The Barracks (13 page)

“I'll be only a few days there,” she persuaded. “You must finish your exercises for school tomorrow. If you don't do them now, how can I expect you to do them when I'm away?'

They brushed their tears and settled themselves to their work.

“That's the way,” she encouraged. “You were making a big thing out of nothing.”

Reegan had moved to the window, made to feel out of place by the delicacy of the scene between the woman and children.

“It's all right about the ambulance,” he said.

“It's all right,” she answered.

The blinds were down, the lamp lit, the children at their exercises, and the night repeating itself in the same order of so many nights. Once she had wanted to protect this calm flow of life against Reegan, she'd succeeded, and what did it matter? Did it make any real difference? Tomorrow night
she'd be in a hospital bed and this'd continue or break up without her.

She started to lay out the things she'd need there and she then went to their bedroom. It was lonely and intensely quiet in the room, with the flame of the small glass oil-lamp blowing in the draughts.

She unlocked the wooden trunk she'd brought about with her all her life. It held bundles of letters and photos and certificates and testimonials, a medal she had won in her final examination, some books, a withered plane leaf, a copybook of lecture notes, and other things that'd be junk to everybody else—except what her hands sought, a roll of money.

So she hadn't trusted much, she'd been afraid. Was this why it had failed? she pondered. With this money she could always be in London in the morning. She had not given herself fully, she had always been essentially free.

“You can only give one thing really to anybody—that's money. Love and sympathy and all that kind of stuff is just moonshine and ballsology. Give a person money and tell them to take a tour for themselves. Tell them to go and look about themselves. That's all you can do, if you feel yourself moved,” she had heard Halliday say bitterly once. Many of the letters in the trunk were his, all the books. She did not know. She might never get back to this house. Maybe, she should destroy these things now, she'd hate anybody else reading through them, but then what did the dead care? She locked the trunk, leaving everything undisturbed, except the money she took. She'd take it to the hospital. But when she saw Reegan and the children in the bare kitchen she began to be tortured with what was still too present to be called remorse, she should tell them, they were all together, it was their money as much as hers; but she could not, she wished she had long ago, it'd be too complicated and dreadful now to tell. And if it all came out when she was dead, how could she be hurt then? She would not even think. “No, no, no, no,” came on her breath, the echo of the mind's refusal to endure more torture.

Mullins came. “I got back at last,” he stated.

“No one came since,” Reegan informed him.

“You could sit down there for a year and nothing'd happen and then the once you'd take a chance you'd be caught out,” Mullins said and stood awkwardly there till he managed to say, “I hope you don't think that I'm too full of curiosity, but is it right that you're goin' to the hospital, Elizabeth?”

She met Reegan's eyes: he had said that nothing could be kept secret in a place as small as this.

“I have to go tomorrow,” she said.

“I'm very sorry to hear that but I hope it'll be all right.”

“It's only for a check-up.”

“With the help of God it'll be nothing and if there's anything I can do …” he offered.

“No, no. Thank you, John. It'll be only for a few days.”

“I'm glad to hear it's not serious,” and he had nothing more to say and still no excuse to go with ease. He stood there waiting for something to release him. The children watched. It was Reegan who finally relieved the awkwardness.

“Will you put me out on patrol? It'll save me going down to the books.”

“Where?” Mullins beamed to life.

“Some of the bog roads. Some place where not even Quirke's huarin' car can get.”

“So it's a patrol of the imagination so,” Mullins laughed the barrack joke.

“A patrol of the imagination!” Reegan laughed agreement.

“As sound as a bell so! It'll be done while Johnny Atchinson is thrashin' ashes in Johnny Atchinson's ash hole! I bet you not even Willie'd say that quick without talkin' about arse holes.…”

He was his old self. He laughed as he pounded down the hallway and the house shivered with the way he let the dayroom door slam.

“Some people should ride round this house on bulldozers,”
Reegan said as he put down a newspaper on the cement and let the beads run into his palm. “We better get the prayers over because, unless I'm mistaken, this house'll be full of women soon.”

They came before Elizabeth had her packing finished, all the policemen's wives, Mrs Casey and Mrs Brennan and Mrs Mullins. They were excited, the intolerable vacuum of their own lives filled with speculation about the drama they already saw circling about this new wound.

