The Barracks by John McGahern Page A

energy that she’d have to pay for yet. The morning went in a flash: the children gone to school, the roll call over in the dayroom, Reegan gone out on patrol. She never felt it go, she couldn’t believe how it went so fast. She was dressed and Mrs Casey was smoothing down the back of her navy costume.
    â€œYou look wonderful today,” she said, and it wasn’t all flattery, the colour high in the usually pale cheeks, the vein in the side of her temple swollen and the eyes bright with fever. She’d know in the next few hours what she had avoided for months: she’d be alive and facing into the summer she loved without mortal anxiety, or she’d have cancer. She put on her dark overcoat and gloves and as she was ready for leaving Mrs Brennan came, a determined little woman with wiry black hair and sharp features that must have been pretty in a cold way once, but whatever luxury of flesh had bloomed there was worn down to skin and hard bone by this. She had heard Elizabeth was going to town and wanted a bottle from the chemist’s for her youngest child. “Would you ever get it in Timlin’s?” she asked and handed over the prescription rolled about a hard pile of silver. Her bright blue eyes lusted with curiosity as she offered conventional hopes about the visit to the doctor, but she was told nothing, and then the talk swung with deadly fixity to doctors and diseases and women’s and children’s ailments till Elizabeth couldn’t escape quickly enough. She’d such a horror of the domestic talk of womenthat she felt she must be lacking somehow, she got frightened sometimes, it could make her feel shut in a world of mere functional bodies, and she broke away with ill-concealed haste to be gone. It was such relief to feel the frost on her face and see the wide skies. They came with her to the door and went inside as she cycled round the barracks. Mullins heard her tyres come on the gravel and was at the window as she passed.
    â€œGood luck, Elizabeth,” he waved, the chest bursting out of the blue tunic, and she waved back.
    â€œOld drunkard!” she smiled and was happy. She saw him close his fist and stiffen the arm as he waved for the last time: to have courage, and calling on God to stand up for all sorts of bastards. He’d have come into the kitchen to wish her luck if the women hadn’t been there.
    She could never see him without remembering how he had staggered in, one evening she was alone in the kitchen soon after being married. He had slumped down in the chair to wag a drunken finger and say, “Elizabeth, I can call you Elizabeth, can’t I? Can you answer me this,’ lizabeth? Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? That’s what you might call a question, Elizabeth! A professortold me that, one Saturday night before an All Ireland Final, in Mooney’s of Abbey Street, and he was drunk as I was! He was a powerful talker, could discourse on any subject under the sun! Did you ever see Mooney’s of Abbey Street, it’s a great place for meetin’ people, and it’s just opposite Wynn’s Hotel where all the priests up from the country stop. There’s nothin’ in the world I like better, Elizabeth, than a good conversation over a pint.”
    She’d given him a meal, she remembered. No one could refuse him who had any heart. Not even if he had abused a hundred responsibilities. He’d shaken with laughing as he ate and said over and over, “ Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? That’s what you might call a question, isn’t it, Elizabeth? Who are they to say that we shall have no more cakes and ale? It gives a man heart to hear something the like of that even once in his life!”
    She saw him at the window and waving and she overflowedwith gratitude as she bumped out the rutted avenue with the line of sycamores inside the garden wall and turned