The Barracks

by John McGahern

  “To hospital,” she murmured in dejected acceptance.

  “Were you ever there before?”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “For twenty years.”

  “You were a nurse before you married?” he started. “It was careless. I should have known. You should have told me.”

  The professional manner cracked a little, he had blundered, “Where?”

  “In London mostly.”

  “Why, that’s where I practised first. What part?”

  It was a common pattern: a few years abroad to gather enough money to start his own practice at home. He had disliked it: it was no place to bring up children, you never belonged, you were always Irish. “With the National Health a doctor’s no more than a glorified clerk there and not half as well paid,” he complained.

  This slight accident of identification brought them closer but other patients were waiting.

  “Is there any place you’d like to go?”

  “No. Wherever you recommend.”

  “The County Hospital. Surgeon O’Hara there is quite good. If there’s anything serious, which I’m almost certain there won’t be, you’ll be sent to Dublin. So you’ve nothing at all to worry about for the present. I’ll ring Surgeon O’Hara immediately I see the last of the patients. It’s better always not to waste any time. And I’ll ring you at the barracks. I expect they’ll find you a bed almost immediately.”

  She knew by his hand on her arm that the examination was over, that it was time for her to rise and go.

  “How are you getting home?” he asked at the surgery door.

  “A bicycle,” she said. She felt a patient now, no longer free, having to live to instructions.

  “If you’d wait I could leave you out on my way to the dispensary. I’d have contacted Surgeon O’Hara before then too.”

  “I’d rather shop and cycle,” she said.

  “You’re running a temperature, you know. And then,” he pondered and said: “I suppose it’ll be all right,” like a schoolmaster granting a concession.

  “And the fee,” she said.

  “No. There’s no hurry. We’ll see about it later. It’s all right.”

  “You’ll not ring before I get home?” she asked.

  “No. When I get back from the dispensary.… Would seven suit? My wife will ring the information if I have to be out.”

  “That would be lovely,” she said. She had all that length of private time.

  “They say we make poor patients. That we know too much and let our imaginations run riot,” he flattered with unconscious snobbery. “But I say that knowledge helps you to face up to the situation. It stands to reason that it must.”

  She smiled and nodded flattering approval. She had seen doctors and nurses ill and getting well again and dying as she had seen people from every other way of making a living getting well and dying too; and it made small difference. No one was very privileged in that position. Money and a blind faith in God were the most use but there came a point when pain obliterated the comfort of private rooms and special care as it did faith and hope. The young and old, the ugly and the beautiful, the failures and the successes took on such a resemblance to each other in physical suffering that it seemed to light a kind of truth. If anything made a difference it was the individual man and woman and that not very much. No one was good company sick. No one died well or got better well, they did it day by desperate day, and none of them wanted to do it alone, and it was no more strange than the fact that none of them had wanted to live alone. Doctors and nurses found they’d learned very little about suffering from the practice of their profession when it came to their own turn and she knew that neither she nor he were likely to be exceptions.

  “At seven so,” she heard him say.

  “At seven,” she nodded.

  She was on the steps in the March sunlight, between the black railings, wondering if she still had her handbag, the door with the brass plate closing behind her. Not until seven would he ring. She had that much time. She came down the stone steps to the footpath, stood a moment at the corner of the railings and then she found herself walking desperate down Main Street. In flashes her mind brought her to stops. Where did Main Street lead to but to Bridge Street and Bridge Street led to St Patrick’s Terrace or the Dublin Road and where in the name of Jesus did they lead but to other streets and roads and towns and countries? What could she do? Where could she go? She wanted to cry out in the street. She could face nothing.

  And then her feet took over, carrying her forward, jostling her against the shoppers; the mindless ease and constancy of their rhythm seeping into her blood with its illusion of habitual order, wore down her strength till it reduced her to a longing for a chair, and she went into a café at the Bridge and ordered coffee and cakes.

  There was no use in worrying, she tried to tell herself as she sipped the wonderfully scalding coffee, there might be nothing the matter yet, the doctor had said that nothing’d be known till after the hospital examination. It had been inevitable that she’d have to go away to hospital from the beginning, that was why she’d put it off so long, but she could not reason. It involved her life in its death and the wave of terror came again.

  What was her life? Was she ready to cry halt and leave? Had it achieved anything or been given any meaning? She was no more ready to die now than she had been twenty years ago. There was the after-life, hell and heaven and purgatory between, Jesus Christ on the right hand of God, but her childhood and adolescence over they had never lived as flesh in her mind, except when she dreamed. She had naïvely trusted that she’d be given some sign or confirmation before the end, or that she’d discover something, something she knew not what, some miracle of revelation perhaps, but she had been given nothing and had discovered nothing. She was as blind as she had ever been. She hadn’t even started to be ready and she felt she had to try and grip the table or something, for it was absolutely inconceivable that she could die. What was it all about? Where was she going? What was she doing? What was it all about?

