The Barracks Page 5

  “That’s a powerful smell, the fryin’, Elizabeth, on a frosty morning. It has me driven wild already with the hunger. Freeze the arse of a brass monkey, this mornin’ would. A holy terror to get out of bed,” he spoke.

  “That’s six days of frost,” she said, the social makeweight of these comings and goings was always left to Elizabeth.

  “Six days surely, though anything’s better than the wet. But wouldn’t we be worse off if we had nothing at all to be complainin’ about,” he remarked and chuckled over his own wit at the door.

  “That’s true, I suppose,” she smiled.

  “We’re all off today,” he said. “Casey’ll be holdin’ the fort on his own.”

  He turned to Reegan and stated that he was going to get his breakfast and shine himself up for the court, he’d be back soon after nine to leave the books in order and go with them to the town.

  “The door’s left open, so you’ll hear the phone if be any miracle it rings. The day in town’ll be a bit of a change,” he said.

  Reegan continued with his meal in silence after Mullins went. Sometimes he watched out past the sycamore and netting-wire to the white field that went down to the river, the calm strip of black water moving through the whiteness, and the thorn hedge half-way up the white hill beyond. Sometimes he watched his own face eating in the sideboard mirror, completely silent. He disliked Elizabeth asking, “Are there many cases today?” “Not many,” he said.

  He’d give her no information. His mind had been a painless blank, watching his own face and the images of white field and river and white hill, and not relating them to anything and not thinking. Now she had forced her way into this total blankness and disturbed him with thought of her and the day.

  “Not many,” was meant to cut her out again but he could not.

  “I only wanted to know whether you’d be home early for your dinner or not,” he had to listen to her injured tones. He had to wake to some sense that she’d been hurt.

  “Only one big case—last month’s crash at the quarry,” he imparted. “It’ll depend on when it’s called. We might be out in an hour and we might be there till night. If we’re not home before two you’ll know we’ll be fairly late.”

  She nodded. There were tears in her eyes that she held back. She felt her strength draining and sat on the side of one of the wooden chairs, her arm on its back. It was early morning, excited with the preparations for the court, and she was as worn as if she’d been on her feet for days. She felt herself go weak. She had to grip the back of the chair fiercely, use all her determination not to go down. She could not let herself collapse. The fit passed; but she’d not be able to go on long like this, not more than days now; in the desperation she took her courage in both hands.

  “Would you call at the doctor’s and ask him what would be a good time to see him tomorrow?” she asked quietly. “I think I’d better go for a check-up.”

  The asking brought a dramatic silence that she shrank from, even the children turned quiet to fix her with their attention. She was drooped and deathly pale.

  “You don’t look well,” he said with unthinking cruelty. “You’ve not been yourself since Christmas.”

  “I don’t think it’s anything,” she protested. “It’s only to make sure.”

  She was haggard.

  “I’ll tell him to come out,” he said.

  “No, no. It’d cost too much.”

  “Cost,” he derided angrily. “We’re not paupers.”

  “No. There’d be no sense in him coming. I’m well able to cycle. And I’d like the day in town.”

  She tried to brush it off as nothing. With all her will she rose from the chair. She lifted off the boiling kettle, put on a saucepan.

  “It’s nothing at all,” she smiled casually with every muscle in her face. “It’s only to be sure.”

  She stood still, making a pretence of tending the fire. She could hear her heart beating. She regretted having ever spoken.

  She saw Reegan rise to change into his best boots, the ones Una had polished. He sheathed the razor and put his shaving things back in the box to take out the button brush and the brass stick and tin of Silvo. There began the scrupulous brushing of his tunic and greatcoat and cap, the buttons drawn together in a row on the brass stick and coated with Silvo, the letting it dry and then the shining, even the medallions on the collar and cap, the whistle chain that went across the tunic to the breast pocket, were polished till they shone like brightnesses. And last of all the black baton sheath was shone; the baton—a short vicious stick of polished hickory filled with lead, the grooved surface tapering to where a leather thong hung from the handle for securing it about the wrist in action—was placed in the sheath and hung from the belt of the tunic. He squared himself before the sideboard mirror, shaved and handsome, stuffing the fresh hankie she handed him up his sleeve.

