John McGahern - The Barracks

She told him it was and asked how he wanted to use it. She felt she was part of their whole lives as they worked. She watched them for a few minutes in a perfect wonder of peace. Then she went to the window to touch the heads of the daffodils with her fingers. The sun had gone down close to the fir-tops across the lake. The level glare stained a red roadway on the water to the navigation signs and the grass of the river meadows was a low tangle of green and white light. It came so violently to the window that she’d soon to turn away, spelling the word Willie had asked her in inarticulate wonder. They were pestering her with questions. She forgot the cysts in her breasts, the cancer, the doctor, the changing moods that swept her day.

She laid the table for Reegan and hoped they wouldn’t stay late drinking. Reegan seldom did: it gave him no release, only made him more silent and dissatisfied as he listened. It was worse if he talked, for he’d dominate, and was not wanted then. He would not stay but it was so easy to get caught in a drinking bout after the courts: he couldn’t very well come home without Mullins and Brennan, because of the nuisance their wives would make.

The banging of the outside door and excited talk down in the dayroom eventually told her they were home. She hadn’t long to listen for Reegan’s feet in the hallway: she saw the children stiffen, they could tell by his step how the day had gone. She saw them turn to gaze at her with meaning quiet — as she had partly sensed herself, it hadn’t gone well.

He said nothing when he came and they knew him too well to speak. He took gloves out of his greatcoat pocket with the quarter of Silver Mints he always brought and left them on the sewing-machine and hung his coat on the back of the door.

“There’s some sweets there for you,” he told them distantly; if he was in high humour he’d shout and ask them what they’d learned in school and throw sweets in the air to watch them scramble. Now he sat at the table and waited for his meal. The three children went without noise or rush to the sewing-machine and Willie divided them, two by two by two, into three little heaps, and they brought their share cupped in their hands to Elizabeth. She took a sweet from each and they went to their father, it was a kind of ceremony. He tried to be pleasant as he accepted their offering, and left the three sweets he took beside his arm at the table-cloth.

None of the others had yet gone home. Their excited voices came from the dayroom, discussing the day with Casey: who won and who lost, Judge O’Donovan’s witticisms, the blunders, the personal animosities of the lawyers; sometimes going for the law books on the shelf to argue the decisions.

Elizabeth put a boiled egg before Reegan and poured out tea. He said, “Thanks,” quietly and drew it to himself. “You had a long day,” she said.

“The big case didn’t come up till three. Hangin’ around all day with our two hands as long as each other.”

“Where did you get your lunch?”

“In the Bridge Café.”

It was by the river, with a green front, and served substantial meals cheaply.

“How did the case go?” she was uneasy asking. He was in bad form, she could tell; he might resent her asking as petty curiosity; but surely he hadn’t forgotten to call at the doctor’s! He’d said nothing yet.

“A fine and a suspended sentence for dangerous driving. The drunken driving charge was squashed. He had a good solicitor, a good background, a good position, a university education.… What more could you ask?” he smiled with sardonic humour.

She saw the old sense of failure and frustration eating but she’d come to fear it hardly at all, or care. Her own life had grown as desperate.

“It’s the way of the world,” she said.

“It’s the way surely,” he laughed harshly, though coming out more, not trying to hold it all back within himself.

She watched him with tenderness. He was a strange person, she knew hardly anything about him, beyond the mere physical acts of intimacy. There had never been any real understanding between them: but was there ever such between people? He’d have none of the big questions: What do you think of life or the relationships between people or any of the other things that have no real answers? He trusted all that to the priests as he trusted a sick body to the doctors and kept whatever observances were laid down as long as they didn’t clash with his own passions.

Yet, it had survived far better than the deepest relationship of her adult life, though she had still Michael Halliday’s letters locked in the wooden trunk in their bedroom and some of the books he’d given her. He’d been a doctor with her in the London Hospital and he changed her whole life. She’d listened to him for so many hours in the long London evenings that were lovely now in the memory; read the books he gave her; went with him to films and plays and concerts; and most of all he made her suffer, he put her through the frightful mill of love.

She saw the streaks of grey in Reegan’s still blond hair, the images of grey and gold bringing the memory of a party, the twenty-first birthday party of a nurse from the hospital. She’d been invited by the girl and had brought Halliday. Though she hadn’t known then the relationship was already well on its way to failure.

The girl’s father, a clerk all his life in some tea company in Aldgate, rose late in the night to sing drunkenly to his wife:

Darling, I am growing old .

Silver threads among the gold

Shine upon thy brow today ,

Life is fading fast away ,

Yet my darling you will be

Always young and fair to me .…

The night was almost over. The chorus was taken up, tears smiling in many eyes, and it was then Halliday tried to shout in some drunken obscenity. Everybody there was drunk or tipsy; it didn’t attract much attention, and she’d managed to stop him and get him home.

The next evening he apologized to her in a way.

“I’m sorry, dear Elizabeth,” he said, “but if I was sufficiently drunk again and you not there I’d do it again.”

“Why?” she asked. “What harm was it? Wasn’t it a human thing enough to want to do?”

“You mean it’s a universal emotion, as the professors put it, is that it, Elizabeth?” he asked maliciously.

She had not known then. She’d been confronted for the first time with a strange language and its mockery and she could only smile and wait.

“Everybody’s full of that kind of thing,” he said bitterly, “but it’s not the truth. It rots your guts that way. You need real style to get away with something like that. And that old bastard after having bored and distracted that unfortunate woman for thirty years to get up as drunk as bejesus on his hind legs isn’t my idea of style. It’s an invitation to sink with him into his own swamp of a life. That’s the kind of thing that kicks in your face on Friday and leads the choir at your funeral service Saturday morning.”

She’d said nothing. There was nothing she could say. Mostly she was dominated by Halliday and content to listen.

She little thought then that she’d be as she was now: married in a barrack kitchen, watching the grey in another man’s hair. It all came round if you could manage to survive long enough. Reegan was growing old, and so was she. There was nothing said or given or fulfilled in her life. He was eating his meal, unaware of her; he hadn’t bothered or remembered about the doctor; he’d brought her nothing home, not even something as unimaginative and cheap as the bag of sweets he brought the children.

“Did you see the Superintendent?” she asked to avoid thinking her way into another depression.