Mrs Casey hummed as she swept and dusted the room, opened fully the window to let out the stale air Elizabeth seldom noticed any more and then left to empty the slops. With her quick young movements and humming she seemed a kind of sunlight to Elizabeth.
“We have it right for the doctor now,” she said when she returned. “We’ll not be disgraced no matter who comes now.”
“It’s marvellous, though it’s so much trouble for you, you have to do everything for us nowadays,” Elizabeth apologized.
“It’s no trouble at all. I haven’t felt so well for ages. Only yesterday Ned said I never looked so well since I fooled him,” she laughed. “It’s those four walls in that joint of ours that gets me down. When you’ve hardly anything to do it’s the worst, you start broodin’ and then your nerves go. Everything frightens you, that’s the worst. I almost think I could sleep on me own tonight if I had to, but it’s wonderful then to have Una or somebody.” She seemed very happy as she left to get the dinner. She went into the dayroom to Casey on her way to the kitchen, and soon he came upstairs with the newspaper to tap as he always did on the open door before he entered.
“You look powerful today, Elizabeth. You’ll be out and about before any time and I brought you the paper,” he said and left it beside her hand on the eiderdown.
“Is there anything strange in it today?” she asked to change his conversation away from herself, she couldn’t endure much more of it. Why had they all to say the same things, or were all lies one thing as truth was one thing too?
“Nothin’ strange,” Casey laughed. “Never anything strange but you buy them all the same, don’t you? I think the day wouldn’t be the same without them, even the hand-lin’ of them and that gives you the feelin’ that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Jay, Elizabeth, we used to have to fairly sweat to learn the lines out of the auld school-books and you find them all the time, even the ones you forgot, comin’ back and back. It’s a terror, isn’t it?”
“I find the same myself: everybody does I think,” she said.
“But they won’t admit it,” he cried with some excitement.
“No, no,” she lingered.
“Only yesterday I was talkin’ to Mullins,” he was begining when he heard Mrs Casey come with the cups of tea and he changed, “Well, didn’t I manage it well, to be here when the tea landed. It shows you how jealous she was of the two of us talkin’ alone and she had to find some excuse,” and the eternal game started between them again till Casey said, “Men are the same as women I suppose. They can’t be got on without and you can’t get on with them, so what are you to do?” and then the doctor’s car was heard. Casey rushed to be downstairs in the dayroom. She put a few last tidying touches to the room and met the doctor on her way down with the tray. They exchanged a few polite words before he climbed the stairs to Elizabeth.
“How is the patient today?” he smiled. He put his bag breezily down on the bed, took off his gloves, and shook her hand.
She didn’t know how to answer, and she knew it made no difference whether she answered or not.
“How are you today, Doctor?” she asked.
“Wonderfuclass="underline" there’s not even the rain to complain about so far today, though it was quite heavy last night. You don’t do much complaining yourself, do you?”
“No. There’s not much use.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for a few roars too, as most people unfortunately realize. At least they manage to get attention, if it’s only for the fuss and nuisance they make.
“How is the pain today?” he asked suddenly. She answered. The examination began. When it was over he gazed at her face; she tried to avoid his eyes; he had little doubt that she suspected the worst.
“It never rains but it pours, that’s the way it seems to be in your case, but I’m not worried. A slight bubble of air in the bloodstream can finish the healthiest in a flash, and there’s people walking about enjoying themselves who’ve been miles worse than you. They say that doctors and nurses can’t face illness, that they know too much, but I say that if they know one side they know the other side too.”
She nodded agreement. She asked him where he hoped to go this year for his holidays.
“To the South of France and if we can manage the money,” he said, “probably across and down to Rome. We’ve had too much of the rain to ever want to see Ireland first, we should get out to the sun when we get the chance. Now it’s in a lot of people’s reach, and we’re losing our inferiority complex about travel and culture and that, the pig-in-the-kitchen days are gone.
“Do you know, when you think, great changes have come over this country in the last years. Now we’re reaping the fruits those men that won us our freedom sowed. Do you know, when I was going to University College, people that had plenty of money were awed of putting their foot inside the door of the Shelbourne Hotel because they weren’t the so-called gentry. That day is gone or going fast. There’s a new class growing up in this country that won’t be shamed out of doing things because they haven’t come out of big houses. I could walk this day into the Shelbourne Hotel as if I owned it, and I was born with no silver spoon.”
Elizabeth nodded: it made her smile to imagine it within her means to go into the Shelbourne Hotel or to the South of France, whatever salvation that could bring to anybody. “Woman, take up your bed and walk to the Shelbourne Hotel”, played itself so fantastically in her mind that she nearly laughed purely when he ended, and she had to tell herself that she was becoming cruel and malicious. Her life was in this person’s hands, she must remember. He was only conversing pleasantly with her, one of his patients, before he left. Though he seemed to speak with the passion of some deep conviction and she wondered could he really believe in his rubbish, what difference could being able to walk proudly into the Shelbourne Hotel possibly make in any real person’s life?
“How do their minds work, Elizabeth? How in the name of Christ do they keep afloat on those lunacies? Can you tell me that one thing, Elizabeth — how do their minds work, how in the name of Christ do they manage to keep going?” she heard Halliday’s voice break through her thoughts.
Always she saw people in the light of her own consciousness, and would she be listening quietly to this doctor and seeing nothing if she’d never met Halliday? Would she be better or worse off now if she hadn’t met him? Consciousness, awareness, even vision lay within herself, but it was he who had shaken them awake, if she’d never met him they might have slept a lifetime. Or she might have met with some one else but how could she know? All she knew was what she was, what she had become, and neither very clearly. He had changed everything in her life and solved nothing: the first rush of the excitement of discovery, and then the failure of love, contempt changing to self-contempt and final destruction, its futile ashes left in her own hands. If she had never come to vision or awareness she’d be left with some sense of belonging — the dark comfort of the crowd huddled together for warmth in their fear of what must not be named — and how could terror in the dark be worse than this lonely terror of the broad daylight?
The room, the bed, the ceiling, her own sweat and discomforts were still there. The doctor had finished the monologue her words had prompted, she was asking him about the nurse, and he shook her hand before he pulled on his gloves and left. She could hear Mrs Casey moving in the kitchen. Casey was in the dayroom. The newspaper he had brought her lay beside her hand on the eiderdown. Nothing was changed. No matter what happened her life had to continue among such things as these, if it wasn’t these it would be some other, and how could accidents make difference now?