The Barracks (23 page)

“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.

On Wednesday and Friday evenings at six they had Lenten Devotions: the rosary and Benediction on Wednesdays;
the Stations of the Cross that she loved, on Fridays.

The priest with the small black prayer book, in black soutane and white surplice, the altar-boys in scarlet and white, their breaths blowing like cigarette-smoke in the light of the candles they carried, the candle-flames flickering yellow before their young faces. At every one of the fourteen stations from Pilate to the tomb the priest's voice ringing:
We adore thee, O Christ, and praise thee
, as he genuflects in the stillness, and the self-conscious whispers of the small congregation of villagers scattering from beneath the gallery as their feet shuffle on the flagstones,
Because by Thy holy
Cross Thou has redeemed the world
.

Christ on the road to Calvary, she on the same road; both in sorrow and in ecstasy; He to save her in Him, she to save herself in Him—both to be joined for ever in Oneness. She'd gone to these devotions all her life, she'd only once fallen away, some months of bitterness in London. She saw her own life declared in them and made known, the unendurable pettiness and degradation of her own fallings raised to dignity and meaning in Christ's passion; and always the
ecstasy of individual memories breaking like a blood-vessel, elevated out of the accidental moment of their happening, and reflected eternally in the mirror of this way. Though, at the fourteenth station, the body was laid in the tomb, it held the seeds and promise of its resurrection, when the door of the tomb would be thrown back and He who was risen would appear in great light, glorious and triumphant. And if the Resurrection and still more the Ascension seemed shadowy and unreal compared to the way to Calvary, it might be because she could not know them with her own life, on the cross of her life she had to achieve her goal, and what came after was shut away from her eyes. She could only smile and Crucifixion and Resurrection ended in this smiling. As a child she'd been given to believe that the sun danced in the sky Easter Sunday morning, and she'd wept the day she saw that it simply shone or was hidden by cloud as on other mornings. The monstrous faiths of childhood got all broken down to the horrible wonder of this smiling.

She was at the end of her tether, she beat off two attacks in the next week, dragging herself to a chair; but the morning came that she failed to rise out of bed. The alarm had torn away the thin veils of her sleep as on other mornings and with the imbedded force of habit she went to reach across the shape of bedclothes that was Reegan to stop its clattering dance on the table, but she fell back without reaching it, as if stricken. Reegan grunted awake, and stopped it with one impatient movement of his arm. He seldom had to stop it and, sensing the break of habit, searched for something wrong. Elizabeth usually stopped the clock without it waking him. She was at his side: could it be that for once she was in heavy sleep, or was something wrong! As if to meet his thoughts he heard her say, “I tried to stop it but I'm not well,” between gasps. He raised himself on his elbow; one look was enough to tell him she wasn't well, he thought immediately of the cancer, they had discovered no cure for cancer yet.

She lay quiet there. The weight of bedclothes, the weight of the boards of the ceiling on her eyes, the weights hanging
from her body removed any hope she might have that she'd recover in a few minutes and be able to rise. She told Reegan that she must have got a stupid 'flu or something, she didn't feel able to get up. She heard him say he'd ring the doctor, immediately. She didn't care, it didn't concern her. She didn't care what he did. The day was rocking gently in the room, the brass bells at the foot of the bed shone like swinging lamps. She heard Reegan pull on his clothes, and he left the door open as he went.