By daylight Teige was strangely renewed. Though he had not slept almost at all, he worked among the horses with vigour and energy. Soon he had chosen for Elizabeth a white filly and coaxed her into handling and then lunging on a line. Other horses he managed also, and was to be seen then riding some or walking them as Elizabeth and the other, who was her cousin, Catherine, came for their daily exercise along the fence. They came now even in the drizzle that spoiled the weather all that early summer. They carried light parasols and twirled them on occasion in a manner that suggested mirth. At no time did Elizabeth show him any recognition then. Sometimes she stopped and the ladies stood and studied and appraised his progress. Sometimes Catherine called out to Teige and waved for him to approach and the high clinking of her laughter carried out across the pasture, but he did not respond. He stayed closely engaged with the horses and whistled and whispered and gestured to the animals in ways he knew they understood, and then too he drew one to him and caressed its flank and stroked and pulled its ears while all the time the ladies watched. Within a few weeks many of the horses were under his dominion. All those in his care improved steadily in form. The ones whose diet he oversaw lost the bulge of belly or beginnings of laminitis, colic, and other ailments. Clancy came and stood by the fence a long time and with legs widely planted scrutinized Teige working. Then he turned on his heel and went off and said nothing.
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.
7
The following morning when Teige was working with the h
orses, 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.”
They rattled down the long avenue then, Clancy leaning forward and making whipping sounds at the horse with his tongue, Teige sitting upright, mute and blind and impassive as a figure cut in stone. When they arrived in the town the haste of the cart turned the heads of those standing in the street. Some turned and looked and kept looking, following the two men with their eyes and enjoying in some way the sense of calamity and grief that was evident. When the cart passed the whispers began. Teige and Clancy paid them no heed. The horse raced on down the streets of the town and the island appeared green and low and tranquil in the grey waters of the river. They came to the jetty where the boatman was waiting. He looked at Teige and then looked sharply away over his shoulder as if at a perching blackbird.
Clancy offered his hand. “Sympathies,” he said.
“Who is dead?” Teige asked the boatman. But on the mention of the word the boatman shuddered and threw his shoulders and glanced quickly from side to side as if dodging the same dark bird as it sought to land upon him.
“Who is… ,” Teige tried again, but the boatman had stepped down into his boat and lifted his oar. He splashed at the water with it and then sank it into the top surface, shuddering and throwing his shoulders, saying sounds that if words were lost to Teige and then vanished altogether as the boat slipped out into the estuary.
The dip and slap of the oars; the glitter of the water as it fell from the raised blades; the weak sunlight of that morning; grey clouds coming up the river like ghost galleons; the fish that moved beneath them; all such entered Teige and became part of memory. He stared across the river for signs and saw none. Where the river met the sea the boat lifted and fell and achieved a kind of jaunty precariousness, and the boatman stopped rowing altogether and allowed it for moments as though awaiting invitation or permission proper to cross those waters in that changing tide. He swayed there and felt the motion in his body and moved within it and waited until his boat did too and then dipped the oars and rowed once more. Seagulls flocked and beat hurriedly across the air. Then the rain came. It fell heavily almost at once and dimmed the light of day and made the waters murky. The boatman jabbered some curse and shook his head and let the drops scatter, then he curved his back and pulled harder to draw them to the island. Up from the shore Teige saw the cottage they had been building was now as high as the roof timbers, though these were not yet thatched and looked dark and skeletal in the rain. There was no sign of life. The boat reached the shallow waters and the boatman single-oared it about and waited then, and Teige stepped out and walked up onto the island. He went up along the beaten track that was shouldered with the yellow furze, heavy with the rain. The day seemed pressed down upon the land. He walked and felt the air of death and still did not know who had died. And while he walked the images of his father and brother were before him and he feared for both of them and tried to banish the fears and not bring himself to have to choose between them. And tangled in his mind too was the sense of an obscure guilt, a vine like a complex algebra that wove and entwined and at last related the x of illicit love and the y of death, binding cause and effect and turning improbabilities into fact.
He reached the doorway of the cabin and stood and looked into the dark. The dog came out to meet him. He could see a figure lying on a table, but he could not distinguish who it was. Then his father said his name.
“Teige, come in. It is Blath.”
She had died of typhoid fever, which was already in the close, damp air of that place. Francis Foley sat by her, and the girls, Maeve and Deirdre, looked up at Teige but did not speak. They looked away again. They had been returned to familiar Death like ones recaptured after brief freedom. Their faces were pale.
