Nights at the Alexandra Read online

  “Both of us were born beneath the sign of Sagittarius,” she said. Not that she entirely believed in the astrology notes she read in magazines, yet she could not quite resist them. “Do you like reading just for fun?” she asked and then, not waiting for an answer, described the various German and French magazines that had delighted her when she’d lived in Germany. What she’d enjoyed most of all was drinking afternoon chocolate in a cafe and leafing through the pages of whatever journals were there. She described a cafe in a square in Munster where the daily newspapers were attached to mahogany rods that made them easier to read, and where there were magazines on all the tables. Guessing that I had never been in a theatre, she described the orchestra and the applause, the painted scenery, the make-up and the actors. She described a cathedral in Germany, saying she and Herr Messinger had been married in it. “Harry, do you think you could save me a horrid journey and bring out the wet battery from Aldritt’s on Tuesday?”

  This was the indication that my present visit had come to an end. There was the lavish smile, and the assumption that naturally I would agree to carry out the wireless battery. Without hesitation, I said I would.

  “I hear you were at Cloverhill,” my father remarked that evening, when all of us were gathered around the dining-table from which we ate our meals. The family atmosphere was as it always was: my grandmothers silent in their dislike of one another, my brothers sniggering, my mother tired, Annie resentful, my father ebullient after an hour or so in the back bar of Viney’s hotel.

  “Cloverhill?” Annie said, her lips pouting in a spasm of jealousy. “Were you out at Cloverhill?” “I had a message from Kickham’s.”

  “So you’d say they were Jews?” my father said. I shook my head. Since the Messingers had been married in a cathedral it seemed unlikely that they could be Jewish. He came from a village near a town called Munster, I said; she was definitely English.

  “Well, I’d say they were Jews.” My father cut a slice of shop bread with the bread-saw, scattering crumbs from the crust over the table-cloth. “The Jew-man goes to the synagogue. There’s no synagogue in this town.”

  My father lent his observations weight through his slow delivery of them, his tone suggesting revelations of import yet to come. But invariably this promise remained unfulfilled.

  “I’m surprised you were running messages for them,” my sister said.

  I did not reply. I would tell my companions at the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory—Mandeville, Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron—about the Messingers: it was clearly no use attempting to convey anything about them to any member of my family. One of my brothers upset a cup of tea, and with a vigour that belied the weariness in her features my mother delivered a slap to the side of his face. The less squat of my grandmothers exclaimed her approval; the other muttered in distaste. The subject of the Messingers did not survive this interruption; my father talked about the war.

  On Tuesday I collected the charged battery at Aldritt’s garage and carried it out to Cloverhill. It was made of glass, and fitted into a wire cage with a handle: it wasn’t difficult to carry, nor was it heavy. Frau Messinger gave me a list that afternoon, and the packets and the single parcel I conveyed to Cloverhill two days later were hardly a burden either. Then it was time to collect from Aldritt’s the battery I had myself left there a week before. I even learnt how to connect the wires of the wireless-set to it.

  “Harry, I should like to tell you a little about my mother and myself,” Frau Messinger said on the last afternoon of my holidays, a warm afternoon in September when the French windows of her drawing-room were wide open. A bumblebee buzzed intermittently, alighting on one surface after another, silent for a moment before beginning its next flight. The last bumblebee of summer, she said, and added without any change of voice, as though the same subject continued:

  “My mother was a poor relation, Harry. From my earliest childhood that was an expression that accompanied us everywhere we went. Often, in Sussex, my mother would wave one of her tiny hands at the landscape and announce that it was the family’s. I also distinctly recall her doing so on the seafront at Bognor Regis, implying with her delicate little wave all the houses of the promenade, and the seashore as well.”

  She handed me the stub of her cigarette and asked me to take it to the garden and throw it away, out of sight somewhere, poked down into a flower-bed, she suggested. It was the first time she made this request of me, but she was often to make it in the future: the smell of stale cigarettes was unpleasant in a room, she explained, answering the bewilderment on my face.

