Love and Summer

‘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 Cafe 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 cafe 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 Cafe 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.’