The Barracks

by John McGahern

  She laid the table for Reegan and hoped they wouldn’t stay late drinking. Reegan seldom did: it gave him no release, only made him more silent and dissatisfied as he listened. It was worse if he talked, for he’d dominate, and was not wanted then. He would not stay but it was so easy to get caught in a drinking bout after the courts: he couldn’t very well come home without Mullins and Brennan, because of the nuisance their wives would make.

  The banging of the outside door and excited talk down in the dayroom eventually told her they were home. She hadn’t long to listen for Reegan’s feet in the hallway: she saw the children stiffen, they could tell by his step how the day had gone. She saw them turn to gaze at her with meaning quiet —as she had partly sensed herself, it hadn’t gone well.

  He said nothing when he came and they knew him too well to speak. He took gloves out of his greatcoat pocket with the quarter of Silver Mints he always brought and left them on the sewing-machine and hung his coat on the back of the door.

  “There’s some sweets there for you,” he told them distantly; if he was in high humour he’d shout and ask them what they’d learned in school and throw sweets in the air to watch them scramble. Now he sat at the table and waited for his meal. The three children went without noise or rush to the sewing-machine and Willie divided them, two by two by two, into three little heaps, and they brought their share cupped in their hands to Elizabeth. She took a sweet from each and they went to their father, it was a kind of ceremony. He tried to be pleasant as he accepted their offering, and left the three sweets he took beside his arm at the table-cloth.

  None of the others had yet gone home. Their excited voices came from the dayroom, discussing the day with Casey: who won and who lost, Judge O’Donovan’s witticisms, the blunders, the personal animosities of the lawyers; sometimes going for the law books on the shelf to argue the decisions.

  Elizabeth put a boiled egg before Reegan and poured out tea. He said, “Thanks,” quietly and drew it to himself. “You had a long day,” she said.

  “The big case didn’t come up till three. Hangin’ around all day with our two hands as long as each other.”

  “Where did you get your lunch?”

  “In the Bridge Café.”

  It was by the river, with a green front, and served substantial meals cheaply.

  “How did the case go?” she was uneasy asking. He was in bad form, she could tell; he might resent her asking as petty curiosity; but surely he hadn’t forgotten to call at the doctor’s! He’d said nothing yet.

  “A fine and a suspended sentence for dangerous driving. The drunken driving charge was squashed. He had a good solicitor, a good background, a good position, a university education.… What more could you ask?” he smiled with sardonic humour.

  She saw the old sense of failure and frustration eating but she’d come to fear it hardly at all, or care. Her own life had grown as desperate.

  “It’s the way of the world,” she said.

  “It’s the way surely,” he laughed harshly, though coming out more, not trying to hold it all back within himself.

  She watched him with tenderness. He was a strange person, she knew hardly anything about him, beyond the mere physical acts of intimacy. There had never been any real understanding between them: but was there ever such between people? He’d have none of the big questions: What do you think of life or the relationships between people or any of the other things that have no real answers? He trusted all that to the priests as he trusted a sick body to the doctors and kept whatever observances were laid down as long as they didn’t clash with his own passions.

  Yet, it had survived far better than the deepest relationship of her adult life, though she had still Michael Halliday’s letters locked in the wooden trunk in their bedroom and some of the books he’d given her. He’d been a doctor with her in the London Hospital and he changed her whole life. She’d listened to him for so many hours in the long London evenings that were lovely now in the memory; read the books he gave her; went with him to films and plays and concerts; and most of all he made her suffer, he put her through the frightful mill of love.

  She saw the streaks of grey in Reegan’s still blond hair, the images of grey and gold bringing the memory of a party, the twenty-first birthday party of a nurse from the hospital. She’d been invited by the girl and had brought Halliday. Though she hadn’t known then the relationship was already well on its way to failure.

  The girl’s father, a clerk all his life in some tea company in Aldgate, rose late in the night to sing drunkenly to his wife:

  Darling, I am growing old.

  Silver threads among the gold

  Shine upon thy brow today,

  Life is fading fast away,

  Yet my darling you will be

  Always young and fair to me.…

  The night was almost over. The chorus was taken up, tears smiling in many eyes, and it was then Halliday tried to shout in some drunken obscenity. Everybody there was drunk or tipsy; it didn’t attract much attention, and she’d managed to stop him and get him home.

  The next evening he apologized to her in a way.

  “I’m sorry, dear Elizabeth,” he said, “but if I was sufficiently drunk again and you not there I’d do it again.”

  “Why?” she asked. “What harm was it? Wasn’t it a human thing enough to want to do?”

  “You mean it’s a universal emotion, as the professors put it, is that it, Elizabeth?” he asked maliciously.

  She had not known then. She’d been confronted for the first time with a strange language and its mockery and she could only smile and wait.

  “Everybody’s full of that kind of thing,” he said bitterly, “but it’s not the truth. It rots your guts that way. You need real style to get away with something like that. And that old bastard after having bored and distracted that unfortunate woman for thirty years to get up as drunk as bejesus on his hind legs isn’t my idea of style. It’s an invitation to sink with him into his own swamp of a life. That’s the kind of thing that kicks in your face on Friday and leads the choir at your funeral service Saturday morning.”