  And then a single voice of memory broke across her agitation and she grew calm to listen. “What the hell is all this living and dying about anyway, Elizabeth? That’s what I’d like to be told,” Michael Halliday would beat out at a certain stage of drunkenness, especially in the months before the car crash on the Leytonstone Road that ended his life, when the affair between them had already failed. She had loved him. She had hung upon his words but they had different meaning then, she had seen them as the end of love, she was seeing them now with her own life.

  Names came. The London Hospital Tavern, The Star and Garter, The Blind Beggar in Whitechapel Road; the prettier pubs of the city with always the vases of red and yellow on the counter, their names like The Load of Hay enough to remember.

  Halliday had fine black hair that took a sheen when brushed, brown eyes, and thick dark brows, hands that had never to toughen themselves to toil; the grain of his throat was coarse and with his pale skin she liked him best in blue.

  In this café by the river images crowded every other source of life out of her mind. Her senses were shut. Her awareness of the café, the river coming white and broken between dark rocks in the arches beyond the side-windows, the shopping street shifting backwards and forwards outside the glass door were greyed away. She was in London, with Halliday, the enriched and indestructible days about her, “What the hell is all this living and dying about anyway, Elizabeth? That’s what I’d like to know,” removed to the fixity of death and memory and coming now like a quality of laughter.

  She’d known him for months on the wards and in the theatre before he had asked her out. It wasn’t easy for her to accept, though she had always liked him. He was a doctor, would probably be yet a surgeon: she was an Irish nurse, trained because it had seemed better than barmaid or skivvy, suffering every week, “So you’re Irish, are you!” in the tone that it’s a miracle you seem civilized. Going out with Halliday would cause the other nurses to hate her: she’d be grasp
ing above her station; and he was an odd bird in the hospital, a bit mysterious and apart, belonging to no set, but known as a drinker, not much liked, the herd instinct immediately smelling an outsider, and he was to blame himself, for he went to no trouble to pay it the lip service with which it is often satisfied. But Elizabeth went out with him. She didn’t care what they said or thought, she’d been already coming into herself. She was less and less awed by the conversations and people and things that had dominated her earlier life. She was already reading, getting books out of the little public library beside Aldgate East Station, beginning to see her life in its passage, it’d end and never repeat itself, and she felt it unique and all the days precious. If she lived the life other people lived, looked on it the way they looked, she’d have no life of her own. She did not want an ensured imitation of other people’s lives any more, she wanted her own, and with the wild greed of youth. Safe examples that had gone before were no use—her mother and father and the nurses about her—she could break her way out of the whole set-up. The impossible became turned by fierce desire into the possible, the whole world beginning again as it always has to do when a single human being discovers his or her uniqueness, everything becoming strange and vital and wondrous in this the only moment of real innocence, when after having slept for ever in the habits of other lives, suddenly, one morning, the first morning of the world, she had woken up to herself.

  She had loved Halliday and had counted no cost. She could feel again her excitement bringing him back the first real books she’d been ever given and crying, “But they’re real! They’re not stories even. They’re about my life.”

  “No, dear Elizabeth. Not exactly,” he laughed, but sharing her wild delight. “You feel and see them with your own life, so much that it becomes real as your own, but it’s not yours. It’s somebody else’s, Elizabeth. All real lives are profoundly different and profoundly the same. Sweet Jesus, Elizabeth, profoundly is an awful balls of a word, isn’t it? But there’s very few either real books or people. They’re few and far between,” he ended savagely.

  “They’re the same and different?” she asked.

  He laughed and began to explain. They’d talk and argue the long evening. He had changed her whole life, it was as if he’d put windows there, so that she could see out on her own world.

  The richness and happiness of that summer and early autumn! People woke and laughed when she came about, sensing the life and rejoicing within her. When she was leg-weary in the sweating wards she had only to say, “Isn’t it marvellous that I’ll be meeting Michael at seven and all this will be as far away as Asia?” to be renewed.

  The excitement of seeing him waiting in the distance, reading an evening newspaper, or if she had arrived the first the throbbing of her heart when only a few minutes passed. The concerts, the theatres, the first restaurants she had ever been in with wine and waiters and the menus in the French she did not know, where eating became a marvellous ceremony, and how Halliday would laugh when he saw her pretending to read the card and saying, “I’ll have whatever you’re having, Michael,” and blushing as she put it down. The walks in the evenings in the great parks that London has, the greensward lovely between the huge plane trees, moving with crowds; and talking together or staying silent over their glasses in pubs with doors open so that the cool of the late summer evening came in.

  Three week-ends they spent.… But was there use, remembering can go on for ever. It changed, it came to nothing. Halliday changed, as quietly as a blue sky can turn to cloud. She suffered the agonies of fear and hope and suspicion and hurt vanity, becoming wildly jealous. She had thought there must be some other woman.

  “No, no, there’s nobody,” he protested.

  “But you’ve changed towards me?”

  “No. I love you, dearest Elizabeth. How could anything have changed?”