“It's only for a few days. It's only for an examination,” Elizabeth tried to keep it from taking wild flight, but they were impatient of any curb. They went over the list of things she'd need. They offered the loan of some things of their own. They talked about their experiences in hospitals and doctors and nurses and diseases. They gave pieces of advice. Tea was made. The children were sent to bed.

Reegan had no part in the conversation. He moved restlessly about the house, not wanting to leave Elizabeth on her own.

Ten came and there was no sign of them going. He turned on the radio full blast to listen to the news and let it blare away up to eleven through the Sweepstake programme.

Eventually he found a pair of shoes to mend and it became a real battle. The ludicrously loud belting of the nails above the radio music and the deliberate scraping of the last on the cement made it painful to try to talk but they stayed militantly
 
on till he gave up.

Elizabeth felt herself near madness by the time it was over. She didn't wait to listen to his curses when they'd gone. She let him do all the small jobs she'd always done herself before sleep, and struggled to their room without caring what kind of unconsciousness overcame her there as long as it came quickly.

T
he ambulance took her away at four the next day and spring came about the barracks that week as it always did, in a single Saturday: bundles of Early York, hundredweights  of seed potatoes and the colourful packets of flower and vegetable seed the children collected coming from the Saturday market. Spades and forks and shovels, cobwebs on the handles, were brought out into the daylight; the ball of fishing-line that kept the ridges straight was found after a long search, beneath the stairs. In the night Reegan sat with a bag of the seed potatoes by his side, turning each potato slowly in the lamplight so as to see the eyes with the white sprouts coming, and there was the sound of the knife slicing and the plopping of the splits into the bucket between his legs.

Mullins and Brennan were splitting the seed in their kitchens exactly as he was there, and Monday they'd be planting in the conacre they rented each year from the farmers about the village. Reegan alone had the use of the barrack garden, but he'd not be able to spend as much time there as they would in the fields—it was open to the village road and anybody passing. The other two would do nothing but plant in the next weeks, all their patrols would be
patrols
of the imagination
as they joked, carried out on these plots of ground. They knew Reegan didn't care and always a child was posted on the bridge to warn them if Quirke or the Chief Super appeared. They couldn't afford to buy vegetables
and potatoes for their large families: their existence was so bare as it was that Mullins was never more than a few days on the spree when they were getting credit in the shops or borrowing or going hungry.

Casey hated manual work. It was as much as his wife could do to get him to mow the lawn and keep the weeds out of the gravel and dig the beds for the roses she put down so as not to be shamed by the school-teacher who had the next rooms. Not having children to feed he wasn't forced to take part in this burst of spring industry; he still brought his cushion down with him on b.o. days, kept his gloves on when he wheeled or rode the bicycle, read newspapers and listened to the end of the season's soccer and the boxing matches and
Sports Stadium
on Friday nights; and he fenced, “It's a bloomin' bad country that can't afford one gentleman!”
 
when Mullins or more seldom Brennan chaffed.

This was the time when poor Brennan's
best-
in-Ireland
act started up for the year in real earnest and it went on obliviously till the crops were lifted in October. “Ten ridges, twenty-nine yards long, meself and the lads put down yesterday. Not a better day's work was done in Ireland,” he'd boast at roll-call, while the others winked and smiled.

Reegan was happy too in this spring, the frustrations and poisons of his life flowing into the clay he worked.

It was good to be ravenously hungry in these late March and April evenings with the smell of frying coming from the kitchen! Would it be the usual eggs and bacon, or might they have thought of getting the luxury of fresh liver or herrings, if the vans brought some to the shops? It was such satisfaction to drag his feet through the gate and look back as he shut it at an amount of black clay stirred, so many ridges shaped and planted; his body was tired and suffused with warmth, the hot blood running against the frost, and there was no one to tell him the work wasn't done fully right, they were his own ridges, he had made them for himself. And these evenings could be so peaceful when the sawing and stone-crushing stopped and the bikes and the carts and the tractors had gone home. The last of the sun was in the fir tops, the lake a still mirror of light, so close to nightfall that the birds had taken their positions in the branches, only an angry squawking now and again announcing that the unsatisfied ones were trying to move.

