Nights at the Alexandra Read online

  “I would place you in the box-office, Harry, to sell the tickets. Later on maybe to oversee the cleaning. To pay the wages of the usherettes. Soon you would learn, Harry. Soon we would learn together.”

  My mother would consider that selling tickets in a cinema was inferior to taking my place in the timberyard. My mother’s tongue became sharp in anger: having suffered pain and inconvenience bringing four children into the world she demanded sensibleness in return. My father would be bewildered and confused, as he was by any deviation from his own assumptions. “Errah, get on with you, girl,” he’d said when Annie had wanted to go to Dublin to sell dresses in Arnott’s or Switzer’s. Wasn’t she the luckiest girl in the town to have a decent position waiting for her in the accounts shed, with old Miss McLure ready to retire? My mother had been more forceful: she’d given Annie what she called “a dressing down,” pointing out that shop-work was on a par with being a skivvy, that the rest of the family would not be able to hold their heads above the disgrace of it. For days there’d been the sound of Annie’s weeping and her blotched face at mealtimes. And, ever since, the sullenness had been part of her.

  “So we are arranged,” Herr Messinger said, with confidence. “Always, since we married, I have dreamed to make a gift like this. Imagine it, Harry, she married an old tortoise like me!” He laughed and kissed her. She clung to him for a moment, whispering something I could not hear. They laughed together; he lit another cigar. He said:

  “She wants it to be nice for everyone. I want it to be nice for her. That is how a gift must be.” He went away with his roll of plans, and after a moment his wife offered me a cigarette. I leaned forward so that the flame of her circular cigarette-lighter might catch the tip of it. The brief touch of her fingers was as cold as marble. She said:

  “I could not give him children.” Her smile continued to indulge him after he had left the room. Her own name was Alexandra, which was something I had not known before: even though she had failed him, he was offering her a gift which was to be created as she wished, to bring pleasure to strangers. All he asked was that, it seemed: the fulfilment of a whim in her.

  “We can live without anything but love, Harry. Always remember that.”

  Daphie brought in the tea, and it was poured. I was made to continue standing by the fire, although my clothes were dry by now and in any case would become damp again on my journey home. All the time, while she talked once more about her past, I thought about the offer that had been made to me. I could feel the cosy claustrophobia of the tiny office of the plans, the window in the glass, hands offering money. For the first time—I think the only time—I hardly listened to the childhood incidents related to me, to the speculations about her unknown father’s appearance, the journeying through England and through Germany, and Bach mellifluous on the organ in that candlelit cathedral. There would be green tickets, and red and grey, and I would tear them off singly or in twos and threes; I would dole out pleasure to patrons of all ages.

  Before I left that day she asked me to kiss her because it was Christmas Eve. I touched her cheek with my lips, and for a moment she slipped her hand into mine. Christmas would be quiet at Cloverhill, she said: she and her husband would exchange presents, and there were presents for Daphie and the workmen. They would sit together by the fire. “And I have this for you, Harry.”

  She gave me a tie-pin, a slender bar of gold. She’d found it years ago, she said, on one of her early-morning strolls about Munster. She’d seen it gleaming on a paving-stone, where someone had lost it the night before. “I used to wonder about that person,” she said, “but I haven’t for a long time now. It’s time I gave this away.”

  She showed me how to pin it into my collar, beneath my tie, but on the way home I took it out in case it should again work itself loose. I have never worn it, fearing its loss, but often I take it from my dressing-table drawer and slip it for a moment into my collar before returning it to safety. Of all I have, it is my most treasured possession.

  * * *

  * * *

  THREE

  In the new year, workmen began the demolition of the two empty houses in the square and my brothers and I watched from a distance. Stones and bricks were carried away in lorries, the silver-painted railings that had rusted in front of the two gardens suddenly weren’t there any more.

  “Oh, the Hun boys don’t let the grass grow,” my father said, knocking pepper over a plate of sausages in the dining-room. The timber for the new building was to be supplied from our yard, and for that he was naturally pleased, but he had not yet come to terms with Herr Messinger’s decision to supply a town in which he was a stranger with a cinema. Between moments of attention paid to his sausages, he remarked upon the swift determination with which the German had acted. “And isn’t it a surprising thing, the way he’d have got the money out of Germany?”

  “Did he send for it?” my mother enquired, without much interest.

  “Errah, how could he, for God’s sake? Isn’t there a war raging over there?”

  My mother never seemed offended by such scorn, appearing to accept it as her due, even nodding her agreement with it. But just occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year, her pusillanimity gave way to protest and in the privacy of their bedroom she could be heard spiritedly shouting abuse at my father, calling him uncouth and unclean, bitterly asserting she’d rather share a bed with an animal. His own voice in reply was always so mumbling and low that you couldn’t hear properly what he said; but his tone suggested that he didn’t deny her accusations, perhaps even promised to do better in the future.

  “Is it she that has the money, boy? Did the woman ever tell you?”

  I shook my head. I said I had obtained no knowledge of the Messingers’ financial arrangements, or the source or distribution of their wealth. I was not telling the truth since I knew

  Frau Messinger to have been a poor relation, and her husband to be a member of a well-to-do family. None of that seemed anyone’s business except their own; certainly it was not a titbit to be carried into the back bar of Viney’s hotel.

  “There’s money there somewhere,” my father said.

  We sat around the dining-room table, all of us eating sausages and fried bread, my grandmothers silently cantankerous with one another, my father airing his views. News he had heard during the day’s business was imparted at this hour, anecdotes repeated, deaths and births announced.

