Yet she had married Reegan. Why, Oh why in fairness to him had she married him with what she knew? She had loved him, but that was too easy, it had no meaning. Was that love a simple longing for security, could it be so mean as that? Or was it longing for her childhood not far from this barrack and village and river flowing out of the woods into the Shannon lowlands? Was it because of Reegan? He was a strange man, lonely and different, she’d always believed; she’d never understood him much and had lived somewhat near to fear of him. There was such vital passion about him sometimes, and then again he often seemed perverse and stupid. She’d been sick of London at the time, its crazy rush wearing at her nerves, Halliday’s cry to her, “I’d come to the end of my own tether and used you to get a short breather. I used you so as not to have to face my own mess. I seduced you because I was seduced myself by my own fucking lust to live,” appeared in terms of her own relationship with Reegan. They all lived on each other and devoured each other as they themselves were devoured, who would devour whom the first was the one question. Plainly nothing could be resolved, she had to come to this again and again. Her love might have been all these things and more, welded into the one inscrutable passion. That was how her life happened, nothing more could be said for certain.
“Nothing more, Elizabeth! That was how it happened and it was all a balls. The sooner it was over the better,” Halliday’s words troubled her mind again, but then her vision had never been the same as his, what he had woken in her grew so different that it could barely be recognized as reflections of the same thing. Oh, it was strange and surrounded by only wonder now, she and he reflections of the one thing.
There was such deep joy sometimes, joy itself lost in a passion of wonderment in which she and all things were lost. Nothing could be decided here. She was just passing through. She had come to life out of mystery and would return, it surrounded her life, it safely held it as by hands; she’d return into that which she could not know; she’d be consumed at last in whatever meaning her life had. Here she had none, none but to be, which in acceptance must be surely to love. There’d be no searching for meaning, she must surely grow into meaning as she grew to love, there was that or nothing and she couldn’t lose. She could make no statement other than that here, she had no right, she was only waiting and she could not say or know more.
All real seeing grew into smiling and if it moved to speech it must be praise, all else was death, a refusal, a turning back; refusal to admit she knew nothing and was nothing in herself, a creature of swift passage, moving into whatever reality she had, the reality she knew nothing about.
All the apparent futility of her life in this barracks came at last to rest on this sense of mystery. It gave the hours idled away in boredom or remorse as much validity as a blaze of passion, all was under its eternal sway. She felt for a moment pure, without guilt. She’d no desire to clutch for the facts and figures of explanation, only it was there or wasn’t there and if there was any relationship they would meet in the moment of her death. She accepted its absolute sway over her life, she had no rights, so how could she have quarrels now! And if the reality is this: we have no life but this one — she could only reflect and smile, it must have been the same before her birth and she doubted if she could have ever desired to be born.
That was the way it must be: but here in this lonely room it ran its course in her cursed life. Mrs Casey was moving downstairs. Why could she not come and break for her the lonely treadmill of this thinking? Was she too busy? She was getting their dinner ready, but couldn’t she spare minutes? Could she not come and say, “Is there anything you want, Elizabeth?” It wouldn’t take very long to do that much? Or did they care about her? What did they care, they were all right themselves, what did they care about her? She wanted to knock with rage on the floorboards and call, “Can you not come up? Have you forgotten me? Have you no consideration?”
She’d have to think up some lying excuse when they came: how could she say, “I want you to stay with me. Stay with me and don’t leave me alone with myself.” Mrs Casey would think she was raving. How could she expect her to come when she had to have the children’s dinner ready by half-twelve. She heard them come: a door banged; their bare feet pattered on the cement, excited chatter began and the rattle of delf and cutlery. She grew calmer as she imagined them at the table in the kitchen, how many times had she given them that same dinner? Soon they were rushing up the stairs to her, and gone as quickly, to try to snatch a few minutes of the play they hungered for before the bell rang.
Reegan didn’t return, he must have risked staying the day on the bog. The Caseys took their meal with her in the bedroom. Her rage and desperation of an hour ago seemed so silly now, they were eating with her when it would have been far more comfortable for them to have their meal downstairs.
“It’s very kind of you to come to have your dinner with me here,” she said and kept her brimming eyes turned away, afraid and ashamed to let them see the fullness of her gratitude; and then as she watched them eat and listened to their bantering talk she saw with some return of terror that they’d drive her even more quickly crazy if they were booked to sit here for ever than she’d drive herself alone, the one reason their company was exciting was that she knew it’d soon end, she’d not have to tolerate it, she’d lose it, it’d be taken away. A smile began to play suddenly deep in her eyes. What was certain was that her temperament would have to undergo a deep sea change before it was fitted for a life that’d be without end.
The day crawled much as other days into late afternoon. A large black fly with the blue sheen in its wings of oil when it floats on water buzzed so loud and long against the pane that she had to call to have it killed. Though nothing was changed when Mrs Casey finally battered it to death with a newspaper and the silence of the distant saws and stone-crusher had time to settle in the room again. Reegan returned late, tired and hungry from the bog, and as he took his tea another heart attack nearly ended Elizabeth’s life.
Afterwards the doctor told Reegan that he didn’t expect her to live through the summer. He considered that if it happened soon it’d be almost merciful, she’d get hardly more than the first cancer pains; ventricular failure would cheat the slow drugged agony of that death, he believed.
The green rushes the children had scattered for Our Lady’s Eve hadn’t been swept and now after the few weeks lay brown and rotting on the doorstep but it was May yet and the bells rang in the evenings for devotions. On the bog, where the white fluffs of cotton tossed, the barrows of turf were fit for handling. The potato leaves pushed their way out of the earth in the garden and Reegan covered them against the frost, but without much care, the turf was his whole care. Night and morning he had the radio on long before news-time to get the weather forecast, and he watched the skies always. If they kept fair he’d be able to go free without fear or worry in September.
The most Elizabeth saw of this spring and early summer was Reegan’s tiredness at night, loose clay on the policemen’s boots when they came to visit her, a little bunch of primroses Sheila brought. The birds were loud about the house all day, it was their mating-time, and life put even song to use. More flies gathered in the room. They had hung a yellow tape from the ceiling, where they stuck and struggled in its sweetness till they died into another motionless black speck. Mrs Lennon, the village nurse, began to come for a few hours night and morning and she made little difference to anything or any one in the house.