The Barracks

by John McGahern

  “I do not know,” she refused.

  “Only a fool tells everything,” he complained bitterly, beginning to be dogged by longing for what he had destroyed. “You can tell nothing. It takes a moron to believe he’ll ever find someone who’ll understand.”

  She couldn’t recall much of the next few weeks. They became swallowed up in a merciful and protective fog. She saw Halliday almost every evening. She didn’t know what’d become of her if she couldn’t see him. This terrifying need to see him took possession of her, she had to know that he was always available. She was helpless. She would be devoured by the need till she’d be able to find her own feet.

  Then she reacted to the lash of hurt vanity, and to recover herself out of the bondage of love. She was still in subjection to him, but she’d recover. She’d smash that subjection, she’d hate him, he was the cause of all her suffering; when she got completely free of him she’d never see him again. She’d be mistress then. And she steeled herself to do without him, destroying the need within herself with the poison of hate and resentment, but in the meantime she saw him constantly, his complete despair coming out in those evenings. He’d go to plays and concerts no more. The only place he could feel free was in pubs, and he was drinking heavily.

  “I came from what’s called a medical family,” he derided one evening. “So when my turn came I walked the long grey line too, ‘privileged to peer down microscopes for a number of years at all the bacteria in the human corpus,’ as a certain ass expressed it. I’d enough illusions myself then to sink a battleship, for never did such a wide-eyed ass arrive at any university! Alleviation of suffering, scientific advancement and all that kind of lark! The prize of the collection was to get a bedside seat at The Human Drama of Suffering, to live and work close to the brass tacks of life. You see I was a pessimistic bastard even then, a volume of Housman in my hip pocket! Soldier-to-the-war-returning and all that slush! Byjesus, I was never set for such a shocker, the whole drama is in your own fucking suffering, the other poor chaps are egomaniacs all! No desire to give you the inside story there, byjesus! Only bribe and blackmail you into taking their carcass as solemnly as they take it themselves! Sweet Jesus, Elizabeth, it’s too uproarious! Wouldn’t an M.Sf. be the degree of degrees, Elizabeth—Master of Suffering! Wouldn’t it go beautiful with a cap and gown? And, byjesus, what a record number of candidates you’d have the day the archangel G jollies all the old centuries up with that bugle of his,” he roared, his hands at his sides because they hurt.

  He didn’t care whether he shocked her or not. He had given up all hope of his life ever getting strength and purpose through her. No, no, no, he argued with himself; she’d not be always there in the evenings when he’d come home tired. She’d not be there to excite him with her dressing-up to go out to the parks and restaurants and theatres and shops and pubs. She’d not be there when a mad fit of sexual desire came, to blind it in the darkness of her womb before it grew to desperate sight enough to see his life moving in a hell of loneliness between a dark birth and as dark a death. Nor would he have her woman’s breathing by his side when he woke at night or have her to talk to when he needed someone; or be able to walk with her through the morning market, sharing the buying of eggs and bread and butter.

  He had dreamed of bringing her to the South he’d fallen in love with in the long holidays from the universities: Chalon on the way down, Lyons, Valence, Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Sete across the marshlands high above the Mediterranean; poplars and the road glowing white between the open vineyards, the cicadas beating and the earth and sky throbbing together in the noonday as you went on to Carcassonne to sit with a glass of wine in the evening at a sidewalk table and wonder how long more you could make your money last out. Even the naming of the towns brought fierce longing and he had dreamed then of bringing back a girl like Elizabeth with him to show her it all. And he hated this dream of happiness as only something can be hated that’s so deep within a person that it’s painful not to want.

  “Sweet Jesus, Halliday, it’s too much,” he would swear silently. “You want to bring a girl back with you to watch over your dead youth, no less, and all that kind of shit! To have her breathing by your side when you wake up in the nights! Jesus, Halliday, it’d do for a literary fucking medical man, praising the job for the experience it gave him of life. Sweet Jesus, Halliday, buck yourself up! You can’t go down into that fucking swamp!”

  So he set his face steadily on his real road, away from Elizabeth, and he would be tempted by dream of neither normality nor goodness nor any other social thing. He often wanted to hurt her now, but she was growing free. His drinking worsened into a steady gloom, he was seldom able to stand up by pub close; and, “What the hell is all this living and dying about anyway?” would come as a scream of frustration and hate at some time or other of those grisly evenings. Then came the car crash on the Leytonstone Road to solve nothing and everything: the inquest; his people’s invitation to Elizabeth to go to visit them, which she never accepted; and his burial in her own mind till the day she’d die.

  “What is all this living and dying about anyway?” came almost as flesh of her own thought at last in this small-town café, but it had been Halliday’s question in the beginning, it had never been hers alone. Even if she hadn’t cancer she was still growing old and it was more than time to face up to the last problems; but weren’t they so inevitable and obvious that they were better ignored? Were the real problems faced and solved or declared insoluble or were they not simply lived in the changes of her life? She could live her life through in its mystery, without any purpose, except to watch and bear witness. She did not care. She was alive and being was her ridiculous glory as well as her pain.

