John McGahern - The Barracks

“They’re the same and different?” she asked.

He laughed and began to explain. They’d talk and argue the long evening. He had changed her whole life, it was as if he’d put windows there, so that she could see out on her own world.

The richness and happiness of that summer and early autumn! People woke and laughed when she came about, sensing the life and rejoicing within her. When she was leg-weary in the sweating wards she had only to say, “Isn’t it marvellous that I’ll be meeting Michael at seven and all this will be as far away as Asia?” to be renewed.

The excitement of seeing him waiting in the distance, reading an evening newspaper, or if she had arrived the first the throbbing of her heart when only a few minutes passed. The concerts, the theatres, the first restaurants she had ever been in with wine and waiters and the menus in the French she did not know, where eating became a marvellous ceremony, and how Halliday would laugh when he saw her pretending to read the card and saying, “I’ll have whatever you’re having, Michael,” and blushing as she put it down. The walks in the evenings in the great parks that London has, the greensward lovely between the huge plane trees, moving with crowds; and talking together or staying silent over their glasses in pubs with doors open so that the cool of the late summer evening came in.

Three week-ends they spent.… But was there use, remembering can go on for ever. It changed, it came to nothing. Halliday changed, as quietly as a blue sky can turn to cloud. She suffered the agonies of fear and hope and suspicion and hurt vanity, becoming wildly jealous. She had thought there must be some other woman.

“No, no, there’s nobody,” he protested.

“But you’ve changed towards me?”

“No. I love you, dearest Elizabeth. How could anything have changed?”

It fell with such sweetness on her ears that she wanted to be blind and believe, but she knew in her heart he had changed. She couldn’t be content, though she wanted nothing else but this blind happiness.

“No. That is not the truth. There must be someone else. I know it. Why do you want to fool me?”

He looked at her. He wondered how much she suspected and knew.

“No. No woman will believe that there’s not another woman, but there’s not! I tell you there isn’t, Elizabeth!”

“There must be something. I know there must be something. You do not love me any more?” she pleaded, her lips shaking.

He looked at her. He suffered whether to tell her or not. She was young and the most beautiful person he had ever met but he didn’t love her any more, and he wondered if he ever had.

“You couldn’t understand. It’d be no use,” he blundered stupidly.

“Do you think I’m too stupid?” she cried, her eyes brimming.

“No, no, no!” He was distressed and harried. “I don’t think you’d believe it! You’re too beautiful.”

“That you do not love me?”

“That there’s nothing, simply nothing!”

“How nothing? Why can’t you speak straight? Why must you always talk in riddles?”

“That there’s nothing,” he almost shouted, goaded into passion. “That there is nothing and nobody in my stupid life. Nothing at all, absolutely nothing. Women have to believe in life, but some men are different.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks. She couldn’t understand, it had no meaning. How could something stay alive on nothing? He was telling her that he loved her no more, that was all she understood. And she winced years later in the café in this small town at the memory of the flood of pain and desperation and total defeat that had come down about her. They had gone out for the evening, to a little Kensington bar, it had red carpets, blue plates and copper or brass goblets hung around the walls. They were sitting in wooden alcoves out from the farthest wall, their glasses on the bench between them. It could return with such shocking vividness.

She had wanted to run away and couldn’t and only the public place kept her from breaking into a complete mess. She had asked hopelessly again, “You do not love me?” and his voice was definite, “No, no. I’m sorry, Elizabeth. It wouldn’t be fair to you, it’d only make it far worse in the end and to do this is harder for me than to go on.”

She had nearly pleaded: to let it go on, to let it persist under any kind of illusion, anything that’d lighten this terrible nightmare. She tried to hold herself calm. She had wanted to shout or scream. She had turned the glass about and about on the bench.

“You told me that you loved me,” she became calm enough to accuse though it seemed more part of insane musing than any accusation. “You told me that you loved me!”

“I loved you. I could not have lived without you. In the weeks before I met you the thought of calling it all a cursed day followed me about like my own shadow. You’re the most beautiful person I ever got to know. You brought a kind of laughing into my life, I can’t even attempt to understand. I began to believe in everything again. I used to think about you all day and then it went and I started to sink back into my own shit again. I could do or feel nothing. Not even you had any meaning. I thought you might never notice it.”

“And it is still the same?”

“Yes.”

He saw she was shocked and broken but the threads had become too involved with his own life and he couldn’t stop.

“These last weeks have been nothing but torture — that I’d come to the end of my own tether and used you to get a short breather. That I used you so as not to have to face my own mess. That I seduced you because I was seduced myself by my own fucking lust.”

Then he woke fully to its effect on her and he tried to jerk her back.

“O, but you are beautiful, Elizabeth. None of this is your fault.…”

Why couldn’t he have let her go on in her illusions? Everything was stripped down to the bone now and there was the pure nothingness that he’d spoken about. Nothing could ever stay alive, nothing could go on living.

He was dragging her to attention by pulling at her wrist. “Do you understand now that there’s no other woman?”

She nodded. She was trying to get some grip on herself. She hadn’t given it all up as lost yet. She’d fight him.

“There’s the books and music,” she ventured quietly, her voice betraying nothing of the hope she trusted to it, of the balance of fear and hope that tore her heart.

“No, no, no,” he denied. “You woke that and it died too. I discovered what I was at twenty in your enthusiasm. When there’s no curiosity any more, when you’re seeing the world through other people’s eyes, deaf and dumb and blind yourself, no two worlds the least alike, what are books and music then? Nothing, nothing at all, an extension of the fraud, that’s all!”

She was silent. Her heart sank in the acceptance of death. She started when she heard him ask, “Will you marry me, Elizabeth? Will you marry me now, Elizabeth?”

“Are you trying to make a fool of me?” her vanity had been hurt to quick life.

“No! How can you say that, Elizabeth? I mean will you marry me after what I told you? Will you, Elizabeth?”

He was serious then; but how could she marry him? He had forced her to see further than marrying for a house and position and children. She had seen the happy solution of her whole world in love and mutual sympathy. She could give her share, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t, and it was quite as useless as if there was nothing on either side. He had destroyed her happiness. She’d never be able to believe even in a dream of happiness again.

“No,” she shook her head. “It’d be impossible now.”

“Is there no hope, no hope at all?”