‘How’re things with yourself, Ellie? The hay looking good, is it?’
Ellie said things were all right. Some of the hay was cut and still lying. It was plentiful this year.
‘Grand!’ Father Millane enthused. ‘Isn’t that grand!’
He often used the word. Noted in the town for his skills of persuasion and an ability to fix things, he it was who laid down the spiritual tenets by which Rathmoye’s people lived their lives, his the voice that fiercely condemned all threats to the orderly Church he spoke for. Respected for his cloth and for himself, Father Millane rejoiced when the news brought to him by his parishioners was good. There was a lot to be thankful for, he regularly asserted; no matter which way you looked at it, that had to be said. This morning Ellie heard it said again; and, believing that she had herself a lot to be thankful for, was warm in her agreement.
Opening her hall door some minutes later, Miss Connulty repeated the sentiments of Father Millane when he’d said that Ellie had been good to attend the funeral.
‘Ah well, I wouldn’t not have, Miss Connulty. I’m only sorry I couldn’t come back to the house. We had Mr Brennock that day. D’you know Mr Brennock at all?’
‘I don’t, to be honest.’
‘He’s the best of them with the cattle.’
It was the daily girl who’d been taking in the eggs for a long time, ever since Mrs Connulty had found the stairs too much. Only once or twice during the last year had Miss Connulty answered the doorbell: Ellie didn’t know her all that well. Not that she’d known Mrs Connulty much better, but even so she wouldn’t not have attended the funeral.
‘I don’t know what we’d do without you, Ellie,’ Miss Connulty said, sounding like her mother. She remarked that it was a glorious day, which Father Millane had said also. ‘Now, whoever’s that?’ she interrupted herself.
Ellie turned round.
‘Just after crossing from Matthew Street,’ Miss Connulty said, and Ellie saw the man who’d asked her for directions on the morning of the funeral. He was wheeling a bicycle through the parked cars and was occasionally obscured by them.
‘Whoever’s that?’ Miss Connulty said again.
Ellie took the money that had been held out to her before Miss Connulty’s attention was distracted. ‘Thanks, Miss Connulty,’ she said.
‘That’s never the chap taking photographs at the funeral, Ellie? Did you see him there?’
Ellie nodded, then said she had.
‘A few people noticed him,’ Miss Connulty said. ‘They said a tweed suit. Did you see him taking the photographs, Ellie?’
‘I did, all right.’
‘Wasn’t that peculiar, though?’
Ellie said she’d thought so herself. She remembered the dark hair flopping across the forehead, the serious gaze when he’d asked whose funeral it was, the smile when it came, the colourful tie. She remembered noticing the hands that operated the camera. Delicate hands, she’d said to herself.
‘I thought he’d be instructed to take the photographs.’
‘Why would he be?’
‘It’s only I thought that. He was asking where the picture house was.’
‘What’d he want with the picture house?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was he wanting to go to the pictures? Didn’t he know the picture house is burnt down?’
‘I’d say he knew the state of it, all right.’
‘Where’s he off to now for himself?’ Miss Connulty asked, when the figure they had been watching mounted his bicycle and rode off towards Cashel Street.
‘The same next Friday is it, Miss Connulty?’
‘Oh, the same’ll do nicely.’
Miss Connulty said she had the beds to make yet and shouldn’t be standing here. Ellie said goodbye and went on.
In English’s the raddle powder still hadn’t come in. The man with the deaf-aid went to look and shook his head from the other end of the counter. She said it didn’t matter and wondered if he could hear and thought he probably couldn’t. ‘Tuesday,’ he called after her when she began to go, and then remembered that Friday was her day for being in the town and raised a hand apologetically. She understood.
She left her bicycle in Cloughjordan Road, against the railings of the church. She had to wait a while before a priest was there to hear her confession, but she didn’t mind. Her penance wasn’t much. She lit a candle before she left.
‘The Connultys owned it,’ the woman in Meagher’s Café said when Florian asked her about the catastrophe at the cinema. ‘Well, of course they still do.’
She was a big woman, broad-shouldered, her black hair in a net. Her chapped fingers and reddened, windswept face suggested a farmer’s wife, hard-working, butter churned in an icy-cold dairy, exposure to all weathers. She had joined Florian at a table in the window, since no table was unoccupied and there was room at his. When she began to talk to him he had marked his place in The Beautiful and the Damned and pushed the dog-eared paperback to one side.
‘You’d remember it?’ he asked. ‘The fire?’
‘Oh, I do, I do.’
The waitress brought a pot of tea. She’d be back with cakes, she said.
‘And boiling water,’ the woman called after her. ‘Bring boiling water.’
There hadn’t been anyone in the office at the coal yards when Florian went there to get permission to take photographs. No one had come while he waited, but there were keys hanging from a rack on the wall and when he asked in the yard a man shovelling coal picked out one with ‘Coliseum’ on the label and handed it to him. Miss O’Keeffe was taking the post over to Mr Connulty in the public house, he said. ‘Be sure you’ll put that key back when you’ve done,’ he instructed, and Florian promised. For an hour he’d prowled about the blackened void. Tattered curtains still hung where the screen had been, the seats were metal skeletons, the balcony had collapsed. He imagined actors’ voices continuing in the clamour of panic, and laughter, music playing. It was a desolate place.
