The Barracks Read online

  “Never you mind, girl. If the money’s wanted it’ll be always found,” Reegan said.

  “Why don’t you go, Elizabeth, when you get the chance?” Willie asked wonderingly.

  “Who’d look after the place while I was away, Willie?”

  “That’s a poor excuse,” Reegan said. “There’s no fear of the auld barracks takin’ flight while you’re away, though more’s the pity!”

  “And what if some one ran away with you when I was gone?” she asked flirtatiously.

  “Not a fear, girl,” he laughed. “Every dog for his day but you, you girl, it’s your day.”

  She was flattered and satisfied. She would not go. Here they had need of her. What would she be at the wedding? A seat at the bottom of the breakfast-table, a relative who had married a widower in the country, a parable to those who had known her as a young girl.

  “I think you should go, Elizabeth. I’d go if I was in your place, definitely,” Willie persuaded with obstinate persistence.

  “But who’d cook and wash and bake and sew, Willie?”

  “We would, Elizabeth. We’d stop from school in turn. We could buy loaves.…”

  “You only think you could, Willie,” she tried to laugh it off nervously.

  “We’d manage somehow,” he enthused, heedless of his child’s place in the house, he gestured excitedly with his hands and went on too quickly to be stopped.

  “I think you’d be foolish to miss Dublin. Not many people ever get to Dublin. For the few days we’d be well able to manage. Shure, Elizabeth, didn’t we manage for ages before you ever came?”

  It fell as natural as a blessing, “Didn’t we manage for ages before you ever came?” And they’d manage, too, if she was gone. She stood with the shock. She must have been holding something for she remembered not to let it fall. Then she broke down.

  She thought she’d never be able to climb the stairs to her room, the things of the house gathering in against her; she thanked God that the dayroom door wasn’t open on her way.

  She heard Reegan shout in the kitchen.

  “Now do you see what you have done? Now do you see what you have done? Jesus Christ, can you not keep your mouth shut for wan minute of the day?”

  Then the boy’s terrified protest, “I didn’t mean anything! I didn’t mean any harm, Daddy.”

  Reegan’s shouts again, “Will you never understand? Will you never grow up? Will you never understand that women look on things different to men?”

  She heard his feet follow her on the hollow stairs. She was sitting on the bed’s edge when he came into the room. She could not lift her head. He’d look as unreal as all people pleading.

  “The lad meant nothing. He was only thinkin’ that we’d be able to give you a holiday at last. Shure you know yourself that we’d never be able to get on without you?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, she’d no wish to create a scene, she dried her face with her sleeve.

  “I couldn’t help it,” she said, looking at him with a nervous smile. “But it doesn’t matter. It was only that it came so sudden.”

  “Would you like to go to the wedding? The lad was only wantin’ to please you.…”

  “Maybe, I should go,” she had tried to look bright. She had not wanted to go. It had been simply easier to go than to stay then.

  She felt the pain at last was easing. The rosary was droning to its end in the kitchen. The decades were over. Reegan was sing-songing,

  Mystical Rose

  Tower of David

  Tower of Ivory

  House of Gold.

  His face a mask without expression, staring as if tranced at its image in the big sideboard mirror, his fingers even now instinctively moving on the beads, the voice completely toneless that repeated Her praises, their continual “Pray for us”, like punctuating murmurs of sleep.

  “The Dedication of the Christian Family,” began the last prayers, the trimmings.

  Prayer for the Canonization of Blessed Oliver Plunkett—whose scorched head, they remembered reading on the leaflet, was on show in a church in Drogheda.

  Prayers for all they were bound to pray for in duty, promise or charity.

  Prayer for a happy death.

  And the last prayer, the last terrible acknowledgement, the long iambic stresses relentlessly sledged:

  O Jesus, I must die, I know not where nor when nor how, but if I die in mortal sin I go to hell for all eternity.

  The newspapers were lifted, the beads and chairs returned to their places. They heard Casey come back from his supper. “Rush! Rush!” Reegan said to the boy and girl. “Off to bed! Ye’ll be asleep all day in school tomorrow if you don’t rush.”

  Some red bricks had been set to warm at the fire. Willie slipped them into a pair of heavy woollen socks with the tongs. He lit the candles in their tin holders and they were ready to be kissed good night.

  Sheila ran to Elizabeth. Reegan was sitting in front of the fire and the boy went close up to him, between his open knees. Hands came on his shoulders.

  “Good night, Willie. God guard you.”

  “Good night, Daddy.”

  He lifted the hot bricks and said at the door, “Good night, Elizabeth.”

  “Good night, Willie.”

  At last they were in the hall, their fluttering candles lighting up the darkness. Casey was coming down the stairs, a pile of the dark grey police blankets in his arms, the top and bottom edges braided with official green thread. He had to feel out his steps very carefully because of his load. They waited on him at the foot of the stairs with the candles.

  “Ye’re off to bed,” he said. “Hot bricks and all to keep ye warm.”

  “Good night, Guard Casey,” they answered simply.

  He turned to them laughing, the whiteness of his bald head thrust over the pile of blankets into their candlelight.

