The Barracks (19 page)

Often he hummed as he worked, the lovely
Danny Boy
, his strange favourite. Then, sensing her about, he'd look up and find her sunk in reflection and call, “A penny for them, Elizabeth!”

“They're not worth that,” she'd wake to laugh, but she'd have stirred his anxiety—was she getting ill again? “Do you feel well, Elizabeth,” he'd probe.

“Yes. Why? I just get lost in a daze sometimes, start to think, and then find myself drifting into an old dream. It's just a foolish habit.”

“Do you not think you're takin' too much on yourself, all the work of the house, so soon out of hospital. Do you not think you'd be better to take it easy for a while? We made good money outa the turf and I was thinkin' if you took a week or two at the seaside, if you went to Strandhill? The Caseys'll be goin' in another week and they'd be company.”

She smiled. He had preferred to ignore her explanation. She'd been at Southend and Margate and Brighton. Excursion days, never any place else. To go with the Caseys to Strandhill or any other place would be an absolute impossibility,
she knew.

“Would you go yourself?” she asked because she knew he would not.

“What would I be doin' at the seaside?” he laughed, trying to turn it into a joke. “Wouldn't I be a nice cut walkin' round with Casey and me hands in me pockets?”

“What would I be doin' there either?”

“It'd rest you and there'd be the sea air.”

“No, it'd be impossible,” she laughed, and he joined her.

Casey alone went from the barracks, his love of ease betraying him for once with what was but its shade; for, though he went religiously for his fortnight each year and talked about it for weeks, it had become another barrack joke; they all knew that it was a grim fourteen days, suffering the loss of each of his home comforts, longing for the day
that'd allow him home, his burden lightened if he could find another policeman, or someone from Dublin who'd talk about the trams, staying in Mrs O'Dwyer's guest house. The fortnight was a grim duty which he felt in some way that he owed himself. Even to Reegan now the notion of Elizabeth involved in this annual crucifixion was ludicrous.

None of the others ever went on holidays. They spaced out their leave for the turf and potatoes, little jobs in their gardens and house, bringing timber from the woods in the rowboat, and the excursions they made with their wives to town, mostly to buy clothes and shoes.

Elizabeth didn't want to go away. She felt more than ever that she'd never leave this barracks again, here she was meant to end her life, and she grew more sure of that with every new day.

She put turf and some wood on the fire while Reegan hammered, took down the flickering Sacred Heart lamp and filled it with oil, put a cloth and delf on the table and she had most of the jobs done.

There was such deep silence in the kitchen when Reegan would stop hammering to examine his work, the men sent home from the woods and the quarry, the constant drip of rain on the window-sills outside. She was completely alone with Reegan. She thought it might be the only right time she'd ever get to tell him about the money of her own she'd always kept, if she didn't tell it now it'd never be told. It had constantly preyed on her mind ever since she took it out of the locked trunk to bring to hospital. She'd spent hardly any of it there and if she didn't get rid of it soon it'd possess her for the rest of her life.

Fear must have made her gather it the first day. She'd seen scraping all her youth, having to wait for winter boots, till the calf or litter of pigs was born, worry over money gnawing at the happiness of too many evenings in childhood; she'd seen her mother and father bitter over each other's spending, and she never wanted to be under its rule again. She'd saved out of her first wages. But when she'd saved enough to give her few desires some freedom she
didn't trouble more. If she had enough to buy some new clothes or go a place or bring something to someone she loved, she was happy. It was not miserliness, there's such fearful unhappiness at the heart of all miserliness, no trust or love, and the passion to live for ever cheapened into the bauble of providing against the wet day, the lunacy of building an outer wall against something that's impregnably entrenched in every nerve and cell of the body.

She hated to either borrow or lend, she'd give money but not lend, she felt any relationship based and bound by money more loathsome than rotten flesh. How her nerves would shiver and creep when a girl out of the hospital would say to her, “I'm not forgettin' about that loan, Elizabeth. I'll be able to pay you back soon.”