He'd wash the dried sweat away inside in front of the scullery mirror and change into fresh clothes before he sat to eat in the lamplight, he'd laugh and make fun with the children and feel the rich communion of being at peace with everything in the world. Never did he get this satisfaction out of pushing a pen through reports or patrolling roads or giving evidence on a court day.

All his people had farmed small holdings or gone to America and if he had followed in their feet he'd have spent his life with spade and shovel on the farm he had grown up on or he'd have left it to his brother and gone out to an uncle in Boston. But he'd been born into a generation wild with ideals: they'd free Ireland, they'd be a nation once again: he was fighting with a flying column in the hills when he was little more than a boy, he donned the uniform of the Garda Siochana and swore to preserve the peace of The Irish Free State when it was declared in 1920, getting petty promotion immediately because he'd won officer's rank in the fighting, but there he stayed—to watch the Civil War and the years that followed in silent disgust, remaining on because he saw nothing else worth doing. Marriage and children had tethered him in this village, and the children remembered the bitterness of his laugh the day he threw them his medal with the coloured ribbon for their play. He was obeying officers younger than himself, he who had been in charge of ambushes before he was twenty.

That movement in his youth had changed his life. He didn't know where he might be now or how he might be making a living but for those years, but he felt he could not have fared much worse, no matter what other way it had turned out. But he'd change it yet, he thought passionately. All he wanted was money. If he had enough money he could kick the job into their teeth and go. He'd almost enough scraped together for that as it was but now Elizabeth was ill. He should have gone while he was still single; but he'd not give up—he'd clear out to blazes yet, every year he had made money out of turf and this year he rented more turf banks than ever, starting to strip them the day after he
had the potatoes and early cabbage planted. He'd go free yet out into some life of his own: or he'd learn why. He was growing old and he had never been his own boss.

That week-end he brought Elizabeth home. They had taken the biopsy of the breast and sent it to Dublin for analysis. The final diagnoses had come back: she had cancer.

As the next-of-kin Reegan saw the surgeon the Saturday he took her home. He was told she'd have to go to Dublin to have the operation: she'd be let home for only a few days, until such time as a bed was ready, the only reason she was being allowed out at all was that she had pleaded to be let spend the spare days she had between the hospitals in her home.

He wouldn't say what her chances were—she had definitely a slight chance. If the operation proved successful she might live for ten or even more years. If it wasn't—a year, two years, he didn't care to say, he had only taken the biopsy, he was forwarding all his particulars to the Dublin surgeon. He could assure Reegan that she would be in the best hands in the country.

The formality of it was terrifying, the man's hand-tailored grey suit and greying hair, the formal kindness of his voice. A thousand times easier to lie in a ditch with a rifle and watch down the road at the lorries coming: you had the heat of some purpose, a job to do, and to some extent your life was in your own hands: but this, this.… It was too horrifying,
a man or woman no more than a caged rat being given over to scientific experiment. He thought the interview would never be over. He wanted to forget, forget, forget. This wasn't life or it was all a hell of a flop. It was no use doing anything: it'd be better to take a gun and blow your brains out there and then, but at least Elizabeth was waiting smiling for him, and he couldn't get her quickly enough away and home.

The five days she was there proved too many. She had to follow instructions, take medicines, stay in bed late, do none of the tasks that had become her life in the house. She was
living and sitting there and it was going on without her. The policemen's wives were constantly in. She had no life whatever then, just chit and chat, skidding along this social surface. She knew she must have cancer. Moments, when she'd suddenly grow conscious that she must be only sitting here and waiting, she'd be seized with terror that it would all end like this, a mere interruption of these banalities and nothing more.

The nights were worse, when she was awake with Reegan and could discuss nothing. Oh, if she could only discuss the operation she was about to face and discover what they both felt! And if they got that far together they might be able to go back to the beginning and unravel something out. There never had been even any real discussion, not to speak of understanding, and while each of them alone was nothing there might be no knowing what both of them might find together. No, she could not even begin when they were awake, silence lay between them like a knife; and he was slaving at the turf-banks these days as well as doing his police work, and was mostly asleep, no sound but some aboriginal muttering rising now and then to his lips, the same that would rise to hers out of the black mysteries of her own sleep.