‘A cigarette thrown down,’ the woman in the café said, stirring sugar into her tea. ‘Only the one life taken, but you’d miss the old picture house.’
‘There’s a poster still intact.’
‘There used be posters in frames on the stairway, going up to the balcony. Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney. Joan Crawford.’
‘It’s Norma Shearer who’s left.’
‘God, Norma Shearer!’
The first time she had been in the Coliseum it was to see Du Barry Was a Lady. ‘Tommy Dorsey,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t long opened then.’
The waitress came with the cakes and Florian took a slice of jam roll. The background music reached the end of its tape and began again.
‘I can’t touch a sweet thing,’ the woman said.
Meagher’s Café was at the junction of Cashel Street and Cloughjordan Road and from the window there was a view of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Occasionally the woman who shared Florian’s table waved to someone on the street or rapped on the glass.
‘You mightn’t know,’ she said, ‘it was old Mr Connulty was the one taken in the fire.’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘His wife lived after, nearly seventeen years. We buried her the other week.’
‘I think I noticed that funeral.’
‘Oh, you would have in Rathmoye, you wouldn’t have missed it. Mr Connulty took to the drink after a trouble they had in the family. Of an evening, when he wouldn’t want to go home with a drop too much taken, he’d settle himself at the back of the balcony and he’d get left there all night if they didn’t shine the torch on him. Well, you can guess it then - the place went up like a box of matches and they overlooked him. Am I too loquacious for you?’
‘No, not at all.’
He offered the woman a cigarette, but she refused it.
‘Oh, go ahead,’ she said when he hesitated before he lit one for himself.
The Leica was on the table, the leather on
it stained and torn, its strap repaired with black insulating tape. The woman had displayed no curiosity about it; nor had she enquired what Florian’s purpose in the cinema had been. She had been courted on that same balcony, she said.
‘Saturday nights, a construction man from north Cork. He said he’d build me a palace, but I didn’t marry him all the same.’
The man she’d married instead had brought her out to where his farm was, his father’s at the time. She’d been there since, seven children. The youngest one had the makings of a Christian Brother, she said, not that anything was mentioned yet.
‘You’d miss the old picture house,’ she said again.
She went soon after that but Florian didn’t open his book. In the destroyed cinema, quite suddenly, he had found himself wondering why he hadn’t known that photography would fail him also, or he it; why he hadn’t known that the images he achieved were too slight, each one too ordinary a statement. But perhaps he had known and failed to make much of it, even particularly to notice? And did it matter, now that so much was over for him, and disappointment’s sting had long ago been drawn?
On the street outside, two women greeted one another and paused for a moment to talk. A van, drawn up to deliver bread, drove off. Figures in the far distance descended the steep church steps.
‘Were you wanting your bill?’ the waitress asked, coming to the table with her empty tray.
He paid, counting out the coins when he was handed what was scribbled for him.
Ellie finished in Corbally’s, delayed for a while by Miss Burke. Then she cycled down to the Cash and Carry.
People were talking about the weather, saying they were getting a great summer. She had heard that already in Magennis Street, and Father Millane and Miss Connulty had said it. She took a cardboard box from the pile by the door and called over to the counter girl she’d recently got to know. She had sugar to get, and creamery butter and cornflour, sultanas or raisins, whichever were there, sixty-watt bulbs. Not more than that; she wouldn’t be late back, easily by twelve.
She went to get the electric bulbs, picking up a packet of Rinso on the way. She was on the way to the sugar shelf when she saw the photographer again, looking for something he wanted, his back to her before he turned and saw her too.
5
Orpen Wren waited at Rathmoye’s railway station, as every morning he did, and again every evening. He waited in all seasons without impatience: this morning, being summery and warm, it was a pleasure and he allowed himself to doze, knowing that the sound of the advancing Dublin train would rouse him. But no train came, and had not since the railway station’s closure, and would not ever again.
Orpen Wren lived in both the present and the past. He had long ago been employed to catalogue the library of the St Johns of Lisquin, and in a sense had never left that house, although the St Johns, thirty-two years ago, had put their estate on the market and auctioned their furniture. The renowned St John library, for generations visited by scholars, was pillaged by dealers, the remnants they rejected thrown on to a fire in the yard when the house was emptied and its roof stripped of lead and slates. Mantel-pieces and ceilings, doors and panelling, the balconies that had curved on either side of the stairs as a feature of the wide first-floor landing, were taken out and put aside to be sold. The ruined shell was razed, tons of stone carted away to be sold also.
More than three years after these events the librarian had arrived in Rathmoye one frosty November morning. It was said that he had been emotionally affected by what he’d witnessed and had since wandered the roads; but this was not known as fact. He stated himself that he had never left Lisquin, that he alone had always been there, yet no habitation remained, not even rudimentary shelter from the weather.
