Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

He saw her. Then he saw the other figure, a man in a black suit of clothes sitting close by her side.

The coach passed on. Teige tugged sharply on the mare’s lead and brought her closer to him and they stood then in the wake of dust and fading noise and the slow reassembling of the world. He could not breathe. He stood a time looking at only the soft curved line of the mare’s back and the fields beyond it, and all were tranquil and still like the changeless and unreal country of dreams. He did not look after the coach. He studied the green horizon of hedgerow and blossom as if such might secure him to the earth. He opened wide his mouth. Then the mare pulled up her head twice and he snap-tugged at the lead and admonished and turned her about and brought her back up that avenue to the stable, where that time she drank water. He left her there then and went across the yard and worked the pump hard and fast until it gurgled and a frayed water came. He stooped and doused his head and the water was first slightly sun-warmed and then cold and then colder still. He shook off the drops and then cupped his hands and drank some and looked across his dripping fingers to see the youth watching him. Teige walked over. Pyle’s eyes lowered and were gone then beneath a fringe of lank red hair. Teige stood next to him.

“Busy at the house, are they?” he said.

“I suppose they are.” The fellow cracked his knuckles.

“Visitors?”

“Feck all I care,” Pyle said, surly and short, his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. “More logs, more water, more logs, feck,” he said.

The afternoon sunlight beheld them. Flies and honeybees flew. The snout of the pump dripped a slow, heavy drip of aftermath.

“Feck,” said Pyle again, daring beneath the blind cover of his hair. “What fires do you need and it fine as any summers day? But fires in every room it’s to be. More logs. And more. For the married ones. Feck.”

Teige did not speak then. The blue sky seemed to pulse. He turned about and found it best to squat down against the wall a moment, as if to study the cobbles of the yard. Then the other fellow got up and went off and Teige stayed there and held back his face to the sun blaze.

For the rest of that afternoon he did not take out the mare. He sat outside there and watched across the yard where the maids and butlers came and went briskly. From time to time he got up and went inside the stable and spoke to the horse and stroked her, but she was restless in the heat and the flies. The time passed slowly. He turned in his head the news that Elizabeth was married. He turned it this way and that, as if trying to find comfort while a stake was in his heart. He told himself it was to be expected. He told himself he must have known all along, that she was certain to be married as soon as she left there and went back to Cork. She would hardly even remember you, he said. You were nothing to her. You were how she tolerated the boredom of being here, nothing more. She probably told her friend and they laughed at you and how you came across the roof in the night to sit and see her naked. He told himself such things, as if bitterest medicine worked strongest. He made mocking images of himself and watched them portentous and comedie in the theatre of his mind. He derided all notions of love and made of them pathetic constructs of artifice and lies for innocents and fools. Anger roiled in him and came and subsided and came again. He saw his life like a story and one without great event or passion, but instead a long dwindling of days islanded with his father. He took from this the solace that such was meant to be, but soon this too was found frail and its comforts thin and chimerical. In the labyrinths of such considerations then the afternoon passed. The lustre of the sun was slowly diminished and the walls of the yard transformed from yellow to gold to an umbered brown. Red-combed hens walked about and pecked the straw stuff, scrabbled three-toed, stood one-footed, dunged a blanched dung, and made sharp head turns, quizzical and affrighted. To these Teige tossed powder of crushed oats that lay in the deeps of his pocket. The hens flurried and ran in startled, swooplike movement. They pecked fast and frantic and in the still emptiness the tiny tapping of their beaks on the cobbles sounded. When the ground was cleaned they stood attendant and Teige got up then and flapped his arms and they scattered in all direction with noise and feather and were in riot so when Elizabeth came into the yard.

He saw her. She wore a dress of pale blue that touched the ground. She carried above her head a parasol and crossed slowly to the stables. There she stopped not ten feet from him and made to look in on one of the other horses stabled there.

“Are you going to say hello to me?” she said at last. She had not turned. She was hidden beneath the parasol and studying the gelding that had come forward for her touch.

Teige stood. He looked across the yard, but there were only the hens in retreat. He turned back to the door of the mare’s stable and stood and looked within.

“You heard I am married now?” she asked him, still not showing her face.

“I did,” he said. His voice was low, his breath seemed to move through ashes.

She reached her right hand and touched the long face of the gelding.

“And what do you think?” she said.

“I have to tend to the mare, that’s what I think,” he said then, and opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

“Teige?”

He heard her say his name, but he did not answer. He took brushes from where they lay in the straw and with swift, arcing motion set about grooming the horse. When he paused later he listened and then came up to the door and looked outside and she was gone.

That night he lay in the straw and could not sleep. He watched the occluded moon cross the partly clouded sky. He heard owls and bats and others nocturnal traverse the dark. The mare shuddered in dream and lifted her hind hoof sometimes and stamped as if in crude imitation of one demonic. Then she stilled again and her breathing resumed its slow and steady heave, filling and venting the vastness of her chest in rhythm hypnotic. Mice myriad and minute scuttered over the stones, vanished into the walls and under the doors. Teige rose and walked out. The vaulted hood of stars glittered in revealed fragments as the clouds passed. Cassiopeia shone her tale of tragedy to all that might read it there, but Teige did not delay. He crossed the yard and by instinct and memory moved to the shadows beneath the wall. He pressed himself close to these and followed their line around by the house. He did not see the red-haired fellow that saw him. He came around by the kitchen and found then the holds between the stones for his fingers and climbed up onto that first low roof. He crouched low and was a shadow and again did not see the shadow of the youth below in his wake. He came to the window and found the sash partly raised. He lifted it with two hands then and waited to still his breath before he stepped inside onto the floorboards of the hallway.

All was an umbrageous hush. Ghosts and their shades ambled and paused momentarily, quizzical and looking askance to see one living among them. Then, in the grave and somnolent manner of their kind, they passed onward and were as shadows as they went about their ceaseless business in the halls of that old house. Teige stood and listened, the dreaming and the dead alike making the softest sounds. Then he stepped forward barefoot and with hands out as if to fend off attack or to balance on a rope. He came to the door of the room where she had slept before and he pressed his ear against it and could not hear the breath of any. Slowly he squeezed the handle around and opened it inches and then he leaned in and saw that the bed was empty. He blew a long, thin breath and tried again to still himself, and while he did he passed through brief, sharp agonies of indecision familiar to all such lovers, and then he went down the hall to the next door. He listened. She was not there. He went on, around the turn of the corridor, emboldened now and grown more reckless as he proceeded. The floorboards creaked, ghosts and dust and dreams astir. He came to a door then and stopped and knew that she was within. He tried to still himself. Then he reached and opened the door.