The Barracks (20 page)

She was alone in the kitchen and she went out to find Willie on the avenue. He was searching the laurels and talking to himself and she was delighted somehow, it was a habit of her own. He was glad to offer to come with her when she told him she was going to the well. His sisters had gone with Reegan to the woods for timber in the rowboat and he had remained behind because of some sulk or jealousy and probably tiring of his own company by this. He carried the enamel bucket for her, but she kept the shopping-bag, not to have her hands empty.

They turned right at the end of the avenue, away from the bridge, the river and lake gleaming behind till they reached the privet hedge before Glinn's when the block of the barracks and trees about the archway shut it away. Glinn's was a little general grocery place, far out on the road, four fresh shrubs of boxwood on the grass margin the far side, the pride of Mrs Glinn's heart. She'd never trouble to cross the road to water them, but came just to her own doorway, and a basin of dish-water went flying across the road to the terror of every one passing, and there'd been more than a few ludicrous accidents with cyclists even since Elizabeth came.

She'd always an eye on the window or the door open so that no one could go by unnoticed. “A powerful evenin' we have, Mrs Reegan,” she greeted Elizabeth from inside.

“It's a lovely evenin', Mrs Glinn,” Elizabeth said but didn't stop. “Stuck-up bitch”, she thought she read in the old barrel-shaped woman's reaction to her never stopping, but it could be so easily her own apprehensive imagination. Behind the forge the men were at pitch-and-toss, the pennies tossed from pocket-combs, a slight roll and thud when they fell on the tramped earth; she had to pass through and she
flinched and tried to smile as they made respectful way and said, ‘Good evenin', Mrs Reegan,” and she had to force her own quiet reply. The shock of new contact with people was getting more violent than ever, and yet she couldn't stay alone. She saw the boy impatiently ahead of her now, ashamed before the men of this ageing woman who was not even his mother, and the men neither noticing nor caring. Sometimes the smile turned to a shudder, but it was best to go on and not notice, if you could possibly manage, and declare the whole mess a shocking comedy.

She left the shopping-bag and the cloth-bound notebook, in which the monthly accounts were written, at the shop and said she'd call for them on her way from the well.

The well was past the chapel, in the priest's field where the presbytery stood blue and white for the Virgin Mary at the end of the long avenue of limes. Always it amused her, the great whitewashed front and the Virgin Mary door and windows, one man's way of proclaiming a love. “
He turned
from grisly saints, and martyrs hairy To the sweet portraits
of the Virgin Mary
,” she remembered out of Don Juan, and began to laugh. She wondered if the priest could read those lines and still paint the house blue and white; probably he could, it'd only add strength of indignation to the brush. It was Halliday who'd first showed her the lines and given her the Byron.

“What's the joke, Elizabeth?” the boy asked in a neglected tone and she'd quickly to come to earth.

“I was thinking of something. I'm sorry, Willie. We must buy some sweets on our way back. What sort of sweets would you like?”

It drew him away, he answered excitedly. They were on the avenue and then she saw the priest, walking in his soutane at the other end of the limes, reading his breviary. The well was only a little distance, a path between barbed-wire on stakes leading to it from the avenue so that people couldn't tramp indiscriminately over the meadow, and she hurried, she wanted to be away before he'd reach the end of his walk and turn and see her.

Soon after she had married he approached her to join the local branch of the Legion of Mary, a kind of legalized gossiping school to the women and a convenient pool of labour that the priests could draw on for catering committees.
There was no real work for it to do, all the Catholics
of the parish attended to their duties, except a few dangerous eccentrics who would not be coerced.

“No, thank you, father,” Elizabeth had politely refused the offer to join.

“Come now, Mrs Reegan,” he wouldn't accept the refusal. “All the other policemen's wives are joined. It's one of the most extraordinary and powerful organizations in the world, it's spread to every country under the sun, and it was founded by one of our own countrymen, Frank Duff. Do you know, and I think this miraculous, it was organized on exactly the same pattern as Communism: a presidium at the top and widening circles of leadership all the way down to the bottom; and even in this humble parish of ours we must try to do our bit. Come now, Mrs Reegan! You don't want us to coax you all that much.”

