John McGahern - The Barracks

“Ned is on his own today,” Elizabeth answered in the same manner.

“Readin’ the papers. He’s talkin’ about comin’ up to you after the dinner to listen to some soccer match or other on the B.B.C.”

She sat and threw the wasted cigarette into the fire, the cork tip stained with the crimson lipstick she wore. “Isn’t it strange you don’t smoke, Elizabeth? Nearly all doctors and nurses are heavy smokers,” she said as she lit another.

“I used,” Elizabeth smiled in memory. “But never much, it was easy for me to give them up.”

“We smoke forty a day — between us. It’s a constant expense, that’s the worst. We tried to give them up once for Lent, but it only lasted three days! There was nearly murder done.… They say that doctors and nurses smoke so much because it’s antiseptic or something. It keeps away germs,” she ended the digression to return to her first theme as if it was obsessional.

“I don’t know why, perhaps it does,” Elizabeth said, she found herself already bored. This conversation echoed a thousand others. When she first married Reegan she’d found the small world absorbing and beautiful: but it was no longer so — her initiation was over, her passion had spent itself, this world on which she’d used every charm to get accepted in was falling in ashes into her hands. She was shackled, a thieving animal held at last in this one field. She’d escaped out of London, she’d not escape out of this, she’d have to stand her ground here at last. She could scream, the desperation she’d experienced on her own coming back on this conversation.

“Do you not feel well, Elizabeth?” the strained intensity of her features was noticed.

“No,” she could have shouted but she drilled herself. “I’ve been feeling tired lately. I don’t think it’s much, probably just run down, but I’m going in to see the doctor tomorrow.”

“It’s always better to be certain, you can’t afford to take chances nowadays,” she echoed Casey and asked, “Which of the doctors are you going to?”

“Dr Ryan — just the police doctor.”

“I always get Dr Malone, though Ned thinks there’s no one in the world like Dr Ryan.”

“It won’t matter very much anyhow. It’ll probably be just another iron tonic,” Elizabeth tried to close the conversation.

“I’ll say a prayer anyhow!”

“That’s nice,” she smiled in gratitude.

A wave of feeling, pity or compassion, crossed her for the other woman, but then she was looking upon her as an inferior. And what had she herself to feel superior about, she asked; were not both of them in the same squalid fix? And was somebody’s unawareness of the horror about them a reason to seethe with pity for them? Were they not far and far better off? Now a hatred was mastering everything and when she was asked, “Were you at first Mass last Sunday?” she knew she couldn’t stand much more.

She nodded. She was at first Mass every Sunday, there were meals to get ready when Second was on.

“Did you see the three Murphys at the rails?” she continued. “They must have got early holidays from the Civil Service. They were all very clever, weren’t they! They passed the exams.

“I think Mary has failed. Irene is the prettiest now. She was dressed in all lavender, and it says in Woman that it’s the latest fashion in Paris now.”

Elizabeth hadn’t noticed them particularly. She used to love watching the young girls home from the city parade to Communion, especially at Easter, when many came; it used excite her envy and curiosity, so much so that when she’d come from Mass she’d always want to talk about them to Reegan; it’d give her back the time when she too was one of them, but he’d never care to listen. Nothing, she knew, can exist in the social days of people without attention, her excitement would be gone before the breakfast was over.

How often was she aware of being present at Mass now! The murmuring of prayers, the rising and standing and kneeling and sitting down, the smells of incense and wet raincoats and candles burning would set a sleepy rhythm going through her blood and drift her into the sickly limbo of her own dreams.

“Do you think it’s right that Irene’s the prettiest now?” Mrs Casey was pressing.

Elizabeth agreed desperately and got up. She put on the kettle, taking automatic part in the conversation as she waited for it to boil. She made tea and put three cups and some bread on the table.

“We better call up Ned,” she invited.

“So many will be too much trouble!”

“One more! What difference will it make? It’d better to have twenty if it’d save us the trouble of worrying about it.”

Mrs Casey called from the door, and when he came out of the dayroom she said flirtatiously, “You’re wanted up here.”

“It seems I’m a wanted man so,” he punned as he came. “It’s as bad as being in Fogra Tora .”

He saw three cups on the table, the plate of buttered bread.

“You’re great, Elizabeth,” he praised, “but you shouldn’t have gone to that trouble.”

“You’re an important man today,” she kept up the game, smiling at why on earth these elaborate acceptances had always to arise in Ireland; in the London she had known the offer would be simply accepted at once or refused.

“I’m the most important man in the house today, without question or doubt,” he laboured on. “The sole guardian of the fortress! The phone never even rang, not to talk of anybody calling.”

“It’d give you the willies,” his wife shivered.

“Not enough money,” he explained. “Not half the men in the woods are working. It’s the same with the council quarries: the tarrin’ of the roads is doin’ away with the stones, and the bogs only last for the summer.”

“What was it like in Skerries?” Elizabeth asked about his last station, where he’d met and married Teresa.

“The East Coast is good,” he said. “There was great life there, near the city; the market gardening, places you couldn’t throw a stone without breaking glass; the fishing-boats, and the tourists in the summer. Too busy we were at times, but not so busy that I couldn’t meet me Waterloo,” he laughed towards his wife.

“It wasn’t always that story,” she flashed. “Do you remember the first night you left me home?”

He made a rueful face, that was all.

“We were dancing in the Pavilion,” she continued spiritedly to Elizabeth. “Nothing would do him but to get me out of it before it was over.

“‘It’s too hot in here. And you can’t dance with the floor crowded, Teresa,’” she mimicked.

“So he brought me down by the harbour and put me up against Joe May’s gable. You could still hear the music from the Pavilion and it was comin’ across the water from Red Island too, Mick Delahunty playing there that night. There was a big moon over the masts of the fishin’ fleet. I knew he was mad for a court.”

Elizabeth laughed lowly. She looked at Casey’s embarrassed face and bald head as pale and waxed as candles. She’d have given dearly to see him mad for a court.

“And just as he was kissin’ me,” she went excitedly on, caught up in the flow of her story, “I pulled back me head and I said: ‘Do you see the moon, Ned?’

“You’d laugh till your dyin’ day, Elizabeth, if you saw the cut of his face as he searched for the moon. And do you know what he said when he found it?” she rocked in a convulsive fit of laughing on the chair.

“What?” Elizabeth had to prompt.

“He said the moon was beautiful,” she roared at last, holding her sides as the fit hurt.

“That’s a nice story to tell on anybody, isn’t it?” Casey appealed, he was ill at ease, and Elizabeth feared one of those embarrassed silences till his wife retorted, “I might never have married you only for that.”