  He turned his back for their inspection. There wasn’t a speck on the uniform.

  “He’ll not be able to find much fault today,” he said.

  No one could, he was shining.

  “Will I leave your bike round at the dayroom door?” Willie wanted to know.

  “Do, and see if the tyres are pumped,” he was told.

  Down in the dayroom the window was lifted up and the key taken from the sill, it was Brennan, for the next minute Casey appeared through the archway. The time was exactly nine. Reegan had to go down to them to sign and call the roll. He’d not return to the kitchen unless he’d forgotten something, but leave with the others from the dayroom.

  “Are you sure you don’t want the doctor out?” he asked Elizabeth as he kissed her good-bye.

  “No. I’ll go in tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” he repeated. He was worried. She hadn’t been a day ill in bed since they were married. Her haggard appearance, her wanting to see the doctor, disturbed him with the memory of his first wife who had died in childbirth. Elizabeth could not die, he told himself; it was impossible that two could die; it would be ludicrous.

  “Are you sure?” he pressed her.

  “I am quite certain,” she said.

  He kissed her and went, she’d have to see the children ready for school, Casey and Brennan were waiting for him in the dayroom. He called the roll and marked Mullins present in his absence, who didn’t come till twenty past, and when he’d done the signings connected with his completed b.o. duty they left. They wheeled their bicycles through the black gateway to the avenue and mounted there. Five bare sycamores lined the avenue from the gate to the road and at the last tree they turned right for the bridge and the town, Reegan and Mullins cycling together in front, Brennan behind because of the law prohibiting more than two to cycle abreast, Casey watching them cross the bridge from the window, a blue procession of three in the morning.

  The village was waking. The green mail car came: then the newsboy from the Dublin train, the cylinders of paper piled high on his carrier bicycle. A tractor with ploughs on its trailer went past at speed, and some carts. There was blasting in the council quarries: four muffled explosions sounded and the thud-thud of blown rocks falling. The screaming rise-and-fall of the saws came without ceasing from the woods across the lake. A riverboat went down towards the Shannon with the first load of the day.

  Willie had to go to the dayroom to discover if Casey wanted any messages done before school, and he was sent for twenty Gold Flake and The Express and Independent.

  Casey had a big fire down and the sunshine lit up the red and black inkstains between the ledgers on the table. The room was bare and clean, nothing but the table and yellow chairs, the stripped iron bed in against the wall of the lockup, old records in filing clips on the walls, piles of ledgers on the green shelf up over the bed, the phone and rainfall chart on the wall close to the green mantelpiece. He kept the boy talking about football when he returned till Sheila came knocking that it was time for school. He then put on his greatcoat and went out to the rain-gauge in the garden to try to measure th
e few drops of moisture that had collected in the bottle since the morning before and entered his findings on the chart beside the phone immediately he got back. It was cold in spite of the sun and he shivered and rubbed his hands together when he’d hung the coat on the rack. He pulled one of the chairs up to the blazing fire, settled down the cushion that he always brought with him on these b.o. days, and sat into it with a sigh of comfort—to read the newspapers from cover to cover.

