John McGahern - The Barracks

And the day so quickly sank once the meal was over, there had been so much excitement and preparation rising to surges of ecstasy that they could not pace it properly to its end. They’d eaten too much, indulged themselves too much, and now they had to endure the gnawing boredom of these last lifeless hours. Reegan went again to the window after finding a dramatized version of A Christmas Carol on the radio. The doors between the kitchen and dayroom were open and they could feel the draughts. All day the doors would be open, none of the policemen would come; everybody stayed in the bosom of their families Christmas Day, it was a rigid custom. A sharp burst of hailstones beat on the window-pane, and Reegan watched the white pellets of hail roll on the sill, interested in any distraction. He fell into a kind of trance watching them beat on the glass and make white the sill and gravel, then jerked himself awake to get the pack of cards from behind the statue of St Therese on the sideboard; he boxed the cards idly for some minutes, standing in the centre of the floor, before he asked, “Would anyone like a game?”

They played before the fire, twenty-one because it would take long to finish, and it was Elizabeth who kept the scores on the margins of the radio supplement. The night began to come as they played, the fire to flame brighter and to glitter on the glass of the pictures, on the shiny leaves of holly twisted with their scarlet berries into the cords. As always close to nightfall, the ghastly red glow from the Sacred Heart lamp grew stronger. Through the windows vague shapes of birds flew towards the wood. There was a pause in the game. The lamp was lit, the blinds drawn, the table laid for the tea, the kettle put to boil. None of them was hungry. They nervously searched each other’s faces. The phone did not ring. The doors were open. No one would come.

“It was powerful, Elizabeth — too good — but we’ll be all havin’ nightmares,” Reegan praised the cold turkey and the rich fruit cake she’d made with icing and holly decorations at the end of the last meal of the day.

Afterwards the cards were played, but only for a little time, they’d become tiresome and monotonous. Reegan engaged Willie in a game of draughts, and the others watched the moves till Reegan won. Then he tramped down to the dayroom, Elizabeth took up a book, the children leaned on the edges of the table about the draught-board.

“Two kings and a man against five men now,” one of them said.

The evening drew on and on, to its end. No phone rang. No one came. Reegan began to pace restlessly about the house and to search in old boxes and drawers. Eventually it was time to pray and go to bed, the same prayers murmured while their minds wandered and dreamed as on every other evening of their lives, the beads in their fingers, their elbows resting on the chairs drawn close to the fire; Reegan alone kneeling upright at the table, staring at his reflection in the big sideboard mirror, the sideboard that tonight was festive with the Christmas cards.

When it was over he gave the children liquid paraffin out of a bottle he took from the curtained press beside the radio; they grimaced as the thick, sickly liquid went down, the last taste of their day and it wasn’t sweet. They went through the ceremony of saying good night and, with their candles in tin holders, their feet passed down the hallway and made a creaking and hollow drum on the timber as they climbed the stairs.

So it was almost over, Elizabeth thought; another Christmas Day, it would take their lives another year to reach it again. She was tired, they had taken no air nor exercise, shut indoors all day with each other. Though she was not disturbed. She’d noticed that she never grew disturbed when Reegan’s troubled restlessness was in the house, it prevented her from dwelling on herself, one poison counteracting the other. She’d little more to do: rake the fire, light the green glass oil-lamp, climb the stairs into a hope of sleep.

“It’s another Christmas Day over,” she said quietly to Reegan.

“Another Christmas,” he echoed. “I hate the day. A whole year of waitin’ for it and then it goes like a wet week. Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow?”

“Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow,” her own mind began to parrot as she did the last chores. “Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow,” but it brought neither despair nor desperation, no feeling whatever. She watched Reegan go to bed. Soon she’d follow. “Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow,” repeated itself over and over, but it did not affect her, the words remained calm and complete as a landscape that she could gaze dispassionately on for ever.

The next day the policemen trooped back to the barracks and the wren boys, children in old clothes with blacking and red indian daubs of lipstick on their faces, came to make their mouth-organs wail outside the door and pounded their feet in imitation of dance on the gravel while the coins rattled fiendishly in their slotted tin canister. Most houses gave them something. They’d have harmless parties, lemonade and sweets and biscuits, on the proceeds of the day.

New Year’s night a few drunken brawlers were hauled to the barracks, and thrown into the lockup to cool — the last gasp of the Christmas spirit, Casey announced. On the sixth of January the ivy and holly were thrown out and the cards swept off the sideboard into one of its drawers. Now the cold months would slowly pass in a sigh for summer. January, February gold of the first daffodils, March that lent itself to dreadful puns, Easter — but that was treading ahead with the names, fast as light compared with the days in which Elizabeth steadily grew worse, little that was haphazard about the decline, it seemed certain and relentless. She was sure the doctor must have noticed, though he said nothing, and she knew she’d refuse if he asked her to stop in bed. She’d stay on her feet this time till she collapsed or changed for the better. And she didn’t think she could go on only for the fact that often when she was alone her sense of the collapsing rubble of this actual day faded, and processions of dead days began to return haunting clear, it seemed as compensation. Her childhood and the wild smell of the earth in the evenings after spring rain and the midges swarming out of the trees; streets of London at all hours, groping for the Jewish names on the lintels — Frank, Levine, Lerner, Goldsberg, Botzmans — above the awnings in the little market off Commercial Road, and did the sun still glitter so on the red-stained glass over the little Yiddish Theatre, the left side of the road as you came from Aldgate, Grand Palais; and the people in her life crowding into the vividness of the memory, shifting with each sudden change and she there at the heart of everything, alive, laughing and crying and calm. And one fantastic afternoon at the end of January she went, ecstatic with remembrance, to the sideboard and got pen and ink and paper to write to a friend of those days, a nurse with her in The London Hospital, she was still there, for at Christmas they exchanged cards. Their relationship had dwindled to that but it could be renewed. She’d write and invite her here. She’d show her this place, so quiet after London, the church that had celebrated its centenary in its grove of evergreens and tombstones, the presbytery staring blue and white with the priest’s love of the Virgin between the rows of old limes and the river flowing out of the lake in the shelter of the hill, Reegan and the children and Mullins and Casey and Brennan.

She’d have to write about herself too: her relationship with Reegan at odd moments now, her heart gone weak, the cancer, the futility of her life and the life about her, her growing indifference. That was the truth she’d have to tell. Things get worse and worse and more frightening . But who’d want to come to a house where times got worse and no one was happy? And on the cold page it didn’t seem true and she crossed it out and wrote, Everything gets stranger and more strange . But what could that mean to the person she was writing to— stranger and more strange , sheer inarticulacy with a faint touch of craziness. So she crossed it out too and wrote: Things get better and better, more beautiful , and she smiled at the page that was too disfigured with erasions to send to anyone now. Her words had reached praise of something at last, and it didn’t appear more false or true than any of the other things she’d written and crossed out. She’d leave it so, it was a ridiculous thing to want to write in the first place, how could she have ever imagined that she’d carry it through. She rose from the table and dropped the sheet of notepaper into the fire, watched the flames crumple it like a hand closing into a fist would, and the charred fragments float in the smoke.