Nights at the Alexandra Read online

  William Trevor

  NIGHTS AT THE ALEXANDRA

  THE MODERN LIBRARY

  NEW YORK

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  2001 Modern Library Edition

  Copyright © 1987 by William Trevor

  Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in hardcover by Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., in 1987. This edition was published by arrangement with the author.

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

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  WILLIAM TREVOR

  William Trevor, the acclaimed Anglo-Irish short story writer, novelist, and dramatist, was born on May 24, 1928, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, of middle-class Protestant parents. He experienced an unsettled childhood; his family relocated frequently throughout the south of Ireland. He attended a variety of schools before entering St. Columba’s College, Dublin, in 1942. “That constant moving has left me something of an outsider and a loner,” reflected Trevor. “I never think of a particular home in Ireland, but always of Ireland itself as being home.” Shortly after graduating in 1950 from Trinity College, Dublin, he accepted a position teaching art in England and later abandoned a successful career as a sculptor to pursue writing. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters, Trevor was named honorary Commander of the British Empire in 1977 in recognition of his services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, and in 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement. William Trevor lives in Devon, England.

  “Trevor is one of the very best writers of our era,” judged The Washington Post Book World. He made an auspicious literary debut in 1964 with the publication of The Old Boys, a satire about English public schools that earned him the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. He soon consolidated his reputation with The Boarding-House (1965), a sprawling Dickensian tale centered around a group of misfits who share lodgings in suburban London, and The Love Department (1966), a contemporary moral fable about love and marriage. Trevor’s next three novels, Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), and Elizabeth Alone (1973), reflect his fascination with the lives of women. He garnered the Whitbread Literary Award for both The Children of Dynmouth (1976), the tale of a small seaside town that is harshly exposed by the prurient curiosity of a sadistic teenager, and Fools of Fortune (1983), his first full-length treatment of the Anglo-Irish conflict. Other novels include Other People's Worlds (1980), a compassionate portrait of a talented sociopath and his victims; The Silence in the Garden (1988), an unraveling of Ireland’s cruel secrets; Felicia’s Journey (1994), a chilling psychological thriller that won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award; and Death in Summer (1998), a sympathetic depiction of the sadness and damage that lie at the heart of some lives. In addition he has written Nights at the Alexandra (1987), the tender story of a provincial Irish town in the 1940s, and Two Lives (1991), comprising the paired novellas My House in Umbria and Reading Turgenev, which was short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize. “ Two Lives demonstrates the grace and assurance of a writer at the peak of his powers,” said Anne Tyler. Juliet’s Story, his first novel for children, was published in 1991. “I think of Trevor as being among the best writers we have in English,” declared Mary Gordon. And novelist Thomas Flanagan observed: “William Trevor is wonderful, lyrical, hilarious when he wants to be, graced with endless powers of laconic and precise observation, shamefully charming, and, in the end, heartbreaking.”

  Trevor has earned equal praise for his short stories, many of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. “There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world,” said The Wall Street Journal, and V. S. Pritchett deemed Trevor “one of the finest short story writers at present writing in the Anglo-Irish modes.” His many collections of short fiction include The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Angels at the Ritz (1975), Lovers of Their Time (1978), Beyond the Pale [9 81), The News from Ireland (1986), Family Sins (1990), After Rain (1996), and The Hill Bachelors (2000). “Trevor is probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language,” stated The New Yorker upon publication of The Collected Stories (1992), his magnum opus of short fiction. “His sixties stories have a wondrous sense of sixtiesness, of youth-quake and space-out and sexual abandon; his seventies stories darken and brood, and the cloud that hangs over them is often the troubles in Northern Ireland, which cleave relationships hundreds of miles away as surely as a newly revealed adultery. His more recent stories take him to the past, often an Irish past, and Trevor increasingly seems to take the long view, watching the way family curses infect generations, the way national curses continue over centuries.” And Reynolds Price noted: “With this new immense collection, William Trevor has filed in serene selftrust the results of years of work of impeccable strength and a piercing profundity that’s very seldom surpassed in short fiction.”

  “William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence,” said The New York Times Book Review. Though best known for his novels and short stories he has also published A Writer's Ireland (1984), an informal history of Irish literary achievement, and Excursions in the Real World (1993), a volume of memoirs. His several plays, which have been staged in both London and Dublin, include The Old Boys (1971), Going Home (1972), Marriages (1973), and Scenes from an Album (1981). “I don’t know who now has most right to claim Mr. Trevor, England or Ireland,” said John Fowles. “It is clear to me that his excellence comes from a happy marriage of central values in both traditions. Art of this solidity and quality cannot be written from inside frontiers. It is, in the best sense of the word, international.”