  When the children had gone and she had washed and swept and dusted, Elizabeth sat with a book in the big armchair by the fire to grasp at an interval of pure rest. Such a quietness had come into the house that she felt she could touch it with her hands. There was no stir from the dayroom, where Casey was sunk in the newspapers; the noise of the occasional traffic on the roads, the constant sawing from the woods came and were lost in the quietness she felt about her. The whiteness was burning rapidly off the fields outside, brilliant and glittering on the short grass as it vanished; and the daffodils that yesterday she had arranged in the white vase on the sill were a wonder of yellowness in the sunshine, the heads massed together above the cold green stems disappearing into the mouth of the vase. In the silence the clock beside the statue of St Therese on the sideboard beat like a living thing. This’d be the only time of the day she might get some grip and vision on the desperate activity of her life. She was Elizabeth Reegan: a woman in her forties: sitting in a chair with a book from the council library in her hand that she hadn’t opened: watching certain things like the sewing-machine and the vase of daffodils and a circle still white with frost under the shade of the sycamore tree between the house and the river: alive in this barrack kitchen, with Casey down in the dayroom: with a little time to herself before she’d have to get another meal ready: with a life on her hands that was losing the last vestiges of its purpose and meaning: with hard cysts within her breast she feared were cancer.… In spite of her effort to stay calm she rose in a panic. She looked at the mantelpiece and clotheshorse and sideboard and doors and windows. She was alone in this great barrack kitchen. She could scream and it’d only bring Casey hurrying up to see what had happened: and all she could tell him was that nothing had happened, nothing at all, she had only become frightened, frightened of nothing. Reegan was at court, the children were at school, she was in the kitchen, and did all these things mean anything?

  She had believed she could live for days in happiness here in the small acts of love, she needing them, and they in need of her. She’d more than enough of London that time, no desire left for anything there, no place she wanted to go to after she’d finish in the theatre or wards, the people she wanted to talk to grown fewer and fewer, her work repetitive and menial and boring—and had she married Reegan because she had been simply sick of living at the time and forced to create some illusion of happiness about him so that she might be able to go on? She’d no child of her own now. She’d achieved no intimacy with Reegan. He was growing more and more restless. He, too, was sick, sick of authority and the police, sick of obeying orders, threatening to break up this life of theirs in the barracks, but did it matter so much now? Did it matter where they went, whether one thing happened more than another? It seemed to matter less and less. An hour ago she’d been on the brink of collapse and if she finally collapsed did anything matter?

  She should never have sat down, she told herself: she should have kept on her feet, working, her mind fixed on the small jobs she could master. A simple trap this half-hour of peace and quiet was, she’d have had more peace if she’d kept busy to the point of physical breaking-strain. She couldn’t ever hope to get any ordered vision on her life. Things were changing, going out of her control, grinding remorselessly forward with every passing moment.

  As she stood hopelessly there she saw Mrs Casey come through the old stone archway that was covered with ivy and cotoneaster, the incredibly shiny leaves still on the crawling branches, the last of the scarlet berries devoured in the December snows. The woman coming was in her late twenties, tall and pale, her flaxen hair drawn straight back in a bun, wearing spectacles with fine gold rims. She turned in towards the dayroom and Elizabeth heard the door open and shut and her voice in conversation with Casey’s. She’d have her with her for most of the morning, she knew. She must surely be twenty years younger than Casey and it wasn’t easy for her in this small village. Mullins’s wife and Brennan’s never lost a chance to make her feel her childlessness, parading their own large families before her like manifestoes. They never tried this with Elizabeth: she was too detached; her age and years in London gave her position in their eyes; and with Reegan’s three children she hadn’t the appearance of either the leisure or money that could rouse their envy.

  The dayroom door opened and she came up the hallway as she always did—smoking.

  “They’re gone to court today, Elizabeth,” she greeted.

  “Ned is on his own today,” Elizabeth answered in the same manner.

  “Readin’ the papers. He’s talkin’ about comin’ up to you after the dinner to listen to some soccer match or other on the B.B.C.”

  She sat and threw the wasted cigarette into the fire, the cork tip stained with the crimson lipstick she wore. “Isn’t it strange you don’t smoke, Elizabeth? Nearly all doctors and nurses are heavy smokers,” she said as she lit another.

  “I used,” Elizabeth smiled in memory. “But never much, it was easy for me to give them up.”