“No, no, no,” she'd want to burst out. “Keep it, do what you like with it, I don't want to see it again,” and how hard it was to discipline herself and say the conventional thing that'd be accepted and not cause hatred. So she was never without money, enough to buy her anything she'd want or even indulge sudden whims without having to worry or consider. It left her free, she'd try to reason, but it went far beyond any reasoning. She even kept it to herself when she married. With that money she could be in London in the morning. It was dishonest. They were living together in this barracks, tied in the knot of each other; they had accepted the burden of her, she the burden of them, and they should have at least every exterior thing in common. They had all failed or were afraid to attempt to live alone, could any one of them endure total loneliness or silence or neglect, and enough had to be kept back by people living together without extending it to something as common and mangy with sweat as money. She'd have to put it right, tell Reegan, force him to take the money.

He had finished the chair. His face was flushed and happy and he was hooking the clasp of his tunic at the throat. He showed her the chair for her praise, and she pretended to test it and inspect the joinings.

“It's as good as new,” she praised.

“Aw, not as good as new, but it'll do a turn. It'll take more than natural abuse to smash it this time,” he showed his real pleasure in the diminishment.

“I think it couldn't be better,” she said, and they sat together to gaze into the fire and out at the grey, steady rain. It wound down, stirred by no breath of wind, barely fouling the mirror of the calm river.

“It'd put you to sleep, that rain,” he said.

“It might be good for the fishing though,” she answered.

“It should, it's never bad on a dull, rainy evenin', you always get bites of something.”

The silence resumed, the kettle murmuring, the drip-drip of rain on the sills. She stirred the fire with the tongs. She tried to get herself to tell about the money, and then she said awkwardly out of the continuing silence, “There's something I want to tell you that's not easy.”

She saw how awful a way it was to break anything, when the words were out: his body went tense, fear came in the eyes. His jerky, “What?” seemed asked more with the muscles than the voice. What could she have to tell him that wasn't easy, it couldn't be pleasant, and he wished he didn't have to hear.

She wished she hadn't to tell, but she was driven. There was no reason to this crying need to speak: what did he matter any more than she mattered; he'd have to die into whatever there was too, and all things were believed to be changed in new light then. It made no sense, this need to speak, she'd be as well to try to get the raindrip from the sycamore leaves outside to understand.

She might as well be honest about why she wanted to speak her truth. It was to ease her own mind. What could it do but disturb his peace or at best leave him indifferent? The Church knew an old trick or two when she said you make your confession to God, and not to the priest in the box, whose understanding or misunderstanding has nothing whatever to do with the Sacrament. But how humanness entered everything. She'd go steeled and prepared to tell the truth to God and end in the squalid drama of trying to get a
name printed on a card outside the box, a voice in the darkness, a smell of after-shave lotion to understand.

She could steel herself, make herself cold as death and inhuman to try to bear witness to the truth, but she was so weak that at its first intimation her preparations and disciplines
would crumple up, and she'd become only more truly human than before she ever set out. Oh irony of ironies! The road away becomes the road back.

There was no end to thinking and she could even think away the need to think. An age of thought can pass before the mind and be lost in the same flash. What she had to do now was state not reason; state it and suffer it in her human self. She had pondered on it for months up to this moment, reasoned it more than once away, and still the need remained.

Reegan was watching her impatiently, fretting at the wait.

“It's money,” she began. “I've some money that I never told you about. I meant to and as time went it got harder to tell. I was afraid you mightn't understand.”

She broke down, beginning to sob with shame and squalor. Nothing struck Reegan for a moment. He'd been tensed for something painful, and now that this was all he was taken by surprise. He'd often wondered if she'd spent all she had earned in London but they never seemed close enough for him to be able to ask without fear of offence. She was crying now.

“Don't, Elizabeth,” he said. “It doesn't matter. It's your own money and nobody ever asked you to tell. It's your own to tell or not to tell and has nothin' got to do with anybody else.”

