The Barracks (3 page)

She cleared her throat as she stooped over the fire, reached for the hankie in the fold of her sleeve. It wasn't there. She spat softly, without thinking. The mucus hissed against the hot ashes. She shuddered as a tiny mushroom of the pale timber ash drifted up. How she'd always hated Reegan's spitting on the floor, then trying to rub it into the cement with a drag of his boot! Now she was no better! And to plague her, a vision of herself in London before the war flashed on her mind, a spring Sunday in London, when the light is grey and gentle as anything on earth. She had come out the great black hospital gates, a red tartan scarf thrown back on her shoulder; and turned right, up the marvellous width of Whitechapel Road, away from the crowds milling into the Lane, for it was the morning. Now she was spitting like any common slut in a barrack kitchen. It was with the abjection of a beaten animal that she lifted her knitting and sat down close to Casey and the three children, who had finished their exercises and come into the circle about the fire.

Reegan sat at the table, filling his report into the Patrol Book. They were silent as he wrote till Casey asked the children:

“Ye're finished the auld lessons?”

“All's finished,” they told him quietly.

“And ye have them all off?”

“Aye.”

“Well, that's the way to be. Be able to puzzle the schoolmaster.”

“I wouldn't be sure they're that well known,” said Elizabeth.

“Well, you'll get nothin' without the learnin' these days. Pass the exams. That's what gets people on. That and swindlin'. I didn't do much of either meself. More's the pity. And signs are on it!”

They laughed at Casey's rueful grin. He brought a wonderful ease with him sometimes into the house, the black hands of the clock would take wings. They loved to sit with him at the fire, listening to the talk, feeling the marvellous minutes melt like sweetness in the mouth for ever.

Reegan wrote quickly at the table, to the well-practised formula, and only when he came to describe the weather had he to pause. He wasn't sure of the wind's direction. He remembered catching his breath at the way it clawed at his face and chest as he turned downhill from Ardcare; and then a mile farther on of the same straight road it came behind him, making the bicycle shift like a boat in full sail, its course warped in some way by the solid beech trees behind the demesne wall.

“What way is the wind blowin', Ned? Is it from the south-west?”

“About that,” Casey pondered to answer. “It was comin' from Moran's Bay when I was out for the turf. It seems about the only direction it knows how to blow from,” he added with a dry laugh.

Reegan was satisfied and turned back to finish his report but the wind's direction continued to amuse Casey.

“Where does the south-west wind come from, William Reegan?” he asked in the tones of a pompous schoolmaster.

“From the Atlantic Ocean,” Willie entered into the game, all the children's faces, and even Elizabeth's bright at the clown's face Casey had on for the performance.

“Very good, young Reegan! And can you tell me now what it gathers on its long journey across the oceans?”

“It gathers moisture,” Willie choked.

“Very right, my boy! I see you are one boy who comes to school to learn something other than villainy and rascality. And then as I have repeated day-in, day-out, while the hairs of me head turned grey, it strikes against the mountains, rises to a great height, and pisses down on the poor unfortunates
who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brows in this holy, catholic, and apostolic country of Ireland.”

There was a stifled roar of laughter as Reegan wrote, frowning to keep his concentration.

“You're a terrible man, Ned,” chaffed Elizabeth.

“But it's the God's truth!” he protested. “You know what Cromwell said: Get roasted alive in hell or drownded and perished in Connaught.”

Naturally timid, the little comic success seemed to release him from the burden of himself. Everything was relaxed and easy as Reegan closed the Patrol Book and pulled his chair in among them, but even so Casey shirked asking for Una to spend the night with his wife, and he'd have to ask soon or it would be too late. Reegan could be moody and strange. At any time he might resent this constant call on Una. A refusal could shatter Casey's ease of mind for the whole night. His nervous fear came out in the painfully round
about,
“The Missus was wonderin' if it'd be all right for Una to come up with me when I'm goin' up for the bit of supper, for to stop the night.”

Tonight he had no cause for fear.