Although in want and homeless, he had not been in low spirits when he first presented himself to the town; he was not now. Declaring that he would be content in whatever accommodation there was, he had been given one of the alms dwellings in St Morpeth’s Terrace, which were in poor repair, only a few fit for occupation. He afterwards showed his gratitude by regularly repeating on the streets that he was happy in Rathmoye, while never ceasing to speak of the great house as if it were still standing. Among his modest items of luggage were what became known in the town as the St John papers, which he declared had been temporarily entrusted to him. He carried them on his person and every day, at the railway station or on the streets, was ready to pass them back to a member of the St John family or any Lisquin servant who might return now that the family’s fortunes had been restored. He was also in possession at all times of an entitlement to a state pension. It wasn’t much, but was enough.
Age had rendered Orpen Wren skinny, the flesh fallen in from the bones of his face, hollows like caverns beneath his wasted chin, eyes that had become pinpricks in the depths. Clothes hung loosely on his limbs, buttons missing from the threadbare overcoat he always wore; tattered brown shoes were in need of better heels and soles. Even this morning in the sun at the railway station, he had a frozen look.
His journey from St Morpeth’s Terrace had taken him past the Protestant church, called after St Morpeth also and distinguished by its dark, slender spire and ancient gravestones, past the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, limestone bright, with space for parking, and a pietà separating its second and third flights of steps. The one-time librarian had entered St Morpeth’s, as he always did, and stayed for fifteen minutes.
When no train arrived - or when, in Orpen Wren’s belief, one arrived and went on without putting down any passengers - he set out on his walk back to the town, the shops beginning when he reached Irish Street. He paused at the windows in case a display had changed overnight. None had: drapers’ dummies were as they had been since early spring, the spectacles on an optician’s cardboard faces had been the same for longer. Pond’s beauty aids were still reduced, travel bargains still offered, interest rates steady.
In Magennis Street a steel keg was being rolled to a pavement aperture. The tall assistant from McGovern’s, white-aproned, with glasses, was talking to a van driver. Yorkshire Relish, Thick. 12 Bottles, the printing on a carton in the van driver’s arms declared. Renowned for his resemblance to de Valera, the tall assistant ticked off the item on an order sheet and said there should be something from Mi Wadi.
A cat came creeping into Orpen’s legs, rubbing itself against his shins, and he bent down to stroke its silky black head. He knew this cat and enjoyed its company. But, as abruptly as always, it lost interest and slinked away.
‘Wait till I’ll get it for you.’ The tall assistant greeted him from the shop doorway, hurrying back to the tea counter even while he spoke. He opened one drawer and then another, eventually finding an envelope on a mahogany shelf between two tall Oriental canisters in which coffee beans were stored. ‘Well, that was great,’ he said, alluding to a reference to McGovern’s in the letter he had been lent.
‘You noticed it?’
‘Oh, I did, I did.’
‘Would Mr McGovern remember the occasion?’
‘To tell you the truth, he said he didn’t.’
The documents that were carried twice a day to the railway station - notes kept of births and deaths, receipts for burial charges at the Church of Ireland graveyard at Lisquin, papers relating to the purchase or sale of land, records of maintenance and repairs at the house - made turgid reading for the most part. But there were a few personal letters that were of greater interest, that touched upon life during the years of Lord Townshend’s viceroyalty, or related details of the rebellion of 1798, or told of the Famine years. In shops Orpen sometimes left one for perusal.
Carefully now, he tucked what had been returned to him into his clothes and continued on his way. Sometimes his name eluded him, but returned when it was used by someone on the streets, or by the post-office clerks when he went to collect his pension. They chided him in the post office because the greater part of what he received there was given away to the tinker girls who hel
d out to him their rag-wrapped infants, or was dropped into the palms of the tramps who now and again passed through the town, or slipped to shame-faced men who mumbled tales of misfortune and bad luck.
Greeted by none of these this morning, Orpen reached the Square, where cars were untidily parked and a woman in an overall was sweeping the pavement outside Bodell’s Bar. Windows bore the names of solicitors and accountants on pebbled glass or sunburnt mesh; more brashly, various other services were offered. The brass plates of doctors and the town’s dentist had for the most part lost their pristine shine; a fortnightly chiropodist relied for custom on a handwritten postcard beside his bell. Hall doors were green or red, black or shades of blue.
One house was derelict. Weeds sprouted from chutes that had rusted, an aerial drooped crookedly from the masonry of a chimney-stack. But next door a credit company was spruce and, further on, the steps and pillars of the grey courthouse struck an important note, although today no court was in session.
The curator of the St John papers rested on the seat beside the Square’s tribute to a rebel hero, a resolute, shirtsleeved figure with his right arm raised in a gesture of command, the unfurled flag he held draping folds of bronze over the stone of his monument’s pedestal. Whenever he was in the Square, Orpen rested on this seat, the colours of the hall doors impinging a little on his reflections, the derelict house occasionally seeming hostile. He watched Mr Hassett from the bank making his way in the direction of Bodell’s Bar. There were references in the papers to the bank when it had been the Valley Hotel: how the St John family of that time had left their trap or dog-cart in the hotel yard when they came in to Rathmoye.