  “Trevor amazes me with the variety of his subjects,” remarked novelist and critic Doris Grumbach. “What a good writer, what a superb story-teller, and he has gone on for so long being so good.” The Sunday Telegraph (London) noted: “Trevor writes of the piercing tragedies and grand dramas of everyday life in a tone through which the echoes of Chekhov and Maupassant are clearly audible. Like theirs, Trevor’s view of the world is melancholy and unsparing. . . . But like them, too, his work is supported by a fundamental optimism, a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit and rare sustaining power of love.” V. S. Pritchett agreed: “As his master Chekhov did, William Trevor simply, patiently, truthfully allows life to present itself, without preaching; he is the master of the small movements of conscience that worry away at the human imagination and our passions.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “one of the finest writers now at work in our language,” and The Washington Post Book World concluded: “To be a master of the story and a master of the novel is a distinction achieved by precious few writers, but such a master is William Trevor.”

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  NIGHTS

  AT THE

  ALEXANDRA

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  ONE

  I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.

  “Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that.”

  That is what I hear most often and with the greatest pleasure: Frau Messinger’s voice as precisely recalled as memory allows, each quizzical intonation reflected in a glance or gesture. I must have replied something, Heaven knows what: it never mattered because she rarely listened. The war had upset the Messingers’ lives, she being an Englishwoman and he German. It brought them to Ireland and to Cloverhill—a sanctuary they most certainly would not otherwise have known.

  She explained
to me that she would not have found life comfortable in Hitler’s Germany; and her own country could hardly be a haven for her husband. They had thought of Switzerland, but Herr Messinger believed that Switzerland would be invaded; and the United States did not tempt them. No one but I, at that time an unprepossessing youth of fifteen, ever used their German titles: in the town where I’d been born they were Mr. and Mrs. Messinger, yet it seemed to me— affectation, I daresay—that in this way we should honour the strangers that they were.

  When first I heard of the Messingers I had just returned from the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory, where I lodged in term-time in order to attend Lisscoe grammar school. My father told me about them. He said the man was twice the woman’s age; he imagined they were Jews since they attended no church. A lot of Jews had slipped away from Germany, he ponderously added.

  As a matter of principle, I refused to be interested in anything my father related, but a few days later I saw Frau Messinger stepping out of her husband’s motor-car in Laffan Street and guessed at once who she was. The motor-car was powered by propane gas, a complicated apparatus being mounted where part of the luggage compartment had been removed: no one had petrol to spare during what in Ireland we called the “Emergency,” and energy so ingeniously contrived was rare. A group of loiterers had gathered round the motor-car. Frau Messinger paid them no attention.

  “Will you carry something for me?” she said to me, and pointed at the wet battery of a wireless-set on the floor by the passenger seat. “Might I ask you to carry it to the garage, and bring the other back?”

  It is odd to think that those were the first words I heard her speak. Other boys had previously undertaken this chore: for some particular reason of her own she chose not to drive into Aldritt’s garage and have the used battery replaced there by the one that had been recharged. Vaguely, she referred to that when she returned to the motorcar with her shopping, something about it being less of a nuisance like this. She opened the passenger door and showed me how to wedge the battery to prevent it from toppling over. “I’d really be most awfully lost without the wireless,” she said, giving me a threepenny-piece.

  She was an extremely thin, tall woman, her jet-black hair piled high, her eyes blue, her full lips meticulously painted: I had never seen anyone as beautiful, nor heard a voice that made me so deliciously shiver. You looked for a blemish on her hands, on the skin of her neck or her face, I wrote in a notebook I kept later in my life. There wasn’t one. I could have closed my eyes and listened to that husky timbre for ever.

  “There is something that hasn’t come in to Kickham’s,” she said. “It’s due on the bus this afternoon. Might I ask you to bring it out to Cloverhill for me?”

  I remember that more distinctly than any other moment in my life. She was already in the car when she spoke, and her tone of voice was not one normally employed when making a request. With a gentle imperiousness, she commanded what she wished, and before she drove away she glanced at me once, a smile flittering across her thin features. The street-corner loiterers watched the slow progress of the car until it was out of sight, and then returned to lean again against the corner of Duggan’s public house. I stood where I was, still aware of tremors dancing beneath my skin.

  “What kind of a female is she?” my father enquired when he discovered—not from me—that I’d been addressed by Frau Messinger on the street. He was surprised when I told him that in my opinion she was an Englishwoman. He insisted I was mistaken, just as later he refused to accept that the Messingers were not Jews: in times like these, he said, no Englishwoman in her sane mind would marry a Hun, it stood to reason. “Amn’t I right?” he persuaded my mother, and she—not really listening—said he was of course.

  We were a Protestant family of the servant class which had come up in the world, my father now the proprietor of the timberyard where he had once been employed. He was a bulky man, inclined to knock things over; he thought of himself as easygoing and wise. My mother’s hands were swollen and red from washing clothes and floors and dishes; her greying fair hair was forever slipping out of its hairpins. My two grandmothers, who lived with us, had not addressed one another since my parents’ wedding-day. My two brothers, younger than I was, were chunkily-built twins, their identities often confused even within the family. My sister Annie—already working in the office of the timberyard—was jealous because I had been sent away to the grammar school at Lisscoe and she had not, and because my brothers would be sent away also. She resented the dullness of the employment she was so often told she was lucky to have. She wanted to work in a shop in Dublin.

