The Barracks by John McGahern

for once. It gets harder to kneel down the later it gets. It was a long day,” he said quietly.
    He went and she heard him call on the street, “The rosary! The rosary! The rosary!” and their shouts from the river path, “Coming, Daddy! Right! Coming, Daddy!”
    The night was with them at last, the flames of the fire glittered on glass and delf, the crib on the mantelpiece bathed in the ghastly blood-red of the Sacred Heart lamp. She should take and light the lamp but their faces would fall if it was lit when they came. She’d leave it till the rosary was over. She’d have less scrutiny to fear in the uncertain firelight as she prayed. She took down the white vase that kept their beads as their feet came.
    Tomorrow she’d see the doctor and she was frightened in spite of the tiredness and hopelessness. Everything might be already outside her control, nothing she could do would make the slightest difference. She could only wait there for it to happen, that was all. Whether she had cancer or not wasn’t her whole life a waiting, the end would arrive sooner or later, twenty extra years meant nothing to the dead, but no, no, no. She couldn’t face it. Time was only for the living. She wanted time, as much time as she could get, nothing was resolved yet or understood or put in order. She’d need years to gather the strewn bits of her life into the one Elizabeth. She did not know what way to turn, nothing seemed to depend on herself any more. She thought blindly since she could turn no way, the teeth of terror at her heart,“I will pray. I will pray that things will be well. I will pray that things will be well.”
    They were with her in the kitchen now. She handed the children the pale mother-of-pearl with silver crosses and took out her own brown beads of wood.
    Reegan got his beads from the little cloth purse he always carried in his watch pocket. He put a newspaper down on the cement and knelt with his elbows on the table, facing the dark mirror.
    They blessed themselves together and he began:
    â€œ Thou, O Lord, will open my lips ”,
    â€œ And my tongue shall announce Thy praise ,” they responded.
    The even, religious tones continued in their unvarying monotony. O Jesus, I must die! I know not where nor how. My happiness is as passing as my evenings and nights and days. I must travel the road of penance and prayer towards my Resurrection in Jesus Christ. It is my one joy and sweetness and hope, and if I will not believe in this Eternal Resurrection I must necessarily live within the gates of my own hell for ever .
    Reegan sang out the prayers as he sang them every evening of their lives and they were answered in chorus back, murmurs and patterns and repetitions that had never assumed light of meaning, as dark as the earth they walked, as habitual as their days.
    â€œWe offer the holy rosary of this night for a special intention,”he dedicated before the Mysteries.
    He didn’t even pause, uttering the prayer in the same monotone as the prayers before and after, but it woke Elizabeth to immediate attention. Could it be possible that he was praying for her?
    She felt delusion of happiness run with such sweetness in her for a moment that she felt blessed; but then was it for her he was praying? She couldn’t know. She had no means of knowing. He wouldn’t tell and she could never ask.
    She felt the warm wood of the beads in her fingers. They were old and rather rare, she knew, and there was a relic ofSt Teresa of Avila enclosed in the carved crucifix. She’d been given them by a priest she had nursed in London. Someone had brought them from Spain and they were more than a hundred years old, she remembered he had told her once.

3
    T hey rose into another white morning, cold as the other days of frost, all of them helping her much, knowing she had to go to the doctor. She had slept little through the night and now she worked in a flame of nervous