9

  “I cannot marry you, Stephen. I cannot.”

They had left the shop of Nelly Grant and, like people carrying heavy burdens, walked mutely from the town. They had taken the Killarney road towards the mountains instinctively, as if the bigness of their emotions demanded the otherworldly landscape of rock and wood silvered now with the torrents of the season. Water was everywhere running and made a noise louder than the birds. Stephen and Gabriella did not touch. They walked two feet apart up the slow incline, and by the time they had left the close cattle smells of the town behind, the air was thin and blue and clean as pine. The bread van passed and stopped and offered them a lift to Killarney, but they waved it on, not meeting each other's eyes but moving like figures in a romantic painting, as if to a prearranged spot in the vastness of that green wilderness.

There was no such spot; a car with four swearing singing bachelor footballers raced past them on their way home from the night, and Stephen stepped into the verge and slipped and almost twisted his ankle, but caught against Gabriella. Her face was white. “I'm sick,” she said.

“Oh God, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say?”

They sat down on a ledge of rock, the mountain behind them.

And for a moment, nothing.

They breathed and looked away. The valley was below, and deep within it the thin morning smoke of three houses rose and vanished in the air.

“Are you all right?”

“It passes.”

“Here, do you want my jacket?”

“No no, keep it.”

Stephen looked at himself for something to offer. He was suffused with a desire for giving to Gabriella, and was only just understanding that singular characteristic of love, that the impulse to do something for the other reached a point of such immediacy that it almost erased him entirely and left only the urgency. He looked at the side of her face with a dizzy desire to put the palm of his hand against it.

“I am so glad you came back,” he said.

“I wasn't sure I would,” said Gabriella, “not when I left. And it's not because of the child.”

“I know.”

“I wanted …” She stopped, and her face briefly frowned, a frown that travelled down from her forehead to her mouth like a wind rumple in a sheet and flowed on then into Stephen. “I wanted to know. I want my life to be, you know, to find a kind of certainty, it's stupid, I know, but just not to fall into things, you know, to feel that …”

“I love you.”

She turned her face towards him, and he saw the pain he had put in her eyes.

“I know that, Stephen. Oh, I know.”

“I want to take care of you. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

She lowered her head until her chin rested low on her fists. A car travelled slowly up the hill and stopped five yards away from them to look down at what the driver imagined the two people must be looking at. It was not until the two tourists had looked all around for the spectacular view they couldn't find that they got back in the car and drove past. They waved at the tall man and the woman sitting on the rock, but no greeting was returned. Gabriella's brown hair fell forward across her cheeks, the pink whorl at the top of her ear appeared through the strands. Stephen held on to his knees. He looked down as if from a precipice at the life he wanted to plunge into. He looked at Gabriella's clothes, her walking boots, the corded wine trousers, the thick woollen coat, and like a demented disciple, he loved them, too. If she had taken off her coat he would have hugged it to him and breathed its scent.

“Gabriella?”

She turned to him. “There's no need to say anything, Stephen,” she said. “I know I know I know” She touched his face and felt the emotion buckle him. “I am terrible,” she said. “I am mean and hard.”

He had turned his mouth to kiss her hand where it touched him.

“Please,” he said.

“Don't.”

“Please.”

“Stephen.” She brought up her other hand and was holding his wet face. “I cannot marry you,” she said. “It wouldn't … I would always feel that I had forced you.” She stopped and held back her head to face the sky. “I love you, Stephen Griffin. I do. But I am not in love with you. I cannot marry you.”

“Don't, then. Don't,” he said, and now held on to her hands at his face and did not let them go. “Don't marry me, but just let me …” He ran out of words and let the pleading rush from his eyes with the force that runs rivers into seas.

“You are the best man,” Gabriella said, and shook her head in disbelief that such a man existed, and then she reached forward and pressed herself against him with such force it might have been for healing or to be healed, and then she kissed his face and then his mouth that was salty like the sea.