Strafford and Quirke #4 and, now fair to say, Phoebe, the latter's daughter.
'How many cinemas were there in Dublin? He thought he must have been to them all over the past year and a half, since the death of his wife. Mostly he went in the afternoons, when there was no one there but himself and a few other vague maimed solitary souls. It was a place to hide, in the rich, dusty darkness. He found it comforting, a little comforting, to sit back and rest in the flickering glow of the giant soot-and-silver images moving before him. He made little effort to keep up with the movie plots. When the opening credits rolled his mind relaxed, like a tensed muscle going slack.
Pictures in Technicolor he avoided. Monochrome was more realistic than all that garish colour. Or easier to look at, anyway. The actresses’ skin had a wonderfully stark, chalky paleness, the stuff of their frocks flared and shimmered with an electric energy, and shed blood was black. …'
