Nights at the Alexandra (10 page)

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 I am pitied because I am solitary and withdrawn, because I have not taken my place and am left in the end with nothing.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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