  Our house was the last building in Laffan Street except for the sheds and concrete stores of the timberyard next door. It was a pale brown house, of painted stucco, without railings to separate it from the pavement and without steps in front of its hall-door. The windows of its three storeys had net curtains as well as heavier curtains and blinds. The narrow, steep stairway that ascended from the hall to the attics was a central vein, supplying access to trim, short landings on the first and second floors. There was an upstairs sitting-room that was never used, the kitchen and the dining-room forming between them the household’s heart. My brothers spread their schoolbooks out on the dining-room table, as Annie and I had once upon a time done also. The kitchen adjoined, with a hatch in the wall for convenience. My grandmothers sat in two armchairs by the dining-room window, watching the people going by on the street; in cold weather they sat on either side of the fire, not looking at one another.

  When we were small Annie and I used to share a bedroom, but now we had one each: patterned linoleum on the floor, an iron bedstead, wash-stand and cupboard, just like our parents’ bedroom and our brothers’.

  These rooms, the steep stairway and the landings, the square backyard you could see from the bedroom windows, its red outhouse doors and the sloping roof of its turf shed: all that constituted my familiar childhood world, and the town that lay beyond this territory of home reflected it in many ways, though at the time I did not notice this. It was a scrappy, unimportant little town, a handful of shops and public houses in narrow streets, its central square spoilt by two derelict houses and a statue to a local martyr. Bridge Quay and Bridge Lane ran off Laffan Street; Nagle Street was where Reilly’s Cafe and the two better grocers’ shops were, separated by Kickham’s drapery. The Wolfe Tone Dance-hall resembled a repository for agricultural implements—a relentless cement facade halfway up Wolfe Tone Hill, with a metal grille drawn across by day, the week’s band announced on a bill stuck to a nearby telegraph pole. On the outskirts of the town was the Church of Our Lady, and at the end of St. Alnoth Street the slender spindle of the Protestant Church of St. Alnoth was dark against the sky.

  I walked through the town on the first of my journeys to Cloverhill, clutching a soft, brown-paper parcel from Kickham’s. I wondered what it contained and tried to feel beneath the string and the overlap of paper, but was not successful. I felt excited, quickening my stride as I passed the abandoned gasworks and the hospital that was being built, branching to the right at the signpost where the road divided. Ballinadee the signpost said, 2 1/2 miles. The road became narrow then, and there were no cottages all the way to the white gates of Cloverhill, which were set in a crescent sweep bounded by a stone wall. An avenue meandered through fields where sheep grazed except where the land had been ploughed. From the moment I passed through the gates I could see the house in the distance, in grey, stern stone against treeless landscape.

  Astride a farm horse, a man rode towards me. “You have come with my wife’s ordering,” he said. “You are good to her.” He was a small, square man, too muscular to be described as fat, with short sandy hair and a drooping eyelid. Agreeably, he asked me my name and where I lived. When I told him my father was the proprietor of the timberyard he replied that that was interesting. He himself, he informed me before he passed on, cultivated sugar-beet mainly.

  The fields on either side of the avenue became uncared-for l
awns, with flower-beds in them. There was a gravel sweep, steps led to a white hall-door. I pulled the bell-chain and heard, a moment later, the tap of the maid’s heels on the flagged floor of the hall. At Cloverhill, I discovered later, the Messingers lived with this single servant, a girl of seventeen or eighteen with attractively protruding teeth, called Daphie. Two farm-workers, one of them her father, came by day. In the Messingers’ marriage no children had been born.

  I was led into the drawing-room, where Frau Messinger was sitting on a green-striped sofa, made comfortable with green-striped cushions bunched into the corner behind her. She was smoking a cigarette. As on all future occasions when I visited her in this room, she wore red, this time a scarlet dress of a soft woollen material, with a black silk scarf knotted loosely at her throat. In other ways, also, it was always just the same: I would enter the elegantly furnished drawing-room and be subjected to wide-eyed, frank appraisal, an examination that was accompanied by a smile. She never said much at first. When the tea was brought she poured it and at once lit a fresh cigarette, then leaned back against her cushions, her eyes not leaving my face, her smile still lingering. Sometimes, for an instant before she settled herself, the black lace hem of her petticoat showed. Then she would tidy her skirt about her knees and the lacy hem would not again be seen.

  “This is kindness itself,” she said that first time. “Boys are not often kind.”

  I deprecated her compliment, but was ignored. A silence fell. She guessed my age, and said that she herself was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. I did not, at the time, find anything odd in that; I did not think of Frau Messinger as a girl, which is how I remember her now, nor of her husband as an old man, which later he appeared to me to be. All that seemed peculiar to me then was that we just drank tea: there was nothing to eat, not even a sandwich or a biscuit.