When Moira Fitzgibbon arrived outside the house, she heard the music playing and knew that she was right to have come. Once,
she would have surrendered to the protocol of respectability and would not have called on a single man; but with each new
day she emerged more as herself and felt a growing confidence in the intelligence of her heart. She had been right about the
concert, the people had come, and that morning there was radiance and astonishment on the streets of Miltown Malbay. Word
of the concert had arrived almost ahead of its audience, and by the time the lights had come back on with the return of the
first car, the town already knew. Those who had not gone to the concert accepted the news of its success with silent dismay;
but during the night they washed their consciences in a deep salty sleep as sudden showers blew in off the sea and swept through
the damp bedrooms like a scouring God. The wind ran through the town and gathered all spite and bitterness, so that in the
morning all awoke full of unanimous praise for Moira Fitzgibbon. The begrudgers had disappeared, transformed into the good
citizens of earnest support who made it their business to mention in Hynes’s, Galvin’s, and other shops that they had so enjoyed
the music. Moira had been right. She brought the profits from the concert to the bank to lodge them in Moses Mooney’s account
and there met Eileen Waters. When the principal congratulated her, Moira felt a surge of weakness and water in her eyes, but
shook her own sentimentality free with the knowledge that a day earlier the same woman would have crossed the road rather
than meet her.
“Well, when you believe in something,” Moira said.
“Yes. Oh, that’s right,” said Eileen Waters. “Absolutely right.”
“You don’t like to just give up on it.” Moira let the phrase linger a moment and, there in the bank, collected another of
the small victories that were becoming common for her. Was it her imagination that made the November street seem brighter,
livelier, that morning? was there dazzlement falling? was there an all but imperceptible lift in the air that made men seem
to move more lightly from their tractors or salute across the erratic hotchpotch of parked cars in Bank Place with a broader
sweep of their arms? Were the twin babies of the Kellys ever laughing like that before? Moira wondered, sauntering along the
footpath. Was it always like this, and she had failed to notice? As if enlightenment was a condition of Miltown Malbay that
noontime, harmony seemed everywhere. People had their best day. They were illumined with an inexplicable sense of things being
right in the world. Their own ordinariness seemed majestic, and in all the coming and going of their everyday shopping and
conversation, from the market to the post office, from Galvin’s to Hynes’s, they were like the townspeople in paintings of
towns and villages of long ago, when time was slower and everything more innocent.
And it was the concert. Somehow it was, Moira Fitzgibbon told the dashboard of her car, and drove to Stephen Griffin’s house,
where she had seen the yellow car earlier and knew that he could not be working.
She heard Vivaldi playing when she opened her car door and stood, allowing her heart to understand the situation before moving
up to knock. She knocked four times to no answer and looked up at the clear sky without discouragement, as if it were the
next white page of the story only just coming to her; then she walked around the back and let herself in.
“Autumn” was playing, that slow collapse of notes that made the air itself seem to fall as Moira stepped inside the back kitchen.
Once she arrived in it she knew she had trespassed some intimacy, that the simplest sights and smells of the domestic disorder
were private revelations, and that the stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, the opened cartons of sour milk left by the windowsill,
the grey smudge that was an ancient sponge, the dusty cobwebs like netting across the corner of the ceiling, these were each
as vulnerable and naked expressions of the heart as rough, raw, first-draft poems. She knew more about Stephen Griffin with
each step, and held herself briefly in the kitchen until the myriad impressions had flown into the farthest corner of her
mind. Then she called his name.
“Mr. Griffin? Oh, Mr. Griffin?”
He did not answer, and Moira walked slowly from the kitchen to the door of the sitting room. Everything about that minor journey—the
condition of the carpet, the faded greyish quality of the wallpaper, cool as old skin when she touched it, and the swell of
melancholy in that movement of the music that was tangible in its pain and dying—made her afraid. When she put her hand on
the door and moved it ever so slowly open, she was inseparable from her own visions of television women detectives arriving
on the scene of murder.
She eased open the door and put her head around it first. Then she saw him: Stephen Griffin, poleaxed, lying back in the armchair
with his head turned to one side. His right hand conducted in a slow waving. His eyes were closed; he did not sense her beside
him, and even when she said his name again with some alarm, nothing happened. Then Moira pulled out the plug of the music
system.
“Mr. Griffin?”
Stephen opened his eyes. He did not want to.
“Mr. Griffin, are you all right?” She was standing over him. She did not ask him if he was injured or ill or if he wanted
to get up; she did not suppose that he had been drinking, nor that a sudden seizure had knocked him back into the chair. Moira
Fitzgibbon was more intelligent than that. The knowledge had gathered in her before she had to think of it.
“I said I’d call in because of tonight,” she said. “I have a complimentary ticket for the concert in Galway.”