“Shure she can go. But that's the woman's territory. Whatever she says,” deferred Reegan.

Elizabeth had no real say, though this social deference pleased her so, and she tried to catch Reegan's eyes with a smile of gratefulness as she assented, “She can, of course. Her nightdress is ready there in the press.”

Una couldn't conceal her delight, though she tried. Nor could Sheila conceal her terror of the loneliness in the cold room. Both tried to suppress any expression of their feelings. They knew their places. They were simply pawns. And this
world of their father and Casey and Elizabeth was as unknowable to them as the intolerable world of God is to the grown, if they have not dulled their sense of the mystery of life with the business or distractions of the day and the hour. All the two black-haired girls could do was sit there and wait, coming and going as they were willed.

“I don't like troublin' you all the time like this,” Casey shuffled.

Elizabeth stopped it. “Don't be talkin' foolish. Una thinks she can't get up half quick enough. Isn't that right, Una?”

The dark child smiled and blushed. No more.

“We don't know what we'd do only for Una. We'd be lost. That woman of mine would go off her head if she had to stop all night in that house on her own.”

“And no one would blame her,” Elizabeth managed to end.

Casey's embarrassment was over. He was as happy as he could be. He looked at the clock and it was already nine. He had nothing more to do before he slept, nothing but the repetitions that had become more than his nature. He'd bring Una with him when he went for his supper; kiss his wife at the door when he left again for the barracks a half-hour later: she'd stand with her hand on the edge of the door until she had heard the white gate that led on to the avenue clang behind him, it was her habit. Then the rest of the night was plain sailing: bring down the mattress and blankets from upstairs and make up his bed beneath the phone, lock the door, put the key on the sill, take out his beads to say a decade of the rosary with his few night prayers, set the alarm for the morning, rake the fire, turn down the oil lamp on the wall before he got into bed. He was at least master of these repetitions, they had no power to disturb him, he knew them in his blood; and they ran there like a drug.

“What about a game of cards? It's ages since we had a game,” he said, now that he was no longer troubled. A pack of cards was found behind a statue of St Therese on the sideboard, the folding card-table fixed in the centre of the hearth. The cards were dealt and played. Elizabeth kept the scores
on the inside of a torn Gold Flake packet. There was no tension in the play, no stakes, only the children excited as the night was cheated and hurried to its mid-hour.

From the outside the heavy porch door was shouldered open, small stones wedged beneath its bottom grinding on the concrete, the knocker clattering through the barracks. Steps lingered about the door of the dayroom before they came up the hall. They held their hands instinctively upright to listen.

“That's Jim's steps for sure,” Casey said before Brennan knocked and entered.

He was small for a policeman, the bare five feet nine of the regulations, his face thin, and the bones standing out. He looked overcome in the heavy woollen greatcoat.

“A terrible night that's in it,” he said.

“A terrible night.”

The voices echoed him, more or less in unison, the hoarse chant of a prayer.

“I saw the light turned low in the dayroom. I was thinkin' ye'd all be here.”

And he left his flashlamp down on the window-sill, his greatcoat and cap on the pedal sewing-machine just beneath. There was no further need of the cards. They were raked up and the green table lifted out.

“You let no grass grow under yer feet tonight, Jim?” he was asked, for it wasn't yet ten, and it was always later than ten when the policemen came to make their reports and sign themselves out for the night.

“I was makin' a bird cradle all the evenin' with the lads,” he explained. “We just managed to make it a minute ago there. So I thought it might be as well to face out for here at wance and be finished with it for the night.”

They could see him on his knees in the kitchen of their rooms across the river, most of his eight children gathered round, building the cradle out of sallies and the cement coloured rods of elder. When the snow came they'd set it on the street. And all through the hard weather they'd have cold thrushes and blackbirds.

“We got a great strong cradle med,” he added. “None better in Ireland!”

The others smiled, Brennan's intense pride in everything that came into his possession was a barrack joke, it was artless as a child's.

