12

  By the beginning of April all but the ash trees were leafed; the wildflowers and berry bushes in the hedgerows moved towards early blossom and lent the air a seasonal gaiety. Big skies opened and let the light of the high heavens fall down on the town. Gardens were dug over and seeded. Men got their hair cut and drove in their tractor cabs with the scalped, white-necked look of plucked fowl. The landscape buzzed. Birds flew down out of the shelter of the trees and shat on the cars beneath the telephone wires a bright confetti, celebrating the return of April.

At last, after some persuasion, Gabriella agreed to leave the house and go shopping in the town with Stephen. In the comfort of the bedroom she had grown slightly fearful of the outside. She distrusted her own happiness and imagined that at any moment the world would crush it. How perfect it was in their own place beneath the mountains. Whatever guilt she felt in seeing Stephen do everything—washing shopping and cooking—was absolved in the evenings when she took him inside her arms, loving him more carefully and tenderly now, with the kind of kisses the rescued bestow upon the rescuer. In their weeks together Gabriella had grown accustomed to this strange rhythm of their relationship. She had allowed Stephen to take over, and banished for the time being all thoughts of what their future might be. She was, she even admitted, almost happy. Why change anything? Then, that third day of April, when Stephen told her he was leaving her briefly to buy the fresh rhubarb Nelly Grant said she would have set aside for them, Gabriella said she did not want him to leave her.

“I won't be long.”

“No, please, Stefano.”

“What is it?”

“Don't go.”

She was sitting on the bed in her nightdress. Her body seemed smaller as her pregnancy grew. She was strangely more frail the larger she became, as if the part of her that was herself was each day subtracted from and was added instead to the child. Her face was flushed.

“What is it? What's the matter?”

“I don't know I am foolish,” she said. “But sometimes …”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I feel that it won't last. That something is waiting to happen.”

He sat down on the bed beside her. The brilliance of the April noon was at his back, letting the light fall like infinite pity into her eyes. She was briefly blinded. Though he asked her what exactly she feared he did not need to. He, too, had felt the fragile quality of each day and knew the awful expectation of loss that was the most enduring and reliable trait of his thirty-two years. The difference now was that since the death of his father and his own return to Kenmare, Stephen had begun to feel he was in a new life. He felt blessed. So when Gabriella curled on the bed and could not quite explain her fear, Stephen Griffin already understood and imagined, like some delirious saint, that the blessing that had fallen on him would now protect her, too. He leaned down and stroked her head softly like a grandfather.

“Come with me,” he said. “Come on out. Come down to the town.”

And so she did. They arrived in the town that had already been speaking about them. Gabriella walked linked on Stephen's arm, her green coat open and the child just visible ahead of both of them. It was not so bad. The sun was warm and welcoming. The first tourists had already arrived at the wool and tweed shops at the top of the street, and a constant jig and reel music was blaring out from the loudspeaker set above the shop in a broadcast of authenticity. Beneath the music Germans were buying bargain sweaters from Michael O'Keefe in his one black suit. He nodded across his dealing at Gabriella and Stephen. “Morning to you.” His eye caught the curve of the child. “Beautiful today,” he said, and turned back to the Germans.

Stephen and Gabriella went to the bank. The money that he had been willed by his father had not arrived yet. Stephen had little idea how much it would be after duties and fees, but knew that the sum was substantial. He was living on his savings from his teacher's salary and needed to transfer his account from Clare and tell the manager the funds would be coming.

The teller asked Stephen his name.

“Just a minute so, Mr. and Mrs. Griffin.”

Moran, the assistant manager, was called from his desk to the counter to meet them.

“Well,” he said, “good morning to ye.” He beamed and reached out a pumiced pink hand. “Mr. Griffin, Mrs.…”

In a moment he noticed the absence of a wedding ring and took a sideways glance away to show that he had not been looking. “Yes yes. Now, Stephen, isn't it? That's right.”

Moran had, he knew, the gift of weighing situations, and when money was concerned, the balances were never even. There were always hidden weights, obscured feelings, fears and motives. The pregnant woman without a ring caused him to reweigh the situation swiftly and temper his approach. So, with his most liberal expression and a face that declared the only and absolute value in life was hard currency, he took the hand Gabriella offered and shook it once as if it were a wet fish.

“This is Gabriella,” Stephen said.

“Yes. Yes,” said Moran, looking at the tall figure of the fool. This woman was too beautiful for him. Could it be that she was not with him for his looks? He leaned on the polished wood of the counter, but did not invite them to enter. Moran was a man of a time, and it was a constant irritation to him that it was not this one. In his view, the situation was compromised by the presence of the woman.

Stephen told him of the money that he expected to arrive. Moran pressed his two hands on the counter. He asked Stephen approximately how much money were they talking about.

“More than ten thousand?”

“Yes.”

“More than twenty?”

“More than a hundred.”

