The Barracks Read online

  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.

  “God bless all here,” he greeted.

  “And you too, Ned,” they returned.

  Reegan was glad of the disturbance. Minutes ago he’d wanted nothing but to be left alone, but he was more than glad by this to be disturbed out of broodings that were becoming more lonely and desperate. He pulled his own chair to one side, eager to make room at the fire.

  “Don’t trouble to move yourself, Sergeant,” Casey assured, “I’ll work me way in all right, don’t you worry. I just thought that if I carted you up the book it’d save you the trouble of comin’ down.”

  “That’s powerful,” Reegan praised. “I’d be down long ago only I couldn’t tear meself away from the fire here.”

  “And small blame to you! The devil himself wouldn’t venture down to that joint on a night like this. I stuffed a few auld coats against the butt of the door but the draughts still go creepin’ up the legs of yer britches like wet rats.

  “God’s truth,” he continued, “I was gettin’ the willies down there on me own: lukin’ at the same bloody wonders all the evenin’ in the fire and expectin’ to be lifted outa me standin’ at any minute be the phone!”

  Then suddenly he felt he was complaining too much about himself and stopped and tried to turn the conversation with all the awkwardness of over-consciousness.

  “And tell me, did you meet anything strange or startlin’ on your travels, Sergeant?”

  “Aye!” Reegan tried to joke. “I met something all right —whether you can call it strange or startlin’ or not is another matter.”

  He was attempting a levity he didn’t feel, it left greater feeling of anger and frustration behind it than violent speech.

  “What did you meet with, Sergeant?”

  “Did you ever hear of His Imperial Majesty, John James Quirke? Did you?”

  “Jay,” Casey exclaimed in real amazement
. “You never met the Super, did you? What was takin’ him out on an evenin’ like this?”

  Reegan began to recount the clash; and it had become more extravagant, more comic and vicious since the first telling. When he finished he shouted, “That shuk him, believe me! That’s what tuk the wind outa his sails!” and as he shouted he tried to catch Casey’s face unaware, trying to read into his mind.

  “Bejay, Sergeant, but he’ll have it in for us from this on. He’ll do nothing but wait his chance. You can sit on that for certain comfort. As sure as there’s a foot on a duck, Sergeant!”

  “But what do I care? Why should I care about the bastard?” Reegan ground back.

  Elizabeth drifted from between them. She gathered the sagging fire together and heaped on fresh wood. The blast of heat on her face made her sway with sleep. She felt how ill she was—and still Reegan’s voice stabbed into the quiet of the big barrack kitchen, harsh with mockery and violence.

  She lifted the kettle and filled it from the bucket of spring water on the scullery table, cold and damp there, the table littered with cabbage leaves and the peelings of turnips that she’d been too tired to tidy away; if anything, the rain drummed more heavily on the low roof—sometimes it seemed as if it might never cease, the way it beat down in these western nights. She replaced the old raincoat of the children’s against the bottom of the door as she came in and lowered the kettle so that it hung full in the flames.

  Soon it would start to murmur over the blazing fire, then break into a steady hum, as if into song. She saw the lamplight, so softly golden on the dark blinds that were drawn against the night. And she could have cried out at Reegan for some peace.

  Were their days not sufficiently difficult to keep in order as they were without calling in disaster? Quirke had the heavy hand of authority behind him and Reegan could only ruin himself. And if he got the sack! What then? What then?

  Her woman’s days had no need of change. They were full and too busy, wanting nothing but to be loved. There was the shrill alarm clock at eight in the barracks morning and the raking of the ashes over the living coals close to midnight: between these two instants, as between tides, came the retreating nights of renewal and the chores of the days on which her strength was spent again, one always unfinished and two more eternally waiting, yet so colourless and small that only on a reel of film projected slowly could they be separated and named; and as no one noticed them they were never praised.

  She cleared her throat as she stooped over the fire, reached for the hankie in the fold of her sleeve. It wasn’t there. She spat softly, without thinking. The mucus hissed against the hot ashes. She shuddered as a tiny mushroom of the pale timber ash drifted up. How she’d always hated Reegan’s spitting on the floor, then trying to rub it into the cement with a drag of his boot! Now she was no better! And to plague her, a vision of herself in London before the war flashed on her mind, a spring Sunday in London, when the light is grey and gentle as anything on earth. She had come out the great black hospital gates, a red tartan scarf thrown back on her shoulder; and turned right, up the marvellous width of Whitechapel Road, away from the crowds milling into the Lane, for it was the morning. Now she was spitting like any common slut in a barrack kitchen. It was with the abjection of a beaten animal that she lifted her knitting and sat down close to Casey and the three children, who had finished their exercises and come into the circle about the fire.

  Reegan sat at the table, filling his report into the Patrol Book. They were silent as he wrote till Casey asked the children:

  “Ye’re finished the auld lessons?”

  “All’s finished,” they told him quietly.

  “And ye have them all off?”

  “Aye.”

  “Well, that’s the way to be. Be able to puzzle the schoolmaster.”

  “I wouldn’t be sure they’re that well known,” said Elizabeth.

  “Well, you’ll get nothin’ without the learnin’ these days. Pass the exams. That’s what gets people on. That and swindlin’. I didn’t do much of either meself. More’s the pity. And signs are on it!”

