8

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm sorry.”

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

“Well?” Stephen said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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