John McGahern - The Barracks

She shook her head, her eyes blind with tears.

“Would you have married me if I hadn’t told you?” he was driven by egotistical curiosity to see what other road his life might have taken.

“I do not know,” she refused.

“Only a fool tells everything,” he complained bitterly, beginning to be dogged by longing for what he had destroyed. “You can tell nothing. It takes a moron to believe he’ll ever find someone who’ll understand.”

She couldn’t recall much of the next few weeks. They became swallowed up in a merciful and protective fog. She saw Halliday almost every evening. She didn’t know what’d become of her if she couldn’t see him. This terrifying need to see him took possession of her, she had to know that he was always available. She was helpless. She would be devoured by the need till she’d be able to find her own feet.

Then she reacted to the lash of hurt vanity, and to recover herself out of the bondage of love. She was still in subjection to him, but she’d recover. She’d smash that subjection, she’d hate him, he was the cause of all her suffering; when she got completely free of him she’d never see him again. She’d be mistress then. And she steeled herself to do without him, destroying the need within herself with the poison of hate and resentment, but in the meantime she saw him constantly, his complete despair coming out in those evenings. He’d go to plays and concerts no more. The only place he could feel free was in pubs, and he was drinking heavily.

“I came from what’s called a medical family,” he derided one evening. “So when my turn came I walked the long grey line too, ‘privileged to peer down microscopes for a number of years at all the bacteria in the human corpus,’ as a certain ass expressed it. I’d enough illusions myself then to sink a battleship, for never did such a wide-eyed ass arrive at any university! Alleviation of suffering, scientific advancement and all that kind of lark! The prize of the collection was to get a bedside seat at The Human Drama of Suffering , to live and work close to the brass tacks of life. You see I was a pessimistic bastard even then, a volume of Housman in my hip pocket! Soldier-to-the-war-returning and all that slush! Byjesus, I was never set for such a shocker, the whole drama is in your own fucking suffering, the other poor chaps are egomaniacs all! No desire to give you the inside story there, byjesus! Only bribe and blackmail you into taking their carcass as solemnly as they take it themselves! Sweet Jesus, Elizabeth, it’s too uproarious! Wouldn’t an M.Sf. be the degree of degrees, Elizabeth — Master of Suffering! Wouldn’t it go beautiful with a cap and gown? And, byjesus, what a record number of candidates you’d have the day the archangel G jollies all the old centuries up with that bugle of his,” he roared, his hands at his sides because they hurt.

He didn’t care whether he shocked her or not. He had given up all hope of his life ever getting strength and purpose through her. No, no, no, he argued with himself; she’d not be always there in the evenings when he’d come home tired. She’d not be there to excite him with her dressing-up to go out to the parks and restaurants and theatres and shops and pubs. She’d not be there when a mad fit of sexual desire came, to blind it in the darkness of her womb before it grew to desperate sight enough to see his life moving in a hell of loneliness between a dark birth and as dark a death. Nor would he have her woman’s breathing by his side when he woke at night or have her to talk to when he needed someone; or be able to walk with her through the morning market, sharing the buying of eggs and bread and butter.

He had dreamed of bringing her to the South he’d fallen in love with in the long holidays from the universities: Chalon on the way down, Lyons, Valence, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Sete across the marshlands high above the Mediterranean; poplars and the road glowing white between the open vineyards, the cicadas beating and the earth and sky throbbing together in the noonday as you went on to Carcassonne to sit with a glass of wine in the evening at a sidewalk table and wonder how long more you could make your money last out. Even the naming of the towns brought fierce longing and he had dreamed then of bringing back a girl like Elizabeth with him to show her it all. And he hated this dream of happiness as only something can be hated that’s so deep within a person that it’s painful not to want.

“Sweet Jesus, Halliday, it’s too much,” he would swear silently. “You want to bring a girl back with you to watch over your dead youth, no less, and all that kind of shit! To have her breathing by your side when you wake up in the nights! Jesus, Halliday, it’d do for a literary fucking medical man, praising the job for the experience it gave him of life. Sweet Jesus, Halliday, buck yourself up! You can’t go down into that fucking swamp!”

So he set his face steadily on his real road, away from Elizabeth, and he would be tempted by dream of neither normality nor goodness nor any other social thing. He often wanted to hurt her now, but she was growing free. His drinking worsened into a steady gloom, he was seldom able to stand up by pub close; and, “What the hell is all this living and dying about anyway?” would come as a scream of frustration and hate at some time or other of those grisly evenings. Then came the car crash on the Leytonstone Road to solve nothing and everything: the inquest; his people’s invitation to Elizabeth to go to visit them, which she never accepted; and his burial in her own mind till the day she’d die.

“What is all this living and dying about anyway?” came almost as flesh of her own thought at last in this small-town café, but it had been Halliday’s question in the beginning, it had never been hers alone. Even if she hadn’t cancer she was still growing old and it was more than time to face up to the last problems; but weren’t they so inevitable and obvious that they were better ignored? Were the real problems faced and solved or declared insoluble or were they not simply lived in the changes of her life? She could live her life through in its mystery, without any purpose, except to watch and bear witness. She did not care. She was alive and being was her ridiculous glory as well as her pain.

The waitress came and took the cup and plate away and she knew it was time for her to pay and go. She had to leave Mrs Brennan’s prescription with the chemist and do her shopping. She was told the prescription would be made up in a half-hour and so as not to mix the little pile of cash that she unrolled out of the paper with her own money she asked if she could pay then. She had to smile as she handed it over — for it was exactly right.

It did not take her long to do the shopping and she got no pleasure from wandering on her own between the windows. The tiredness was returning, people with whom she knew she could have no conversation were stopping her to talk, draining away the little life she had left for her own things. The only real conversations, anyhow, she ever had were with the people she had loved, and if she had God’s energy she could possibly love everybody, but she had even less and less of her human share. She had to keep it for her own things or she’d be nothing. She had been lavish once, looking round for things to give herself to, and she did not regret any of the giving but she couldn’t do it any more. She had to be what she would have despised once — careful! She had nothing against these social pleasantries of weather and births and marriages and success and failure, the falls of the humble dices of life, but she didn’t care enough. They were not exciting any more. She couldn’t care for everything. Her love had contracted to just a few things. It might be squalid and true but hadn’t the love the same quality of herself as it had in the beginning? What more did it matter? What did it matter if these social exchanges had reduced themselves to the nightmarish vision of the idiotic and barely comprehensible gestures and grimaces of face and head and hand people make when they try to communicate through a closed window. They did not exist any more, but she did.