The Barracks Page 16

  Mullins spoke and after what seemed an age of conversation in the quiet day the van moved again.

  “What did I tell you, Elizabeth; they were kept all that length in the shop,” Mullins pricked immediately to attention, returning to his former tone. “That lazy auld bollocks has enough information to keep his swamp of a mind employed for another while. Some of the bread-van men and the travellers’d want to be sexual encyclopedias to satisfy some of the people in this village.”

  “It’s never a full-time occupation,” Elizabeth said, not able to resist, afraid when she’d said the words that’d tempt him into a monotone of sex for the evening.

  “No, that’s the good truth anyhow,” he laughed, “but when it’s confined to talkin’ and imaginin’ it can be full-time till the final whistle blows.”

  The van had stopped, it would be for the last time.

  “They’ll not stay long with that hape of a Glinn bitch with her Jasus Christ tonight and would you be tellin’ me that now in her man’s voice and her legs spread far enough apart to drive a fair-sized tractor through.”

  “You’re very hard on the people, John,” Elizabeth accused, though amused to soreness by this time.

  “It’s easy for you to talk, Elizabeth; you never mix with them; you always keep yourself apart. But if you were fightin’ and agreein’ with them for more than twenty years, till you can’t have any more respect for yourself than you have for them, you might have evidence enough to change your mind,” he defended, taking the accusation seriously.

  She nodded: the conversation was beginning to disturb and pain her; she wished he’d soon decide to go away.

  The bread-van’s motor started to life for the last time in the evening and Mullins stiffened as it came in sight to read, “Broderick’s—I knew I saw a capital b, Β for Bread and Β for Broderick’s, Broderick’s from Athlone: Mullingar, Athlone and Kinnegad as the Geography used to say.”

  They watched it cross the bridge, dust rising and some loose stones cracking out from the tyres, and Mullins said, “Those loose stones would tear any tyre to pieces. I got two punctures on me back wheel this week. Do you know where I’d like to be now?” he asked when the silence fell.

  “Where?” she answered desperately.

  “In one of those pubs along the Liffey—the White Horse or the Scotch House—and a nice pint of stout in me fist. Isn’t it strange that Dublin’s the only place in the country that you can get a nice pint of stout, they say it’s the Liffey gives it its flavour!”

  “’Tis strange,” she nodded but wished the phone’d call him or he’d take it into his head to go. He was silent now against the sycamore trunk, his heavy red face sunk in reflection as she continued with the picking, the can more than half-full; and she was disturbed by how even his presence grated on her in the silence.

  “Do you ever think, Elizabeth, that gettin’ married and havin’ a steady job takes a lot of the ginger outa life,” he soon broke that silence. “There’s not the same adventure at all any more! It’s all more or less settled and the only information missin’ for the auld nameplate is the age!”

  She lifted her face: who’d ever think Mullins of the barrack arguments had such dangerous notions running through his head, she thought quickly. She wished she could be honest and giving, that she could strip her own heart bare in answer, for his words were but the cry of a fumbling loneliness, but the only answer she could make was to join his seeking with her own; and she knew she neither could nor would, she’d be deliberately dishonest, smiling and presenting him with the mirage of flattery that’d more than satisfy him. To answer truly could only lead to compassion or the discovery of each other’s helplessness and squalor, and the one possible way to go that way was through the door of love, it would probably end the same, but at least it’d be with the heart and not in the cold blood of boredom.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’d want to be the two things together to compare them, both married and single at once, and none of us can manage that.”

  “That’s perfectly right, Elizabeth,” he agreed. “You’re the only person anyone can have a real talk with about here. You’re the only one who understands anything.”

  “Don’t be foolish!” she laughed.

  “That’s the God’s truth,” he said and moved away from the trunk. “And I suppose I’d be better to be gettin’ back to base and let you go on with the pickin’.”

