The Barracks Read online

  He went and she heard him call on the street, “The rosary! The rosary! The rosary!” and their shouts from the river path, “Coming, Daddy! Right! Coming, Daddy!”

  The night was with them at last, the flames of the fire glittered on glass and delf, the crib on the mantelpiece bathed in the ghastly blood-red of the Sacred Heart lamp. She should take and light the lamp but their faces would fall if it was lit when they came. She’d leave it till the rosary was over. She’d have less scrutiny to fear in the uncertain firelight as she prayed. She took down the white vase that kept their beads as their feet came.

  Tomorrow she’d see the doctor and she was frightened in spite of the tiredness and hopelessness. Everything might be already outside her control, nothing she could do would make the slightest difference. She could only wait there for it to happen, that was all. Whether she had cancer or not wasn’t her whole life a waiting, the end would arrive sooner or later, twenty extra years meant nothing to the dead, but no, no, no. She couldn’t face it. Time was only for the living. She wanted time, as much time as she could get, nothing was resolved yet or understood or put in order. She’d need years to gather the strewn bits of her life into the one Elizabeth. She did not know what way to turn, nothing seemed to depend on herself any more. She thought blindly since she could turn no way, the teeth of terror at her heart, “I will pray. I will pray that things will be well. I will pray that things will be well.”

  They were with her in the kitchen now. She handed the children the pale mother-of-pearl with silver crosses and took out her own brown beads of wood.

  Reegan got his beads from the little cloth purse he always carried in his watch pocket. He put a newspaper down on the cement and knelt with his elbows on the table, facing the dark mirror.

  They blessed themselves together and he began:

  “Thou, O Lord, will open my lips”,

  “And my tongue shall announce Thy praise,” they responded.

  The even, religious tones continued in their unvarying monotony. O Jesus, I must die! I know not where nor how. My happiness is as passing as my evenings and nights and days. I must travel the road of penance and prayer towards my Resurrection in Jesus Christ. It is my one joy and sweetness and hope, and if I will not believe in this Eternal Resurrection I must necessarily live within the gates of my own hell for ever.

  Reegan sang out the prayers as he sang them every evening of their lives and they were answered in chorus back, murmurs and patterns and repetitions that had never assumed light of meaning, as dark as the earth they walked, as habitual as their days.

  “We offer the holy rosary of this night for a special intention,” he dedicated before the Mysteries.

  He didn’t even pause, uttering the prayer in the same monotone as the prayers before and after, but it woke Elizabeth to immediate attention. Could it be possible that he was praying for her?

  She felt delusion of happiness run with such sweetness in her for a moment that she felt blessed; but then was it for her he was praying? She couldn’t know. She had no means of knowing. He wouldn’t tell and she could never ask.

  She felt the warm wood of the beads in her fingers. They were old and rather rare, she knew, and there was a relic of St Teresa of Avila enclosed in the carved crucifix. She’d been given them by a priest she had nursed in London. Someone had brought them from Spain and they were more than a hundred years old, she remembered he had told her once.

  3

  They rose into another white morning, cold as the other days of frost, all of them helping her much, knowing she had to go to the doctor. She had slept little through the night and now she worked in a flame of nervous energy that she’d have to pay for yet. The morning went in a flash: the children gone to school, the roll call over in the dayroom, Reegan gone out on patrol. She never felt it go, she couldn’t believe how it went so fast. She was dressed and Mrs Casey was smoothing down the back of her navy costume.

