Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

He was too rash and independent a man to wait long for reply, and the following morning when none had come, he loaded his wife and family on their small cart and moved them northeastward into the wind. Emer did not want to go.

“This is madness,” she said.

“Nothing is gained by sitting still,” he told her as the gale bit off his ears. “This is not our home.”

“It could be.”

“No, it couldn’t. Look at it. We are going. This is not what I promised you.”

“What if I said I didn’t care?”

“You’d be lying.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“This is not our home.”

They wandered like biblical travellers looking for a sign, and were met with blizzards. Gulls were blown out of the sky. To keep his family alive, Francis stole sheep and killed them with his hands. They slept under hedges of whitethorn, the father lying himself down and letting the others rest wrapped upon him as the cold rose into his bones and by the dawn made of his face a white, bloodless mask.

When at last they found a place to live, it was no better than the one they had left behind. They stayed a year and two months, then moved again.

And so on it went, that life of struggle and hardship that followed the innocent days of love so swiftly that soon they themselves were almost forgotten and survived only as the thinnest faded memories of a once upon a time sweetness. They did not find a home. They lived on for times in various cabins and ruined cottages, deeply mired in the disappointment of their dreams. They stayed awhile and then moved, each time at the insistence of Francis over the increasing resistance of his wife. At last, when Teige was born Francis found work as one of an army of gardeners on an estate. They had a small cottage. The country itself was lost too in disillusionment. Spies and betrayals were everyday, the air of towns was opaque with mistrust and the yellow scent of greed. Those who owned the land did not live on it, and those like Francis who worked it imagined they were little more than the beasts in the field. It was a long, hard kind of living. And though he heard the whispered news of rebels, the perennial plots and hot dreams of those who promised a new country of their own, Francis Foley resisted joining them. He bowed his head and stayed working, clucking the horse and leading the mower down the long lawns of the estate, trimming the hedges and tending the perfect gardens of Lord Edward James Fitzroy of the county of Essex.

Emer was by then almost contented. She was the mother of four boys. She tried to teach them classes in the Latin and Greek her father had taught her, but Tomas was impatient to be with his father and the twins rolled and knocked each other about and showed little interest. Only Teige sat and listened. His hair was first blond and then fair brown, and he had a way of sitting in close attention that was serene and knowing. His mother told him he would be a master. She ruffled his hair and touched his face with floury fingers.

But trouble was already gathering. Francis had no garden of his own and tended another man’s instead, clipping the laurel bushes that the lord himself never saw, grooming them into globes of green in case the lord should visit this year, and bringing home the clippings to add to the stew of their dinner. He planted potatoes, dug carrots and turnips and parsnips that were marshalled in such straight lines that they mocked the crooked stonewalled boundaries of the fields outside the garden. His hands grew black with earth. When the old angers rose in his chest, he reached down and tore at the weeds with fury. And shortly he was noticed by the head gardener, Harrington, for none rooted at the ground like him or pulled up the stumps of dead trees or turned over the soil with the same fury.

The garden was a kind of paradise. It was made to defy the typical view of that country in the drawing rooms of London. From there, the neighboring island was a place unruly and wild where everything rioted in nature and a straight line was not to be seen. But in that garden was a proof of empire, a living evidence that in the hands of the educated and well-bred even the most inauspicious place, the damp, dreary ground of that estate, could become transformed into an elegant country residence that would not offend a visiting lord. It would both reflect and inspire. It would show the natives the advantages of dominion, of what could be done, mirroring in its majesty the glory of its owner while subduing them to it at the same time.

Within it, Francis worked silently from grey dawn until the gloaming. The years ran into his hands and lined his skin like the knots in trees. The lord never came. The house was prepared several times, fires lit, woodsmoke hanging in the trees, and every plant and bush in the garden balanced on the instant of its best display. Rain was prayed away. Maids ran about in black dresses with white aprons and caps and polished the dishes that had never been used. The world waited and was disappointed once more.

It was the evening after one of those false visits, when all day eyes had watched the avenue for His Lordship’s arrival and the gardeners had looked at their garden as though it were the painting of a garden, a masterpiece in which every detail had been painted just so, that Francis Foley came home angrily to Emer. He sat at the table and placed upon it his hands brown with mud.

“What are we doing?” he said to her.

“We are living our life. Get yourself cleaned,” she told him.

“We have nothing.”

“Stop. Don’t. I know what you are going to say and I don’t want to hear it, Francis,” she said, and went to get the food for the dinner. The boys stood about and watched silently to see calamity coming. But that evening it did not.

Later that night Francis left the cottage in the falling darkness and broke into the big house. He felt he had been scorned by the lord and that this was only the latest of all those assaults life had made on his dreams. He opened a window and stepped inside that mute and perfect world. He walked through its ordered elegance, down the polished oak floors that reflected the stars, and into rooms that offered themselves like nervous debutantes, hoping for approval. He stood in the bay window and saw in the stellar light the long view down the garden. He saw it the way it was meant to be seen, and in those moments, hearing his own breath sighing in the empty house, he was struck with a cruel knowing of how completely he had surrendered his soul. Bulbs of anger exploded inside him. He was in the middle of his life and realized how much of it was lost. He touched the smooth painted sill with his fingertips, then he crossed the dark room and looked out at the western view of the rosebed, the eastern view of the boxwood. He moved from room to room to see out through each of the windows, and as he did, his rude boots making creaking noises on the floors, he felt a tightening in his heart. The whole country is a jail, he thought. They have us prettying it up for their visits, and they never even come. He was in the library looking outward, and when he turned away from the garden view in anger, he saw behind him the great brass-and-wooden contraption that was the telescope.

At first he did not even know how to look through it. He did not know about angles or focus, but he knew the stars he had learned for Emer. The moment he touched the telescope, his life had already begun to change. For he was at once reminded of his courtship, of the innocent nights beneath the sky when he and she had imagined the world spread before them. It was a memory made bitter now He turned his eye to the glass and looked up into the clouds.

It was three nights later before the skies were clear and Francis saw Venus from the library. He saw it and stared. He watched it with the kind of wonder children know and was still watching the stars when the light of the dawn thinned them into nothing.