The Barracks

  So it was almost over, Elizabeth thought; another Christmas Day, it would take their lives another year to reach it again. She was tired, they had taken no air nor exercise, shut indoors all day with each other. Though she was not disturbed. She’d noticed that she never grew disturbed when Reegan’s troubled restlessness was in the house, it prevented her from dwelling on herself, one poison counteracting the other. She’d little more to do: rake the fire, light the green glass oil-lamp, climb the stairs into a hope of sleep.

  “It’s another Christmas Day over,” she said quietly to Reegan.

  “Another Christmas,” he echoed. “I hate the day. A whole year of waitin’ for it and then it goes like a wet week. Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow?”

  “Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow,” her own mind began to parrot as she did the last chores. “Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow,” but it brought neither despair nor desperation, no feeling whatever. She watched Reegan go to bed. Soon she’d follow. “Whatever people be waitin’ for anyhow,” repeated itself over and over, but it did not affect her, the words remained calm and complete as a landscape that she could gaze dispassionately on for ever.

  The next day the policemen trooped back to the barracks and the wren boys, children in old clothes with blacking and red indian daubs of lipstick on their faces, came to make their mouth-organs wail outside the door and pounded their feet in imitation of dance on the gravel while the coins rattled fiendishly in their slotted tin canister. Most houses gave them something. They’d have harmless parties, lemonade and sweets and biscuits, on the proceeds of the day.

  New Year’s night a few drunken brawlers were hauled to the barracks, and thrown into the lockup to cool—the last gasp of the Christmas spirit, Casey announced. On the sixth of January the ivy and holly were thrown out and the cards swept off the sideboard into one of its drawers. Now the cold months would slowly pass in a sigh for summer. January, February gold of the first daffodils, March that lent itself to dreadful puns, Easter—but that was treading ahead with the names, fast as light compared with the days in which Elizabeth steadily grew worse, little that was haphazard about the decline, it seemed certain and relentless. She was sure the doctor must have noticed, though he said nothing, and she knew she’d refuse if he asked her to stop in bed. She’d stay on her feet this time till she collapsed or changed for the better. And she didn’t think she could go on only for the fact that often when she was alone her sense of the collapsing rubble of this actual day faded, and processions of dead days began to return haunting clear, it seemed as compensation. Her childhood and the wild smell of the earth in the evenings after spring rain and the midges swarming out of the trees; streets of London at all hours, groping for the Jewish names on the lintels—Frank, Levine, Lerner, Goldsberg, Botzmans—above the awnings in the little market off Commercial Road, and did the sun still glitter so on the red-stained glass over the little Yiddish Theatre, the left side of the road as you came from Aldgate, Grand Palais; and the people in her life crowding into the vividness of the memory, shifting with each sudden change and she there at the heart of everything, alive, laughing and crying and calm. And one fantastic afternoon at the end of January she went, ecstatic with remembrance, to the sideboard and got pen and ink and paper to write to a friend of those days, a nurse with her in The London Hospital, she was still there, for at Christmas they exchanged cards. Their relationship had dwindled to that but it could be renewed. She’d write and invite her here. She’d show her this place, so quiet after London, the church that had celebrated its centenary in its grove of evergreens and tombstones, the presbytery staring blue and white with the priest’s love of the Virgin between the rows of old limes and the river flowing out of the lake in the shelter of the hill, Reegan and the children and Mullins and Casey and Brennan.

  She’d have to write about herself too: her relationship with Reegan at odd moments now, her heart gone weak, the cancer, the futility of her life and the life about her, her growing indifference. That was the truth she’d have to tell. Things get worse and worse and more frightening. But who’d want to come to a house where times got worse and no one was happy? And on the cold page it didn’t seem true and she crossed it out and wrote, Everything gets stranger and more strange. But what could that mean to the person she was writing to—stranger and more strange, sheer inarticulacy with a faint touch of craziness. So she crossed it out too and wrote: Things get better and better, more beautiful, and she smiled at the page that was too disfigured with erasions to send to anyone now. Her words had reached praise of something at last, and it didn’t appear more false or true than any of the other things she’d written and crossed out. She’d leave it so, it was a ridiculous thing to want to write in the first place, how could she have ever imagined that she’d carry it through. She rose from the table and dropped the sheet of notepaper into the fire, watched the flames crumple it like a hand closing into a fist would, and the charred fragments float in the smoke.

  The evening was coming and she had the hens to feed. The feeding was kept in a wooden tub in the scullery, the red and white fowl flocking round as she went with it down to the ovens at the netting-wire. She’d no business playing games of fancy such as the letter, she talked with herself. She wasn’t a leisured person, all her life she had to work with her hands, the most of her energy had been absorbed by that, little more than a performing animal; her praying and her thinking and reading just pale little sideshows. A few impassioned months of her life had perhaps risen to such a fever as to blot everything else out, but they were only months or maybe but days in so many years. They’d subsided but the work had to go on, grinding, incessant, remorseless; breaking her down to its own dead impersonality, but never quite, and how often she had half-wished to be broken into the deadness of habit like most of the rest, it was perhaps the only escape.

