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concerts she played in Venice and
     Verona, and sat mesmerized by the cold passion she brought to the music; she believed in rigour and rectitude, and while she
     bowed the notes of Vivaldi, her eyebrows met in a narrow frown of concentration that the poet loved. She played perfectly
     and yet, when the concerts were over, lacerated herself with the harshest of self-criticism, appalled at the slightest flaw
     and the injustice she had done the composer. Pollini was entranced by her. Or so he thought, not realizing that it was the
     intensity of his own reaction he loved, the quickened thrumming of his own heartbeat as he strode through the streets to the
     concerts. As a poet of twenty-five, he had been acclaimed widely for his first collection,
Spontaneo.
The praise had been so unexpected and so lavish that he had woken one morning believing he possessed a soul that was infinitely
     more sensitive and attuned to the sweetness of the world than anyone else’s. He got out of bed and carried his soul like a
     golden chalice. Then he met Gabriella Castoldi and was amazed at how moved he felt by the bruised and tender quality of her
     eyes, and offered her the chalice, thinking he would witness the miracle of her transformation under the power of such a love
     as his.
    But it had not happened. He had courted her with freesias and poetry, and watched himself languishing in the tossed sheets,
     as if enacting a scene. When at last she had come to his bed, he had visions of roses bursting from the walls and wings growing
     from the backs of men. He imagined the air itself would take on the perfume of permanent springtime, and he kissed her with
     a passion that was beyond anything he had known. However, when, two weeks later, he watched her play one of the concerti of
     Mozart in the Palazzo Musica in Venice, he was struck like a blow with the knowledge that he had not yet loved her into happiness.
    Now they drove into Ireland. They drove west along the southern coast in the great disappointment of that outrageous rain.
     (They did not know that the downpour was already on the point of ending, and that within four days the Gulf Stream would bring
     a freakish Indian summer that would last into November and make children and old men feel the winter was already over.) It
     was not only the grey skies that dismayed Pollini, for he had lived through grim Venetian winters; this was something more,
     a desolate quality he sensed in the grim houses along the roadside, as if they huddled there in the misery of all weathers,
     barely enduring. When he turned on the radio, he heard the news of a corrupted minister in Dublin, and that a woman had been
     strangled to death on a farm in County Meath. He wanted an imagined loveliness, a rapture that would make vanish the failings
     of their passion. He wanted fairyland, not this, and sped the car towards the coastline of Cork, taking the wrong way twice
     and stopping at a butcher shop where a dog gnawed a bone to ask what the number of the road was. Nobody knew. They told him
     it was the road to Mallow. He was flushed with embarrassment and sat back in the red car in a collapsed silence. His method
     in the world was straightforward; you proceed straightforward, you go after what you want, and when you meet an obstacle you
     ignore it, you go straight through it. Belief is everything. The world will surrender all its treasures if you bang down its
     doors. So he had raced the car forward in the failing light of late October and carried Gabriella Castoldi in a gesture that
     since time immemorial has been made against the waning of love: the flight to a new place. Pollini drove with impotent rage
     and passed through many small towns and villages, not noticing that he was moving constantly inland and away from the extraordinary
     beauty of the coastline, and only stopping again in the ten o’clock darkness when Gabriella suggested they should stay the
     night where they were, in a damp