  She’d said nothing. There was nothing she could say. Mostly she was dominated by Halliday and content to listen.

  She little thought then that she’d be as she was now: married in a barrack kitchen, watching the grey in another man’s hair. It all came round if you could manage to survive long enough. Reegan was growing old, and so was she. There was nothing said or given or fulfilled in her life. He was eating his meal, unaware of her; he hadn’t bothered or remembered about the doctor; he’d brought her nothing home, not even something as unimaginative and cheap as the bag of sweets he brought the children.

  “Did you see the Superintendent?” she asked to avoid thinking her way into another depression.

  “Aye,” he admitted.

  “Did things go any way well?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Very little at all happened so,” she yielded with such tired frustration that he looked. Her head was lowered over a shirt of Willie’s. The needle shone as it was driven in and out of the cream stuff with mechanical precision.

  He’d always felt her hostile to his private feud with Quirke, not that she ever reproached him openly, but he’d glimpsed it in stray words and silences. Once he had spoken about applying for a transfer and she had argued against it for the children’s sake, “Whatever life they’ve built up here for themselves will be broken down if we move. There’ll be new teachers, new friends.…”

  He had just nodded and gone away and said nothing. So for the children’s sake he was supposed to make a monkey out of his own life, he thought. No man had more than one life, the children would have to take their chance as he had to take his, he wasn’t going to give it up for anybody’s or anything’s sake; but he’d decided that he didn’t want a transfer then—it would be little better than changing one hairshirt for another. In plain clothes he’d leave when he left, it would be in nobod
y’s uniform, and at his own choosing. He’d go about it in his own way, without reference to anybody. So he kept his mouth shut about his feelings and plans and frustrations, only confiding when the pressures became too great inside and another human being seemed possessed of more understanding than a bedroom wall.

  Tonight he sensed that she had somehow changed: she’d oppose nothing and he wondered if it was possible that she might really want him to speak out. He saw her sewing away, and he laughed, a dry breaking laugh—she’d have her way.

  “No. Nothing happened,” he said. “Except what happened the last time and the time before and the time before that again.

  “‘My Lord, it was a thoughtless act of the moment that this young man will suffer in his conscience for the remainder of his life,’” he began to parody but grew too bored or angry to continue.

  “Such bullshit—and it never stops! It has no end. You should have heard O’Donovan’s wisecracks today. He surpassed himself. He didn’t miss one chance.”

  O’Donovan was the judge, waspish and one side of his face disfigured with a livid birthmark, never comfortable except in the display of his own wit, a composition of stabbing little references and allegories delivered with pompous sarcasm that played on small disadvantages; a kind of beating down that was surely meant to compensate for some private failure. Reegan had tasted the sting himself more than once.

  “Two labourers home from England were up for drunken brawling and he said”—here Reegan began to mimic the cocksure tones of O’Donovan—“Labourers home from England who behave between jobs like film stars between pictures can’t expect to get the same kind of admiring treatment.’

  “Apparently some of the Hollywood stars were up for brawling in Los Angeles last week: which was supposed to give the whole point to the joke,” Reegan explained. “And you should have heard them laughin’ and the sound of it. Such a performance all day! If someone let off an honest shout of laughin’ at any time you’d be able to hear a pin drop in that court. He’d never be forgiven! It reminded me at every turn of the school we went to and old Jockser Keenan—he fancied himself as an entertainer and we used to have to laugh for our lives all day.”

  “They’re only men and not perfect,” Elizabeth pleaded out of mere curiosity and not to seem too silent. Her voice carried no conviction. It sounded the platitude it was and no one could take it as opposition.

  “That’s right,” he shouted. “You’d have some search for a saint in that crew, there’s no mistake! But when I’m expected to dance to the tune, that’s the trouble! What the hell do I get out of dancin’ up?

  “Nothing would do Quirke only come and talk to me. I got an hour of enforcin’ the law, and rules and regulations and Acts of Parliament. He asked me did I read the article in this month’s Review on The Road Traffic Act. What in-the-name-of-Jesus interest have I in The Road Traffic Act as me pay comes? And I’m sure I was supposed to play the game and say: ‘I looked quickly through it, sir, when it came but I must have missed the article somehow. I’d have read anything as interestin’ as that. I must look for it the very minute I go home. I’m terrible grateful to you for remindin’ me about it, sir.’ Jesus, it’s so ridiculous,” he swore.

  “Then he asked me didn’t I think O’Donovan had a great sense of humour. You should have seen him watch me face to try to see what I meant when I said, ‘Yes, sir. He has a very fine sense of humour. He’d be able to make his livin’ in a circus, sir!’ ‘Yes, Reegan. A circus!’ he said and you should have heard his accent. ‘Yes, Reegan, a circus!’ He was afraid somebody had seen through him, but he’ll get on, make no mistake! He led the laughin’ every time O’Donovan cracked out. It’s the system of arselickin’: whoever’s on the bottom rung of the ladder must lick the arse above him till the last arse at the top is safely licked; they lick the arse above them and to keep their minds easy the buggers below must keep on lickin’ theirs. The poor bastard at the bottom has always the worst end of the stick! It’s in the natural order of things then, as Quirke would put it.”

