John McGahern - The Barracks

The shutter shivered against the wall of the confession box, there was no one now between you and the heavy curtain, your hand groped to pull it aside. It drew you to its darkness like the attraction of death but you wanted to start preparing for it all over again, quite safe at the other end of the queue, going through the five little formulas you knew so well; or you wanted to rush outside and vomit or something between the evergreens and tombstones.

She felt the strain of waiting the same as she moved closer to the moment when the receptionist would call her name. The images echoed no afterworld, there were no vistas of hell and heaven; but the mind and the heart and the stomach reacted as if they were all the one.

Her whole being was on the door when it opened, the pretty made-up face of the receptionist, the calling, “Mrs Reegan now!”

She moved to the door but had to retrace her steps in a fit of embarrassment for her handbag. At last she was standing on the black and white squares of the hall. The surgery door was open. Her name was quietly announced. The doctor rose from his desk to offer her his hand and a small modern armchair.

She did everything ingratiatingly, her eyes full of fear. She watched him walk across the grey carpet to the windows.

“Your husband was in yesterday,” he chatted, “and he thought he might persuade you to call me out, but you preferred the outing, I see! It takes you out of the house, doesn’t it, and it was a lovely morning for exercise. I don’t take half enough exercise myself these days. A car spoils one, you can’t post a letter without it in the finish, it gets such a grip on you. I see the other day where Eisenhower has taken to his bike: it’s probably some publicity stunt to get the Yanks out of their automobiles. They say they’re worried to death about the lack of exercise there. They’re afraid they’ll become a decadent race in the next generation, if they don’t learn to take more exercise.”

He adjusted the pale Venetian blinds and returned to his chair at the desk. Then she recognized it all. He had noticed her fear when she came. He was putting her at her ease.

“You didn’t mind the waiting?” he smiled as he sat down, pulling the chair sideways so as not to have to face her across the desk with inhibiting formality.

“No. Not at all,” she answered.

“You must have patience so. I simply loathe waiting m if.”

“Does there be so much every morning?” she kept up.

“Yes. Sometimes much more,” he smiled with pride and she smiled and nodded too. He took up a biro to amuse his hands. There was a world of professional kindness and availability in his voice as he asked, “Well, can I help you?”

The priest would say, “Now tell me your sins, my child,” but this room was full of light and not the dark enclosure of the box. She was sitting in a modern armchair and not kneeling on bare boards. There was a walnut clock on the mantelpiece with the inscription, To Dr. and Mrs. James Ryan on their wedding from their friends at Mullingar G.C . and not the white Christ on a crucifix above the grille. It was her body’s sickness and not her soul’s she was confessing now but as always there was the irrational fear and shame. She could not know where to begin. She was tired and anaemic. There were secret cysts in her breast.

“I’ve been feeling tired and run down,” she said. She paused. He smiled her on.

“I thought it better to see you.”

He nodded approval.

“Do you think might there be any cause? Is there anything you suspect? No?”

“There are some growing cysts in my right breast,” she said and it surprised her that it came out in mere words.

She held his face in a scrutiny so passionate that it’d sift flickers into meanings. Nothing stirred there, neither eyes nor mouth, the hands played on with the biro. She saw seriousness, listening, readiness, understanding; but neither surprise nor alarm.

“Have you been aware of them for long?” he asked.

He did not even ask to see them yet. She pretended to count back.

“Last November,” she diminished. “I felt as well as usual. Christmas was coming. There seemed so many things I had to do. It went on the long finger and slipped from day to day.”

“Do not worry,” he said. “We all put things on the long finger, foolish as it may be! Is there any pain?”

“No. Sometimes an awareness of something there, a discomfort, but not a pain.”

“Can I see?” he asked at last.

She unbuttoned the blue coat of the costume and then the lace blouse that rose squarely to the throat in the V of the coat, unhooked her brassière. She let him guide her to the couch against the wall and lay down there.

There was the usual probing and asking of questions, “Here? There? Yes? Does it hurt?”

The breasts that her own hands had touched, the breasts that men had desired to touch by instinct and to seek their own sensual dreams of her there, now these professional hands sought their objective knowledge of her for a living. She dressed. They sat again. It was his responsibility to speak or stay silent.

“I don’t think you have a thing to worry about but,” and she knew the words that were coming, “from my examination I think it’d be better to send you for a hospital investigation, just to make certain.”

“To hospital,” she murmured in dejected acceptance.

“Were you ever there before?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “For twenty years.”

“You were a nurse before you married?” he started. “It was careless. I should have known. You should have told me.”

The professional manner cracked a little, he had blundered, “Where?”

“In London mostly.”

“Why, that’s where I practised first. What part?”

It was a common pattern: a few years abroad to gather enough money to start his own practice at home. He had disliked it: it was no place to bring up children, you never belonged, you were always Irish. “With the National Health a doctor’s no more than a glorified clerk there and not half as well paid,” he complained.

This slight accident of identification brought them closer but other patients were waiting.

“Is there any place you’d like to go?”

“No. Wherever you recommend.”

“The County Hospital. Surgeon O’Hara there is quite good. If there’s anything serious, which I’m almost certain there won’t be, you’ll be sent to Dublin. So you’ve nothing at all to worry about for the present. I’ll ring Surgeon O’Hara immediately I see the last of the patients. It’s better always not to waste any time. And I’ll ring you at the barracks. I expect they’ll find you a bed almost immediately.”

She knew by his hand on her arm that the examination was over, that it was time for her to rise and go.

“How are you getting home?” he asked at the surgery door.

“A bicycle,” she said. She felt a patient now, no longer free, having to live to instructions.

“If you’d wait I could leave you out on my way to the dispensary. I’d have contacted Surgeon O’Hara before then too.”

“I’d rather shop and cycle,” she said.

“You’re running a temperature, you know. And then,” he pondered and said: “I suppose it’ll be all right,” like a schoolmaster granting a concession.

“And the fee,” she said.

“No. There’s no hurry. We’ll see about it later. It’s all right.”

“You’ll not ring before I get home?” she asked.

“No. When I get back from the dispensary.… Would seven suit? My wife will ring the information if I have to be out.”

“That would be lovely,” she said. She had all that length of private time.

“They say we make poor patients. That we know too much and let our imaginations run riot,” he flattered with unconscious snobbery. “But I say that knowledge helps you to face up to the situation. It stands to reason that it must.”