Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“What are you doing there?”

Teige did not move.

“Hello? Oh, hello?”

Again the noise of whispers and urgings and some scuffling of pebbles, and Teige heard the girl say, “Wait, wait, he will.”

He turned around then. They were standing there, the girl with the brown hair looking directly at him, the other turned aside and studying the smallness of her white shoe.

“We were wondering,” the girl said. “What are you doing?”

He thought to stay where he was and shout across to them. He thought it and decided on it and then was walking closer. There was a drift of perfume there. It hung like a silk. He came within it and stopped and tried to draw deeper than a shallow breath. He was looking past the girl who looked at him. He was looking at the girl now wearing a cream-coloured dress.

“Hello, do you understand? Maybe he can’t understand. What… are… you—”

“I am training the horses,” Teige told her.

“You do understand. Well, that’s what I said you were doing, but yesterday we saw you get knocked down and Elizabeth said you weren’t, you couldn’t be, because you’re not supposed to get knocked down, are you? But I said, I do think he is training them, and Elizabeth said that she supposed it could be true and maybe he’s just not very good at it.” She arched one eyebrow and her lips curved in a tightened smile.

” ‘Tis true, maybe,” Teige told her.

There was a pause of sunlight and birdsong. Then Elizabeth lifted her eyes to him and said: “I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

“Come on.” Elizabeth pulled at the other’s arm. “Come on, Catherine, I am going back.”

“Wait, maybe he’ll show us. Won’t you show us? Go on, do some, we’ll watch. Train them. You’ve to choose one for her, you know”

“I’m going.” Elizabeth took steps away and Teige’s eyes followed her and absorbed all that she was.

“Spoilsport,” Catherine said after her, and then looked at Teige and laughed and skipped and ran and caught up with her and they were gone.

The rest of that day Teige managed even less with the horses. He moved toward them like one in a dream and they swept past. Sometimes in gathering desperation he ran then, sprinting alongside, pumping with his fists and sucking and blowing the air through his teeth. Briefly he was like one of the ancient Fianna or Indian braves, a figure mythic and noble and swift, until the horses opened gait and were gone and he was left panting and slumped in the empty grass. That evening when he lay in the straw bed he watched the image of the woman his eyes had captured. She lingered before him awhile as he stretched there with hands behind his head and the hushed darkness filled with the movement of the bats and the noises of the horses sleeping. Then he rose and went outside. The night sky was quickened with cloud. Light from a gibbous moon came and went. He walked barefoot across the courtyard and then out around by the short avenue that he knew led to the big house. When he saw it, all of its windows were dark. Two wolfhounds lay on the top of the steps to the front door. They raised their heads to look at him and Teige shushed at them and they lay down again. He stood there and studied the house and felt the feelings of his father years before standing before the house of the lord. He slipped around by the side then. He touched the walls as he went. He arrived at the back of the house where in latter years an addition had been built to the kitchen, and this he climbed until he was on the cold slates of its roof. He moved along it low and catlike until he came to a window. With the tips of his fingers then he slid it upward and watched the reflection of his face vanish as a thin curtain of muslin blew softly outward. This he moved like a veil and then stepped quietly inside.

He was in a corridor. There was timber flooring and it creaked beneath his foot. He heard the noise travel and listened in its aftermath for any response. But there was none. He brought the second foot inside and stood there, growing accustomed to the quiet, listening within it to hear the sounds of sleeping. He moved down the corridor then. A pulse in his brain beat and he seemed to hear it along with another in his neck. He paused to still them and failed and moved on. He came to the first of the doors and pressed himself flatly against it, his ear and the palms of his two hands against the timber. Shut-eyed, he listened. Then he moved farther down the hallway to the next door. With each he did the same, but it was no use. He could not tell. He turned and arched his head back and leaned against the wall and his chest heaved. The moonlight shone on him. He waited. Then suddenly he turned and held the porcelain knob and opened the room door next to him. It made a small click. He held it tight and leaned in and smelled the strong powdered air of the room and saw in the rumpled bedclothes a woman large and a man small. Teige withdrew as silently as he had entered. He moved down the way to the next door. This time he squeezed the lock back and there was no click. The moment the door was only slightly ajar he knew it was hers. He was informed by some instinct not attributable simply to scent or sound or sight. He knew, and stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

She was lying on her side. The bedclothes were white. Her right hand lay on the pillow beside her head. Teige stood there. He heard his own breathing and held it and wished it might have stayed so and he a silent and invisible presence there, timeless, witness only to this creature sleeping. The room stilled about him once more. When his pulse had steadied he took a step closer to the bed, and then another. He beheld her. He beheld the way her fair hair fell there and how her eyelashes quivered in sleep, how her lips were pursed. He studied the line of her nape, the delicacy of her ears. Such things. He did not move closer to touch her. He stayed there and the night passed on about him and the sleeping house rumbled sometimes and made airy noises and creaked with the traverse of ghosts and dreams. She moved in dreams of her own, too, and turned away from him and then back again, making small moans in her throat that Teige could not decipher as pleasure or pain. He matched the rhythm of his breathing with hers, and when he had achieved this he closed his eyes, and was so, and found a kind of peace in that union.

Time sped on. The moon flew through the sky and dragged her stars and still Teige was there in Elizabeth’s bedroom. He could not leave. He stood and was sentry to that beauty and could not have put in words his hopes or desire or told how long he might have stayed. Then she turned in the bed and her hair crossed her mouth and she brushed at it with the back of her hand and opened her eyes and saw him.

She did not cry out.

Teige raised his hands palm outward and made as if placing them gingerly to settle some disturbance in the air. Then he took a step backward, and then another. Without taking his eyes from her, he reached behind him and felt for the handle of the door and twisted it and then quickly turned and was gone.

That morning Teige struggled once again with the horses. The day was soft with rain and the ladies did not come on their walk. Time was slow and stretched out and in the absence of the obscured sun seemed not to pass at all. Teige walked about and through the horses and spoke to them and waited, wondering if Elizabeth had told and he was to be summoned at any moment and ordered to leave. In his wet shirt his chest was tight, his eyes were glossed with intensity and glanced sidelong toward the avenue. Where was she? What was she thinking? The sleek flanks of the horses glistened in the rain, their hooves making short, sucking sounds where the ground had mucked. The birds stayed occluded in the trees, and their song from there seemed to Teige strangely despondent. The long day was like an ache. When the redheaded fellow Pyle came and brought him his food, he told Teige that the men said the weather was an ill omen. There was no health in it.