  When the hens were fed she had still much to do inside. They’d be home soon and hungry in this cold weather, if she’d neglected them to think or dream she’d see their resentment rise to such intolerance that she’d not be able to endure watching it: she worked in a burst of energy that must have been close to panic, and all the neglected things were done before they came, the lamp lit, the fire blazing and their food warm on the table. No one could resent or fault her, but afterwards she couldn’t stand with tiredness. She thought she had no feeling of the water against her hands as she washed the dishes, nor could she see the real gleam of the white knobs on the yellow press when she returned the dishes to the shelves and hung the cups. She seemed living within the dead husk of herself, as in the weeks before she went to hospital, staring out at life and every sensual contact with it gone, the one desire she had left increasing to overpower her—to sink down within herself to unending sleep and rest.

  While this happened the policemen went on as usual in the barracks. The books were kept in order, the b.o. made his bed up each night against the wall of the lock-up and lifted it in the morning, their common sense cut the ridiculous number of patrols demanded of them by the regulations down to bare gestures in this weather of the early year. They did little jobs in their houses—painted or mended utensils or furniture or shoes—played cards in the barrack kitchen, never in the dayroom in case Quirke should surprise them there, and the books brought up for them to write reports on these fictitious patrols.

  “Wind from the south-west, sky conditions cloudy, weather showery with bright intervals. I patrolled Knock-narea Road to Woodenbridge and returned via Eslin and Drumgold. I noticed cattle grazing on the Eslin Road and made inquiries, discovered their owner was James Maguire (farmer), and issued due warning. Commencement of patrol 2 p.m. Conclusion of patrol 6.15 p.m. (Signed) Edward M. Casey” they ran.

  Elizabeth loved to see them come: there was only the dull silence of the present if they didn’t, Reegan, filling pages of foolscap with profit and loss calculations at the table, the amounts of money he hoped to have at the end of the summer, when he’d leave the police.
This year he had secured the contract to supply all the fuel to the laundry the Sisters of Mercy ran in the town, the biggest contract he’d ever got, and if it went lucky he’d have enough money to buy a good farm, he’d be his own master, and with his pension he’d not have to slave too hard. So he whiled away most of the winter evenings dreaming on paper over the root facts the figures these contracts provided. He never noticed how drawn and beaten Elizabeth looked: she’d have to collapse before he’d ever notice now.

  His enmity with Quirke did not ease. Reegan was decided and waiting. When he’d have provided against his fear of starvation and that Authority would kick his face in if he missed Quirke’s throat, he’d act, and savagely. A natural perversity set him on to provoke Quirke within the limits he knew were safe, never going too far, avoiding a decisive clash until his time was ripe.

  Many of these small clashes continued to reach Elizabeth, she was too worn to be interested in them for their own sake, she saw them as just the accidental revelations of the same thing seething within Reegan: but what she did notice was their changing tone. The bluster and rhetoric and surges of fierce passion were fast disappearing out of his accounts of the clashes, they became far more quiet, controlled, full of a humour that was both malicious and watching, intensely aware of the ridiculous.

  “I ran into Quirke today,” he mentioned to her, a wet evening close to the end of February.

  “‘It’s a powerful job for exercise, the police, sir,’ I said. ‘I’d be rotten at my age in an office, sittin’ down, but this job takes you out into God’s clear air and the weather of Ireland. This patrollin’ is great for givin’ you an appetite, sir.’ You should have seen the luk on his face.

  “‘It gives you an appetite, does it, Reegan?’ he said as if the words were poison. ‘The police has a few other functions besides providing its members with an appetite. Seeing that the people obey the law is not one of the least of its functions.’”

  “‘It’s good for the auld appetite too though, it must be admitted; seein’ that the people obey the law isn’t of course, as you say, to be forgotten either,’ I said.

  “If looks could kill I’d be dead, Elizabeth,” Reegan roared, laughing on the chair.

  “‘It’s good for the appetite! Or do you take me for a fool, Reegan,’ he hissed like a weasel and drove off as if I stank to the high heavens.”

  “If you provoke him so much he’ll try to get rid of you before you’re ready to go, he’s bound to get his chance sooner or later, you can’t guard against that if you go on like this,” she pondered tiredly to him, not seeing any reason why people could want to create a hell for each other in cold blood, surely their world had to be a microscopic place for them to have to resort to that.

  “He’ll have to get a move on so,” Reegan countered. “He has only till September.”

  “You’ve made up your mind definitely to resign in September?”

  “Yes, the turf contracts’ll be done then. They say the spring’s the best time to move but you can’t have everything right, and if you keep on waitin’ for the right time you’ll never do anything, that’s what I’ve learned. You have to make the best of what you have.”

  He seemed anxious, as if he was afraid she might have changed her mind about the going. “You’ve decided definitely to go then, in September?” she repeated and that was all.

  “Yes. Definitely. You don’t mind, do you, Elizabeth?”

  “No, no. I’m glad you’ve decided for certain at last,” she said, and closed her eyes as she saw him lift the pages of foolscap that were covered with calculations. He started to explain how much money he had in the bank; the profit he’d make out of the turf; the gratuity he was owed on leaving the police; the little he’d be able to save out of his salary between now and then; what it would all amount to —in September. He was so excited with these plans and calculations that she hadn’t even to interject the occasional question to show her continuing attention. All she did was nod and nod her head and fix attention in her eyes and she was certain he would never notice.

