that from the front of the room their bright blouses and blue and white shirts looked like spring in Italy. The music transported them. Every man and woman was already in some Italy of the mind, and the storm of the November night blew outside with all the fruitlessness and ineffect of a government warning. When they had finished playing the Vivaldi, the people swept to their feet and let their coats fall to the floor. They applauded loudly and with such frantic joy that Piero Motte felt tears spring up in his eyes. With the applause ringing in the high chandeliers above them, the musicians looked at each other in bewilderment. The room was balmy with delight. And when the people sat again for the slow and romantic melancholy of the Puccini, they were pillowed on a deep and heartfelt gladness. Eamon Waters took the plump and warm fingers of his Eileen’s right hand and held them in his lap. Smelling the deepening scent of her perfume rising in the heat of the room, Jack Nolan at fifty-seven kissed Margaret Mungovan on the side of her neck and only barely kept himself from telling her he was ready to marry again. (It did not matter, for she knew it already, and when the music began once more, she allowed her head to lean against his shoulder and let him know in the silent language of perfume that she wanted his arms around her.)

In the back row, Stephen Griffin held his face in his hands and stared at the woman playing the violin. He, too, had been taken from himself by the music; the music offered an invisible opening to another place, and through it, like a secret river, flowed the frustrations, sorrows, and ceaseless longings of everyone there. For each of them, it became the music of themselves.

By the time the Puccini was being played, Stephen found himself looking at no one but the slender figure of Gabriella Castoldi. Even when she was playing the quick fluttered notes of the Vivaldi allegro her expression remained one of frowning intensity. The bow flew back and forth across the strings like a sweet yet almost unendurable torture. Stephen looked at the woman whose name he did not yet know and his heart raced. The air in the room wavered with warmth. Men and women closed their eyes and, in the minor pause between notes, swallowed hard the emotions that rose within them.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

The last note was played and the music stopped. There was a pause, a long beat in which that Venice of the mind lingered in the hot humid room of the Old Ground Hotel. There was a held moment of nothing, of silence, as if no one who sat there wished to embark on the home journey, to emerge once more in the November rain. Nobody moved. (Later, Piero Motte would swear that when he looked down at them, every single man and woman had wet faces and suntans. He would tell his aged father in the pasticceria in Burano that in the old music they had revealed a new invention that night, a kind of heart travel, he would say, that took them all, tutti, to the place of Vivaldi—which is not Venice but Vivaldi himself. They did not applaud, he would tell his father. They could not.)

And how long passed before the first hands clapped could not be measured in time. It was a slow awakening, full of reluctance and dawning amazement, like sleepers rising from the most sensuous dream. Men raised their hands to clap and felt the dampness under their armpits and across the shirts on their backs. They stood and noticed they were in their stockings, and had slipped off their shoes earlier, in the mistaken certainty that they were sitting by the waterside. The women clapped their hands beneath their chins and felt their own air fanning them back from dizziness. Councillor O’Rourke, who had slipped out at the beginning of the concert to attend to mobile-phone calls, now stepped back in the door on the wave of applause. He smiled, raised his head to show his throat, and held up his hands to applaud so that Moira Fitzgibbon could see him clearly.

The possibility of an encore vanished in the wave of people spilling forward towards the small stage. Stephen did not move; he stood applauding and lost sight of the musicians as the crowd swelled about them. He angled his head to see the woman better, but she had stepped off the podium and was lost to him amidst the jostle of the Miltown Malbay people. His mouth was dry, his eyes burned. In his chest his lungs seemed to have collapsed. He could not breathe. He felt as if he had been struck in the throat. There was a moment when he thought he would fall down; then he looked up and blinked at the chandeliers and was able to move quickly from the room.

Once he made the doorway, he could move faster, and took the red carpeted stairs three at a time, hurrying down into the lobby like a man escaping a fire.

The cool dark dampness of the evening after rain was like a blanket thrown over him. Now he could breathe. He walked out of the grounds of the hotel and past the pulling-away cars and the dazzling lights of the homeward bound. But he did not want to go home, he wanted to walk, to keep moving until he could travel all the way back into the feeling of the concert. He walked around the shut shops of Ennis and heard the music of Venice in his mind. Stephen Griffin walked, mute, beneath the moonless sky. It was two o’clock in the morning and he was six miles out on the Inagh road. He had been walking for four hours and not once lost sight of the face of Gabriella Castoldi.