Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Finan and Finbar?” Tomas asked, but knew the moment their names reached the air that there was an answer already in their absence.

“Later,” the father said. His eyes were wet. He made motions with his mouth before speaking as if afraid to dare the words. “We are going to see our new home now.”

And Teige handed Tomas the reins and went ahead and walked with his father leading the pony forward.

This is the story that Teige and his father heard of what happened to Tomas. They did not hear all of it at once. But some of it they heard that first night when the Foley cart had arrived at the seashore and Francis Foley had walked down to the edge of the country and stood alone a long time with his face to the sea. They heard it when he returned to the small fire Teige had built of sticks of ash and thin faggots scavenged from the fields nearby. They heard it while the wind played and they sat close to each other and even the two girls stayed awake with the dog taking turns in their laps. Tomas sat with the woman Blath lying curled and small beside him. As he told it, his hand sometimes travelled down the twist of her hair. She lay, her eyes open all the time, and her face like worn vellum shadow-creased and burnished in the movement of the flames. Tomas told them some of it that night, and stopped when it seemed the woman grew distressed or the fever in her made her moan and her teeth jabber though they piled their coats on her. He told some of his story that night and more the night after and again over each of the four nights they stayed there on the edge of the town of Kilkee.

He had gone back to Limerick that day long ago. He had ridden in along the banks of the Shannon River with his head low on the horse and his eyes watchful for bailiff and agent and constable. He had considered the situation. He knew that she was waiting for him. He knew too the life that she was living and that her waiting was secret and silent and existed only in the thin, insubstantial way of hope or prayer. Still he remembered a look in her eyes. He told Teige this. He said it looking into the starless sky when she was sleeping. There was a look in her eyes when he had told her that he loved her, he said, and that was all he saw that day riding back into the town of Limerick. He had no plan.

“No,” his father said, as though this were an inevitability of his birth.

Tomas had arrived back in the town in the evening. Rain was pouring down and the streets were mucked and the sewers ran like dark streams. Rats traversed the streets and carried leftovers from the stalls of the market. Apple cores, plumstones, flecks of potato skin, passed into the shadows. Tomas tethered his horse in the narrow alley behind the building where he knew Blath was. The rain fell. In his wet shirt his chest hammered. He said he tried to swallow hard, for it seemed he had bitten a huge apple and the piece of it was wedged in his throat. But there was no apple, he said. He went around the alley. When he approached the front door, he saw it was locked. He wanted to bang on it. But for once he knew he shouldn’t and crossed the street and waited. The curtains of the rooms upstairs were drawn poorly and frayed amber light showed. The rain threaded across it. There was the traffic of late gentlemen in their coaches passing up the street, there were dragoons in uniform cursing and laughing and kicking a bottle they had emptied. There were dogs that meandered night-eyed and low-snouted. So many dogs, he told them, dogs and rats and figures scurrying in the dark.

He waited a long time and none came out or in. He waited longer still. He struggled with doubt and dark imaginings, and when he could wait there no more he stepped into the rain and walked across the street up to the front door and banged on it like a hopeless emissary of love. He banged again. Then he heard the noise of calling from within and footsteps coming on the stairs. He was asked his name through the door, and he said, “I am Tomas Foley, I am here for Blath.” And the door opened and there was a man there of small stature with bald pate and whiskers and the smell of tobacco.

“She’s not here,” he said. His eyes were screwed near shut. He rocked on the balls of his feet as though a long time used to the sea.

“Where is she?”

“There’s another Blath,” he told Tomas, “there’s as many Blaths as you want, eh?”

Tomas hit him then and the man fell back against the banister and his eyes opened wide for the first time and he rolled himself quickly to one side and stood with the swaying motion of a boxer, though Tomas was nearly twice his size. He fisted at the air and made short jabs of no import as Tomas advanced upon him.

“Where is she?” he asked again.

The man did not say, and Tomas reached across his fists and lifted him and flung him against the wall. He followed him across the hallway and pulled him like a sack upward until the man’s eyes were somewhere below his chin. He held him there and asked him again where she was. The man shook his head in quick motion as though his head were preparing to spin off. Then Tomas broke his arm. The man’s screams brought an old woman to the top of the stairs. She held a candle and peered down at them. Her eyes were painted. Her hair was loose and those strands she possessed at the sides of her head were brushed outward by intent or accident and lent to her the weird air of one grotesquely masked. She shouted for them to get out in the street. Tomas asked the man again as he held him against the wall, and this time he heard that she was gone, that all the girls were gone to the house of Lucius Stafford, cousin of the baronet. He heard the news but did not comprehend it. He stood a moment staring into the face of the man. The man, fearing for his other arm, said the name again and told him where the place was.

When Tomas left there it was the middle of the night. The rain was still falling. He found his horse and rode out into the darkness to the south. His progress was slow. The rain blew in his face and the moonlight was lost to him. He had been told where the house was and so went there with the single purpose of getting Blath back. He was not thinking of the other girls or who they might be or in what engaged. He was gifted the naive vision of the lovelorn and experienced such a simplified view whereby the only significant measure in the world was the straight line between lover and loved. He rode on, an absurd servant of forgotten chivalry or one bearing lit candelabra through the falling rain. He arrived at the house before dawn and saw its candlelit windows as he came upon the curve of the avenue. It was a tall house. Its chimneys smoked the scent of oak wood. Next to it, a smaller lodge nestled in the trees. Tomas tied off the horse and crept up across the lawns in the rain. When he reached the house, he knelt and looked in the window and thought he had arrived by some magic inside a painting.

“I could not believe it at first,” he told them. “I could not understand it.” For there inside the long room were naked statues of women. There were a dozen or so of them. They were as like real as could be imagined. Yet they did not move. They were set about on alabaster podia through the room in a series of poses, some bearing fruits, some holding a hand out in frozen invitation, some covering modestly with draped arm or fingers their bosom or sex. It was not until he saw Blath there with flowers in her arms in the pose of Persephone that Tomas knew for sure that they were not statues. Then he saw Lucius Stafford in the gown of a Roman emperor with a garland of leaves about his head and three others similarly attired. They moved among the goddesses. Lucius led a pair of fawn bullish dogs like mastiffs on a rope of red velvet. They passed down along the figures there. They laughed and made comments on each and restrained themselves to resume their performance and seem imperial. The goddess Diana holding a wooden bow wavered in her place, and one of the men whipped at her with a tasselled cord.