  September, September, September, it droned in her mind; in September they’d leave this barracks where they’d lived so long. A haunting and beautiful September, the year at its fullness, the summer lingering and the approaching leaf fall, the sway of the year shifting forward towards its death. There’d be reapers and binders, stacks of corn, the hum of the first red threshing mills; apples falling and rotting, the first waste of the orchards; and those blue, blue evenings that always reminded her of the bloom on Victoria plums. March, April, May, June, July, August: it was just over six months away, spring left yet and the whole of summer and all the things that might change before then.

  Could she plan till then? It’d be too full of painful joy, and in a few minutes she’d have to make an effort to rise out of this chair. September was too far away, it was unreal, she had only dreamt it in the Septembers she remembered. And she had to live a day at a time, a day between waking and sleeping, not even days, in the passing moments that enclosed her life.

  She woke, the gaze that had been directed inwards in rich dream she turned outwards, to wake on the surface of observance, observing Reegan. He too could be excited by September but his September was not hers. Money in the bank, smashing Quirke and going free out of the police to start a new life—that was his September. Starting a new life at fifty, declaring thirty years a stupid waste, and beginning again, at fifty; it had something of greatness, it made rubbish out of the passage of time, it pissed at futility, it took no cognizance of death. It was the spirit of life declaring itself in defiance of everything, and it sent a thrill of excitement to the marrow of her bones, but she wasn’t able to rise and affirm it with her own life. She was excited, she marvelled, but she couldn’t understand. How do his mind and body work that he is able to be so; how is he able to go so violently on and on and on? She watched his face, the lines of its years and deaths and grey streaks in his hair, the large hands streaked with veins, and the uniform with silver buttons and badges and the three silver stripes on the sleeve that so many had worn and were wearing and would wear, and she wanted to break down and cry. She had loved him, still loved him, and would love him till she died, but how was she to tell him so? She hadn’t the beauty and attractions left that can turn the simplest gestures of a young girl into meaning, and she’d no words or her words were not his words. She knew nothing about him, just things she’d observed and what were they; as she’d observed things about herself and still knew nothing, but all grew into the one desire to love and to cause no living thing pain.

  “It doesn’t matter much whether we go a little before or after September, only the main thing is that we’re goin’,” Reegan was saying. “And Superintendent John James Quirke is guaranteed one or two exciting days before then or my name’s not Reegan. We’ll see who’ll come out on top. We’ll see who’ll come out on top then, Elizabeth!”

  With an effort she rose out of the chair, swayed for a moment as if she half expected to be struck, and smiled as she managed to move towards the spool of blue thread on the sewing-machine. Her collapse would come at its own choosing.

  She could run now, throw herself on the netting-wire, and call out across the lake to the woods where the saws still sung, “Oh, answer me. Will Something answer me?” and she’d be met with echoes and real sounds of the saws and birds, cloud shadow on corrugations the wind had made on the water, and silence—the silence of the sky and lake and wood and people going about their lives. And if she was heard it could be only by people and what could they do? She’d look silly or gone crazy, she’d have broken the rules. She could only cause painful concern to those involved with her and wring ridicule and laughter from those who were not, the thing that runs counter to the fabricated structure of safe passions must be slaughtered out of its existence.

  “We’ll see then, we’ll see what’ll happen then,” Reegan’s excited words came, able to see past the danger of the living moment and not so
far as the moment of his death; absorbed by how the dice would fall; and that was the way to be, that was the way to be safe.

  “What does it matter about Quirke? He has his own cares, let him go his own way, what does it matter whether he’s right or wrong as long as you can go your own way in peace,” she wanted to say but she knew the answer she’d get. “So nothing matters. So everybody’s the same. But we’re not dead yet bejasus! We’re not altogether in that state yet,” and he was right in his own way. People didn’t want peace but shouting and activity and excitement, that was life; fullness of life for them was not thought, that was to be free and lonely and to die, life was ceaseless activity. Peace was not life, it was death.

  “Will you be going to the court tomorrow? It’s the District Court day, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’ll want to get the things ready if you are.”

  “Aye—I’m goin’; me and Casey, that’s all, but don’t put yourself to too much bother.”

  She knew the things she had to do: they never varied; and in the morning there’d be the shining of his boots and baton sheath, the scrupulous shining of the silver buttons and badges and whistle chain as on every other court morning.

  The year moved forward, cold with frost, the fields firm enough to carry the ploughing tractors. Ash Wednesday, a cold white morning, all the villagers at Mass and the rails, to be signed with the Cross on their lives to be broken, all sinners and needing the grace of God to be saved, the cross thumbed by the priest on their foreheads with the ashes of their mortality. The organ was silent in the organ loft; those who did not get dispensed from the fast could have only one full meal in the day; the yew branches would be blessed Palm Sunday and left in a bath-tub outside the church for the people to take away; and the beautiful, beautiful ceremonies of Holy Week.