John McGahern: The Barracks

Whether he was ashamed or not to pass the shops so sleepily in the broad middle of the day, he started awake at the chapel gate and noticed Elizabeth.

“Powerful weather we’re havin’,” he shouted down, and it came to her as a prayer of praise, she never had such longing to live for ever.

She was helping her mother and brother on their small farm then, and they had opposed her marriage to Reegan from the beginning.

“There’s three childer and his wife is barely cauld in the grave, remember. That’s no aisy house to be walkin’ into! An’ what’ll the neighbours say about it? Himself can be no angel neither, not if quarter of the accounts be true,” her brother had said one autumn night in the kitchen while their mother stirred the coals on the hearth and supported him by her half-silence.

“Take heed to what he says! Marryin’ isn’t something, believe me, that can be jumped into today and outa tomorrow. It’s wan bed you have to sleep on whether it’s hard or soft, wance you make it. An’ remember, as he tauld you, it’s no aisy house to be walkin’ into, but I’m sayin’ nothin’. It’s for your God above to direct you!”

Elizabeth knew it would suit them if she stayed, stayed to nurse her mother as she crippled, the mother who had seemed so old when she died three months ago that not even her children had wept at the funeral, she meant as little as a flower that has withered in a vase behind curtains through the winter when it’s discovered and lifted out on a day in spring.

And it would have suited her brother who’d never marry if she had to stop and keep house for him, but she did not stop. She married Reegan. She was determined to grasp at a life of her own desiring, no longer content to drag through with her repetitive days, neither happy nor unhappy, merely passing them in the wearying spirit of service; and the more the calls of duty tried to tie her down to this life the more intolerably burdensome it became.

She’d not stay on this small farm among the hills, shut away from living by its pigsties and byres and the rutted lane that twisted out to the road between stone walls. She would marry Reegan, or she’d go back to London if she could ever forget the evening she came away from the operating theatre with Sister Murphy.

“I lit three candles today in St. Anne’s before the Blessed Virgin,” the frail Sister had said.

“Are you praying for something special? Or is there something worrying you, Brigid?” Elizabeth asked out of politeness.

“If I tell you, you’ll not mention it to anybody, will you?”

“No. Why should I want to? But, maybe then it might be better not to tell me at all.…”

“But you’ll not mention it to anybody?”

“No! No!”

“I am praying to Her to send me a man — some nice, decent person.”

Elizabeth stared at her in astonishment, but this frail woman of more than fifty had never been more serious in her life. She had blurted it out with such sudden, confiding joy. It seemed obscene for a minute; yet, when Elizabeth thought, the desire itself was not ludicrous, no more than a young girl’s, but only the ferocious ruthlessness of life had made it in time seem so. Hardly fifteen years separated the two women. Elizabeth had blanched before this vision of herself growing old and blind with the pain of ludicrous longing. She had few hesitations about marrying and she believed she loved Reegan. The children weren’t hostile, even if they’d remained somewhat reserved. And for a time she was happy, extremely happy at first.

When Reegan had his clothes changed he felt new and clean before the fire, drowsily tired after miles of pedalling through the rain. He was in high good humour as he pulled his chair up to his meal on the table, but he wasn’t easy until he had asserted himself against Elizabeth’s, “Couldn’t you let it go for once with the Superintendent? You’ll be only bringing him down on top of you?”

“When we’re dead it’ll be all the same,” he asserted. “But bejasus we’re not altogether in that state yet! It’s still God for us all and may the devil take the hindmost. Isn’t that right, Willie?”

Elizabeth said nothing. She gathered up his wet clothes and put them to dry. She listened to him talk with the three children.

“What did ye learn at school today?”

They were puzzled, nothing new or individual coming to their minds out of the long, grey rigmarole that had been drummed all day in school, one dry fact the same as the next.

“English, Irish …” Willie began, hesitant.

“And sums,” continued Reegan, laughing. “Shure that tells nothin’. Did ye learn anything new? Did ye learn anything that ye didn’t know yesterday?”

He saw by the boy’s embarrassment that he’d be able to tell him nothing, so he turned to the girls, almost clumsily kind, “Can the lassies tell me anything when this great fool of ours only goes to school to recreate himself?”

Neither could they think of anything. They had experienced nothing. All they’d heard was fact after fact. That nine nines were eighty-one. That the London they didn’t know was built on the Thames they didn’t know.

“Shure ye might as well be stoppin’ at home and be givin’ Elizabeth here a hand about the house,” he teased, rather gently, a merriment in his blue eyes.

“Do ye know why ye go to school at all?”

“To learn,” Willie ventured again, with renewed courage.

“To learn what?”

“Lessons.”

Reegan laughed. He felt a great sense of his superiority, not so much over the children, he took that for granted, but over every one who had anything to do with them.

“You’ll never get wit, Willie! Were you never tauld that you go to school to learn to think for yourself and not give two tuppenny curses for what anybody else is thinkin’?”

“And a lot of good that’d do them,” Elizabeth put in dryly; it shook Reegan, then amused him.

“A lot of good it did for any of us,” he laughed.

“We might as well have been learnin’ our facts and figures and come out in every other way just as God sent us in — as long as we learned how to bow the knee and kiss the ring. If we had to learn how to do that we were right bejasus! And we’d have all got on like a house on fire! Isn’t that right, Elizabeth?”

“That’s perfectly right,” she agreed, glad he was happy.

He made the sign of the cross as he finished his meal. He’d never known mental prayer, so his lips shaped the words of the Grace as he repeated them to himself. He sat facing the fire again, beginning to feel how intimate he’d been with them ever since he came into the house tonight, his mind still hot after the clash with Quirke, and he fiercely wanted to be separate and alone again. The pain and frustration that the shame of intimacy brings started to nag him to desperation. He didn’t want to talk any more, nor even read the newspaper. He would have to go down to Casey in the dayroom before ten and fill his report into the Patrol Book, but that could wait its turn. All he wanted now was to lounge before the fire and lose himself in the fantastic flaming of the branches: how they spat or leaped or burst in a shower of sparks, changing from pale red to white to shifting copper, taking on shapes as strange as burning cities. The children’s steel nibs scratched in the silence when Elizabeth wasn’t moving. She knew the mood he was in and lingered over the little jobs tonight, stirring the porridge for the morning and watching the cake brown in the oven, putting off the time when she’d take her darning or library book and sit with him, when the drowsy boredom of the hours before bedtime would begin.

Down the hallway the dayroom door opened and Casey’s iron-shod boots rang on the cement. They thought he might be rushing out again into the rain for a bucket of turf, but the even, ponderous steps all policemen acquire came towards them in the kitchen. He tapped on the door and waited for the disturbed Reegan’s, “Come in”, before he entered. He was over six feet, as tall as Reegan, but bald, and his face had the waxen pallor of candles. The eyes alone were bright, though all surface, without any resting-place. He carried the heavy Patrol Book under his arm.