The Barracks (8 page)

“Shure there'd have to be something,” he said as he left, “or we'd all go off our rockers. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

He was gone as the children came exultant and rosy-cheeked from playing on the quay, willing to do anything rather than submit to the discipline of their homework. She loathed this badgering and coaxing she had to do.

“We haven't much this evening—we'll have plenty of time after tea,” they protested.

“But if you do them now you'll be finished and done with them for the whole evening,” she reasoned.

“We'll have plenty of time after tea,” the same old excuse came back and then the sulky cry from Willie, “Why do we have to do all these lessons anyhow?”

He'd need to write and read and add to live in modern society; to penpush his way to sixty-five in some city office; discipline his formless will and not to be for ever the child of his own longing, and there were other reasons, she knew.
And if they were let follow their own longings now they'd accuse back: “You never gave me a chance, Elizabeth! I didn't know what was right and you didn't care enough to show me,” and they had the right, she supposed, to grow to knowledge of everything and perhaps the desperate satisfaction of knowing for certain that there is nothing that can be really known here and now.

But did these children want to get their way? Did they not in their hearts want her to enforce the rules of their lives so that they could assert themselves against them without real danger, they wanted to shake their fists at the skies but not for the skies to crash about their heads? They too had need of their laws and gods, they wanted to feel secure. It was all difficult and complicated, it might be this and it might be that, nothing real about the lives of people could ever be known, but she'd enough of thinking and reasoning and arguing for one evening.

“You must do your lessons now,” she commanded firmly and they obeyed. She saw them unbuckle the blue cloth schoolbags she'd made them out of an old tunic of Reegan's, get the bottle of ink from the sideboard and bend over their blue-lined copies, and she felt as defeated as they did.

“I'll help you in anything you want,” she tried to atone for the severity, and listened to their nibs scrape in the silence with anxiety. She was afraid her firmness would harden them against her till Sheila raised great dark eyes and asked her how to do a problem that she began to read out of the Arithmetic. She stooped over her to help. The small child soon understood. She was able to continue on her own. Then Una asked something else out of jealousy; and later, Willie, “Is b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l the way to spell beautiful, Elizabeth?”

She told him it was and asked how he wanted to use it. She felt she was part of their whole lives as they worked. She watched them for a few minutes in a perfect wonder of peace. Then she went to the window to touch the heads of the daffodils with her fingers. The sun had gone down close to the fir-tops across the lake. The level glare stained a red
roadway on the water to the navigation signs and the grass of the river meadows was a low tangle of green and white light. It came so violently to the window that she'd soon to turn away, spelling the word Willie had asked her in inarticulate
wonder. They were pestering her with questions. She forgot the cysts in her breasts, the cancer, the doctor, the changing moods that swept her day.

She laid the table for Reegan and hoped they wouldn't stay late drinking. Reegan seldom did: it gave him no release, only made him more silent and dissatisfied as he listened. It was worse if he talked, for he'd dominate, and was not wanted then. He would not stay but it was so easy to get caught in a drinking bout after the courts: he couldn't very well come home without Mullins and Brennan, because of the nuisance their wives would make.

The banging of the outside door and excited talk down in the dayroom eventually told her they were home. She hadn't long to listen for Reegan's feet in the hallway: she saw the children stiffen, they could tell by his step how the day had gone. She saw them turn to gaze at her with meaning quiet —as she had partly sensed herself, it hadn't gone well.

He said nothing when he came and they knew him too well to speak. He took gloves out of his greatcoat pocket with the quarter of Silver Mints he always brought and left them on the sewing-machine and hung his coat on the back of the door.

“There's some sweets there for you,” he told them distantly;
if he was in high humour he'd shout and ask them what they'd learned in school and throw sweets in the air to watch them scramble. Now he sat at the table and waited for his meal. The three children went without noise or rush to the sewing-machine and Willie divided them, two by two by two, into three little heaps, and they brought their share cupped in their hands to Elizabeth. She took a sweet from each and they went to their father, it was a kind of ceremony. He tried to be pleasant as he accepted their offering, and left the three sweets he took beside his arm at the table-cloth.

None of the others had yet gone home. Their excited voices came from the dayroom, discussing the day with Casey: who won and who lost, Judge O'Donovan's witticisms,
the blunders, the personal animosities of the lawyers; sometimes going for the law books on the shelf to argue the decisions.

Elizabeth put a boiled egg before Reegan and poured out tea. He said, “Thanks,” quietly and drew it to himself. “You had a long day,” she said.

“The big case didn't come up till three. Hangin' around all day with our two hands as long as each other.”

“Where did you get your lunch?”

“In the Bridge Café.”

It was by the river, with a green front, and served substantial
meals cheaply.

“How did the case go?” she was uneasy asking. He was in bad form, she could tell; he might resent her asking as petty curiosity; but surely he hadn't forgotten to call at the doctor's! He'd said nothing yet.

“A fine and a suspended sentence for dangerous driving. The drunken driving charge was squashed. He had a good solicitor, a good background, a good position, a university education.… What more could you ask?” he smiled with sardonic humour.

She saw the old sense of failure and frustration eating but she'd come to fear it hardly at all, or care. Her own life had grown as desperate.

“It's the way of the world,” she said.

“It's the way surely,” he laughed harshly, though coming out more, not trying to hold it all back within himself.

She watched him with tenderness. He was a strange person, she knew hardly anything about him, beyond the mere physical acts of intimacy. There had never been any real understanding between them: but was there ever such between people? He'd have none of the big questions: What do you think of life or the relationships between people or any of the other things that have no real answers? He trusted all that to the priests as he trusted a sick body to the doctors
and kept whatever observances were laid down as long as they didn't clash with his own passions.

