We agreed that there wasn’t and continued our walk in silence, each of us lost in fantasy. I might become a servant at Cloverhill House; I might keep the flower-beds tidy and the grass cut on the lawns; I might work in the fields with Herr Messinger. I wouldn’t mind sitting in the kitchen with the young maid, taking my meals with her, and doing whatever they wanted me to do, growing anemones or lighting the fires every morning.
It snowed, surprisingly, in the autumn of that year. We stood around a coke stove in the hall of the rectory, endeavouring to keep warm, while in his homilies the Reverend Wauchope reminded us that thousands of British soldiers were sheltering under canvas, in temperatures far lower than those we were experiencing. The snow covered the huge hollow in front of the school where the town’s dust carts dumped their cinders, the intention being that one day the level would reach that of the surrounding ground and allow for the laying out of a hockey pitch. Unfortunately the dust lorries occasionally committed the error of depositing a load of garbage, which was an attraction for rats and seagulls. At least the snow held in check the foetid odour of decay that normally drifted into the classrooms.
I imagined Frau Messinger suffering from the cold also, a rug drawn over her knees on the sofa in the drawing-room, the fingers that grasped her magazine so numb that she had to rub the life back into them. “Daphie is good at fires,” she had said, but I guessed that in the big draughty rooms it would be chilly, no matter how vigorously the fires blazed. I imagined her husband in the frost-whitened landscape, felling trees and sawing them into logs. He and one of his men would go about the task in silence, skilfully working the cross-saw. Daphie would appear with a can of tea.
“Whatever’s this stupid nonsense?” the Reverend Wauchope tetchily demanded one evening, sending for me specially. “You’re making yourself important, are you, with reports of German spies? That amounts to falsehood, you know.”
A rumour had got going in the grammar school, I endeavoured to explain. It was without foundation; it was simply that a German had come to live near the town I came from.
“Rumours are grapeshot for the enemy. We will pray to God.” I didn’t listen to his voice, but imagined instead how astonished the Messingers would be if they could see us. She would laugh her tinkling laugh, her head thrown slightly back. He would shrug his shoulders in his expressive way.
“Stand up, man, stand up.” Renewed crossness interrupted my reflections, for I had remained on my knees longer than I should have. “Your stupidity is a mockery of the human race. Go from my sight, boy.”
Castigated on one score by the Reverend Wau-chope, I was approached on another by the assistant master. He sought me out when I was alone in a classroom, spoke first of the cold weather, made enquiries about my family, then said: “There’s talk of a certain nature that goes on between yourself and your friends.”
“What kind of talk’s that, Mr. Conron?”
“You know what I’m referring to. Involving women.”
I shook my head, instantly denying this.
“Mr. Wauchope would not discuss things of that nature with you on account of he’s a clergyman. So it falls to myself.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Mandeville carries a photograph of a woman around with him. There’s a certain type of story Houriskey tells. There’s stories you’ve made up yourself apparently.”
“Which stories are those, Mr. Conron?”
He turned his tormented eyes away from me. In one of his trouser pockets he snapped a piece of chalk in half. His fingers emerged with one portion lightly held. He looked at it. Still doing so, he said:
“You have a pretence that you go to a house where there’s a woman.”
“A pretence, Mr. Conron?”
“Something you’d make up in your mind, the same as Mandeville with the photograph in his pocket. When you’d talk about a matter like that it would acquire a reality for you.”
I might have explained that, in fact, the opposite had occurred, but I did not do so. The assistant master said something I didn’t hear and then referred to carnal temptation, enquiring as to my familiarity with it. “Bad thoughts are at the root of carnal temptation. Things you’d pretend about.”
“I understand, sir.”
“It’s best to avoid talk that would lead the way to it.”
“I’ll take your advice, sir.”
Mr. Conron regarded a stain on the boarded floor. In a voice so low that, again, I could hardly hear it he said:
“Did you ever pretend anything about Mrs. Wauchope?”
I imagined, when I repeated this, Houriskey’s and Mahoney-Byron’s raucous laughter, and the intensity developing in Mandeville’s expression. I shook my head. I had never pretended anything about Mrs. Wauchope, I said; nor, since I was asked this too, about the maid, Lottie Belle.
The eyes closed, in relief or otherwise I had no way of knowing. “Avoid anything like that,” Mr. Conron advised, and I felt ashamed that I had ever spoken of Frau Messinger in the rectory or the school.
“Well, I’ll tell you a queer thing,” my father said when I returned home at the end of that term. “You’ll never guess what I’m going to tell you.”
Ponderous head-wagging took place. I said I couldn’t guess.
“There’s talk of a picture house for the town. Did you ever hear the beat of that?”
I said I never had. There was money in a picture house, my father went on. Maguire the auctioneer had been going to build one nine years ago only he dropped dead. In the length and breadth of Ireland there wasn’t a town of the same population that didn’t possess a picture house. Didn’t it take a cute old Hun to put his finger on the shame of it?
“D’you mean he’s going to build it?”
“Sure, we’re a disgrace to the world,” my father said.
On Christmas Eve the town was crowded with people who had come in from the country, people you did not usually see on the streets. An old man in rags was playing an accordion, tinker women begged. Public houses were noisy, and as I walked down Laffan Street on my way to the Ballinadee road there was an air all around me of expectation and excitement. Soft misty rain had begun to fall; my clothes were wringing wet by the time I reached Cloverhill House.
“Stand by the fire,” Frau Messinger urged in the drawing-room. “Oh, Harry, you are foolish! You could catch your death!”
Her husband, wearing riding breeches and gaiters, was crouched on the floor, poring over a mass of papers he had spread out on the fleur-de-lis pattern of the carpet. He was smoking a thin, black cigar and when he greeted me he confirmed what my father had said: he intended to build a cinema. The papers were the plans for its construction. It was a marriage gift for his wife, he said. She had asked for it specially.
“But, Harry, that site they offer me is not good. Too near the slum part of the town.”
Frau Messinger said hardly anything; she never did in her husband’s presence. Instead she smiled with pleasure, delighting in his enthusiasm over the drawings on the carpet. His legs were tucked under him, a stubby finger indicated features of the proposed architecture. In the auditorium the seats would be tiered and there would be a balcony; most important of all, apparently, there would be Western Electric sound.
“On the curtains the pattern will be of butterflies, Harry.”
I did not know much about cinemas. Twice during my years at Lisscoe grammar school the Reverend Wauchope had granted permission for his boarders to attend Hussey’s Picture House under the supervision of Mr. Conron. We had sat enthralled, watching W. C. Fields and Edna May Oliver, and Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty. There’d been no balcony and no curtains such as Herr Messinger described; in the fourpenny seats gangs of ragged urchins had ceaselessly talked and whistled.