  ‘Good night,

  Sleep tight,

  And mind the fleas don’t bite,”

  he recited.

  They smiled with polite servility, but it was the end of the night, and his pleasantness went through them like a shiver of cold. They watched him cruelly as he shaped sideways to manœuvre his load of blankets through the dayroom door. They took his place on the stairs, the paint completely worn away in the centre of the steps, and even the wood shredding and a little hollowed by years of feet. They climbed without speaking a word. When they got near the top they could see their images with candles and bricks mounting into the night on the black shine of the window. It was directly at the head of the stairs, facing out on the huge sycamore between the house and the river. There was no sign of moon or star, only two children with candles reflected out of its black depth, raindrops slipping down the glass without, where the masses of wind struggled and reeled in the night.

  Willie went with Sheila into her room. On nights like these they were never at ease with each other.

  “Will you be afraid now, Sheila?” he asked.

  “I’ll leave the candle lit,” she said.

  “And do you want the door open?”

  He knew by the way she said “Aye” that she was almost dumb with fear.

  “Well, you want nothing else so?”

  An importance had crept into his voice, the situation making him feel and act like a grown person.

  “No,” Sheila said. “Nothing.”

  “Well, good night so, Sheila.”

  “Good night, Willie.”

  Downstairs Elizabeth strained Reegan’s barley water into a mug with a little blue circle above its handle. He drank it sitting before the dying fire, blowing at it sometimes, for it was hot. He loved drawing out these last minutes. The thought of Quirke didn’t trouble him any more than the thought of his own life and death. All things became remote and far away, speculations that might involve him one day, but they had no power over him now, and these minutes were his rest of peace.

  “Is the cat out?” he asked.

  “She didn’t come in at all
tonight,” Elizabeth answered.

  “Are the hens shut in?”

  “They are.”

  “Do you want me to go out for anything?”

  “No. There’s nothing wanting.”

  He rose, put the mug down on the table, and went and bolted the scullery door. She was setting the table for the morning when he came in.

  “Don’t stay long now,” he said on his way to bed, because she’d found it hard to sleep since she grew uneasy about her breasts, and often sat reading for hours in the stillness after he’d go, books Willie brought her from the lending library in the school, a few books she’d brought with her from London and kept always locked in her trunk upstairs, books that’d grown in her life as if they’d been grafted there, that she’d sometimes only to handle again to experience blindingly.

  “No. I won’t be a minute after you. When I rake the fire.”

  At the hall door he noticed the intense strained look on her face.

  “You look tired out. You’re killin’ yourself workin’ too hard.”

  And then he asked as if he had been given vision, “Are you sure you’re feelin’ well, girl?”

  “Don’t be foolish,” she tried to laugh. “How could I work too hard with the few things that’d have to be done in this house! When I rake the fire I’ll be in bed.”

  “Don’t be long so, that readin’ at night’d drive a person crackers,” he said and left for his bed.

  She put a few wet sods of turf on the fire, then covered it with ashes. She heard Casey noisily shifting his bed down in the dayroom, soon Reegan’s boots clattered overhead on the ceiling and she blew out the lamp and followed him to their room.

  2

  The alarm woke her out of a state that wasn’t deep enough to call it sleep. The night was still outside, and the room in total darkness with the blind of the one window down, the air raw with frost. The evenings of the wet February had gone; Lent was in, the days closing up an early Easter.

  By sheer force of instinct and habit she reached across the shape of bedclothes that was Reegan and stopped the clock’s dance on the table. Then she fell back, though she knew it could only make it harder than ever to rise in the end, as tired as if she’d never slept. Reegan hadn’t woken; his elbow brushed her as he changed sides, the surface of his sleep no more than trembled by the alarm.

  “If you go to bed tired and wake up tired,” began to twitch like a nerve in her mind, and stayed there in its mystifying repetition till she fixed it among the ad. columns of many magazines and newspapers, “If you go to bed tired and wake up tired drink Bourna-Vita.” She grimaced in recognition and settled herself deeper in the warmth. There had been another night of frost, she could tell by the air on her face. She didn’t know how she’d managed to get up since the frosts came, but even before then it was becoming a more desperate struggle with every fresh morning.

  A few more minutes, she told herself, she’d stay: Reegan hadn’t woken: there was no noise of the children stirring in the next rooms; but, oh, the longer she enjoyed the stolen sweetness of these minutes the more it had to become a tearing of her flesh out of the bedclothes in the end. And she used to love rising into these March mornings, to let up the blinds gently in the silence and find the night not fully gone and the world white with frost. She’d unbolt the door to break the ice on the barrel with the edge of the basin and gasp with waking as her hands brought the frozen water to her face.

  The mornings of these last weeks had been one long flinching from the cold and the day, what used to be the adventure once all changed to the drudgery she could barely get herself to face. She’d ask for nothing better than to lie on in bed and not to have to face anything, but these small reprieves she gave herself were always adding up till she rose in the last minute and the mornings were all a rush.

  Suddenly she remembered: this was not any morning, it was the morning of the Circuit Court. She’d set the alarm for early, for twenty past seven. The room was still pitch dark, nothing was stirring.