Yet, it had survived far better than the deepest relationship of her adult life, though she had still Michael Halliday's letters locked in the wooden trunk in their bedroom and some of the books he'd given her. He'd been a doctor with her in the London Hospital and he changed her whole life. She'd listened to him for so many hours in the long London evenings that were lovely now in the memory; read the books he gave her; went with him to films and plays and concerts; and most of all he made her suffer, he put her through the frightful mill of love.

She saw the streaks of grey in Reegan's still blond hair, the images of grey and gold bringing the memory of a party, the twenty-first birthday party of a nurse from the hospital. She'd been invited by the girl and had brought Halliday. Though she hadn't known then the relationship was already well on its way to failure.

The girl's father, a clerk all his life in some tea company in Aldgate, rose late in the night to sing drunkenly to his wife:

The night was almost over. The chorus was taken up, tears smiling in many eyes, and it was then Halliday tried to shout in some drunken obscenity. Everybody there was drunk or tipsy; it didn't attract much attention, and she'd managed to stop him and get him home.

The next evening he apologized to her in a way.

“I'm sorry, dear Elizabeth,” he said, “but if I was sufficiently drunk again and you not there I'd do it again.”

“Why?” she asked. “What harm was it? Wasn't it a human thing enough to want to do?”

“You mean it's a universal emotion, as the professors put it, is that it, Elizabeth?” he asked maliciously.

She had not known then. She'd been confronted for the first time with a strange language and its mockery and she could only smile and wait.

“Everybody's full of that kind of thing,” he said bitterly, “but it's not the truth. It rots your guts that way. You need real style to get away with something like that. And that old bastard after having bored and distracted that unfortunate woman for thirty years to get up as drunk as bejesus on his hind legs isn't my idea of style. It's an invitation to sink with him into his own swamp of a life. That's the kind of thing that kicks in your face on Friday and leads the choir at your funeral service Saturday morning.”

She'd said nothing. There was nothing she could say. Mostly she was dominated by Halliday and content to listen.

She little thought then that she'd be as she was now: married in a barrack kitchen, watching the grey in another man's hair. It all came round if you could manage to survive long enough. Reegan was growing old, and so was she. There was nothing said or given or fulfilled in her life. He was eating his meal, unaware of her; he hadn't bothered or remembered about the doctor; he'd brought her nothing home, not even something as unimaginative and cheap as the bag of sweets he brought the children.

“Did you see the Superintendent?” she asked to avoid thinking her way into another depression.

“Aye,” he admitted.

“Did things go any way well?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Very little at all happened so,” she yielded with such tired frustration that he looked. Her head was lowered over a shirt of Willie's. The needle shone as it was driven in and out of the cream stuff with mechanical precision.

He'd always felt her hostile to his private feud with Quirke, not that she ever reproached him openly, but he'd glimpsed it in stray words and silences. Once he had spoken
about applying for a transfer and she had argued against it for the children's sake, “Whatever life they've built up here for themselves will be broken down if we move. There'll be new teachers, new friends.…”

He had just nodded and gone away and said nothing. So for the children's sake he was supposed to make a monkey out of his own life, he thought. No man had more than one life, the children would have to take their chance as he had to take his, he wasn't going to give it up for anybody's or anything's sake; but he'd decided that he didn't want a transfer then—it would be little better than changing one hairshirt for another. In plain clothes he'd leave when he left, it would be in nobody's uniform, and at his own choosing. He'd go about it in his own way, without reference to anybody. So he kept his mouth shut about his feelings and plans and frustrations, only confiding when the pressures became too great inside and another human being seemed possessed of more understanding than a bedroom wall.

Tonight he sensed that she had somehow changed: she'd oppose nothing and he wondered if it was possible that she might really want him to speak out. He saw her sewing away, and he laughed, a dry breaking laugh—she'd have her way.

“No. Nothing happened,” he said. “Except what happened the last time and the time before and the time before that again.

“‘My Lord, it was a thoughtless act of the moment that this young man will suffer in his conscience for the remainder of his life,'” he began to parody but grew too bored or angry to continue.

“Such bullshit—and it never stops! It has no end. You should have heard O'Donovan's wisecracks today. He surpassed himself. He didn't miss one chance.”

O'Donovan was the judge, waspish and one side of his face disfigured with a livid birthmark, never comfortable except in the display of his own wit, a composition of stabbing
little references and allegories delivered with pompous sarcasm that played on small disadvantages; a kind of
beating down that was surely meant to compensate for some private failure. Reegan had tasted the sting himself more than once.

“Two labourers home from England were up for drunken brawling and he said”—here Reegan began to mimic the cocksure tones of O'Donovan—“Labourers home from England who behave between jobs like film stars between pictures can't expect to get the same kind of admiring treatment.'

“Apparently some of the Hollywood stars were up for brawling in Los Angeles last week: which was supposed to give the whole point to the joke,” Reegan explained. “And you should have heard them laughin' and the sound of it. Such a performance all day! If someone let off an honest shout of laughin' at any time you'd be able to hear a pin drop in that court. He'd never be forgiven! It reminded me at every turn of the school we went to and old Jockser Keenan—he fancied himself as an entertainer and we used to have to laugh for our lives all day.”

“They're only men and not perfect,” Elizabeth pleaded out of mere curiosity and not to seem too silent. Her voice carried no conviction. It sounded the platitude it was and no one could take it as opposition.