“No. I don't wish to join,” she said firmly; the half-patronizing, half-bullying tone annoyed her, she'd been too short a time out of London.

“But come now, Mrs Reegan. You must have a reason—why?” he grew hot.

“Because I dislike organizations,” she tossed, betrayed by her annoyance.

“So, my dear woman, you dislike the Catholic Church: it happens to be an organization, you know, that's founded on Divine Truth,” he countered quickly and she was taken aback; but she saw the roused egotism, the personal fail it'd be if he didn't make her join now. Meaning or words didn't matter, except as instruments in the brute struggle—who was going to overpower whom—and this time she was roused too. She was too angry and involved to slip away and leave the field empty. She wanted to brush the
my dear woman
aside like she would a repulsive arm-clasp or touching of clothes, the assumptions of a familiarity that does not exist.

“No, thank you, father. I won't join and I must leave you now,” she closed and went, in the succeeding remorse at least she'd escape the pain of brawling. He came to the house several times afterwards but she was prepared and able to thwart him, though one time she'd despaired of him ever giving up. And when he finally did she avoided him as much as was possible in a place as small as this.

She filled the bucket from the well and they managed to be on their way out the avenue before he turned in his slow, reading walk. The gate of the avenue faced the church gate and to the right was the shop and a piece of waste ground hedged with flowering currant where candidates spoke from the roofs of cars at elections. Here she gave the boy money for chocolate and sent him to the shop. She crossed to the church gate and went on the old brown flagstones between the laurels into the church.

It was still as death within, no one entered much this time of day, soon the sacristan would come to close the doors for the night, and the kneeler she let so carefully down frightened her with the way it seemed to crash on the flagstones. Her skin was uncomfortably hot and damp after the blind race to escape the priest.

Pray that you may get well, was her first thought, and then the quietness started to seep into her mind. The long strips of whitewash peeling between the windows, the dark light of blood from the lamp hanging before the tabernacle, late roses and geraniums and tulips in the vases on the altar and no candles burning in the sockets on the gleaming candle-shrines, the wooden communion-rail and pulpit and the Stations of the Cross in their wooden frames, and her mind began to wander dispassionately, an old habit, over the life of Christ. The God made flesh in a woman, preparing thirty years to change the lives of people and being crucified for His trouble after three; the Resurrection and the going away from it all into heaven after declaring it saved; lunatic enough at least to fit the situation it proposed itself to answer. And then odd moments on the way that fascinated her: the absurdity and total humanness of the cry, “Can
you not watch one hour with me?” to the apostles asleep in their own lives in the garden, his agony not their drama; and what real good would their watching do, except its little deceit of flattery might obscure for its hour the terror of his loneliness with what he'd have to face anyhow, alone; for even if they did watch they could not take the chalice from his lips, no one can find anybody to suffer their last end for them.

But soon her mind was shifting, not able to stay long on any one thing, her eyes gazing now at the initials cut in the bench where she knelt, some of them covered with so much grime and dust that those who'd carved them there must be long dead, the single letters cut in the wood that lent themselves to so many interpretations having endured longer than the hands that carved them; and a little way from her right hand she noticed the white trade-plate:

Waterford, a port town in the south, famous for its glass, where there must be a factory that made church furniture. There she woke. Her mind was giving the same attention to this old bench as it had given to the mystery of the world and Christ. There were no answers. All the mind could do was wander and wonder from object to object and find no resting-place, in the end all things were lost in contemplation.
That was all, there seemed nothing more, she'd no business to be in the church except she loved it and it was quiet; Willie must be waiting this long while outside, tired to his teeth of her solemn practices.

She found him at the pier, between the bucket and shopping-bag, and she carried the bucket. They went between the churchyard and McDermott's, the pub giving way to the dwelling-house, and then the stables and sheds, where the animals were kept and the drinkers pissed. They had to pass the men tossing at the forge and when she saw the boy stiffen she said, “Don't mind, Willie. They're paying us as
much attention as the man in the moon is,” but she saw he didn't believe her, resented her touching so close on his secret feelings.