  “It’s almost finished, John,” she said and watched the back of his blue uniform go, heard his feet stir the gravel when he passed through the gate. She had thought she’d never get rid of him and now that he was gone she felt guilty. She felt such sympathy for people and yet she denied them—but this thinking only made bad worse. She wished she was blind as they.

  “Why had he to come to disturb her anyhow?”

  She was just out of hospital, it was the summertime, the pain of the clash with Reegan had almost faded when he arrived. Could he not leave her easy to enjoy the garden and the day? The pure shining blackness of the clusters of currants stared at her out of the leaves, the cold grasses touched her legs; the light was making a marvel out of the great rough rhubarb leaves over by the netting-wire, speckled with birds’ droppings; the long ridges of potato stalks were all about her, tiny blossoms riding above the leaves and butterflies tossing. Could he not leave her alone to these? She heard him pottering about in the dayroom, then come out again to sit on the yellow chair in the shade, and later she heard him hum over and over to himself:

  Said the Bishop of old Killaloe,

  “I am bored, I have nothing to do.”

  So he climbed on his steeple

  An’ pissed on his people,

  Singing tooralaye—ooralaye—oo.

  She smiled, she hadn’t heard it before, she wondered was the Limerick his own. The singing grew louder and more provocative. She heard the words clearly. Her can was full. She pushed her way through the green stalks to the rain-gauge. He was humming and beating time on the gravel with a stick but as soon as he saw her come he stopped.

  “I see you’re singin’,” she said.

  “Takin’ to cultivatin’ me artistic talents in me auld age,” he mocked, his phrases echoing the gossip columns in the newspapers, and then he said fiercely, “Hangin’ b.o. about this joint’d drive a man to anything!”

  “It’ll soon be time for the tea.”

  “That itself,” he muttered but half-grinning.

  “Will you leave the door open when the mail car comes?” she inquired.

  “I’ll give you a knock if Brennan doesn’t come to relieve me by then,” he said.

  “That’ll be perfect,” she answered.

  “The lads are on the bog today?” he made conversation.

  “They are,” she said, and started to move on the gravel. “I intend makin’ some jam before they get home.”

  “That’s what’ll be into their barrows,” he laughed as she was going, the hens gathering excitedly about, believing she carried feeding in the can.

  She didn’t think once she was inside and she was happy, absorbed in preparing and washing the fruit, measuring sugar on the balance scales and going to the yellowed cookery book to make sure of the recipe. Soon the kitchen was full of the scent of the steaming jam, she stirred and tasted it to see if it was coming right, and then she had to scald the old jam jars and find rubber bands and cellophane. She’d often pause and smile to herself as she imagined how they’d shout when they’d smell the jam, untackling the donkeys without.

  A light evening breeze had risen, blowing the curtains in the window open on the river. The sawmill had stopped, and the stone-crusher. Brennan must have relieved Mullins in the dayroom for he hadn’t opened the door and she’d heard the noise of what must have been the mail car go.

  She went to the windows where the curtains blew, the light had slanted, making such violence on the water that she’d to shade her eyes to see the reeds along the shore, the red navigation barrels caugh
t in a swaying blaze at the mouth of the lake and the soft rectangles of shadow behind.

  In a sort of an awe she put her fingers to the vase of roses on the sill, she’d been given them by Mrs Casey yesterday, and lifted them to her face. How deep and strong the scent at first, and then the longer she held her face close how the scent faded till no fragrance came. She’d want to go away and have other loves and when she’d accidentally return that fragrance would be given back to her fresh as after rain.

  That would be the wise way. Things had to be taken in small doses to be enjoyed, she knew; but how that mean of measurement degraded and cheapened all passion for life and for truth, and though it had to go through human hell, a total love was the only way she had of approaching towards the frightful fulfilment of being resonant with her situation, and this was her whole terror and longing. She could love too much, break the vase, cast herself on the ground, and be what she was, powerless and helpless, a broken thing; but her life with these others, their need and her own need, all their fear, drew her back into the activity of the day where they huddled in their frail and human love, together. And she had to watch the blackcurrants till they were stewed and pour the jam steaming into the glass jars that seemed made of light in the evening, and she knew she was waiting for them to come home and when they’d come there would be other things.