  The waitress came and took the cup and plate away and she knew it was time for her to pay and go. She had to leave Mrs Brennan’s prescription with the chemist and do her shopping. She was told the prescription would be made up in a half-hour and so as not to mix the little pile of cash that she unrolled out of the paper with her own money she asked if she could pay then. She had to smile as she handed it over—for it was exactly right.

  It did not take her long to do the shopping and she got no pleasure from wandering on her own between the windows. The tiredness was returning, people with whom she knew she could have no conversation were stopping her to talk, draining away the little life she had left for her own things. The only real conversations, anyhow, she ever had were with the people she had loved, and if she had God’s energy she could possibly love everybody, but she had even less and less of her human share. She had to keep it for her own things or she’d be nothing. She had been lavish once, looking round for things to give herself to, and she did not regret any of the giving but she couldn’t do it any more. She had to be what she would have despised once—careful! She had nothing against these social pleasantries of weather and births and marriages and success and failure, the falls of the humble dices of life, but she didn’t care enough. They were not exciting any more. She couldn’t care for everything. Her love had contracted to just a few things. It might be squalid and true but hadn’t the love the same quality of herself as it had in the beginning? What more did it matter? What did it matter if these social exchanges had reduced themselves to the nightmarish vision of the idiotic and barely comprehensible gestures and grimaces of face and head and hand people make when they try to communicate through a closed window. They did not exist any more, but she did.

  She got away as quickly as possible each time. She had her shopping done. She came back to Timlin’s for Mrs Brennan’s prescription and had to wait a while, sitting on the chair between the weighing-machine and the Kodak girl, quiet and very clean there with the rubber advertising mats down, and not many came. She put the bottle she had already paid for in her bag when it was ready and left. At the bottom of Main Street she met the woman who kept the sweet shop beside the chapel in the village, the fourth person this day she had to stand to speak to.

  “We h
ad a good day for coming to town,” it went. “How did you get in? How’ll you get home? Will it be long till you’re going?”

  She was going now. She was in a hurry. She was delighted to have met the other woman, they must have a long talk some time, but not just now, she simply had to rush. She had been in town all morning. She should have been gone an hour ago.

  And she was free, crossing the bridge with her shopping-bag, and her bicycle was where she’d left it, at the post office. A slight wind had risen that blew with her. She climbed uphill out of the town and mounted the bike above it, her push-push-push on the pedals lulling her into the temporary effort and peace of its rhythm. Even when she had to walk the hills the conversations that began within her kept far from the cysts in her breasts, light and musing and futile.

  “Why are you pushing this bike, Elizabeth?”

  “To go home, of course!”

  “But why do you want to get home?”

  “Because I want to get home!”

  “But why?”

  “That’s the why!”

  “That’s a stupid child’s answer!”

  She went along the demesne wall Reegan had patrolled on that wet night in February, swollen green with ivy, the great beech trees stirring behind. Cars met and passed her, bicycles, a tractor, a coal lorry from the pits, three timber lorries. The rooks were mating in the bare sycamores about the Protestant Church and cawing and flapping clumsily about overhead.

  “All answers are stupid and questions too,” the game continued in her head. “I am pushing the bike because I am pushing because I am pushing. I am going home because I am going home because I am going home.”

  “But you must have some reason!”

  “I want to go home.”

  “But why?”

  “But why?”

  “But why ask? That’s it: why ask? I’m going home. I’m alive. That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  Men were gathered about tractors and a solitary horse at the forge beside the crossroads where she turned down the dirt track to the village. A cylinder of Calor gas was out on the street, the blacksmith or more mechanic now since he’d come home from Birmingham goggled as he stooped over a broken plough, the explosion of blue and white light shocking her passing eyes as the acetylene in his hand made contact with the steel.

  She could see the village as she came downhill, the light staring her in the face, the woods across the lake, the mountains beyond with the sheds and gashes of the coal pits on the slopes, the river flowing through into the Shannon lowlands. The long pastures with black cattle and sheep, stone walls and thorn bushes came to meet her; and in a tillage field a tractor was ploughing monotonously backwards and forwards with its shadow.

  “I am coming home and I am alive,” it at last decided and started to go over and over in her mind till it tired away.

  Mullins was asleep by the fire and was not woken by her tyres passing the dayroom window on the gravel, but the two dark-haired girls came chasing, “We were watching the window for you, Elizabeth. We thought you must have got a puncture, Elizabeth,” and to carry the shopping-bag proudly in. Mrs Casey was there with a cigarette and smiling.

  She gave them the sweets she brought and they cried out with excitement as the ceremony of dividing them began and the offering of their portions to Mrs Casey and then Elizabeth.

  There was no use sidetracking the young woman’s curiosity. She told her that she was going into hospital for examination. She didn’t give any intimate information. Nothing would be known until she went into hospital, she said. She came with the other woman to the door after they had made cups of tea and thanked her there. She watched her go and she didn’t turn left through the archway but crossed the bridge towards the great stone house where the Brennans had rooms. The wind, Elizabeth thought, had risen: the days of frost were about to turn to spring rain.