  “You naturally wonder about my father,” she said when I returned. “Who he was and why he was never with us. Well, I’ll tell you, Harry: I never knew my father. I never so much as laid an eye on him or heard his voice or even saw a photograph. My father was a dark horse. My mother wore a wedding ring, but I am honestly not sure that she did so with any title. I rather believe my father was something dreadful, like a pantryman.”

  I did not know what a pantryman was, nor do I to this day. But I could tell from the lowered voice accompanying the revelation that in Frau Messinger’s view a pantryman was a long way down the scale from a butler, or even a footman. Her mother had become enamoured of a lesser servant.

  “My mother, no matter what else she was, Harry, was a very foolish little person. If she had not been foolish about some tedious investment she would not have become a poor relation. She was taken in by a solicitor in Sevenoaks who claimed he could make a fortune for her. She was lucky to have ended up with anything at all left. But not enough for my education.”

  Her cigarette-lighter was round, like a polished gold coin. Sometimes she played with it while she talked. Sometimes she took a cigarette from her yellow Gold Flake packet, then changed her mind and returned it, tidily folding the silver paper as it had been folded before.

  “My mother stayed in people’s houses: that’s how we lived. We went from house to house, in a circle all over Sussex, and when we arrived at a certain point we began all over again. Governesses taught me, Harry. I was passed from schoolroom to schoolroom in the houses where we stayed, from Miss Kindle to Miss D’Arcy, to Miss Moate, to Miss Hindhassett, on to Miss Binding and Miss Gubbins. To tell the truth, Harry, I’m hardly educated at all. I mean, a smattering. I have nothing more.”

  I formed a picture of the existence she described, of arriving with her mother and their luggage in this house or that, endlessly beholden. I saw her as the child she’d been, much taller than her mother, just as she was taller than her husband: a thin, lanky child was what she’d said, not very happy. I knew nothing of the kind of houses she spoke of, and imagined palaces in soft English countryside, with gardeners and parlour maids. She and her mother travelled by train, and someone met them at the railway station. Often it wasn’t actually a railway station but a special stopping place in the middle of nowhere, a “halt,” she called it, used only by the people of the nearby estate.

  Even now, so very long afterwards, I can clearly see the clothes she described to me: her favourite dress when she was twelve, in forget-me-not blue with tiny white dots that were flowers when you looked closer, and plain white buttons; her favourite dress when she was fifteen, of crimson velvet, the first of her red dresses; the lace stole she was given once; green shoes she’d had. Furniture in the houses she’d visited remained vivid in her recollection, and has passed into mine: a Queen Anne dressing-glass of inlaid rosewood, so delicately finished that she had always had difficulty in drawing her eyes away from it; a gold-faced clock on a mantelpiece in a hall; pale Chippendale chairs around an oval table. On the day after her eighteenth birthday a young man had proposed marriage to her, and she wept because she loved him but even so rejected him. They had walked together through a meadow where poppies bloomed, then by a river and an apple orchard. That year she had learnt Italian. That year she had tried particularly to be good at tennis, which she had always wanted to be. At nineteen she had become religious, and had wonde
red about the Virgin Mary and the mystery of the Annunciation.

  “You will wonder why we were in Germany, Harry. Well, it’s the same kind of thing as staying in other people’s houses. Mrs. Marsh-Hall needed a companion to travel with, her sister having died the previous year. So she took my mother with her as well as a maid, and of course I was permitted to go along. Otherwise I would never have met my husband.”

  When she spoke of that time Frau Messinger uttered a few words in German before returning to English to tell me about her husband’s many sisters and his cousin who was unable to speak because of a stroke, his niece who’d been a singer and lived with the family in their Schloss. Herr Messinger had been left a widower seven or eight years ago; he had three sons in Hitler’s army.