  It fell with such sweetness on her ears that she wanted to be blind and believe, but she knew in her heart he had changed. She couldn’t be content, though she wanted nothing else but this blind happiness.

  “No. That is not the truth. There must be someone else. I know it. Why do you want to fool me?”

  He looked at her. He wondered how much she suspected and knew.

  “No. No woman will believe that there’s not another woman, but there’s not! I tell you there isn’t, Elizabeth!”

  “There must be something. I know there must be something. You do not love me any more?” she pleaded, her lips shaking.

  He looked at her. He suffered whether to tell her or not. She was young and the most beautiful person he had ever met but he didn’t love her any more, and he wondered if he ever had.

  “You couldn’t understand. It’d be no use,” he blundered stupidly.

  “Do you think I’m too stupid?” she cried, her eyes brimming.

  “No, no, no!” He was distressed and harried. “I don’t think you’d believe it! You’re too beautiful.”

  “That you do not love me?”

  “That there’s nothing, simply nothing!”

  “How nothing? Why can’t you speak straight? Why must you always talk in riddles?”

  “That there’s nothing,” he almost shouted, goaded into passion. “That there is nothing and nobody in my stupid life. Nothing at all, absolutely nothing. Women have to believe in life, but some men are different.”

  Tears slipped down her cheeks. She couldn’t understand, it had no meaning. How could something stay alive on nothing? He was telling her that he loved her no more, that was all she understood. And she winced years later in the café in this small town at the memory of the flood of pain and desperation and total defeat that had come down about her. They had gone out for the evening, to a little Kensington bar, it had red carpets, blue plates and copper or brass goblets hung around the walls. They were sitting in wooden alcoves out from the farthest wall, their glasses on the bench between them. It could return with such shocking vividness.

  She had wanted to run away and couldn’t and only the public place kept her from breaking into a complete mess. She had asked hopelessly again, “You do not love me?” and his voice was definite, “No, no. I’m sorry, Elizabeth. It wouldn’t be fair to you, it’d only make it far worse in the end and to do this is harder for me than to go on.”

  She had nearly pleaded: to let it go on, to let it persist under any kind of illusion, anything that’d lighten this terrible nightmare. She tried to hold herself calm. She had wanted to shout or scream. She had turned the glass about and about on the bench.

  “You told me that you loved me,” she became calm enough to accuse though it seemed more part of insane musing than any accusation. “You told me that you loved me!”

  “I loved you. I could not have lived without you. In the weeks before I met you the thought of calling it all a cursed day followed me about like my own shadow. You’re the most beautiful person I ever got to know. You brought a kind of laughing into my life, I can’t even attempt to understand. I began to believe in everything again. I used to think about you all day and then it went and I started to sink back into my own shit again. I could do or feel nothing. Not even you had any meaning. I thought you might never notice it.”

  “And it is still the same?”

  “Yes.”

  He saw she was shocked and broken but the threads had become too involved with his own life and he couldn’t stop.

  “These last weeks have been nothing but torture—that I’d come to the end of my own tether and used you to get a short breather. That I used you so as not to have to face my own mess. That I seduced you because I was seduced myself by my own fucking lust.”

  Then he woke fully to its effect on her and he tried to jerk her back.

  “O, but you are beautiful, Elizabeth. None of this is your fault.…”

  Why couldn’t he have let her go on in her illusions? Everything was stripped down to the bone now and there was the pure nothingness that he’d spoken about. Nothing could ever stay alive, nothing
could go on living.

  He was dragging her to attention by pulling at her wrist. “Do you understand now that there’s no other woman?”

  She nodded. She was trying to get some grip on herself. She hadn’t given it all up as lost yet. She’d fight him.

  “There’s the books and music,” she ventured quietly, her voice betraying nothing of the hope she trusted to it, of the balance of fear and hope that tore her heart.

  “No, no, no,” he denied. “You woke that and it died too. I discovered what I was at twenty in your enthusiasm. When there’s no curiosity any more, when you’re seeing the world through other people’s eyes, deaf and dumb and blind yourself, no two worlds the least alike, what are books and music then? Nothing, nothing at all, an extension of the fraud, that’s all!”

  She was silent. Her heart sank in the acceptance of death. She started when she heard him ask, “Will you marry me, Elizabeth? Will you marry me now, Elizabeth?”

  “Are you trying to make a fool of me?” her vanity had been hurt to quick life.

  “No! How can you say that, Elizabeth? I mean will you marry me after what I told you? Will you, Elizabeth?”

  He was serious then; but how could she marry him? He had forced her to see further than marrying for a house and position and children. She had seen the happy solution of her whole world in love and mutual sympathy. She could give her share, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t, and it was quite as useless as if there was nothing on either side. He had destroyed her happiness. She’d never be able to believe even in a dream of happiness again.

  “No,” she shook her head. “It’d be impossible now.”

  “Is there no hope, no hope at all?”

  She shook her head, her eyes blind with tears.

  “Would you have married me if I hadn’t told you?” he was driven by egotistical curiosity to see what other road his life might have taken.