Read Online The Barracks by John McGahern - Free Book Online Page B

trouble!”
    â€œOne more! What difference will it make? It’d better to have twenty if it’d save us the trouble of worrying about it.”
    Mrs Casey called from the door, and when he came out of the dayroom she said flirtatiously, “You’re wanted up here.”
    â€œIt seems I’m a wanted man so,” he punned as he came. “It’s as bad as being in Fogra Tora .”
    He saw three cups on the table, the plate of buttered bread.
    â€œYou’re great, Elizabeth,” he praised, “but you shouldn’t have gone to that trouble.”
    â€œYou’re an important man today,” she kept up the game, smiling at why on earth these elaborate acceptances had always to arise in Ireland; in the London she had known the offer would be simply accepted at once or refused.
    â€œI’m the most important man in the house today, without question or doubt,” he laboured on. “The sole guardian of the fortress! The phone never even rang, not to talk of anybody calling.”
    â€œIt’d give you the willies,” his wife shivered.
    â€œNot enough money,” he explained. “Not half the men in the woods are working. It’s the same with the council quarries: the tarrin’ of the roads is doin’ away with the stones, and the bogs only last for the summer.”
    â€œWhat was it like in Skerries?” Elizabeth asked about his last station, where he’d met and married Teresa.
    â€œThe East Coast is good,” he said. “There was great life there, near the city; the market gardening, places youcouldn’t throw a stone without breaking glass; the fishing-boats, and the tourists in the summer. Too busy we were at times, but not so busy that I couldn’t meet me Waterloo,” he laughed towards his wife.
    â€œIt wasn’t always that story,” she flashed. “Do you remember the first night you left me home?”
    He made a rueful face, that was all.
    â€œWe were dancing in the Pavilion,” she continued spiritedly to Elizabeth. “Nothing would do him but to get me out of it before it was over.
    â€œâ€˜It’s too hot in here. And you can’t dance with the floor crowded, Teresa,’” she mimicked.
    â€œSo he brought me down by the harbour and put me up against Joe May’s gable. You could still hear the music from the Pavilion and it was comin’ across the water from Red Island too, Mick Delahunty playing there that night. There was a big moon over the masts of the fishin’ fleet. I knew he was mad for a court.”
    Elizabeth laughed lowly. She looked at Casey’s embarrassed face and bald head as pale and waxed as candles. She’d have given dearly to see him mad for a court.
    â€œAnd just as he was kissin’ me,” she went excitedly on, caught up in the flow of her story, “I pulled back me head and I said: ‘Do you see the moon, Ned?’
    â€œYou’d laugh till your dyin’ day, Elizabeth, if you saw the cut of his face as he searched for the moon. And do you know what he said when he found it?” she rocked in a convulsive fit of laughing on the chair.
    â€œWhat?” Elizabeth had to prompt.
    â€œHe said the moon was beautiful,” she roared at last, holding her sides as the fit hurt.
    â€œThat’s a nice story to tell on anybody, isn’t it?” Casey appealed, he was ill at ease, and Elizabeth feared one of those embarrassed silences till his wife retorted, “I might never have married you only for that.”
    â€œYou might never have been asked,” he was able to return and then they laughed quietly together, easy again.
    They talked another three or four minutes and then Caseyrose, “Elizabeth will want to get the children’s lunch. We’re only keeping her from her work.”
    â€œCan I help you to wash or anything, Elizabeth?” she offered.
    Elizabeth refused. They left. The dayroom door