  “None of it is nice for him, Harry. ‘You must buy land with the house in Ireland,’ I said. ‘You must be occupied.’ For my husband, idleness is a penance.”

  She offered me a cigarette, the first time she had done so. She held out the packet casually, appearing not to consider it unusual that a boy of fifteen should smoke. I accepted it because at the grammar school I often smoked behind the lavatories.

  “My mother died, Harry, or else you would have met her. She would have come here with us, I think.”

  Her tone was not melancholy. She seemed happy to have only Herr Messinger. People had come to call when she had first arrived at Cloverhill, women mainly, bearing visiting cards to represent their husbands, since husbands tended to be occupied at that time of day.

  “Of course I returned the calls, Harry. Well, really, it would be rude not to.”

  But social life ended there. There were invitations to bridge and whist parties, but neither Frau Messinger nor her husband had any interest in card-playing.

  “Yet of course we were right, Harry, to come to Ireland. We are proved right every day. Adolf Hitler apologised, you know, when a bomb fell out of one of his aeroplanes on to a creamery somewhere—in Co. Tipperary, was it?”

  She didn’t care for Adolf Hitler, nor did Herr Messinger, even though his sons were fighting for the Nazis. She had fallen in love with Germany and almost overnight Germany had become a tragedy.

  “Old women sat in the cafes of Munster, Harry, their faces crinkled in despair at what they read in the newspapers and the magazines. And then the horrible Brownshirts would go by, goose-stepping with their legs. You couldn’t help loving the manners of the Germans, but what good were manners then?”

  I held my cigarette as nonchalantly as I could, dangling it as she was dangling hers.

  “It’s such a disappointment, Harry, that people can be so silly. Don’t you think it is?”

  She went on talking, not waiting for my response. Herr Messinger could hardly bear even to think about the sadness that had befallen Germany. “And poor England, too, Harry—those horrid bombs coming out of the darkness!”

  The houses she had visited in Sussex were maybe in ruins by now. People lived on a rasher of bacon a month, and eggs made from powder. In England clothing wasn’t warm enough. In Germany the elderly died.

  “We’re creatures of absurdity, you realise, my husband and myself. Creatures of ridicule, Harry, sitting out two countries’ conflict.”

  It hadn’t been easy for her husband to come away, to leave his family behind, his sisters and his sons. When he read the news in the papers he wondered if they still survived.

  “They are not permitted to communicate, Harry. We must wait to know until all this is over.” She would have been arrested and sent to an internment camp in Germany, as Herr Messinger would have been in England. Every indignity that could be devised would have been visited on them. And the one remaining free would have been reviled for marrying the other.

  “I am ashamed of my country when I think of that, Harry. As my husband is of his. That the innocent should be ill-treated, even allowed to die, in the glorious name of war: what kind of world have we made for ourselves?”

  He had tried to persuade his sisters, and all the household of the Schloss, to accompany them to Ireland; his sons would not have been allowed to. But it was easier for his sisters to continue with the familiar than to embark upon the strangeness of a country they had scarcely heard of. And they were getting on in years, and less pessimistic about the future than their brother.

  “So we came alone to our sanctuary, and live with the guilt of it, Harry There is always guilt in running away.”

  Listening to her voice, I found myself wondering what happened in the drawing-room after my afternoon visits. Did she lie for a little longer on the sofa and then rise from it to prepare a meal for her husband? It was hard to imagine her with her sleeves rolled up and an apron tied over her dress. She did not appear to belong in a kitchen, with meat and vegetables and bread-soda. Yet Daphie did not strike me as someone capable of preparing meals: Daphie belonged more with brushes and dusters and tins of Brasso. A long time later I discovered that Herr Messinger did all the cooking at Cloverhill.

  “Always be gentle with my husband, Harry Not just his country, but a way of life, has been destroyed by criminals. That is not pleasant for any man to bear, you know.”

