'You wouldn't miss the west?'
'I suppose I would,' he said, making a swirl of Russian smoke in the gloomy room. 'Tom?' I said.
'Yes?'
'Do you love me?' 'I do, surely. Certainly I do.' 'That's good,' I said, 'because I love you.' 'Do you?' he said. 'You show very good taste. That's very wise of you, I must say. Yes.' And then he laughed. 'Do you know,' he said. 'I really do.'
'What?' I said.
'I mean, not just talking. But I do. Love you.' And I really think he did.
He was the decentest man, I think it is important to say that.
You could judge a lot of the effects of Mr de Valera's famous economic war that time from the window of a train. We had been married in the springtime and because there was no market for lambs now, the farmers had to kill the lambs in the fields. So as the train went through the country every now and then we saw these perishing corpses. Tom was very upset about all this. De Valera's men were in power and to him that was just the same as gunmen and murderers taking over the country, the very selfsame country they had tried to scupper after the Treaty. It all set the teeth of fellas like Tom on edge. Tom was young and coming into his own and he wanted to inherit the country I suppose, make something of it. There was a great feeling in him that de Valera, having tried to strangle the new country at birth, would now make a hames and shambles of its childhood, as it were, and ruin the place in the greater world. Anyway it broke the heart of strong farmers to have to be killing lambs, and have nowhere to send the sheep themselves, it was all a strangulation of their dreams.
'Like a fucking madhouse,' said Tom beside me, looking out on the desolation of the farms. And he knew, because of course his father and mother both worked in a madhouse. 'The whole of Ireland is just a madhouse now.'
So Tom's father was asked to cut and sew a blue shirt for Tom, and he started having little meetings and marches in Sligo, to see if they could get things going the other way. There was a man called O'Duffy had set them up, he had been in charge of the police but lost that job somehow, and now he was like one of those lads like Mussolini or Franco. Tom admired him because when he had been a minister he had tried to bring in laws to protect children in Ireland. He had failed in that, but nevertheless. Also he was a passionate man in his speeches, and Tom thought that all the great men had been killed during the troubles, Collins of course in chief. And O'Duffy had been a great ally of Collins. So it all made sense really, to Tom at any rate. I never knew a man to sweat like Tom and after a march his blue shirt would be drenched. I had to dye it a few times because it would go pale under the armpits and that didn't look right. I never saw him march but I wanted him to look smart, like a wife would naturally.
In the meantime we set up house in a small corrugated place out in Strandhill. It was a shack really, but it was close to the dancehall and kept me out of Sligo. At the same time it was an easy jaunt for him back into the town. Our bedroom looked out on Knocknarea, we could actually see the tip of Maeve's Cairn at the top, it was funny lying there, a young married couple in the thirties, in modern times, and her up there lying in her own bed, her own leaba as they say, and tucked in there all of four thousand years ago. We had a nice view of Coney island from the rickety porch at the front, and although the heap of the island hid him, I knew the Metal Man was there, solid and eternal, I could imagine him in my mind's eye, faithfully and stoically pointing down into the deep water.
Flying Down to Rio. Top Hat. The man that ruled the country of the heart was not de Valera with his skinny, haunted face, but Fred Astaire, with his skinny, haunted face.
Even the grandees came to the pictures. If it had been a church there might have been pews for them. As it was most of the fur coats were to be found in the balcony. The rest of Sligo teemed in the stalls below. There would have been mayhem other than that Mr Clancy and his brothers had all been in the army, and marshalled the patrons like unruly recruits. Any trouble and a lad would be turfed out on his ear into the rainy dark night of Sligo, which was not desirable. Oh he didn't mind kissing, he was no parish priest, and what could he have done anyhow, when the lights were low. It wasn't the church, but it was like the church, better, far better. It was at the pictures that you could look around and see that rapt gaze on people's faces that maybe the priest or the minister dreamed of one day seeing on the faces of their parishioners. The whole of Sligo in a damp crowd, all those different people and different degrees, paupers and princes, united by their enchantment. You could have said Ireland was united and free, at the pictures anyhow. Although Tom kept me in quarantine in Strandhill, till he could get his mother to relent in her hostility to me, he wasn't so cruel as to extend my exile to Saturday nights. We roared into town in his nice little car and took our places as always, as if we feared for our souls if we did not.
There was always great joshing at the cinema, fellas freely called out insults to each other. Sometimes political affiliations were alluded to, sometimes it was all taken in good part, but just now and then things weren't so lightly taken, and bit by bit in the thirties this got worse. You could tell a lot about the state of the country from the quality of the insults at the Saturday night pictures. Of course Mr Clancy was not for any party in particular, and against politics maybe in general. You could be expelled for a nasty remark, which was more than you could say for the Dail itself, according to Tom.
'There's things you can say with impunity in Dail Eireann that'd get you thrun out of the Gaiety,' Tom might say.
There were always newsreels before the features and if there was stuff about the Spanish Civil War for instance, there'd be roars going up about Blueshirts and the like. Mr Clancy and his brothers would be kept real busy trying to root out the satirists.
'Crowd of bowsies,' Tom would say.
'Casual pack of buggers,' Jack would say, if he wasn't in Africa. Not that Jack followed the Blueshirts.
'I'm afraid your friend O'Duffy is a casual pack of buggers,' he might say to Tom.
But Tom always roared with laughter, he liked his brother Jack, he didn't care what he said. That was part of Tom's great charm as a friend and brother. He was easy-going in his very marrow. He thought Jack was a genius too, because he had done the two degrees at Galway, Engineering and Geology, whereas he had lasted only the few months at Law School. He had a way of feasting on Jack's words that was just their ancient practice from the time they were boys together. I don't know how their other brother Eneas fitted into that. Of course I never heard much said about poor Eneas.
One night at the showing of Top Hat as I was going down to the ladies' toilet a familiar dark figure briefly blocked my way. It wasn't usual for a single man to engage a married woman in casual conversation, but on the other hand there was never too much casual about John Lavelle. Now that his crowd were securely in power, he seemed to be flourishing, even though he was only slashing at brambles on the roadside for the council. That was better than being on the run or eating prisoner's hash in the Curragh. He must have liked black clothes because he wore only black, and it gave him a very cowboylike look, with the white pallor of his skin and the sweep of black hair above. For a roadsweeper he certainly understood about waistcoats. Myself I was dressed in my best purple summer dress, which I must suppose was a sort of wordless remark in itself. Anyway John Lavelle didn't care too much for what a person should be doing or not be doing.
'Hello, Roseanne. You know, girl, you look really lovely.'
Now this was an enormous statement for him. For anyone. He had never offered the slightest sort of love-talk to me. After all, we only knew each other because of the direst of tragedies. Maybe he even believed still that I had brought the Free State soldiers down on his head years ago. Maybe talking like that to me was a sort of subtle revenge. Whatever it was, I didn't take it seriously, I brushed past him, and went on my way. Anyway my bladder was bursting.