The progress of dreams is in fits and starts. Time hastens and slows and makes of the clock of desire not minutes and hours
but fevers, flushes, and languid long eternities. So in one day everything happened, and after it almost nothing at all.
Money does not travel quickly, and the more of it there is, the more leisurely its pace, Stephen learned. He imagined Moran, the assistant manager in Kenmare, reading with tight small eyes the request for the transfer of funds, and delaying it with a kind of exquisite spite that is the triumph of the small-minded. Nothing happened, no money arrived. Mr. MacNamara, a small man who came in a large exhausted car, told Stephen and Gabriella he was the auctioneer for the Mooney property. He laughed into his fist, as if holding a small microphone, and said yes yes yes in constant repetition, replying to some question no one could hear but himself. He looked at them and said yes yes yes; he looked at the window and did the same. When Stephen told him they were only waiting on the money to arrive, Mr. MacNamara gave his triple affirmative and added a wink, running his tongue about the inside of his mouth so it appeared he was chasing a lozenge and not a sale. He left abruptly after that, but returned the next day as if he had forgotten that he had ever been there. He stood in the doorway and said yes yes yes when Stephen told him he had no news. In the following two weeks he made six appearances, sometimes standing in the sitting room with his hands lost behind his back under the flaps of his jacket and looking about him for a clue as to his purpose.
While the plans for the building were in stasis, other aspects of the music school were not. Gabriella struck up a friendship with Moira Fitzgibbon, and in morning meetings over the strong tea which Stephen made in the kitchen they planned together how the word might be spread. Gabriella grew bigger almost by the moment. She sat at the table and bloomed, as if the hope in her spirit grew the child more quickly now and warmed the air in the room with incipient life. Moria Fitzgibbon gave her tips and counselled sea walks on the noon shore; she recounted the adventures of her own pregnancies, and through the simple means of her own personality gave Gabriella Castoldi the gift of being grounded. So while the talks began in air and music, they ended in the earthed practicalities of house heating, plumbing, and a place for the cot. After Moira's third visit, Gabriella had redrawn the inside of the cottage; as Stephen watched with a kind of fearful astonishment, she showed him where they should break out the roof and add skylights, where the extra bedroom needed to be made off their own, where the central heating pipes could run and the bathroom replace the hose-like shower that hung over a discoloured draining sink.
So, in those light blustery days at the end of April, when the sun appeared in the sky above the sea like a promise delivered, builders arrived at the cottage and broke holes in the slate for the skylights. Corry & Son & Nephew opened the roof like a great wound, pushing aside a thickly woven web of time and watching spiders fall down and scurry to new hiding across the floor below. Because Gabriella loved the idea of them so, Stephen doubled the order to four skylights and watched as the series of squares were cut away from the roof, making the house suddenly appear absurdly vulnerable and exciting at the same time, as if it were a giggling and intrepid centenarian going across the sunlit grass in the nude. Birds flew in and out of the house and bats arrived in the twilight, flickering across the starred heavens to alight inside the high ceilings in a sign Tom Clancy said guaranteed good fortune. For three days the house breathed through its top while Corry & Son & Nephew climbed the ladders and sat on the roof and smoked Woodbines, looking out at the fine view of the ocean; Corry said sometimes you wouldn't think it stretched all the way to America and watched the waves from that high position with a kind of grieven mesmerism that only Son knew betrayed he was thinking of Son Two, who was that noontime waking to work in Duggan's Bar in Brooklyn. The Corrys took their time; they threw down the old slates, which Son said were as crisp as cream crackers, and when Stephen at last broke through his diffidence and asked if the windows would be in soon because he feared a change in the weather, the father shouted down to him that he had it on several counts—the frog spawn, the movements of the heron, and the cloud formations reported over Mount Brandon—that the dry spell would continue for weeks. Nephew concurred. He had it from Sky News Long Range, he said, and looked up at the blue heavens as if towards a satellite God.