“The best woman in Ireland to get a bargain,” he'd say when his wife came from town on a shopping Saturday; and when he came home himself with the little yellowed bundle of Early York in spring, the plants still knotted in their ragged belt of straw, he had already, “A hundred of the best heads of cabbage in Ireland. Without question or doubt!”

“And how is Mrs Brennan's cold?” asked Elizabeth quietly.

“She's still coughin' away. A fierce rasp in her chest. But nothin'll get that woman of mine to stay up in bed,” he complained proudly.

“She'd be wiser to stop. Is she takin' anything for it?”

“She rubs on a bit of Vick at night. That's all I ever see her do. She always says a cauld has to run its course.”

“The bed's the only man,” advised Casey. “It's the only place you can keep your temperature even. She needn't think that she can't be done without—the very best of us can be done without. So she's as well to take it aisy. Time and tide, they say, waits for no man, nor woman neither.”

It was the end, this litany of truisms, draining away whatever little life the conversation ever had. In the way women are so quick to sense, Elizabeth knew it was the time to do things. She got cups and saucers from the dresser, bread from the white enamelled bread box, tea out of a paper bag on the mantelpiece. They took the cups in their hands at the fire, and a plate of buttered soda bread was passed about.

Mullins came as they were eating. He was no older than the others, but red and swollen, a raw smell of porter on his breath, though he appeared more depressed than tipsy.

“A wild night!” he said. “It seems I'm the last of the Mohicans.”

“But the last shall be first, remember,” Casey couldn't
resist quoting. With his weak laugh it came like a sneer of derision. Mullins stiffened at the door with resentment.

“Aye!” he answered inarticulately back. “And the first might be last.”

“Don't be standin' there, John. There's a cup of tea just waiting for you,” Elizabeth urged.

She pulled out a chair and Reegan, who had been taking less and less part in the conversation, just lying in a bored stupor in the chair, laughed, “It's not who's first or last counts in this house. It's to be in time for the tay. That's what counts. And you couldn't have timed it nicer, John!” as the ungainly old policeman sat down.

It took all the hatred that the gibe brought. Mullins laughed so tipsily that the cup rocked over and back on his saucer.

“Bejasus!” he swore. “It seems I med it on the eleventh hour, surely.”

Reegan began to tell his clash with Quirke to Brennan and Mullins, Casey forced to listen again; and the tones of violence had now taken the resonance of a constant theme repeating itself through the evening.

They listened nervously to his frustration and spleen wear itself to the end of its telling. When he finished Mullins burst out in drunken passion that, “They can't ride rough
shod
over us these days. Them days are gone. They can try it on. But that's all—bejasus!”

“You'd be surprised what they can do,” Casey argued with unusual conviction. “Things don't change that quick. They might luk different, that's all. But if you
wance
cross them they'll get rid of you, no matter whether they can or they can't. They'll find ways and means, don't worry. Who do you think the Chief Super's goin' to stand up for? For John Mullins or Mr. Quirke? Power, let me tell you, always stands up for power.”

“But what do I care? What the hell do I care?” Reegan shouted and it was another argument.

Examples began to be quoted, old case histories dragged up for it to end as it began—with nothing proven, no one's
convictions altered in any way, it becoming simply the brute clash of ego against ego, any care for tolerance or meaning or truth ground under their blind passion to dominate. And the one trophy they all had to carry away was a gnawing resentment of each other's lonely and passing world.

Even that resentment went quickly as a sudden liking can when Brennan steered the antagonism to a safe stop against the boy, “What does young Willie think of all this? Will he join the Force when he grows up?”

“Not if he has any sense in his skull,” Reegan intervened. He spoke with the hotness of argument. The others were cooled and tired of it now.

“But do you think will he be the measurement?” Casey asked, preferring to ignore the challenge.

“We'll have to put a stone on his head, that's what we'll have to do soon with the way he's growin' up on us,” Mullins said kindly and then he laughed. “But I'm afraid he'll never be
thick
enough.”