John McGahern - The Barracks

“It’s cold for April,” she shivered, her eyes resting on the features they knew too well to experience any more.

“It’s better to have it now than a bad summer,” clicked as automatically out as if she had put a coin in a slot.

“But if we could have it both ways!” the words forced other words.

“That’d be perfect,” it continued, “but with the weather this country has we’re lucky to get it any way at all.”

“There’s not many travelling,” she looked about her after a silence.

“No. Never in the morning. We’re lucky not to be on the three twenty-five. It’s like a cattle train these days and them all for the night-boat,” he said.

“There’ll be soon nobody left in the country,” she murmured what was being said everywhere.

A signalman crossed the tracks with a white hoop, and Reegan took his watch out of the little pocket that kept his beads.

“Another few minutes,” he said. “It’s due in four minutes.”

“Is it going well, the watch?” she asked very quietly.

“It hasn’t broken for four years.”

“And it’s very old, isn’t it?”

“More than twice my age. There are no parts for it any more. It costs a fortune if it breaks. It was bought in New York. My father gave it to me when I joined the police. Elgin ,” he read off the white face with its numerals and hands of blue steel. She had these details before and she asked as she asked more than once before, “Will you keep it?”

“For my time,” he laughed as he always did. “Willie can do what he likes with it when it comes to his turn.”

The diesel in the distance turned to a powerful roar as it came closer, the signalman exchanged the white hoop for what seemed an identical hoop with the driver, it must be some safety device. Reegan put her cases on the rack and they sat facing each other at one of the windows of an almost empty carriage.

The train pulled out of the station. Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles jerking on wires, thorn hedges, cattle, sheep, men, women, horses and sows with their litters started to move across the calm glass; a piece of platform was held still for three minutes at every wayside station and for ten at Mullingar.

She had cancer, she was going for a serious operation, and it was so frighteningly ordinary. The best years of her life were spent and all she’d managed to do was reach this moment in this train. “Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles, Elizabeth Reegan, cattle, horses, sheep,” throbbed in her head to the train’s rhythm as they flashed past. They seemed so unimportant, she and Reegan and people; after a struggle of a lifetime they managed to get in a train or some place, “Trees, fields, houses, Elizabeth Reegan”, beating like madness in their heads as the train beat on to its terminus.

She was going weak, and it was the stuffy heat of the carriage, she told herself. She must try and talk. She must try and ask Reegan something. She must break this even drumming of, “Trees, fields, houses, Elizabeth Reegan”, to the beat of the train. She’d collapse or go crazy if she couldn’t stop it soon, she’d have to try and start a conversation, she’d ask, “Have we many more miles to go?” and it would be a beginning. “Have we many more miles to go?” she asked and he answered. From Westland Row they got a taxi to the hospital. She knew every inch of this squalid station and the street outside: the Cumberland and Gros-venor hotels, the dingy bed-and-breakfasts, the metal bridge, and the notice above the entrance at the traffic lights.

How the lights of this city used to glow in the night when the little boat train taking her back to London after Christmas came in and out of the countryside and winter dark. The putting-on of overcoats and the taking of cases off the racks and the scramble across the platform to get on the train that went the last eight miles out to the boat. Always girls weeping, as she had wept the first time too, hard to know you cannot hide for ever in the womb and the home, you have to get out to face the world.

Often she had wanted to lie down at dawn and die on this platform after the night-ride across England and Wales, the crossing from Holyhead, the fight off the boat through the Customs at Dun Laoghaire, the fight for the seats on the train for here, carriaged home those 23rd of December nights like cattle.

Suddenly, she’d remember she was going home. She could lie in bed late in the mornings, she hadn’t to tramp from bed to bed on the wards for three whole weeks more. The ones she loved and hadn’t seen for a year would be waiting with a hired car and shy, lighted faces outside the red-brick station, coloured bulbs in the Christmas tree and whiskey on the porter’s breath, and they’d lift her off the train and take her home.

They’d be shy at first, thinking she must grow grand and away from them in a great city like London, and she making things more awkward still by telling them what they could not believe — that she was growing more and more the simple human being that had been forced to leave them the first day.

The sheer ecstasy of laying out the presents on the deal table in the lamplight. She’d have spent every penny of money and imagination and now was the hour of indulgence, the blessed ecstasy of giving and being accepted in love, tears lighting her eyes as she watched their faces while they stripped away the festival paper, patterned with red berries and the green, spiked leaves of the holly. Every gift was wrapped in yards of paper so that their imaginations would have chance to make a glory out of the poor thing she had brought, she had gone without things for herself to bring these presents, gone without for weeks before Christmas. And she would do it again. She would do it again and again and again.

Soon they’d force her to sit to her meal and they’d even remembered the dishes she used like best as a child. Now was their turn. They had her present. She gave sharp cries as she tore away the twine and paper, “What is it? What can it be?” and it was there and she was breathing, “Oh, it is too much and so lovely”, as she lifted the shining bracelet and they gathered about to gloat over her happiness.

They were a big family and she was young then, and full of life, which is the only youth, and far rarer than beauty. They’d sit together about the blazing pile of ash on the hearth and she’d make them go over every scrap of local news. She’d tell them about London. They’d laugh much. The whiskey and sherry bottles that were kept for Occasions would be brought out of hiding and someone would sing: because Elizabeth was home.

What did it matter that it had all slowly broken up and separation had come before even the first death? It didn’t matter, she must affirm that — it made no difference! Only her happiness mattered. She’d been given all that much happiness and she wanted to praise and give thanks.

She was not really going in a common taxi to a common death. She had a rich life, and she could remember. She’d suffer a thousand anythings for one such Christmas again.

She reached over and took Reegan’s hand, her face alive with joy, and he held it uneasily. He couldn’t understand. She was at the gates of the hospital and the defeated woman that had faced him in the train was gone. He was uneasy and couldn’t understand.

The hospital was in its own grounds, trees partly shutting it away from the city; a new state hospital, modern and American, several rectangles of flat roofs in geometric design, the walls more glass than concrete.

They didn’t notice much as they paid the taxi and asked the way with their cases to the reception desk. Elizabeth’s name was checked on the list of admittances for the day and they were sent to wait in a kind of hall or corridor facing four official doors. A few little groups already waited there about their own patient, all lonely-looking and humble and watching. The doors opened and people in white coats came out to call their names off a file in their turn.