  He spoke with vicious reasonableness but he could not keep it up. It bit too near the bone.

  “I’m sick of it,” he burst out. “Sick of saying:

  ‘Yes, sir!

  ‘No, sir!

  ‘It looks so, sir.

  ‘What do you think, sir?

  ‘I think it might be the best way to do that, sir.’ As I grow older I get sicker and sicker,” he said with heat and pain. “I can’t take much more of it, that’s certain! I don’t want to come just because some one else wants me, and have to go away when he doesn’t; I want to come when I want to myself and go away for the same reason. Why should another bastard shove me about? I don’t want to push anybody. But I’ll not be pushed much longer and Jesus, I’m tellin’ you that!”

  Elizabeth was silent. She suspected that he’d be soon ashamed of having spoken at all, that was always the way with him, and she’d never heard him say so much before or so openly. Life for her these days happened much the same everywhere, she’d not enough illusions left, it had to be endured like a plague or transformed by acceptance but she said nothing. She went on sewing.

  He sat silent at the table, his hands moving about his forehead and jaws with nervous excitement, until she asked cleverly, “Did Mullins come?”

  “You can hear him down below,” he said, glad of the escape route. “We had just the round, three drinks, and he came away with us. It’s too near the first of the month for a spree.”

  He laughed. He was easier.

  The talk of town and court, their father echoing the world that they would one day climb to out of the servitude of their childhood captured the three children; but eventually the anger and frustration became too wearing. They went to steal outside in this first lull. It was the last hour of daylight.

  “Just to put water on the slide,” they explained, when they were noticed going. “It’s going to freeze heavy tonight.”

  “Mind you don’t put it where someone will fall.”

  “It’s on the river path. Nobody’ll be walkin’ there till the summer.”

  “Put coats on yourselves,” Reegan at last took it into his head to play the part of father, “and no splashin’ about of water. It’s no time of the year yet for a wettin’.”

  A lovely blue dusk was on the water, a vapour of moon that’d climb to yellow light as the night came was already high. The sun had gone down to the rim of the hills they could not see beyond the woods, the spaces between the treetops burning with red light.

  The sawmill came to a stop, then the stonecrusher in the quarries. Men called to each other and their voices came with haunting clarity across the frozen countryside. A bucket rattled where a woman was feeding calves in some yard. Groups of men from the quarries crossed the bridge on bicycles, their faces pale with the powdered limestone, the army haversacks that carried their sandwiches and bottles of tea wrapped in woollen socks slung from their shoulders. Tractors were ploughing in the distance, using their headlamps now; and the carts came crunching home on the road, the men’s faces white with dust, talking to their horses.

  The children slid till they were warm and when they tired scattered buckets of water on the path and smoothed out bumps with an old shovel.

  Elizabeth and Reegan were silent together within. She put aside the sewing as the light went. Then when she thought it was all too terrible and hopeless, that he’d gone to brood again over the court day, he asked with tenderness, “Are you feelin’ anything better this evenin’, my girl?”

  He turned her face gently with his hands till their eyes met.

  “Are you feelin’ tired?” he asked.

  She felt she could have no other wish but to fall into his arms and give way to starved emotions. And, still, she could not do that, it would be in no ways fair, neither to him nor to herself. Even if there was no such thing as control or private order, it was better to try to have a semblance, so that they might stay in some measure free, and not
be all gathered into a total nothingness. She couldn’t let herself fall into his arms, it’d obscure everything, it would be as if nothing had ever begun or happened.

  “I feel full of pity for myself,” she smiled. “I feel as tired as if the whole weight of the world was on my shoulders.”

  Once she’d admitted and mocked it the need to weep was gone, as if she’d mastered it by managing to stand upright in the admittance; but a part of her felt utterly cheated as they both smiled together.

  “That’s always the way when you’re in the dumps,” he said. “But there’ll be no loss, you’ll be all right.”

  “You saw the doctor?” she asked.

  “Yes. I didn’t want to tell you with the children there.”

  “What time did he say?”

  “Ten to twelve are his surgery hours. They would be almost certain. But would it not be better to get him out? It’s a long auld cycle. And I’ve only to go down to the phone to get him out.”

  “No—I’ll go in the morning.”

  “If you’re sure you want to,” he conceded. “Will one of the girls stop from school?”

  “No. Teresa Casey will be down later and I’ll ask her to stop. She hasn’t much to do and she feels she has to pay us back for Una going up nights. She has no way but those foolish presents. She’ll be delighted and Ned can take his meals here till I come.”

  He disliked having such intimacy with anybody, but he agreed, he didn’t really care enough not to let her have her way.

  “We better call the children and have the rosary over early for once. It gets harder to kneel down the later it gets. It was a long day,” he said quietly.