When she got past Glinn's she rested, the weight of water too much for her strength, and the boy coming to himself when she smiled, “We brought the lazyman's load, didn't we, Willie?”

“We'll have to know better next time,” he laughed.

“Why does the Virginia creeper—you know the stuff on the church, Elizabeth—turn red and the ivy stay green?” he asked with the insatiable eagerness to know that took possession of him sometimes.

“Because it changes, because it dies,” she said absently, not really knowing. “That's what I suppose. The ivy doesn't change or die. Oh, I never went to school much; I don't know much, Willie.”

“How long did you go to school for?”

“Till I was fourteen.”

“You're tired, Elizabeth, aren't you?” he asked and she started.

“I'm sorry, Willie. I'm afraid I'm not better yet, not fully.”

She'd not been paying him enough attention. Why could she not keep her mind fixed? Half her attention as they walked had been on the orchard underneath where the Caseys lived, the light coming across the lake, between the great oaks standing in the laurels on the avenue, to fall on the apple trees. The blackbirds flew clacking between the low branches to peck the skin of the honeycombs for the wasps to burrow in, so that they'd fall light as leaves, just shells of red and yellow in the trodden grass of the orchard —and she was beginning to make vague analogies, to think of herself, her mind about to go on its futile wanderings again, when she saw she was neglecting everything else. She was growing too engrossed in herself and no matter what she'd think or where her mind might wander she was still a woman on an earthen road with a boy and a bucket.

“Oh, things get too terrible sometimes, Willie,” she blurted suddenly out and when she saw his worried amazement
she was sorry. She lifted the bucket. When she'd have dragged as far as the scullery table she'd try to give him all her attention till the others would get home, she promised.

The school holidays ended in early September, the kitchen emptier all the mornings and afternoons, and Mrs Casey began to come practically every day and to stay for hours. She had nothing to do, she complained.

“I didn't mind at all,” she said; one morning Elizabeth had praised her for taking care of the house while she was in hospital. “There was great excitement, them all were good and helped, and I felt I was needed—it's when you have nothin' to do and start thinkin' that's the worst.

“I'll go off me rocker some day I'm alone up in that elephant of a house, that's the God's truth,” she cried. “If you had a child or something you'd be better able to knuckle down! But when you have nothin', that's the thing! I was at Ned to adopt one out of the Home but he wouldn't hear of it. They'd have bad blood or wild, their father's or mother's blood, he said. What does he care? He's down in the dayroom here or at court or out on patrol most of the time but where am I?”

Elizabeth didn't know what to do, only let her cry. She liked her, but she was afraid the younger woman was beginning to depend too much on her, and she could drag like deadweight. Mullins's wife and Brennan's were hard and vulgarly sure of their positions, always ferociously engaged in some petty rivalry or other, but they were too full of their own things to ever drag. The most they'd want was to make some material use out of you, and it was always easier to deal with them than such as Mrs Casey. You'd only to meet their demands on the one level, and perhaps a person had always to stay on that level to survive as untouched  as they were. She'd try and tell Mrs Casey that she was running through a bad time, as every one did, and that it would pass. Though it'd be quite useless as anything else. She'd better make tea. The one thing was that her own situation didn't seem so desperate when it was confronted with such as this.

The days grew colder and there came the first biting frosts, the children having to wear their winter stockings and boots, some lovely nights in this weather, a big harvest moon on the lake, and the beating whine of threshing-machines everywhere, working between the corn-ricks by the light of the tractor headlamps. The digging of the potatoes began. And there was great excitement when apples were hung from the barrack ceiling for Hallowe'en and nuts went crack under hammers on the cement through the evening. All Souls' Day they made visits to the church, six Our Fathers and Hail Marys and then outside to linger awhile beneath the bell-rope before entering again on another visit, and for every visit they made a soul escaped out of purgatory.