  How had she lain there for even these few minutes without it entering her mind? She had even checked his clothes the last thing in the kitchen the night before, and it had been on her mind between the fitful snatches of sleep she’d got during the night. Here she’d been playing a game of rising and it was a court day. Her dread of the cold and her weariness were gone in a flash: she was out of bed and dressed and moving through the dark to the door without being conscious that she’d managed to rise. She didn’t let up the blind or shut the bedroom door fully so as not to make noise. She could hear Reegan’s breathing as she left. She would not wake him until she was ready.

  The house was quiet as death and dark as she came down, her slippers loud on the hollow stairs, her hand sliding down the wooden railing to guide her way; when it came against the large round knob at the bottom her foot searched out for the solid concrete. Here she could touch the dayroom door. She could hear nothing behind the shut door, but the smell of Mullins’s smoked Woodbines came. She trailed her fingers along the wall as she came up the hallway to avoid knocking against the collapsible form that was laid against it. When she let up the blinds a little light came in. The bare whiteness of the field sloping down to the river and the hill beyond shone against the dark. She lit the small glass oil lamp and turned to rake the coals out of the ashes.

  She worked quickly and well and without thinking much. She didn’t wash herself or brush her hair or go outside till she had to get water out of the barrel for Reegan’s shaving. The cold made her wince as she broke the ice, and she saw their black cat dart in through the door she’d left open; she came in afraid to find her thieving, but she was only waiting to wrap her frozen fur about Elizabeth’s legs and purred and cried loudly till she was given a saucer of milk in the scullery.

  The children were rising, their feet were padding on the boards overhead. The kettle was boiling, the shaving water, the slices of bacon laid on the pan ready for frying, the table set. The morning’s work was almost done; her sense of purpose, of things needing her to do them, failing fast. There wasn’t enough in front of her now to keep her going headlong: she didn’t want to wash or brush her hair and she could not bear the look of her face in the mirror; and when the children came with a rush of life into the kitchen it made her only more oppressively aware of her sickness. “There was frost, Elizabeth?” their cries came. “We’ll be able to slide on Malone’s pond if it keeps up.”

  She could only answer them with tired assent. There seemed no end to their excitement and curiosity. She wondered if they’d wake Reegan.

  “Daddy’s off to court today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it time for him to get up, Elizabeth?”

  “Can I go up to call him?”

  “Me, Elizabeth, I’ll go up!”

  “Let Sheila go up so,” she said to Una.

  “Then I can quench the lamp, Elizabeth? It’s no good any more, it’s too bright.”

  “I’ll shine his boots, Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, it seemed without end. Sheila was racing up the stairs. The blinded darkness met her with a shock. She stood at the door and called, “Daddy, it’s time to get up,” but she got no answer and she had to tiptoe to the window and let up the blind so that the light poured in.

  “Daddy, it’s time to get up,” she timidly rocked his shoulder.

  She had to rock harder and raise her voice.

  “It’s the day for the court, Daddy.”

  He grunted, and then suddenly opened his eyes. She felt the wild fright of his eyes opened on her and not recognizing her and then the slow remembering and the dawning there of the world he lived in. At last he knew who she was.

  “It’s time to get up, Daddy.”

  “It’s you, Sheila,” he rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “What day is today, Sheila?”

  “Thursday, Daddy. It’s the day of the court.”

  He took a moment to absorb what she sai
d and then his eyes searched swiftly for the clock on the table: it was five past eight. “Christ, I forgot,” he swore as he jumped out of bed. “Another blasted day in town.”

  He was downstairs almost with her in his collarless shirt and trousers and stockinged feet. He stopped to listen at the dayroom door: but there was no noise of Mullins moving.

  “You must have been up early,” he praised Elizabeth when he felt the kitchen warm with the blazing fire.

  “I thought not to wake you,” she replied.

  “Is there water boiled?”

  “It’s ready—when you want it.…”

  He took down the plain wooden box that held his shaving-kit from the top of the medicine press and opened it on the sewing-machine to get his cut-throat razor and he stroked it over and back on a strip of fine leather tacked to the side of the press. After he’d tested its sharpness he laid it carefully on a newspaper in the window and searched the box for the brush and stick of soap.

  Elizabeth poured the hot water into the basin in the scullery, watched the steam rapidly rise up to cloud the mirror in the window, and took a clean towel from the clothes-horse to hand to one of the waiting girls.

  “When he’s finished,” she said, for the ritual of these court mornings never varied.

  The child waited till the scraping of the razor stopped and he was sousing himself with water. She was beside him when he turned, his eyes blind with soap, the large hands groping.

  They were quiet in the kitchen as he sat to his breakfast, but the alarm had gone down in the dayroom. Mullins was up, pounding upstairs with mattress and load of bedclothes, dragging the iron bed in against the wall of the lock-up. His poker and tongs banged on the concrete as he set the fire going. They heard him unlock the outside door and the boots go on the frozen ground down to the ashpit at the bottom of the garden, with his bucket and piss-pot.

  He came up to the kitchen in his greatcoat and cap a little later. His red face was burning blue, the pores plainly visible in the swollen flesh. He hadn’t washed.