“Where is Tomas?”
“He’s gone off,” Francis said. “He was pitiful with her. He did all a man could do. He made her drinks and remedies and things he had heard and she could keep none of it in her. And we sent word for a doctor to come, and we waited and he did not come and she losing strength all the time so that she could not take even a drink of water. Tomas would go up and stand on the hill and watch for the doctor and still no sign of him.” The old man’s eyes watered in the shadows. He paused and held the anger in his chest. “Why would the doctor not come? What is the matter with us, are we beasts in the field?”
“He did not come at all?”
“He did not. She died in the afternoon. Tomas went out and I found him beating his two fists on the stones of the house over. He bloodied himself red-handed and when I came to him he threw up his fists at me and spun around and went off and would not be spoken to since.”
Teige stood there in the gloom of the cabin and he looked at the dead woman and saw the blue-and-purple shadows about her mouth and eyes.
“We must bury her,” he said.
“There is a place here on the island. Govt na marbh,” his father said. “It is where they bury some from over the water. They bring them here because of the old churches.”
Teige went out then to find Tomas. He went and whistled the white pony and she came to him and he let her smell the other horses on him and he nuzzled and stroked her and then rode off down the shore in the falling rain. He rode fast. He galloped her because of the urgency and because he found relief in that speed, racing away from many things. He rode and stopped and scanned about for his brother. Then he saw the boat coming across the water with the black figure of the priest sitting erect in the bow. He hurried back and told his father.
Francis Foley came out of the cabin into the spoiled daylight.
“Now he comes,” he said, and scowled and took from the doorside his stick and walked brusquely ahead of Teige toward the shore.
The rain muddied the way. Francis tramped along it and swung and beat at the furze randomly, scattering petals of yellow. At the place where the shore shelved off and there was a small drop to the sand, he stopped and watched the boat coming. The priest could be seen clearly now He was a thin figure with a wide-brimmed black hat. His nose was sharp and this combined with the prominent narrow edge of his chin to lend his face the appearance of having been pressed in from either side. Clutched at his chest was the Bible. Beside him in the boat sat another, a younger man also in black whose head was hatless and whose cheeks were polished a purplish hue by the rain. The boat bobbed in the shallow water. Then this boatman whom the Foleys had not seen before stepped out in the small waves and offered his back and the angular priest stood and climbed onto it and was carried so onto the sand. The younger priest did not wait for this transport but paddled across and kicked water from his shoes. They stood then and the Foleys walked down to meet them.
“I am Father Singleton,” said the priest. “Show me to the deceased.”
He raised the Bible slightly at his chest and made as if to hasten on with his business. But Francis Foley stood.
“Come on,” said the
priest. “What is the matter? Do you understand me? The deceased. The dead.”
His tone was exasperated and sharp, and in his eyes was a silvery scorn.
“What is the matter with this man?” he said, and looked to Teige. “You. Do you understand? Lead us. We must hurry before the tide turns. We have other matters. Father Boland, can you?”
The younger priest looked at them and made quiver his lips as if uncertain whether to smile. When he spoke his voice was soft as a girl’s.
“We are here for the burial. There is a woman who died.”
The old man stood and he was appalled at them and felt a riot gather in his blood. The rain dripped off the priest’s hat. He sniffled.
“Are you Christians?” he snapped then. “Do you know this is a holy island?”
“We do,” Francis said at last, and stepped forward and was now not a yard from the priest and could smell his dinner off him.
“Do you know it is the island of Saint Senan, and that he decreed that no woman was to set foot on it? Do you know that?” He paused and looked and Francis Foley did not move an inch and the priest’s ire raised a purplish vein in his forehead. “And what kind of woman was she? Will you answer that?” he said. “Because I know. I know what she was. You see. Nothing is hidden, remember that, if you are Christians. Have you other women here?” The priest’s sharp features were raised and he let his righteousness and judgement be seen and felt by them and was awaiting some demeanour of reverence and contrition when Francis Foley stepped quickly forward and pushed him back in the chest.
“Go away!”
“What? Stop!”
He was pushed again and he staggered back two steps and a fringe of raindrops scattered from his hat.
“Are you defying the word of God?” he shouted. “What are you that you can face damnation?”
The Fall of Light Page 19