John McGahern - The Barracks

“Good luck, Elizabeth,” he waved, the chest bursting out of the blue tunic, and she waved back.

“Old drunkard!” she smiled and was happy. She saw him close his fist and stiffen the arm as he waved for the last time: to have courage, and calling on God to stand up for all sorts of bastards. He’d have come into the kitchen to wish her luck if the women hadn’t been there.

She could never see him without remembering how he had staggered in, one evening she was alone in the kitchen soon after being married. He had slumped down in the chair to wag a drunken finger and say, “Elizabeth, I can call you Elizabeth, can’t I? Can you answer me this,’ lizabeth? Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? That’s what you might call a question, Elizabeth! A professor told me that, one Saturday night before an All Ireland Final, in Mooney’s of Abbey Street, and he was drunk as I was! He was a powerful talker, could discourse on any subject under the sun! Did you ever see Mooney’s of Abbey Street, it’s a great place for meetin’ people, and it’s just opposite Wynn’s Hotel where all the priests up from the country stop. There’s nothin’ in the world I like better, Elizabeth, than a good conversation over a pint.”

She’d given him a meal, she remembered. No one could refuse him who had any heart. Not even if he had abused a hundred responsibilities. He’d shaken with laughing as he ate and said over and over, “ Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? That’s what you might call a question, isn’t it, Elizabeth? Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? It gives a man heart to hear something the like of that even once in his life!”

She saw him at the window and waving and she overflowed with gratitude as she bumped out the rutted avenue with the line of sycamores inside the garden wall and turned across the bridge for the town.

She had two miles of beaten dirt and stones, scattered by the traffic out of the potholes the council were always filling, till she reached the Dublin Road. Here the traffic began to pass and come against her incessantly. She hadn’t to go far till she found she’d set her strength at least its equal. Even as far back as Christmas she had found it tough going, the day she went with Reegan for the children’s Santa Claus and the fruit and spices and whiskey and things that would create their festival with the candles in all the windows of the houses Christmas Eve and the walk at night to the church ablaze with lights for midnight Mass.

Her clothes grew clammy with sweat as she cycled, and she felt the journey come down on her more like a weight. There were great beech trees between ash and oak and chestnut along the road and she started to count, numbering when the smooth white flesh showed out of the darker trunks in the distance, cycling past, her eyes already searching ahead for the next. There were five hills to go that she’d have to dismount under and walk. She turned and pushed and turned the pedals till they dwindled to four and three and two, with so many hills behind, till she was across the last; holding the handlebars as she free-wheeled down into the town, the solid block of the mountains beyond dominating the slate roofs and the treetops.

It was twenty past eleven on the post office clock in Carrick Street and she left her bike against the wall there to walk to the doctor’s house at the other end of the town.

She read on the brass plate: DR. J. RYAN, M.B., N.U.I. and climbed the steps between black railings to press the doorbell and was let in by a very made-up girl in her early twenties.

“Mrs Reegan,” Elizabeth said.

“Was the doctor expecting you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you come this way, please? He’s rather busy this morning but I do not think you’ll have long to wait. I shall tell him that you’ve come,” with the practised smile and bow and opening of the door.

There were five women in the room, a youth, two children — all sitting round the big elliptical table with its vase of daffodils and quota of magazines.

They watched her find the most deserted corner of the table like a half-dazed animal and she was in no condition to observe them read her belly for pregnancy, her face and greying hair for age, the cost of the dark coat and the bag she carried, the third finger of her left hand when she took off her gloves.

Their curiosity soon exhausted itself. They did not know her. They were women from the poorer class of this ex-garrison town. The companies had gone, the windows smashed in the great stone barracks, but somehow their class remained — Browns and Gatebys and Rushfords and Boots and Woods — hanging idle about the streets; or temporary postmen or lorry helpers or hawkers of fish and newspapers — now that it was Britain’s peace-time! But they had been Monty’s Rats and in Normandy as their fathers had been at Mons and the Dardanelles. Already Friday Gateby’s account of Dunkirk had become the local classic of the whole war. “It was a very dangerous place,” he agreed, home for a few weeks’ leave after the collapse. “A very dangerous place surely!”

With holy-water bottle and stole and speeches to the tune of Soldiers of Old Ireland are We , Wellington Parade became St Brigid’s Terrace in white paint on a green plaque, but they went on breeding more than their fair share of illegitimates and going and coming from the Ulster Rifles and Inniskilling Fusiliers as if nothing had ever happened.

They continued with the conversation Elizabeth had interrupted. She listened quietly there, turning the pages of The Word that happened to lie at her hand till she was calm. When she raised her eyes she saw nothing on the faces that she hadn’t seen in Whitechapel and the evenings in her own barracks when the policemen gathered: the frightening impatience of the listening, holding back the dogs of their egos till they could unleash them to the sweet indulgence of their own unique complaint and wonder; the one or two who dominated and the ridden faces of the many who had learned to wait in the hope of getting a word of their own world in edgeways.

The two children played across the back of a chair, admonished every now and then by their mother. Only the youth seemed apart, biting at his finger-nails, and turning the pages and pages in front of him without reading.

She put some cooling scent on her hands and throat. She wasn’t thinking of anything and she began to look more carefully through the magazines. The receptionist called another name: a woman rose and left. An old man, who looked like an army pensioner, was admitted. Another woman was called. They had started to go quickly and it was coming close to her own turn.

She might have been kneeling in the queue in front of the confessional and her turn to enter into the darkness behind the purple curtain coming closer and closer. You were sure you were ready and prepared and then you weren’t any more when you got close, less and less sure the closer you got. Doubts came, the hunger for more time, the fear of anything final — you could never bring all your sins into one moment of confession and pardon, you had lost them, they had escaped, they were being replaced by the new. The nerves began to gnaw at the stomach, whispering that you were inadequate, simply always inadequate. The penny candles guttered in the spikes of their shrine; the silver sanctuary lamp cast down its light of blood, great arum lilies glowed in the white evocation of death on the altar; reverential feet on the flagstones tolled through the coughing and the stillness.

The wooden slide rattled shut across one grille, rattled open on the other. A woman’s voice, “Bless me father, for I have sinned,” and a tired priest’s, “Continue, my child.… Is there anything else troubling you now, my child?”