‘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 pieta 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