  July went, the weather breaking at its end, a fine drizzle that spun slowly and endlessly down and wet you to the skin without you noticing. They didn’t go to the bog these days, the pass would be soft with rain and Reegan wasn’t worried; he had most of the turf sold and what remained on the banks wasn’t enough to matter. The borrowed donkeys nodded in the shelter of the sycamore and the hens slept on their feet beneath the heeled-up carts. The children helped Elizabeth inside or played draughts or push-halfpenny on the window-sills, where they could watch out at the rain, their knees on the warm rug of the sofa along the wall. Or they got tired of the house, put on old police raincoats, dug a canister of worms in the garden, and went down the meadows to fish for perch, the eelhook and cork and brown perch line rolled about the rods of hazel they carried on their shoulders.

  Reegan sat mostly with the other policemen in the atmosphere of Casey’s, chain-smoking in the dayroom, doing whatever clerical work had to be done, and trying to shut his ears to the crazy arguments that went on non-stop. Sometimes, if he thought the children had gone and Elizabeth was alone, he’d come and they’d have tea together and he’d tell her about the money he’d made out of the turf and his plans for next year. He mentioned nothing about clashes with Quirke or when he hoped to get out of the police; and she suspected that he thought these things might worry her and she was grateful and didn’t try to pry beyond his care. She was happy, not since their first days did he show himself so aware of her, and there was something of the hour for the hour’s vitality about him that had always excited her. Whenever they kept their talk to the impersonal truck of their lives, not scraping down to the cores of personality, everything went smooth and easy, and that was almost always now.

  He was specially happy if she found him something to mend on these wet days in the kitchen, a saucepan that wanted soldering or a chair with a broken leg. What he hated most was stillness. He’d complain at first: “These children’ll have to learn that they can’t be rockin’ back on these chairs; that’s how the back goes and the legs,” but it was complaining for the pleasure of complaining and to throw an extra light of importance on the job he had in hand. She’d watch him as he worked and share it when he’d want something held steady. When she was at peace she loved the kitchen full of the noisy life of his hammering, seeing the metal gleam of the nails between his teeth, and wanting to touch the smoothness of the new wood when it was planed. Sometimes she’d think how lucky she was to have found Reegan, to be married to him and not to Halliday, where she and he would drive each other crazy with the weight and desperation of their consciousness.

  Often he hummed as he worked, the lovely Danny Boy, his strange favourite. Then, sensing her about, he’d look up and find her sunk in reflection and call, “A penny for them, Elizabeth!”

  “They’re not worth that,” she’d wake to laugh, but she’d have stirred his anxiety—was she getting ill again? “Do you feel well, Elizabeth,” he’d probe.

  “Yes. Why? I just get lost in a daze sometimes, start to think, and then find myself drifting into an old dream. It’s just a foolish habit.”

  “Do you not think you’re takin’ too much on yourself, all the work of the house, so soon out of hospital. Do you not think you’d be better to take it easy for a while? We made good money outa the turf and I was thinkin’ if you took a week or two at the seaside, if you went to Strandhill? The Caseys’ll be goin’ in another week and they’d be company.”

  She smiled. He had preferred to ignore her explanation. She’d been at Southend and Margate and Brighton. Excursion days, never any place else. To go with the Caseys to Strandhill or any other place would be an absolute impossibility, she knew.

  “Would you go yourself?” she asked because she knew he would not.

  “What would I be doin’ at the seaside?” he laughed, trying to turn it into a joke. “Wouldn’t I be a nice cut walkin’ round with Casey and me hands in me pockets?”

  “What would I be doin’ there either?”

  “It’d rest you and there’d be the sea air.”

