John McGahern - The Barracks

“No. There’s not much use.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for a few roars too, as most people unfortunately realize. At least they manage to get attention, if it’s only for the fuss and nuisance they make.

“How is the pain today?” he asked suddenly. She answered. The examination began. When it was over he gazed at her face; she tried to avoid his eyes; he had little doubt that she suspected the worst.

“It never rains but it pours, that’s the way it seems to be in your case, but I’m not worried. A slight bubble of air in the bloodstream can finish the healthiest in a flash, and there’s people walking about enjoying themselves who’ve been miles worse than you. They say that doctors and nurses can’t face illness, that they know too much, but I say that if they know one side they know the other side too.”

She nodded agreement. She asked him where he hoped to go this year for his holidays.

“To the South of France and if we can manage the money,” he said, “probably across and down to Rome. We’ve had too much of the rain to ever want to see Ireland first, we should get out to the sun when we get the chance. Now it’s in a lot of people’s reach, and we’re losing our inferiority complex about travel and culture and that, the pig-in-the-kitchen days are gone.

“Do you know, when you think, great changes have come over this country in the last years. Now we’re reaping the fruits those men that won us our freedom sowed. Do you know, when I was going to University College, people that had plenty of money were awed of putting their foot inside the door of the Shelbourne Hotel because they weren’t the so-called gentry. That day is gone or going fast. There’s a new class growing up in this country that won’t be shamed out of doing things because they haven’t come out of big houses. I could walk this day into the Shelbourne Hotel as if I owned it, and I was born with no silver spoon.”

Elizabeth nodded: it made her smile to imagine it within her means to go into the Shelbourne Hotel or to the South of France, whatever salvation that could bring to anybody. “Woman, take up your bed and walk to the Shelbourne Hotel”, played itself so fantastically in her mind that she nearly laughed purely when he ended, and she had to tell herself that she was becoming cruel and malicious. Her life was in this person’s hands, she must remember. He was only conversing pleasantly with her, one of his patients, before he left. Though he seemed to speak with the passion of some deep conviction and she wondered could he really believe in his rubbish, what difference could being able to walk proudly into the Shelbourne Hotel possibly make in any real person’s life?

“How do their minds work, Elizabeth? How in the name of Christ do they keep afloat on those lunacies? Can you tell me that one thing, Elizabeth — how do their minds work, how in the name of Christ do they manage to keep going?” she heard Halliday’s voice break through her thoughts.

Always she saw people in the light of her own consciousness, and would she be listening quietly to this doctor and seeing nothing if she’d never met Halliday? Would she be better or worse off now if she hadn’t met him? Consciousness, awareness, even vision lay within herself, but it was he who had shaken them awake, if she’d never met him they might have slept a lifetime. Or she might have met with some one else but how could she know? All she knew was what she was, what she had become, and neither very clearly. He had changed everything in her life and solved nothing: the first rush of the excitement of discovery, and then the failure of love, contempt changing to self-contempt and final destruction, its futile ashes left in her own hands. If she had never come to vision or awareness she’d be left with some sense of belonging — the dark comfort of the crowd huddled together for warmth in their fear of what must not be named — and how could terror in the dark be worse than this lonely terror of the broad daylight?

The room, the bed, the ceiling, her own sweat and discomforts were still there. The doctor had finished the monologue her words had prompted, she was asking him about the nurse, and he shook her hand before he pulled on his gloves and left. She could hear Mrs Casey moving in the kitchen. Casey was in the dayroom. The newspaper he had brought her lay beside her hand on the eiderdown. Nothing was changed. No matter what happened her life had to continue among such things as these, if it wasn’t these it would be some other, and how could accidents make difference now?

Yet she had married Reegan. Why, Oh why in fairness to him had she married him with what she knew? She had loved him, but that was too easy, it had no meaning. Was that love a simple longing for security, could it be so mean as that? Or was it longing for her childhood not far from this barrack and village and river flowing out of the woods into the Shannon lowlands? Was it because of Reegan? He was a strange man, lonely and different, she’d always believed; she’d never understood him much and had lived somewhat near to fear of him. There was such vital passion about him sometimes, and then again he often seemed perverse and stupid. She’d been sick of London at the time, its crazy rush wearing at her nerves, Halliday’s cry to her, “I’d come to the end of my own tether and used you to get a short breather. I used you so as not to have to face my own mess. I seduced you because I was seduced myself by my own fucking lust to live,” appeared in terms of her own relationship with Reegan. They all lived on each other and devoured each other as they themselves were devoured, who would devour whom the first was the one question. Plainly nothing could be resolved, she had to come to this again and again. Her love might have been all these things and more, welded into the one inscrutable passion. That was how her life happened, nothing more could be said for certain.

“Nothing more, Elizabeth! That was how it happened and it was all a balls. The sooner it was over the better,” Halliday’s words troubled her mind again, but then her vision had never been the same as his, what he had woken in her grew so different that it could barely be recognized as reflections of the same thing. Oh, it was strange and surrounded by only wonder now, she and he reflections of the one thing.

There was such deep joy sometimes, joy itself lost in a passion of wonderment in which she and all things were lost. Nothing could be decided here. She was just passing through. She had come to life out of mystery and would return, it surrounded her life, it safely held it as by hands; she’d return into that which she could not know; she’d be consumed at last in whatever meaning her life had. Here she had none, none but to be, which in acceptance must be surely to love. There’d be no searching for meaning, she must surely grow into meaning as she grew to love, there was that or nothing and she couldn’t lose. She could make no statement other than that here, she had no right, she was only waiting and she could not say or know more.

All real seeing grew into smiling and if it moved to speech it must be praise, all else was death, a refusal, a turning back; refusal to admit she knew nothing and was nothing in herself, a creature of swift passage, moving into whatever reality she had, the reality she knew nothing about.

All the apparent futility of her life in this barracks came at last to rest on this sense of mystery. It gave the hours idled away in boredom or remorse as much validity as a blaze of passion, all was under its eternal sway. She felt for a moment pure, without guilt. She’d no desire to clutch for the facts and figures of explanation, only it was there or wasn’t there and if there was any relationship they would meet in the moment of her death. She accepted its absolute sway over her life, she had no rights, so how could she have quarrels now! And if the reality is this: we have no life but this one — she could only reflect and smile, it must have been the same before her birth and she doubted if she could have ever desired to be born.