Darkness fell at four o'clock. It was the first day of December, and when the sunlight was thinned out like beaten metal in
the mid-afternoon the fog floated in like fine wrapping. The air smelled of wool and herbs, and might have slipped the town
into fairytale sleep had it not been for the iron clatter of Guinness barrels, the last delivery between the mountains, and
the twin Keogh brothers carting crates of empties that cackled with remembered delight like false teeth come alive.
Meanwhile, the town readied itself for Saturday night; it held its breath and did the small jobs. It hurried around the yard,
it checked the football scores and ate its bread and butter and its slice of curranty brack, hearing the nightly tragedies
on the news with mute and impotent anger, before washing its face, putting on a clean shirt, and going to stand outside seven
o'clock Mass. By the time Father Moriarty was giving out Communion to the variously odoured breaths of his congregation, the
pulse of the town had quickened, and for the first of the escapees, who had drifted away on the last word of the Gospel, the
porter was already filling pint glasses on mahogany counters.
When Stephen walked out into the night, it was like walking into a pillow. He had to hold his face upward towards the obscured
moon to find air. Scarves of fog entwined the mountains. When he arrived at the hotel, Maurice Harty on the door gave him
a nod like a movie spy; the same girl was at Reception, and while she gave him his ticket she told him with deep self-pity
that the crack at the previous night's computer bingo had supposedly been Unreal.
There were forty people for the concert. He sat in the third row in the aisle seat and did not take his eyes off Gabriella
from the moment she entered in a blue dress.
While she bowed the thousand notes, she saw and heard nothing else, and neither the polite applause nor the coughing fit that
took one of the elder Donoghue sisters moved her from the far country of the music. It was only between the pieces that she
sometimes glanced down at the audience, turning the sheet music with her bow hand and looking briefly at the faces of those
astonished to have found such a musician playing in the hotel. It was in those moments that she looked for the face of Stephen
Griffin and found him there in the third row looking at her. She saw him and he looked away, and before she had drawn breath
to begin the Kreisler, she was already moved by him. A quality of longing in his look pierced her, and as she pressed into
her chin rest, she had to steady herself against the suddenness of feeling. (Although she did not know it yet, there was common
ground between them, for Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of
despair. Neither did she realize yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and
that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow
like a brother of our own.) She did not think of this yet. She played the Kreisler. She played the Elgar after that, and did
not look down at him again until the concert was over. Then, as unexpectedly as life, Gabriella Castoldi walked down amongst
the chairs and the departing audience to Stephen Griffin and asked him if he would like to walk out into the fog with her.