The Barracks (2 page)

She blushed hot at the flattery. He seemed so handsome to her in his blue uniform. He came to the door to see her out. She saw him watch from the barrack window as she cycled out the short avenue and turned left up the village.

The desire for such a day could drag one out of a sickness, it was so true to the middle of the summer. She felt so full of longing and happiness that she crossed from the shop to the chapel when she'd got the groceries for the house. The eternal medals and rosary beads were waiting on the spikes of the gate for whoever had lost them; the evergreens did not even sway in their sleep in the churchyard, where bees droned between the graves from dandelion to white clover; and the laurelled path between the brown flagstones looked so worn smooth that she felt she was walking on them again with her bare feet of school confession evenings through the summer holidays.

The midday glare was dimmed within, the church as cool as the stone touch of its holy water font, but she could get herself to say no formal prayer, all her habits and acceptances lost in an impassioned tumult of remembering.

A cart was rocking past on the road when she came out, its driver sunk deep in the hay on top of the load, a straw hat pulled down over his face. The way his body rolled to every rock and sway of the cart he could have been asleep in the sunshine. The reins hung slack. A cloud of flies
swarmed about the mare's head and her black coat was stained with sweat all along the lines of the harness, but they rolled on as if they had eternity for their journey.

Whether he was ashamed or not to pass the shops so sleepily in the broad middle of the day, he started awake at the chapel gate and noticed Elizabeth.

“Powerful weather we're havin',” he shouted down, and it came to her as a prayer of praise, she never had such longing to live for ever.

She was helping her mother and brother on their small farm then, and they had opposed her marriage to Reegan from the beginning.

“There's three childer and his wife is barely cauld in the grave, remember. That's no aisy house to be walkin' into! An' what'll the neighbours say about it? Himself can be no angel neither, not if quarter of the accounts be true,” her brother had said one autumn night in the kitchen while their mother stirred the coals on the hearth and supported him by her half-silence.

“Take heed to what he says! Marryin' isn't something, believe me, that can be jumped into today and outa tomorrow. It's wan bed you have to sleep on whether it's hard or soft, wance you make it. An' remember, as he tauld you, it's no aisy house to be walkin' into, but I'm sayin' nothin'. It's for your God above to direct you!”

Elizabeth knew it would suit them if she stayed, stayed to nurse her mother as she crippled, the mother who had seemed so old when she died three months ago that not even her children had wept at the funeral, she meant as little as a flower that has withered in a vase behind curtains through the winter when it's discovered and lifted out on a day in spring.

And it would have suited her brother who'd never marry if she had to stop and keep house for him, but she did not stop. She married Reegan. She was determined to grasp at a life of her own desiring, no longer content to drag through with her repetitive days, neither happy nor unhappy, merely passing them in the wearying spirit of service; and the more
the calls of duty tried to tie her down to this life the more intolerably burdensome it became.

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.