The Fall of Light (43 page)

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.

When they came outside the night was in hurly-burly. Teige carried her small case. They came out the kitchen
door and at once the wind whipped it from Elizabeth’s hand and banged it hard. They ran then. Leaves flew in circles in the
yard as they crossed it. They went to the stables and Teige opened the door on a chestnut gelding that neighed and stamped
in alarm and wall-eyed turned about in its narrow confines as if visited by nightmare. Teige approached it palms extended
and spoke to it in what seemed tones of urgent beseeching. Then he laid his hands along the horse and moved beside it and
so was able to fasten a bridle. He led the horse out then into the storm. He took Elizabeth’s hand and brought her closer
and then cupped his fingers for her foot and helped her mount the horse, which sidestepped and made shivers of nervy reaction
until he soothed it once more beneath his command. They set off then out of the yard and down the avenue, Elizabeth bareback
on the horse and Teige carrying
her bag and leading it at a quick trot alongside. The wind sang demented in the trees. The starless, moonless dark seemed
itself a creature poor tormented by some flagellant merciless and huge. Noises crashed about. Branches snapped. Boughs moaned
in long ache, and still the wind blew. Rain lanced sidelong and vanished and came again. Down the end of the avenue they went,
the horse wild-eyed and on the point of frenzy and Teige mastering and coaxing it and taking rearward glances to see if their
pursuit had begun.

They reached the gates. He looked to Elizabeth. There was an instant in which they might have turned back at that threshold.
She had discarded already her bonnet. It hung in the branches of an oak, where it would be found in the morning. Her face
was wet and her hair was blown free of pins and came across her mouth and she moved it aside as he looked at her. Then he
climbed up on that horse and she held to him, and they rode off down the road toward the town of Kilrush.

They arrived there in darkness still hours before dawn. They came down the centre of the streets between those buildings where
all lay in grim repose, clutched in fearful sleeps while the wind took the slates off the houses. Nothing moved. The air smelled
of salt and squalor. Gutters and sewers ran sleek and black like festered wounds opened. The night howled. At the end of the
town they came to the shoreline and rode along it to the grassy place where Teige had left the boat. There they got down and
stood before the river that now was like the sea. Teige turned the horse about and waved his arms and slapped its back and
it went off and was lost into the rent and velvet dark. There, he told Elizabeth, was where the island was. It was not far,
he said when she looked and could make out nothing. She stood there while he overturned the boat and laid it on the water.
She seemed in all manner one unsuited to such adventure. She seemed too fine and delicate in appearance, too long used to
the broad, high-ceilinged drawing rooms and dining rooms of elegant china. She seemed of a different world and stood there
on the brink of this in the thrashing of the storm like one not quite awake but lingering in the vestiges of a dream. Her
toed shoes were muddied. Spatters, muck splashes, painted her legs.

“Come.”

She stepped into the boat. It dipped and righted itself and dipped
again and then Teige had pushed it off and they were fast in the current. The river took them. The tide that had been unruly
before was wild and swollen now The boat crashed against waves and was taken without course. Elizabeth cried out and clung
to the sides. She called Teige’s name. She cursed. They spun off into the dark and were like the smallest toy of the sea.
Teige pulled and angled the oars and tried to steer about in that blackness, and the town came before them and then the mouth
of the river and then the island and all seemed as if in some dark dioramic scene played for those watching from above. Teige
rowed. He pulled and shouted at the storm as if it were a thing animate. He let out long, wordless cries and these were lost
in the wind. Elizabeth’s face was white. She called to him that they must go back. Water slapped in the boat at her feet.
She called to him again, and he shouted back to her that they could not. They were in the current fast and strong. Above and
about them the storm thundered. It let down its rain in cold sheets and darkened the dawn.

But some time at last, whether by chance or design, the small boat crossed the midpoint of those waters and Teige was able
to row it to shore at the eastern end of the island. They came up on the stones and Elizabeth stood and retched and Teige
held her about the waist. Then she took three steps and had to sit in a weakness and he let her back into his arms and held
her there on the open ground where the rain fell upon them still.

After some time slender light opened to the east as at the rim of the world. Clouds heavy and regally purpled were revealed
sailing across the sky. The field the lovers lay in was littered with small leaves and twigs and feathers and other debris.
Pieces of sacking, cord, cloth, such things. The wind like a ghost departing moved about the place a final time. And then
it was gone. The fields of the island settled in the dawn light, and in that serene and unreal aftermath Elizabeth clung to
Teige. They were soaked to their skins. Their faces were cold when they kissed. They stayed there a time still and gazed out
and watched the morning come across the fields. It was as if they could not move yet into the new world they had brought about.
As if the full realization of what was now their life were only just arriving and they were as yet only beginning to comprehend
it. So they held to each other and said nothing, and when she felt the fright of what lay ahead of them Elizabeth
kissed him hard. Small birds ventured across the air. Hares that came it seemed from shadows darted out and down the fields
and painted tracks of dark in the silvered grass. At last Teige stood up and offered her his hand and they walked off down
the island toward the tower.

He brought Elizabeth to the cabin where he slept and he set a fire there and blew the flames alight. Then he left her briefly
as if she required privacy to undress and he went to where his mother had slept with his father and was afraid he would find
her dead. He stood in the doorway and saw there an image that he would carry with him for the rest of his days. His mother
lay small in the arms of his father. Both of them were sleeping. Their breaths came and went in slow, easeful rhythm. Upon
their faces was the same expression that was an expression he would return to and see in the air of nights far distant from
there and would tell himself was the look of peace and forgiveness. He watched them awhile. He watched them and did not want
to step away and did not want the world to spin onward and the rough consequence of all our actions to follow. Then he went
out the door and down to the raft house, where already BoatMac was standing on the shore looking for his boat. Teige told
him he had taken it and where it lay now on the far side of the island. The boatman looked at the stones.