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.