  “No, it’d be impossible,” she laughed, and he joined her.

  Casey alone went from the barracks, his love of ease betraying him for once with what was but its shade; for, though he went religiously for his fortnight each year and talked about it for weeks, it had become another barrack joke; they all knew that it was a grim fourteen days, suffering the loss of each of his home comforts, longing for the day that’d allow him home, his burden lightened if he could find another policeman, or someone from Dublin who’d talk about the trams, staying in Mrs O’Dwyer’s guest house. The fortnight was a grim duty which he felt in some way that he owed himself. Even to Reegan now the notion of Elizabeth involved in this annual crucifixion was ludicrous.

  None of the others ever went on holidays. They spaced out their leave for the turf and potatoes, little jobs in their gardens and house, bringing timber from the woods in the rowboat, and the excursions they made with their wives to town, mostly to buy clothes and shoes.

  Elizabeth didn’t want to go away. She felt more than ever that she’d never leave this barracks again, here she was meant to end her life, and she grew more sure of that with every new day.

  She put turf and some wood on the fire while Reegan hammered, took down the flickering Sacred Heart lamp and filled it with oil, put a cloth and delf on the table and she had most of the jobs done.

  There was such deep silence in the kitchen when Reegan would stop hammering to examine his work, the men sent home from the woods and the quarry, the constant drip of rain on the window-sills outside. She was completely alone with Reegan. She thought it might be the only right time she’d ever get to tell him about the money of her own she’d always kept, if she didn’t tell it now it’d never be told. It had constantly preyed on her mind ever since she took it out of the locked trunk to bring to hospital. She’d spent hardly any of it there and if she didn’t get rid of it soon it’d possess her for the rest of her life.

  Fear must have made her gather it the first day. She’d seen scraping all her youth, having to wait for winter boots, till the calf or litter of pigs was born, worry over money gnawing at the happiness of too many evenings in childhood; she’d seen her mother and father bitter over each other’s spending, and she never wanted to be under its rule again. She’d saved out of her first wages. But when she’d saved enough to give her few desires some freedom she didn’t trouble more. If she had enough to buy some new clothes or go a place or bring something to someone she loved, she was happy. It was not miserliness, there’s such fearful unhappiness at the heart of all miserliness, no trust or love, and the pas
sion to live for ever cheapened into the bauble of providing against the wet day, the lunacy of building an outer wall against something that’s impregnably entrenched in every nerve and cell of the body.

  She hated to either borrow or lend, she’d give money but not lend, she felt any relationship based and bound by money more loathsome than rotten flesh. How her nerves would shiver and creep when a girl out of the hospital would say to her, “I’m not forgettin’ about that loan, Elizabeth. I’ll be able to pay you back soon.”

  “No, no, no,” she’d want to burst out. “Keep it, do what you like with it, I don’t want to see it again,” and how hard it was to discipline herself and say the conventional thing that’d be accepted and not cause hatred. So she was never without money, enough to buy her anything she’d want or even indulge sudden whims without having to worry or consider. It left her free, she’d try to reason, but it went far beyond any reasoning. She even kept it to herself when she married. With that money she could be in London in the morning. It was dishonest. They were living together in this barracks, tied in the knot of each other; they had accepted the burden of her, she the burden of them, and they should have at least every exterior thing in common. They had all failed or were afraid to attempt to live alone, could any one of them endure total loneliness or silence or neglect, and enough had to be kept back by people living together without extending it to something as common and mangy with sweat as money. She’d have to put it right, tell Reegan, force him to take the money.

  He had finished the chair. His face was flushed and happy and he was hooking the clasp of his tunic at the throat. He showed her the chair for her praise, and she pretended to test it and inspect the joinings.

  “It’s as good as new,” she praised.

  “Aw, not as good as new, but it’ll do a turn. It’ll take more than natural abuse to smash it this time,” he showed his real pleasure in the diminishment.