  “You look wonderful today,” she said, and it wasn’t all flattery, the colour high in the usually pale cheeks, the vein in the side of her temple swollen and the eyes bright with fever. She’d know in the next few hours what she had avoided for months: she’d be alive and facing into the summer she loved without mortal anxiety, or she’d have cancer. She put on her dark overcoat and gloves and as she was ready for leaving Mrs Brennan came, a determined little woman with wiry black hair and sharp features that must have been pretty in a cold way once, but whatever luxury of flesh had bloomed there was worn down to skin and hard bone by this. She had heard Elizabeth was going to town and wanted a bottle from the chemist’s for her youngest child. “Would you ever get it in Timlin’s?” she asked and handed over the prescription rolled about a hard pile of silver. Her bright blue eyes lusted with curiosity as she offered conventional hopes about the visit to the doctor, but she was told nothing, and then the talk swung with deadly fixity to doctors and diseases and women’s and children’s ailments till Elizabeth couldn’t escape quickly enough. She’d such a horror of the domestic talk of women that she felt she must be lacking somehow, she got frightened sometimes, it could make her feel shut in a world of mere functional bodies, and she broke away with ill-concealed haste to be gone. It was such relief to feel the frost on her face and see the wide skies. They came with her to the door and went inside as she cycled round the barracks. Mullins heard her tyres come on the gravel and was at the window as she passed.

  “Good luck, Elizabeth,” he waved, the chest bursting out of the blue tunic, and she waved back.

  “Old drunkard!” she smiled and was happy. She saw him close his fist and stiffen the arm as he waved for the last time: to have courage, and calling on God to stand up for all sorts of bastards. He’d have come into the kitchen to wish her luck if the women hadn’t been there.

  She could never see him without remembering how he had staggered in, one evening she was alone in the kitchen soon after being married. He had slumped down in the chair to wag a drunken finger and say, “Elizabeth, I can call you Elizabeth, can’t I? Can you answer me this,’ lizabeth? Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? That’s what you might call a question, Elizabeth! A professor told me that, one Saturday night before an All Ireland Final, in Mooney’s of Abbey Street, and he was drunk as I was! He was a powerful talker, could discourse on any subject under the sun! Did you ever see Mooney’s of Abbey Street, it’s a great place for meetin’ people, and it’s just opposite Wynn’s Hotel where all the priests up from the country stop. There’s nothin’ in the world I like better, Elizabeth, than a good conversation over a pint.”

  She’d given him a meal, she remembered. No one could refuse him who had any heart. Not even if he had abused a hundred responsibilities. He’d shaken with laughing as he ate and said over and over, “Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? That’s what you might call a question, isn’t it, Elizabeth? Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? It gives a man heart to hear something the like of that even once in his life!”

  She saw him at the window and waving and she overflowed with gratitude as she bumped out the rutted avenue with the line of sycamores inside the garden wall and turned across the bridge for the town.

  She had two miles of beaten dirt and stones, scattered by the traffic out of the potholes the council were always filling, till she reached the Dublin Road. Here the traffic began to pass and come against her incessantly. She hadn’t to go far till she found she’d set her strength at least its equal. Even as far back as Christmas she had found it tough going, the day she went with Reegan for the children’s Santa Claus and the fruit and spices and whiskey and things that would create their festival with the candles in all the windows of the houses Christmas Eve and the walk at night to the church ablaze with lights for midnight Mass.

  Her clothes grew clammy with sweat as she cycled, and she felt the journey come down on her more like a weight. There were great beech trees between ash and oak and chestnut alon
g the road and she started to count, numbering when the smooth white flesh showed out of the darker trunks in the distance, cycling past, her eyes already searching ahead for the next. There were five hills to go that she’d have to dismount under and walk. She turned and pushed and turned the pedals till they dwindled to four and three and two, with so many hills behind, till she was across the last; holding the handlebars as she free-wheeled down into the town, the solid block of the mountains beyond dominating the slate roofs and the treetops.

  It was twenty past eleven on the post office clock in Carrick Street and she left her bike against the wall there to walk to the doctor’s house at the other end of the town.

  She read on the brass plate: DR. J. RYAN, M.B., N.U.I. and climbed the steps between black railings to press the doorbell and was let in by a very made-up girl in her early twenties.

  “Mrs Reegan,” Elizabeth said.