She heard what he said, it did not matter. She tried to pull herself together, out of this breakdown. She'd have to try and see it through to the end once she'd started.

“No, that's not right. When I didn't want to take money for clothes you used say,' What's mine is yours. It's there for you to take as much as me',” she said.

“But I married you,” he protested. “It's a man's job to keep his wife, she has to keep the home.”

“I want to give you that money,” she said.

“No. That's your money, not mine. You'll want it to be able to buy things that you'll need yourself. Nobody wants to depend entirely on somebody else. That money has nothing got to do with me.”

“I want you to take the money,” she didn't try to argue. “I want you to take it now. If I need anything I'll ask you for the money and you'll give it to me.”

“You'd get it anyhow. I never refused you for anything, did I? But why?”

“Don't mind the why, take it, for my sake. Of course you never refused me anything!”

“But why?” he puzzled as she left to go quickly upstairs to get the money out of the trunk and hurry down again.

“Why should you …” he was beginning an argument he'd thought of while she was away but she pressed him with the money.

“I'll put it in an account for yourself. I'll open a new account for you.”

“No, you must put it in your own.”

“But why?” he said again.

“No why, except I want you to, that is all.”

This useless argument threatened to drag on and on and not till he heard the children did he finally pocket the money.

Water dripped on the concrete from their soaked clothes, but they were excited. They showed proudly the perch they'd caught, hanging on a small branch that'd been passed through their dead gills and mouths, their scarlet tails and bellyfins shining against the grey blackstriped scales, lying against the sally leaves of the branch that were vivid with wet.

Elizabeth gave them dry clothes and when they'd changed they skinned some of the perch for their meal. Roasted brown they were sweet as trout, though full of small bones. Through the meal they talked excitedly of their evening's catch in the rain.

Afterwards the long, dark evening was let rest in the kitchen. The rosary was said. Reegan lit his carbide bicycle lamp, put on cape and pull-ups to go on patrol, more to break the claustrophobia of the day indoors than to do his
duty. They played draughts on the sill when he'd gone, and Elizabeth read. She was strangely content and at peace, she felt no guilt nor worry, and sure of this ease until at least this night's sleep.

That broken August crept towards September, the dead sycamore leaves lying on the roof of the lavatory now on calm days, the length disappearing so noticeably out of the evenings that it was all the time in their conversations. Soon the children would be back at school, the summer ended.

There was little change. She had to go one Friday to the clinic in Athlone, as arranged by the Dublin cancer hospital, and there was no deterioration in her condition. It was her heart they feared most now, the strain of the operation and illness proving too much, and they told her to take things easy. She'd have to be careful, they said; but she paid no attention, how could she stay with them in this barracks and not be occupied. She'd go on as she was, as long as ever she was able. She'd no pain, there was no sign of the cancer stirring, and if her heart went she'd probably go out in a flash, without time for terror or thought.

Though often too she'd feel herself trapped on this quiet drift of days and grow a moment desperate. They were all the same, they would not change, the same day would follow the same day and day and day, nothing more would happen. On these days she was being drifted to her destruction, disease had started, and her life was almost ended.

She'd handle objects on the sideboard, lifting them and putting them back in the same place; or go to the window and rest her palms on the sill. The river was out there and the hill and the hedge of whitethorns half-way up; the great sycamore stood inside the netting-wire, a few dead leaves caught in its meshes. All she could do was stay in this kitchen and despair or go some place to break the claustrophobia with distraction. She could wash and comb and dress herself up, these simple acts had saved her many times before; and she could find some of the children and go to the well and shop. One of these evenings was extraordinarily
vivid, a lovely evening both green and yellow together,
held still between summer and autumn. She'd grown gradually desperate through the day and then made a last effort to live, and when she had washed and dressed herself she began to feel new and better, refreshed, the grime and sweat of the habitual day shed for ever, and desire and eagerness rose in her again.