“I see.” There was a pause. “A good deal of money then,” Moran said, and waited, and raised and lowered his hands on the countertop lightly as if playing the slow chords of the third movement of Disaster. “You need to come in sometime yourself,” he said, “and we can have a talk about it, what best to do and so on. Sometime when you have a minute, when you can come in when em …” He stopped and nodded a tight smile. He could not say what he wanted to. He could not say: Come in when this woman is not with you. He could not say: This is a matter between men, though he thought it and tried in vain to let his expression say so. Moran offered Stephen the form to sign to open the account in his name, and winced inwardly, watching the fellow push it over to the woman for her to sign, too. The assistant manager looked at her with a pained smile. He endured her with a thin tightness in his lips and harsh judgement in his eyes. He would tell Mrs. Moran about her in the evening. He would reaffirm the main lesson life had taught him: money comes to the coarse and undeserving, and it was his unlucky lot in life ceaselessly to serve and assist those more wealthy than he. He nodded at the two of them. All the greatest fools in the known world, he told himself as he returned to his office, are ruled by the heart and not the head. For them there should be no such thing as money, they don't deserve it.

Martin Moran was not the only one who let himself be haunted by their visit. Mickey Hayes, standing in his Wellingtons in the queue at the counter, saw the way the assistant manager had leant over to talk to them. He could see the look of pound notes in Moran's eyes, and craned his neck and allowed the gambling addiction of his lifetime to make him think he overheard what he most feared: another's fortune. “They've won the fucken' lotto,” he said in a cracked voice too far above a whisper for Maggie Saunders not to hear it and turn at once to watch Stephen and Gabriella walking contentedly out the door.

From that moment the word travelled like an airborne virus, so that it seemed to move and arrive in every house and business in the town as quickly as human greed. Mickey Hayes carried it to three pubs. He allowed the bitterness that life had long ago lodged in his bloodstream to inflate the terrible tale of the two, not even married, flaunting their fortune in the streets of Kenmare. Narrow-eyed and with Guinness froth moustaching him like a banderillero, he described them as walking mockeries. He said they had hidden it from everybody. They must have won the fucken' thing weeks ago and hidden themselves up in that house. Not even one drink on the house anywhere had the feckers bought, not the steam off their piss were they thinking of donating to anyone.

“That's nice carry-on, isn't it?” he asked Donal Mungovan on the stool next to him.

“Christ, but it is,” said Donal, and shook his head in slow wonder at what the hell God was up to, letting the likes of them win instead of him.

Even before Stephen and Gabriella had passed Cox's butchers midway up the town, Helena had heard. She was still bruised on her left cheek from the business in the post office and was unsure yet that her cosmetic covered it sufficiently. She stayed indoors upstairs and received callers. When Maggie Saunders told her, her heart sank. Love and money, she thought, and had to tilt her head back to stop the involuntary spasm of her tears from streaking across the covered bruise. There was a silence bitter and heavy and thick in her sitting room, where women's magazines were scattered gaudily like unfulfilled promise in an empty heart.

Then Maggie Saunders said, “Well, all can't be well in paradise.” She nodded and half-closed her eye, cocking her head at the invisible lovers. “They're not married. There's no ring.”

This seemed to console Helena Cox slightly. She went to the window and looked out across the street, to where Stephen and Gabriella were talking to Nelly Grant at the stall of cabbages. In the tender spring light even she could see the love glowing from them; it smote her like a cold iron and made her think of Francie downstairs at the butcher stall, with his dumb brutish kind of passion that subsided into nothing. With Maggie behind her, she bit on her cherry-painted lip. “I have to tell some people,” she said. “Father Dempsey will want to know.” Then she turned and walked away, lighter and suddenly eased with the plan of spreading her sourness.

By evening everyone in the town had heard. It was talk with a life of its own. By the fall of darkness people who told the tale of the lottery win could not even remember whom they first heard it from. It was a fact. New details emerged in each telling and clung to the tale like wasps in flowers. Just so came the story of how Stephen had first tried to hide the fortune from the people of Clare, how he had failed to tell his principal and simply disappeared, pretending all kinds of elaborate ruses, even inventing his own father's death, so that no one would discover the money. Gabriella was no better. She was carrying some Italian fellow's child. She had dumped him and gone off and come back only when she heard, and was now pretending the child was Stephen's. The fellow was such a fool, his own greed was so thick that he could not even see hers.

Not everyone in the town that night was bitter with envy. The German silversmith laughed and clapped; he loved to see fairy tales in Ireland, he told Helena, and his blue eyes twinkled above the mass of his beard like cloudless azure. Nolan and McCarthy & Son, undertakers and builders, took the news as a sign of the nearness of luck and bought double scratchcards; the two O'Connells, solicitors, shrugged indifference and beeped the automatic alarms of their Rovers. There were others, too, to whom the news when it reached them had the quality of grim fable, and so slipped into their lives only as a chastening reminder of how terrible money can be.

Nonetheless, from the few the sickness of greed grew. And by the time the light died on that April evening, the story of Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi had spun a kind of thick yellowish brume out of the window of O'Loughlin's and Coughlan's, and O'Siochru's pub, too, and the air was so heavily scented with the exhaled bitterness and envy that it choked the lungs and browned the stars and half obscured the moon itself, so that it hung over the town like a gouged eye.