So it continued till she went, they did not even make simple sexual contact because his hands would come against the bandages. Few were waiting at the town station that morning she went. A cold wind blew down the tracks but the little red-brick building, old and rather pretty, had last year's holiday posters and narcissi and daffodils tossing between the bare rods of the fuchsias in the beds.

“It's cold for April,” she shivered, her eyes resting on the features they knew too well to experience any more.

“It's better to have it now than a bad summer,” clicked as automatically out as if she had put a coin in a slot.

“But if we could have it both ways!” the words forced other words.

“That'd be perfect,” it continued, “but with the weather this country has we're lucky to get it any way at all.”

“There's not many travelling,” she looked about her after a silence.

“No. Never in the morning. We're lucky not to be on the three twenty-five. It's like a cattle train these days and them all for the night-boat,” he said.

“There'll be soon nobody left in the country,” she murmured what was being said everywhere.

A signalman crossed the tracks with a white hoop, and Reegan took his watch out of the little pocket that kept his beads.

“Another few minutes,” he said. “It's due in four minutes.”

“Is it going well, the watch?” she asked very quietly.

“It hasn't broken for four years.”

“And it's very old, isn't it?”

“More than twice my age. There are no parts for it any more. It costs a fortune if it breaks. It was bought in New York. My father gave it to me when I joined the police.
Elgin
,” he read off the white face with its numerals and hands of blue steel. She had these details before and she asked as she asked more than once before, “Will you keep it?”

“For my time,” he laughed as he always did. “Willie can do what he likes with it when it comes to his turn.”

The diesel in the distance turned to a powerful roar as it came closer, the signalman exchanged the white hoop for what seemed an identical hoop with the driver, it must be some safety device. Reegan put her cases on the rack and they sat facing each other at one of the windows of an almost empty carriage.

The train pulled out of the station. Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles jerking on wires, thorn hedges, cattle, sheep, men, women, horses and sows with their litters started to move across the calm glass; a piece of platform was held still for three minutes at every wayside station and for ten at Mullingar.

She had cancer, she was going for a serious operation, and it was so frighteningly ordinary. The best years of her
life were spent and all she'd managed to do was reach this moment in this train. “Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles, Elizabeth Reegan, cattle, horses, sheep,” throbbed in her head to the train's rhythm as they flashed past. They seemed so unimportant, she and Reegan and people; after a struggle of a lifetime they managed to get in a train or some place, “Trees, fields, houses, Elizabeth Reegan”, beating like madness in their heads as the train beat on to its terminus.

She was going weak, and it was the stuffy heat of the carriage, she told herself. She must try and talk. She must try and ask Reegan something. She must break this even drumming of, “Trees, fields, houses, Elizabeth Reegan”, to the beat of the train. She'd collapse or go crazy if she couldn't stop it soon, she'd have to try and start a conversation, she'd ask, “Have we many more miles to go?” and it would be a beginning. “Have we many more miles to go?” she asked and he answered. From Westland Row they got a taxi to the hospital. She knew every inch of this squalid station and the street outside: the Cumberland and Gros-venor hotels, the dingy bed-and-breakfasts, the metal bridge, and the notice above the entrance at the traffic lights.

How the lights of this city used to glow in the night when the little boat train taking her back to London after Christmas came in and out of the countryside and winter dark. The putting-on of overcoats and the taking of cases off the racks and the scramble across the platform to get on the train that went the last eight miles out to the boat. Always girls weeping, as she had wept the first time too, hard to know you cannot hide for ever in the womb and the home, you have to get out to face the world.

Often she had wanted to lie down at dawn and die on this platform after the night-ride across England and Wales, the crossing from Holyhead, the fight off the boat through the Customs at Dun Laoghaire, the fight for the seats on the train for here, carriaged home those 23rd of December nights like cattle.

Suddenly, she'd remember she was going home. She could lie in bed late in the mornings, she hadn't to tramp
from bed to bed on the wards for three whole weeks more. The ones she loved and hadn't seen for a year would be waiting with a hired car and shy, lighted faces outside the red-brick station, coloured bulbs in the Christmas tree and whiskey on the porter's breath, and they'd lift her off the train and take her home.