  “Was the doctor expecting you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you come this way, please? He’s rather busy this morning but I do not think you’ll have long to wait. I shall tell him that you’ve come,” with the practised smile and bow and opening of the door.

  There were five women in the room, a youth, two children —all sitting round the big elliptical table with its vase of daffodils and quota of magazines.

  They watched her find the most deserted corner of the table like a half-dazed animal and she was in no condition to observe them read her belly for pregnancy, her face and greying hair for age, the cost of the dark coat and the bag she carried, the third finger of her left hand when she took off her gloves.

  Their curiosity soon exhausted itself. They did not know her. They were women from the poorer class of this ex-garrison town. The companies had gone, the windows smashed in the great stone barracks, but somehow their class remained—Browns and Gatebys and Rushfords and Boots and Woods—hanging idle about the streets; or temporary postmen or lorry helpers or hawkers of fish and newspapers—now that it was Britain’s peace-time! But they had been Monty’s Rats and in Normandy as their fathers had been at Mons and the Dardanelles. Already Friday Gateby’s account of Dunkirk had become the local classic of the whole war. “It was a very dangerous place,” he agreed, home for a few weeks’ leave after the collapse. “A very dangerous place surely!”

  With holy-water bottle and stole and speeches to the tune of Soldiers of Old Ireland are We, Wellington Parade became St Brigid’s Terrace in white paint on a green plaque, but they went on breeding more than their fair share of illegitimates and going and coming from the Ulster Rifles and Inniskilling Fusiliers as if nothing had ever happened.

  They continued with the conversation Elizabeth had interrupted. She listened quietly there, turning the pages of The Word that happened to lie at her hand till she was calm. When she raised her eyes she saw nothing on the faces that she hadn’t seen in Whitechapel and the evenings in her own barracks when the policemen gathered: the frightening impatience of the listening, holding back the dogs of their egos till they could unleash them to the sweet indulgence of their own unique complaint and wonder; the one or two who dominated and the ridden faces of the many who had learned to wait in the hope of getting a word of their own world in edgeways.

  The two children played across the back of a chair, admonished every now and then by their mother. Only the youth seemed apart, biting at his finger-nails, and turning the pages and pages in front of him without reading.

  She put some cooling scent on her hands and throat. She wasn’t thinking of anything and she began to look more carefully through the magazines. The receptionist called another name: a woman rose and left. An old man, who looked like an army pensioner, was admitted. Another woman was called. They had started to go quickly and it was coming close to her own turn.

  She might have been kneeling in the queue in front of the confessional and her turn to enter into the darkness behind the purple curtain coming closer and closer. You were sure you were ready and prepared and then you weren’t any more when you got close, less and less sure the closer you got. Doubts came, the hunger for more time, the fear of anything final—you could never bring all your sins into one moment of confession and pardon, you had lost them, they had escaped, they were being replaced by the new. The nerves began to gnaw at the stomach, whispering that you were inadequate, simply always inadequate. The penny candles guttered in the spikes of their shrine; the silver sanctuary lamp cast down its light of blood, great arum lilies glowed in the white evocation of death on the altar; reverential feet on the flagstones tolled through the coughing and the stillness.

  The wooden slide rattled shut across one grille, rattled open on the other. A woman’s voice, “Bless me father, for I have sinned,” and a tired priest’s, “Continue, my child.… Is there anything else troubling you now, my child?”

  The shutter shivered against the wall of the confession box, there was no one now between you and the heavy curtain, your hand groped to pull it aside. It drew you to its darkness like the attraction of death but you wanted to start preparing for it all over again, quite safe at the other end of the queue, going through the five little formulas you knew so well; or you wanted to rush outside and vomit or something between the evergreens and tombstones.

  She felt the strain of waiting the same as she moved closer to the moment when the receptionist would call her name. The images echoed no afterworld, there were no vistas of hell and heaven; but the mind and the heart and the stomach reacted as if they were all the one.

