Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

But Teige did not care. He had lost all care for the world as long as he knew that he could each night escape into the bedroom above the kitchen. When he opened her door it was like lifting some pressure from his heart. He sighed in relief Sometimes she had the candle lit and was waiting. She was sitting upright and her hair was loose and her eyes fixed on the door as he entered. He came in and stood and she told him to sit down and he did. Every night it was the same. He did not presume, and this she enjoyed, delaying sometimes her invitation and stroking some imaginary flaw in the quilt while he stood. He did not touch her. He sat on the wooden chair by her bedside.

“You think I am beautiful?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“More beautiful than Catherine?”

“Yes.”

She smiled and made a small laugh and looked at him. She leaned a little closer and then wrinkled her small nose.

“You smell like horses,” she said.

And to that he answered nothing, and flushed and sat there entangled in the same feelings of shame and guilt and unworthiness whose source he did not understand.

And she was contrite then to see him so and looked across the candlelight at him and was moved.

“Promise me you won’t do anything,” she said. “Promise.”

He did, and she fixed her eyes on his and slowly drew down the quilt over her knees until her feet were bare. Then she raised herself up and stood on the bed and her hair fell down and her scent assailed him, and slowly, looking at him all the time, she reached and found the buttons of the nightdress and one by one she opened them. Then when the garment was fallen open she stood there on the bedclothes and raised her two hands and drew it back away from her on either side and it fell without noise to her feet. She stood. The candlelight made her skin lustrous, her eyes were glazed. She took her hands and placed them on her breasts and then moved them down along her body, swaying them outward like wings.

“Well?” she said.

Teige looked at her.

“See, I’m not so terrible.”

She turned on the bed as on a podium and she let him study her from the back and take his time and absorb into imagination and memory the detail of that beauty.

“Now,” she said, “am I terrible? Am I, Teige Foley?”

“No.”

“Is that all you can say?” She turned, disappointed, and lay down on her back on the bedclothes. Teige did not speak. His throat was too tight for words. If he freed his fingers from their grasp on his knees, they would shake and waver. He sat. She lay there naked before him and spoke calmly of the flaws she found in her body. She said her legs were too short. She said she did not like her toes and held one foot in the air for his inspection. After a time they heard footsteps in the corridor outside and they hushed and listened and the room was tight with the beating of their hearts. When the footsteps had passed she told him he had better kiss her good night and she held out her hand. He stood then beside where she lay on the bed and he was twisted in the torment and his lips trembled and dried.

“Good night, Teige,” she said.

And he kissed her hand and was gone.

The following night when he came to her she was already undressed. She was standing in the far corner of the room and held open over her breasts a fan of peacock feathers. The candle was placed on the ground.

“Who can this be?” she said, and lowered her face in a pretense of shame. She moved across the room then and fluttered the fan, and Teige caught anew the scent of her. “Do you know how to dance, Teige Foley?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

She stood right there in front of him. “You never say my name. You can, you know.”

He said nothing.

“Go on.”

“Elizabeth.” It was a whisper. Her face was next to his.

Then she stepped past him. “That’s a pity you don’t dance. I was watching you at the horses and thinking what a fine dancer you might be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly.” She walked back down the room again, and his eyes followed her. “You’re in love with me, aren’t you?” For a moment he did not want to say. “Well?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

And that seemed to please her and she smiled and raised her head at an angle and then, moving the fan, swayed with grace as if music played.

“You could never marry me, you know. You know that, Teige Foley?” She swayed still to that unheard music and her eyes looked directly at him. “You’re a stable boy.”

“I know what I am,” he told her. He did not move.

“I could not be in love with you.”

He did not answer her and she swayed about him and danced and he watched the movement of her neck and her breasts as she arched and turned there in the candlelight and how her hair fell and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.

“Do you love me more than your horses?” she said, and she lay on the bed and moved her legs and held the fan so it covered her face.

“Yes.”

“Well, then. You can touch me if you want.”

And for an instant Teige was not sure. It was as if the moment his hand reached her, some tender and perfect thing might perish and tragedy and grief begin their long fall downward to him through the stars. It was as if with that first touch the entire and myriad constellation of all his future would be mapped and foretold and fated and he a mere and powerless nothing lost to the inevitability of that suffering.

Then he touched her. He touched the calf of her leg and it quivered. Elizabeth kept the fan covering her face and her leg moved under the firmness of his fingers. He knelt beside the bed and caressed her. His hands moved palely across the flesh of her stomach and circled and traced patterns intricate and ephemeral. He watched his own fingers in their tender exploration, he watched where they travelled to her breasts and how she arched and moved on the bedclothes then. The room grew close and crowded with an infinity of desire. She rolled to the side and still held the fan to her and rolled again and lay luxuriant and sighed and was to him a goddess from the fabled stellar world and he a mortal transgressing or elected by the mystery of fate.

“My name,” he said in whisper. “Say my name.”

But she did not. She said nothing at all. She turned on the bed beneath his touch and his own eyes he squeezed tightly shut with bliss and his face he lifted back where the thin moon and starlight glanced upon it and made of his features a mask of anguish and pleasure and desire.

The following morning when Teige was working with the horses, Clancy came to see him. He came on the cart down the avenue at pace and reined the horse roughly and jumped down and came out into the field with a purposeful stride. He moved too quickly for his girth and sighed and blew with agitation. His cap he drew back by its peak right-handedly and with his left he forked up the hair that was flattened. His cheeks were red. When Teige had reached him Clancy did not speak at first but seemed to be weighing words like lead measures in the near distance just left of Teige’s head. They stood so and the horses in the field turned to look at them. The sky soured.

“There’s been a death,” Clancy said at last. “You’re to go.”

“What?”

For a moment Teige imagined it to be Elizabeth. His face whitened and Clancy saw this and reached and held on to his shoulder stiffly at a distance.

“There’s one dead. The word has come. On the island. You’re to go.”

“Is… Who is it? Who is dead?”

” ‘Tisn’t said. The boatman came with it. He’s waiting to take you back. Here,” Clancy said, and from the side pocket of his jacket drew out some wages. “Get in the cart.”