  “We smoke forty a day—between us. It’s a constant expense, that’s the worst. We tried to give them up once for Lent, but it only lasted three days! There was nearly murder done.… They say that doctors and nurses smoke so much because it’s antiseptic or something. It keeps away germs,” she ended the digression to return to her first theme as if it was obsessional.

  “I don’t know why, perhaps it does,” Elizabeth said, she found herself already bored. This conversation echoed a thousand others. When she first married Reegan she’d found the small world absorbing and beautiful: but it was no longer so—her initiation was over, her passion had spent itself, this world on which she’d used every charm to get accepted in was falling in ashes into her hands. She was shackled, a thieving animal held at last in this one field. She’d escaped out of London, she’d not escape out of this, she’d have to stand her ground here at last. She could scream, the desperation she’d experienced on her own coming back on this conversation.

  “Do you not feel well, Elizabeth?” the strained intensity of her features was noticed.

  “No,” she could have shouted but she drilled herself. “I’ve been feeling tired lately. I don’t think it’s much, probably just run down, but I’m going in to see the doctor tomorrow.”

  “It’s always better to be certain, you can’t afford to take chances nowadays,” she echoed Casey and asked, “Which of the doctors are you going to?”

  “Dr Ryan—just the police doctor.”

  “I always get Dr Malone, though Ned thinks there’s no one in the world like Dr Ryan.”

  “It won’t matter very much anyhow. It’ll probably be just another iron tonic,” Elizabeth tried to close the conversation.

  “I’ll say a prayer anyhow!”

  “That’s nice,” she smiled in gratitude.

  A wave of feeling, pity or compassion, crossed her for the other woman, but then she was looking upon her as an inferior. And what had she herself to feel superior about, she asked; were not both of them in the same squalid fix? And was somebody’s unawareness of the horror about them a reason to seethe with pity for them? Were they not far and far better off? Now a hatred was mastering everything and when she was asked, “Were you at first Mass last Sunday?” she knew she couldn’t stand much more.

  She nodded. She was at first Mass every Sunday, there were meals to get ready when Second was on.

  “Did you see the three Murphys at the rails?” she continued. “They must have got early holidays from the Civil Service. They were all very clever, weren’t they! They passed
the exams.

  “I think Mary has failed. Irene is the prettiest now. She was dressed in all lavender, and it says in Woman that it’s the latest fashion in Paris now.”

  Elizabeth hadn’t noticed them particularly. She used to love watching the young girls home from the city parade to Communion, especially at Easter, when many came; it used excite her envy and curiosity, so much so that when she’d come from Mass she’d always want to talk about them to Reegan; it’d give her back the time when she too was one of them, but he’d never care to listen. Nothing, she knew, can exist in the social days of people without attention, her excitement would be gone before the breakfast was over.

  How often was she aware of being present at Mass now! The murmuring of prayers, the rising and standing and kneeling and sitting down, the smells of incense and wet raincoats and candles burning would set a sleepy rhythm going through her blood and drift her into the sickly limbo of her own dreams.

  “Do you think it’s right that Irene’s the prettiest now?” Mrs Casey was pressing.

  Elizabeth agreed desperately and got up. She put on the kettle, taking automatic part in the conversation as she waited for it to boil. She made tea and put three cups and some bread on the table.

  “We better call up Ned,” she invited.

  “So many will be too much trouble!”

  “One more! What difference will it make? It’d better to have twenty if it’d save us the trouble of worrying about it.”

  Mrs Casey called from the door, and when he came out of the dayroom she said flirtatiously, “You’re wanted up here.”

  “It seems I’m a wanted man so,” he punned as he came. “It’s as bad as being in Fogra Tora.”

  He saw three cups on the table, the plate of buttered bread.

  “You’re great, Elizabeth,” he praised, “but you shouldn’t have gone to that trouble.”

  “You’re an important man today,” she kept up the game, smiling at why on earth these elaborate acceptances had always to arise in Ireland; in the London she had known the offer would be simply accepted at once or refused.