  They laughed at Casey’s rueful grin. He brought a wonderful ease with him sometimes into the house, the black hands of the clock would take wings. They loved to sit with him at the fire, listening to the talk, feeling the marvellous minutes melt like sweetness in the mouth for ever.

  Reegan wrote quickly at the table, to the well-practised formula, and only when he came to describe the weather had he to pause. He wasn’t sure of the wind’s direction. He remembered catching his breath at the way it clawed at his face and chest as he turned downhill from Ardcare; and then a mile farther on of the same straight road it came behind him, making the bicycle shift like a boat in full sail, its course warped in some way by the solid beech trees behind the demesne wall.

  “What way is the wind blowin’, Ned? Is it from the south-west?”

  “About that,” Casey pondered to answer. “It was comin’ from Moran’s Bay when I was out for the turf. It seems about the only direction it knows how to blow from,” he added with a dry laugh.

  Reegan was satisfied and turned back to finish his report but the wind’s direction continued to amuse Casey.

  “Where does the south-west wind come from, William Reegan?” he asked in the tones of a pompous schoolmaster.

  “From the Atlantic Ocean,” Willie entered into the game, all the children’s faces, and even Elizabeth’s bright at the clown’s face Casey had on for the performance.

  “Very good, young Reegan! And can you tell me now what it gathers on its long journey across the oceans?”

  “It gathers moisture,” Willie choked.

  “Very right, my boy! I see you are one boy who comes to school to learn something other than villainy and rascality. And then as I have repeated day-in, day-out, while the hairs of me head turned grey, it strikes against the mountains, rises to a great height, and pisses down on the poor unfortunates who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brows in this holy, catholic, and apostolic country of Ireland.”

  There was a stifled roar of laughter as Reegan wrote, frowning to keep his concentration.

  “You’re a terrible man, Ned,” chaffed Elizabeth.

  “But it’s the God’s truth!” he protested. “You know what Cromwell said: Get roasted alive in hell or drownded and perished in Connaught.”

  Naturally timid, the little comic success seemed to release him from the burden of himself. Everything was relaxed and easy as Reegan closed the Patrol Book and pulled his chair in among them, but even so Casey shirked asking for Una to spend the night with his wife, and he’d have to ask soon or it would be too late. Reegan could be moody and strange. At any time he might resent this constant call on Una. A refusal could shatter Casey’s ease of mind for the whole night. His nervous fear came out in the painfully roundabout, “The Missus was wonderin’ if it’d be all right for Una to come up with me when I’m goin’ up for the bit of supper, for to stop the night.”

  Tonight he had no cause for fear.

  “Shure she can go. But that’s the woman’s territory. Whatever she says,” deferred Reegan.

  Elizabeth had no real say, though this social deference pleased her so, and she tried to catch Reegan’s eyes with a smile of gratefulness as she assented, “She can, of course. Her nightdress is ready there in the press.”

  Una couldn’t conceal her delight, though she tried. Nor could Sheila conceal her terror of the loneliness in the cold room. Both tried to suppress any expression of their feelings. They knew their places. They were simply pawns. And this world of their father and Casey and Elizabeth was as unknowable to them as the intolerable world of God is to the grown, if they have not dulled their sense of the mystery of life with the business or distractions of the day and the hour. All the two black-haired girls could do was sit there and wait, coming and going as they were willed.

  “I don’t like troublin’ you all the time like this,” Casey shuffled.

&n
bsp; Elizabeth stopped it. “Don’t be talkin’ foolish. Una thinks she can’t get up half quick enough. Isn’t that right, Una?”

  The dark child smiled and blushed. No more.

  “We don’t know what we’d do only for Una. We’d be lost. That woman of mine would go off her head if she had to stop all night in that house on her own.”

  “And no one would blame her,” Elizabeth managed to end.

  Casey’s embarrassment was over. He was as happy as he could be. He looked at the clock and it was already nine. He had nothing more to do before he slept, nothing but the repetitions that had become more than his nature. He’d bring Una with him when he went for his supper; kiss his wife at the door when he left again for the barracks a half-hour later: she’d stand with her hand on the edge of the door until she had heard the white gate that led on to the avenue clang behind him, it was her habit. Then the rest of the night was plain sailing: bring down the mattress and blankets from upstairs and make up his bed beneath the phone, lock the door, put the key on the sill, take out his beads to say a decade of the rosary with his few night prayers, set the alarm for the morning, rake the fire, turn down the oil lamp on the wall before he got into bed. He was at least master of these repetitions, they had no power to disturb him, he knew them in his blood; and they ran there like a drug.

  “What about a game of cards? It’s ages since we had a game,” he said, now that he was no longer troubled. A pack of cards was found behind a statue of St Therese on the sideboard, the folding card-table fixed in the centre of the hearth. The cards were dealt and played. Elizabeth kept the scores on the inside of a torn Gold Flake packet. There was no tension in the play, no stakes, only the children excited as the night was cheated and hurried to its mid-hour.

  From the outside the heavy porch door was shouldered open, small stones wedged beneath its bottom grinding on the concrete, the knocker clattering through the barracks. Steps lingered about the door of the dayroom before they came up the hall. They held their hands instinctively upright to listen.

  “That’s Jim’s steps for sure,” Casey said before Brennan knocked and entered.