John McGahern - The Barracks

“Are you sure you don’t want the doctor out?” he asked Elizabeth as he kissed her good-bye.

“No. I’ll go in tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?” he repeated. He was worried. She hadn’t been a day ill in bed since they were married. Her haggard appearance, her wanting to see the doctor, disturbed him with the memory of his first wife who had died in childbirth. Elizabeth could not die, he told himself; it was impossible that two could die; it would be ludicrous.

“Are you sure?” he pressed her.

“I am quite certain,” she said.

He kissed her and went, she’d have to see the children ready for school, Casey and Brennan were waiting for him in the dayroom. He called the roll and marked Mullins present in his absence, who didn’t come till twenty past, and when he’d done the signings connected with his completed b.o. duty they left. They wheeled their bicycles through the black gateway to the avenue and mounted there. Five bare sycamores lined the avenue from the gate to the road and at the last tree they turned right for the bridge and the town, Reegan and Mullins cycling together in front, Brennan behind because of the law prohibiting more than two to cycle abreast, Casey watching them cross the bridge from the window, a blue procession of three in the morning.

The village was waking. The green mail car came: then the newsboy from the Dublin train, the cylinders of paper piled high on his carrier bicycle. A tractor with ploughs on its trailer went past at speed, and some carts. There was blasting in the council quarries: four muffled explosions sounded and the thud-thud of blown rocks falling. The screaming rise-and-fall of the saws came without ceasing from the woods across the lake. A riverboat went down towards the Shannon with the first load of the day.

Willie had to go to the dayroom to discover if Casey wanted any messages done before school, and he was sent for twenty Gold Flake and The Express and Independent .

Casey had a big fire down and the sunshine lit up the red and black inkstains between the ledgers on the table. The room was bare and clean, nothing but the table and yellow chairs, the stripped iron bed in against the wall of the lockup, old records in filing clips on the walls, piles of ledgers on the green shelf up over the bed, the phone and rainfall chart on the wall close to the green mantelpiece. He kept the boy talking about football when he returned till Sheila came knocking that it was time for school. He then put on his greatcoat and went out to the rain-gauge in the garden to try to measure the few drops of moisture that had collected in the bottle since the morning before and entered his findings on the chart beside the phone immediately he got back. It was cold in spite of the sun and he shivered and rubbed his hands together when he’d hung the coat on the rack. He pulled one of the chairs up to the blazing fire, settled down the cushion that he always brought with him on these b.o. days, and sat into it with a sigh of comfort — to read the newspapers from cover to cover.

When the children had gone and she had washed and swept and dusted, Elizabeth sat with a book in the big armchair by the fire to grasp at an interval of pure rest. Such a quietness had come into the house that she felt she could touch it with her hands. There was no stir from the dayroom, where Casey was sunk in the newspapers; the noise of the occasional traffic on the roads, the constant sawing from the woods came and were lost in the quietness she felt about her. The whiteness was burning rapidly off the fields outside, brilliant and glittering on the short grass as it vanished; and the daffodils that yesterday she had arranged in the white vase on the sill were a wonder of yellowness in the sunshine, the heads massed together above the cold green stems disappearing into the mouth of the vase. In the silence the clock beside the statue of St Therese on the sideboard beat like a living thing. This’d be the only time of the day she might get some grip and vision on the desperate activity of her life. She was Elizabeth Reegan: a woman in her forties: sitting in a chair with a book from the council library in her hand that she hadn’t opened: watching certain things like the sewing-machine and the vase of daffodils and a circle still white with frost under the shade of the sycamore tree between the house and the river: alive in this barrack kitchen, with Casey down in the dayroom: with a little time to herself before she’d have to get another meal ready: with a life on her hands that was losing the last vestiges of its purpose and meaning: with hard cysts within her breast she feared were cancer.… In spite of her effort to stay calm she rose in a panic. She looked at the mantelpiece and clotheshorse and sideboard and doors and windows. She was alone in this great barrack kitchen. She could scream and it’d only bring Casey hurrying up to see what had happened: and all she could tell him was that nothing had happened, nothing at all, she had only become frightened, frightened of nothing. Reegan was at court, the children were at school, she was in the kitchen, and did all these things mean anything?

She had believed she could live for days in happiness here in the small acts of love, she needing them, and they in need of her. She’d more than enough of London that time, no desire left for anything there, no place she wanted to go to after she’d finish in the theatre or wards, the people she wanted to talk to grown fewer and fewer, her work repetitive and menial and boring — and had she married Reegan because she had been simply sick of living at the time and forced to create some illusion of happiness about him so that she might be able to go on? She’d no child of her own now. She’d achieved no intimacy with Reegan. He was growing more and more restless. He, too, was sick, sick of authority and the police, sick of obeying orders, threatening to break up this life of theirs in the barracks, but did it matter so much now? Did it matter where they went, whether one thing happened more than another? It seemed to matter less and less. An hour ago she’d been on the brink of collapse and if she finally collapsed did anything matter?

She should never have sat down, she told herself: she should have kept on her feet, working, her mind fixed on the small jobs she could master. A simple trap this half-hour of peace and quiet was, she’d have had more peace if she’d kept busy to the point of physical breaking-strain. She couldn’t ever hope to get any ordered vision on her life. Things were changing, going out of her control, grinding remorselessly forward with every passing moment.

As she stood hopelessly there she saw Mrs Casey come through the old stone archway that was covered with ivy and cotoneaster, the incredibly shiny leaves still on the crawling branches, the last of the scarlet berries devoured in the December snows. The woman coming was in her late twenties, tall and pale, her flaxen hair drawn straight back in a bun, wearing spectacles with fine gold rims. She turned in towards the dayroom and Elizabeth heard the door open and shut and her voice in conversation with Casey’s. She’d have her with her for most of the morning, she knew. She must surely be twenty years younger than Casey and it wasn’t easy for her in this small village. Mullins’s wife and Brennan’s never lost a chance to make her feel her childlessness, parading their own large families before her like manifestoes. They never tried this with Elizabeth: she was too detached; her age and years in London gave her position in their eyes; and with Reegan’s three children she hadn’t the appearance of either the leisure or money that could rouse their envy.

The dayroom door opened and she came up the hallway as she always did — smoking.

“They’re gone to court today, Elizabeth,” she greeted.