Annie began to come to the cinema with young Phelan from Phelan’s grocery, in whose presence she was less sullen. She showed him off, one eye on me in the box-office, pausing on the balcony stairs and calling out loudly to people she knew. She had begun to wear different shades of lipstick, and had her hair done in a different way. For all my good fortune in being sent away to school, and my escape from the timberyard, she would outdo me in the end. She was outdoing me already, her manner implied, standing close to young Phelan.
A month before the war ended the death took place at Cloverhill House. Herr Messinger did not mention it but I knew it had occurred because he arrived at the cinema in mourning, and two days later there was the funeral, her body taken to our Protestant graveyard. He made arrangements about the sale of his land and the running of the cinema, placing certain matters in the hands of McDonagh and Effingham, the solicitors, others in the care of the Munster and Leinster Bank. It was not clear then that one day I would become the cinema’s proprietor, that arrangements had been made in this respect also. “I’d say you landed on your feet,” my father grudgingly remarked when the big attendances the cinema had begun to attract showed no sign of abating, but my mother never forgave me for rejecting my heritage in favour of selling tickets, and for ignoring her wishes. When my mother lay dying in 1961 she referred again to Frau Messinger as a wanton and a strumpet, whose grave she knew I tended, growing anemones on the humped earth.
My mother was right when she sensed the need to be jealous. Frau Messinger had claimed me from the moment she stepped from her husband’s car that day in Laffan Street; and she had held me to her with the story of her life. Details that were lost in the enchantment of her voice return with time. How when she was five she picked a flower from a garden where she was a visitor, and afterwards felt a thief. How she overheard servants being cruel about her mother. How she had bathed in a shrubbery lake, before anyone else was up, the water so petrifyingly cold she’d thought she could not bear it. How the old man said to her the first time she met him, in a German bookshop furnished like a drawing-room: “Have you read Wanderers Nachtlied?” She hadn’t even heard of it, and blushed with shame.
I retrieved her present from the crevice in the step at Cloverhill. All the windows already had boards on them, efficiently nailed into place, as though Herr Messinger wished to keep the contents of the house exactly as they were, unaffected even by sunlight. The land was sold and farmed by someone else; Daphie went to work for other people. I was given the task—for which I was remunerated once a month through the solicitors—of seeing that the window boards remained in place and were renewed when necessary, and that the doors were kept secure. It was everyone’s belief—the solicitors’, the bank’s, his employees’ at the cinema—that Herr Messinger intended to return, that once again he would root out the brambles from the garden and let light into the drawing-room. I knew he never would. He could not be alone in Cloverhill. In Germany he would be hopelessly searching for his sons.
SIX
My brothers run the timberyard, my sister married Phelan, my father went the way of my mother and my grandmothers. I do not forget those family mealtimes, the half bottle of whiskey kept in the sideboard in case anyone had toothache, holly poked behind the pictures at Christmas. I do not forget my companions of the rectory bedroom, nor poor obese Lottie Belle, who did not then seem worthy of compassion. I do not forget them, but even so I do not dwell much on those particular memories. Is such love reserved for the dying? I ask myself instead, and do not know the answer.
Years ago the butterfly curtains had to be taken down because they were rotting. When you listen with your ear to the boarded windows of Cloverhill you can hear the rats inside. One day next week men will place corrugated iron over the entrance to the cinema, and over the exit doors at the back. I shall not sell the place, even though I have been tempted with a fair price from a business partnership that would turn it into a furniture store; in the town I am considered foolhardy because I have rejected this offer. I am considered odd, being so often seen on the Ballinadee road on my way to tap the window boards, making certain they are sound. In the town it is said that the cinema has destroyed me, that I’d have been better off if I’d never inherited it in that peculiar way. My sister and brothers have said it to my face, others have whispered. I am pitied because I am solitary and withdrawn, because I have not taken my place and am left in the end with nothing. I have no answer.
It is sad that through a quirk of fashion no one came much to the Alexandra these last few years. It is sad that rats are in charge at Cloverhill. But a husband’s love and a woman’s gratitude for sanctuary have not surrendered their potency. I am a fifty-eight-year-old cinema proprietor without a cinema, yet when I sit among the empty seats memory is enough. She smiles from the green-striped cushions, he spreads his drawings on the floor. My rain-soaked clothes drip on to the fender by the fire, there is happiness in spite of death and war. Fate has made me the ghost of an interlude: once in a while I say that in the town, trying to explain.
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