  Her whole being was on the door when it opened, the pretty made-up face of the receptionist, the calling, “Mrs Reegan now!”

  She moved to the door but had to retrace her steps in a fit of embarrassment for her handbag. At last she was standing on the black and white squares of the hall. The surgery door was open. Her name was quietly announced. The doctor rose from his desk to offer her his hand and a small modern armchair.

  She did everything ingratiatingly, her eyes full of fear. She watched him walk across the grey carpet to the windows.

  “Your husband was in yesterday,” he chatted, “and he thought he might persuade you to call me out, but you preferred the outing, I see! It takes you out of the house, doesn’t it, and it was a lovely morning for exercise. I don’t take half enough exercise myself these days. A car spoils one, you can’t post a letter without it in the finish, it gets such a grip on you. I see the other day where Eisenhower has taken to his bike: it’s probably some publicity stunt to get the Yanks out of their automobiles. They say they’re worried to death about the lack of exercise there. They’re afraid they’ll become a decadent race in the next generation, if they don’t learn to take more exercise.”

  He adjusted the pale Venetian blinds and returned to his chair at the desk. Then she recognized it all. He had noticed her fear when she came. He was putting her at her ease.

  “You didn’t mind the waiting?” he smiled as he sat down, pulling the chair sideways so as not to have to face her across the desk with inhibiting formality.

  “No. Not at all,” she answered.

  “You must have patience so. I simply loathe waiting m if.”

  “Does there be so much every morning?” she kept up.

  “Yes. Sometimes much more,” he smiled with pride and she smiled and nodded too. He took up a biro to amuse his hands. There was a world of professional kindness and availability in his voice as he asked, “Well, can I help you?”

  The priest would say, “Now tell me your sins, my child,” but this room was full of light and not the dark enclosure of the box. She was sitting in a modern armchair and not kneeling on bare boards. There was a walnut clock on the mantelpiece with the inscription, To Dr. and Mrs. James Ryan on their wedding from their friends at Mullingar G.C. and not the white Christ on a crucifix above the grille. It was her body’s sickness and not her soul’s she was confessing now but as always there was the irrational fear and shame. She could not know where to begin. She was tired and anaem
ic. There were secret cysts in her breast.

  “I’ve been feeling tired and run down,” she said. She paused. He smiled her on.

  “I thought it better to see you.”

  He nodded approval.

  “Do you think might there be any cause? Is there anything you suspect? No?”

  “There are some growing cysts in my right breast,” she said and it surprised her that it came out in mere words.

  She held his face in a scrutiny so passionate that it’d sift flickers into meanings. Nothing stirred there, neither eyes nor mouth, the hands played on with the biro. She saw seriousness, listening, readiness, understanding; but neither surprise nor alarm.

  “Have you been aware of them for long?” he asked.

  He did not even ask to see them yet. She pretended to count back.

  “Last November,” she diminished. “I felt as well as usual. Christmas was coming. There seemed so many things I had to do. It went on the long finger and slipped from day to day.”

  “Do not worry,” he said. “We all put things on the long finger, foolish as it may be! Is there any pain?”

  “No. Sometimes an awareness of something there, a discomfort, but not a pain.”

  “Can I see?” he asked at last.

  She unbuttoned the blue coat of the costume and then the lace blouse that rose squarely to the throat in the V of the coat, unhooked her brassière. She let him guide her to the couch against the wall and lay down there.

  There was the usual probing and asking of questions, “Here? There? Yes? Does it hurt?”

  The breasts that her own hands had touched, the breasts that men had desired to touch by instinct and to seek their own sensual dreams of her there, now these professional hands sought their objective knowledge of her for a living. She dressed. They sat again. It was his responsibility to speak or stay silent.

  “I don’t think you have a thing to worry about but,” and she knew the words that were coming, “from my examination I think it’d be better to send you for a hospital investigation, just to make certain.”