  She had never before spoken of Herr Messinger in this manner, and certainly I had not thought of him as someone with whom it was necessary to be gentle. Yet now, so long afterwards, I understand, for the pictures that filled his mind—his sons engaged in futile battles, the Schloss a barracks, the old women weeping in the cafes—must daily have felt like a canker consuming him.

  “When I was young, Harry, far younger than you are now, I used to wonder what life was going to be like.” She smiled in her sudden way, her evenly-arranged teeth whitely glistening. She had imagined an existence in the English countryside, watching her mother growing old, collecting bone china. “I always loved pretty things, Harry. Thimbles and tiny mantelpiece ornaments. Such little objects were always in the houses we stayed at, but of course they were never mine. My husband has made up for that.” She showed me a cabinet fall of objets d’art that I had hardly noticed before, in the corner of the drawing-room. Some of the china was German, some English. “Cheek by jowl, Harry, making the silly war seem sillier.”

  In a small garden she would have grown anemones, which were her favourite flower. “I did not see how I could marry, yet later I did of course.” She smiled but did not explain that further: why it was she had chosen Herr Messinger, having rejected the young Englishman whom I had so very clearly seen walking with her in the poppied meadow on the day after her eighteenth birthday, when there were tears on her cheeks because she was in love. Herr Messinger, with his lined, square face and his drooping eyelid, was different in every way from the dark-haired figure in a white cotton suit and panama hat I had imagined. “It was impossible that my husband and I should not marry,” was all she said.

  I left her reluctantly on the last day of my holidays, wondering who would fetch the glass batteries for her until I returned, hoping no one would. Her eyes smiled her own particular farewell at me as she lay languid on the sofa, a cigarette she had not yet lit between her fingers. The bumblebee was still in the room, darting between the two brass lamps that hung from the ceiling, settling on one glass globe and then the other, before again becoming restless.

  As I walked through dwindling sunshine, down the avenue and out on to the empty road, strange fantasies possessed me. I saw with vividness the Messingers’ marriage in the German cathedral, candles alight on the altar, guests mysterious in a twilight gloom. I heard the singing of a choir, and then the bridal couple were in their honeymoon bedroom, she still in her wedding-dress, he pouring champagne into glasses. They ate slices of their wedding cake and laughed in their happiness, defying the war that already threatened to deprive them of it.

  * * *

  TWO

  At the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory, in the bedroom I shared with Mandeville and Houris-key and Mahoney-Byron, I journeyed again to Cloverhill, as I do in my memories to this day. At the grammar sch
ool my inability to learn what I was required to learn was soothed by possessive daydreams, my failure to make sense of mathematical abstractions lightened. Although later I wished I had not, I described to my companions at the rectory Frau Messinger’s flawless skin and the way she had of smiling when she looked at you, and her jet-black hair. I mentioned her perfectly painted lips. “Holy Jesus!” Mandeville whispered, his voice reverent with envy; Houriskey wanted to know if I ever got a look up her skirts. At Lisscoe grammar school there was a lot of talk like that; all humour was soiled, double meanings were teased out of innocence. When I described the clothes Frau Messinger wore I could see from Mahoney-Byron’s expression that, one by one, he lifted the garments from her body.

  “You haven’t a snap of her?” Mandeville asked quietly.

  “There are only the wedding photographs in her bedroom.”

  “Were you in her bedroom?”

  “She showed me one time.”

  “Jesus Christ, man!” Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron shouted, perfectly in unison, but Mande-ville’s reaction was more intense and private. Mandeville was an emaciated boy with spectacles, the ravages of a departed acne still evident about his nose and chin. He had wavy fair hair that he brushed back from his forehead, with a central parting. Mandeville was besotted by the younger of the two English princesses, an infatuation that had developed in him the ambition to find employment of some kind in Buckingham Palace. Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron were bigger, heavier boys, the sons of farmers.

  “What’d she show you in the bedroom?” Houriskey asked.

  “Nothing; only what it was like. She showed me every room in the house one time.”

  “Why’d she do that?”