  Inside she heaped wood and turf on the fire, filled the kettle, hung it to boil, put some slices of bacon that were too salty in a bowl of warm water, all the time waiting for Reegan to come home. The hands of the clock were crawling up to five. At seven the doctor would ring. Surely Reegan would be home before then, surely she would not have to take the call on her own.

  The children went out to play on the avenue. She heard their shouts about the archway. The minutes beat by in the stillness, the slow minutes waiting for him to come home; more than sixty minutes, for his blue uniformed bulk did not pass through the window light till it was almost six. The whole day had gone in waiting for this or that: it had torn her nerves, and all boiled into sudden hatred of Reegan. “Didn’t he know that she had been to the doctor? Couldn’t he make it his business to wait home for her? The patrols were not that necessary? What right had he to keep her suffering like this?” had gnawed all reason and vision away by the time he came.

  His feet sounded on the cement of the street where the barrels stood under the eavespipes. He lifted off his cap and put it carelessly down on the sideboard, unbuttoning his greatcoat.

  “You got back all right, Elizabeth,” he greeted smiling, and then he saw her waiting for him, her face tensed, the hour spent resenting his delay making it the image of the reproach she had not yet uttered.

  “I was waiting here this past hour,” she cried with the maniacal temper of a child.

  It was the last thing he had expected. He’d seen small flashes of resentment, and these but seldom, but never such an explosion. In his blind way he felt something terrible must have happened.

  When she heard her own frustrated voice and saw him stand so shocked and frozen her feeling burst in tears. He came towards her and he was awkward. She felt ashamed. She’d betrayed herself. She’d let the stupid passion of resentment rise up through the frustration and strain of her life in this day and she had given full vent to it on Reegan for keeping her waiting. What right had she to expect Reegan to wait at home for her? She’d no right to expect anything. She hadn’t even the right to live.

  Reegan didn’t know what to do but he did the right thing by instinct: he came to her. His first wife that he’d taken from the Show Dance in Sligo had often been like this, he’d have to pet and pleasure her or else affirm his male strength, and everything would come out all right in the embracing or sexual intercourse that always followed as naturally as sun after a shower. Elizabeth was different. He had never got close enough to be able to predict her but he was attentive and careful now and it was right.

  “I didn’t think,” he said. “I never thought of this,” and then with stultifying awkwardness, “I love you, Elizabeth. It doesn’t make any difference, this! You know I love you, Elizabeth.”

  She sobbed. Then he kissed her. She kissed him back. Tears blinded her eyes. She could not see, and now she was drowning in this emotional swoon. She must grip herself. She must, somehow, try to stand upright.

  “What did the doctor say?” his common sense came with the pure relief of the first daylight.

  “He said that I’ll have to go into hospital for examination. He’s afraid I may have cancer. He’s phoning at seven, he’s arranged about a bed in the County Hospital.”

  She had said everything in her reaction from the breakdown. She wouldn’t have to use the sign language of concealment and fear any more, it was a miracle how she’d managed to tell everything. Reegan was shaken now.

  “He said you may have cancer?” he repeated, not able to believe. He’d seen his first wife in the morgue and had experienced little except a desire never to see a dead face again. She was gone, he was frightened, his whole life would be upside down.

  How could two wives die on the same man? It was incredible.

  “He said you may have cancer,” he repeated, flinching at the clear viciousness of the word, “but he doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know,” she started with painful hope.

  “Where, does he think?”

  “In the breast. There are cysts there. They may be malignant.…”

  “When did you not
ice them?”

  “A few weeks ago,” she lied.

  “You never told?” he reproached.

  “I thought that they were nothing,” she tried to excuse. “I didn’t want to cause you more trouble. I was feeling tired and didn’t know till he said.…”

  She was near breaking again. She saw his eyes on her breasts in morbid fascination. No, he couldn’t want to see them now, she cried within herself: the church in which they had married had proclaimed them one flesh, but no, no, no.… People rotted apart. With fierce relief she heard the children come. It was half six. She’d been alone with Reegan all that length of time and it seemed gathered into the intensity of a single moment. At seven the doctor would ring and she had many things to do before then. She put the steeped slices of bacon on the pan. Rain spat at her when she went out to the barrels for water. That was why the children must have come in, she thought. She heard the unearthly cry of the foxes in their season from the brushwoods along the river. It always filled her with terror, this raw cry of animal heat. She smelled the bacon frying as pure sweetness when she closed the door. There was a white cloth on the table, cups, sugar, bread, butter. The kettle was singing on the fire. They had even chairs to sit in. Soon the children would light the lamp with her, draw the blinds against that night. Mullins was coming up the hallway.

  “That frying has me driven mad, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it any longer. I’m off for the auld tea. So I’ll leave the door open and you’ll be able to hear the phone or anyone knocking,” he said as if he had never known himself to say it before.

  “Brennan didn’t come?” Reegan asked.

  “He must have got held up!”

  “You should have gone before,” Reegan said, “You should have gone at six. I’d have told you to go only I thought Brennan had relieved you.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant. The auld appetite is the better for it. Hunger is good sauce,” he laughed. “And these things’ll all right themselves in a hundred years, isn’t that it?”