Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Lead me right to him.”

“I should tell him.”

“No.” She clutched at his arm with her fingers. “No, Teige. Stay here.” She stepped away from him then and was a shape in the dark against the darkness, holding her hands out and moving forward in the night like a thing of flimsy sail. She walked toward the tower and Teige watched her and then, when she thought she was close, she called out:

“Francis! Francis!”

And he must have heard her and not believed her voice part of the corporeal world, for he did not move then and she called again and still he stayed there, lain on his back with his eye against the eyepiece. The wind took her words the third time she called. It played them across the night and swept them into the tower. And Francis Foley heard his name said in her voice and thought it a sweetness long gone out of the world and imagined he was near the precipice of this life and she calling him to cross a bourn into the next. He took his eye from the stars. He looked at the stone walls as if in puzzlement that he was still not transported. He touched the straw on the ground and then lifted his head to look outside, and he saw her there. She stood some feet away, and behind her stood Teige and all about them the blowing darkness. He looked from one to the other and back again and seemed to reach understanding slowly or slowly to overcome his fear that the moment was mere vision. Then he said her name. He said it and stood and she opened her arms and something in him seemed to buckle then and it seemed he would fall down. But he did not. And he came forward and said her name again and reached out his hands to her face and knew that she was blind, and then he raised his head to the dark and swirling heavens and let out a cry long and hard and pitiful and cried it again and voiced there the grief and regret and loss of all his days. Then he held that woman to him and kissed her head and her face and did not let her go.

Later, when his father sat beside the bed where his mother was sleeping, Teige left the stone cabin and went down to the shore. The night was wild now. The wind thrashed at hedge and tree and made moans in the gaps of the stones. The river and the sea surged. Waves broke on the shore and dragged the pebbles in an urgent music. Tethered on its moorings the raft house sung, but the BoatMacs were sleeping soundly. Teige paused a moment to be sure, then he went on down to the boat and pushed it out into the water and climbed in. He rowed out into the crosscurrent but was inexpert and was soon marking a course westerly on the outgoing tide. He pulled on the oars. He tried to steer across the darkness for the few lights of the town. The wind threw rain slantwise down the night. The waves were capped with white and slapped and churned and his progress was slow. But he was not to be stopped, and he made his way into the centre of the river and across and arrived at the shore some ways from the pier. He drew the boat up there and turned her over upon the oars, and he left then and walked along the grassy shore to the town. All was dark and empty. Rain lashed and stopped and fell again. Buildings grey and cold and grim of disparate size with roofs tiled and mismatched and at levels up and down stood and took the weather and seemed things of some inhuman order that had no fear of time. As if such were the faces of that town and would stand there forbidding and severe forever. The wind howled. Teige walked up the street with head low. Rain stains saddled his shoulders. Cats in an alley mewed. A dog, lone and wolflike with coat forked with dirt and gutter water, passed down the centre of the town and gave no heed to any. It appeared to have journeyed a long distance and returned there perhaps in such metamorphose from another life, so grave and decided was its manner. It padded down the darkness and was gone. Teige walked on. He went out the end of the town and was soon in the blackness of the country road to the estate. The night starless, he saw not four feet in front of him. He shut his eyes and stood some moments blind. He heard his own blood racing in his ears. Then he opened his eyes and was accustomed and saw the way in the dimmest light that fell from sources obscured and years gone. He went on. Cold was inside his clothes now. He hurried then, running into the darkness as the storm that was not a storm yet gathered overhead. Trees on the roadside whooshed and let down their leaves. Teige knew his way in the darkness. He came to the gateway of the estate and went up the gravel. He passed the fields where the horses had grazed and where he had first seen Elizabeth. He took note of the fields and the fence and the places he had seen her, as if such were talisman’s and assured him of love. He came to the stable yard then and saw that the horses were fastened in and the doors bolted. Still some neighed and whinnied when he came there and he went to one and through the door said words, though these were gone in the wind.

The night whirled. As he crossed the yard Teige turned and looked into the heavens as if some rent might appear there, and he thought of his mother sleeping on the island and the lore of the curse, and had he the time to make a prayer, he would have done so. He went as he had before around by the back kitchen. There he scrabbled at the wall for finger and toe holds and, finding these between the stones, he began to climb. The slates of the roof where he arrived were wet, and the soles of his feet slid upon them. He crouched and moved on all fours and found his way to the window. It was shut tight. The latch was turned over. He pulled at it hard as he could but could not open it. On the wind another shower of rain fell. Teige cursed it softly and looked along the dark of the house, but all windows were likewise latched against the storm and there was no way he could get in unless he broke the glass. He squatted there and the rain blew on him. What desire fired in his body flamed then. He would break the window. They might not hear. They might be so soundly asleep. They might think it the crash of thunder. There on the roof before the window he took off his shirt then and wrapped it around his fist. He looked at the glass. He knew the ruin that might await. He knew his life might all have come to this one moment, and that forever all happiness or sorrow might be traced back to this. And he did not care. He drew back his hand to break the glass and he saw her there framed in the window. He stopped. She was there in her nightgown. She had heard the noises at the window. She had been waiting.

There was a time that froze and was held. There was a stilled moment that entered each of them, a moment in which Elizabeth did not open the window and Teige did not move. A time in which the meaning of that moment was only then becoming apparent. And then Elizabeth unlatched the window and the curtains blew inward and Teige climbed inside the house.

He was wet and cold and half-naked. But she shut down the window and then turned and kissed him there in the corridor. They kissed as if hungry. They seemed like creatures whose condition was to be joined at the mouth. Then they stood and she touched his face and he tried to kiss the hand and she drew him along the corridor to a room that was her dressing room. He closed the door behind them and came to her and kissed her nape and she moaned out and pulled at his hair and then he bit into the shoulder of her nightgown. He lifted it high to reveal her. He stood and looked at her and she trembled and she said in a whisper his name. Then he laid her down on dresses of green and yellow brocade and silks of scarlet and black, and she said to him to take off his clothes and she watched him as he did so. And then there in that room while the storm thrashed the world outside and her husband slept not fifteen feet away in the next room, Teige Foley loved Elizabeth Price and changed his life forever.