  “They were saying in Viney’s,” he reported now, “that there’s marble on order for the front steps. Did you ever meet the beat of that, marble steps for a picture house!”

  “Is it the Connemara marble?” my mother enquired.

  “What else would it be? What’s the price of Connemara, Annie?”

  It was a delusion of my father’s that because she kept the timberyard accounts Annie was conversant with the price of any commodity that had to do with the building trade. “Corrugated, Annie?” he had a way of saying in the diningroom. “What would I give for a three by six?” Further resentment in Annie would fester then, her face becoming even heavier in her resistance to all that was being foisted on her. “Ah, sure, she’s settled in well to the accounts,” I had heard him telling a man on the street one day. “Sure, what more could she want?”

  “When they have the picture house built,” one of my brothers asked, “will they charge much to go in there?”

  My mother told him not to speak with his mouth full of bread because no one could hear him properly. My father, to whom the same objection might have been put, said:

  “I’d say they would. I’d say your man would need a big return on his money. What would he charge, Annie, to make sense of the thing?”

  My sister said she had no idea. Briefly, she closed her eyes, endeavouring to dispose of my father and the ability she had ages ago been invested with as regards swift calculation. My father did not pursue the matter. Completing the consumption of another sausage, he turned to me.

  “Did you ever find out are
they Jews?”

  “She’s a Protestant. They were married in a Catholic cathedral.”

  “I’d say you had it wrong.”

  At that time of my life, harshly judging my father’s opinions and statements, his dress, his clumsiness, his paucity of style, his manner of lighting a cigarette, I found it perhaps more difficult than I might have to forgive him for dismissing the answers I offered to his questions. In retrospect, of course, forgiveness is easier.

  “That man’s not rough enough to be a Catholic,” my mother put in.

  The squatter of my two grandmothers asked us what we were talking about. In a raised voice my father replied that the man out at Cloverhill was going to build a new picture house for the town. “I’ve nothing against ajew-man,” he said. “He has a head for business.”

  “Isn’t Colonel Hardwicke out at Cloverhill?” my grandmother asked. “Running after the maids there?”

  “Colonel Hardwicke’s dead,” my father shouted, and my other grandmother nodded disdainfully. “Dead as a doornail,” said my father.

  My mother cut more bread. She poured tea into my father’s cup. “There’s a picture they’re after making in America that’s four hours long,” he said. “Did you hear about that one, Annie?”

  “Gone with the Wind. ”

  “What’s that, girl?”

  “The name of the film is Gone with the Wind." “It was young Gerrity was telling me when he came into the yard. I’d say it was called something else.”

  “ Gone with the Wind is the only picture that’s as long as that. It’s coming to the Savoy in Dublin. There’s people going up to see it.”

  “Cripes!” one of my brothers exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t it be great to be in the pictures for four hours!”

  Sharply, my mother told him not to say “Cripes” in the dining-room. She reminded him that she’d given a warning in this respect before. My brothers were getting rougher with every day that went by, she said, glaring at both of them.

  “Mr. Wauchope’ll knock it out of them.” My father confidently wagged his head, at the same time turning it in my direction. He winked at me. “What’s that big stick you were telling me about, that Mr. Wauchope has in a cupboard?”

  I looked at him dumbly, extreme denseness in my eyes. “What stick’s that?”

  “Hasn’t he a blackthorn for beating the living daylights out of any young fellow who’d misbehave himself?” He released a guffaw, winking at me a second time.

  “He has a rod for closing the windows with. You can’t reach the top part of the windows,” I explained to my brothers, “so old Wauchope has to hook the end of a rod into them.”

  “Is it Mr. Conron I’m thinking of in that case?” my father persevered, his hand held up to disguise further winking from my brothers. One of my grandmothers asked him what the matter was, but he didn’t answer her. “Is it Mr. Conron that lays into you with the blackthorn?”

  “Conron wouldn’t have the strength to hit anyone.” I paused, leisurely dividing a piece of fried bread into triangular segments. I imagined myself in the box-office, telling people who asked me that Gone with the Wind wouldn’t end till one o’clock in the morning. “Conron’s a type of loony,” I told my brothers.

  My father was taken aback. The grin that had been twitching about his lips gradually evaporated. Before I’d been sent to lodge in the rectory he used to read from a letter he’d received from the Reverend Wauchope which itemised the attractions of the boarding arrangements for Lisscoe grammar school. Around this same dining-table we had listened to elaborate inaccuracies about well-heated rooms and plentiful supplies of fresh vegetables from the rectory’s own garden. The assistant master lodged at the rectory also, the letter said, so that discipline was maintained.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life,” my father muttered crossly.

  “A boy from Enniscorthy says Conron was in the loony place they have there. He used to roll a hoop along the road. He thought he was Galloping O’Hogan.”

  “That’s eejity talk, boy Don’t take any notice of it,” my father sternly advised my brothers.

  “I’m only saying what I was told,” I said. “You’d be sorry for poor Conron.”

  “What’s the trouble?” one of my grandmothers demanded, and I began to repeat all over again what I’d just told my brothers, but my father interrupted me and shouted at my grandmother not to waste her energy listening. “No man could teach in a classroom if he was a lunatic. We’ve heard enough of it.” he said to me. “Annie, did the pine come in?”

  There was a film Houriskey had seen in which the main actor was employed in the box-office of a theatre when all the time he wanted to be on the stage. To make matters worse, he fell in love with an actress who passed by the box-office every night. That was the kind of thing you’d have to be careful about. You could become so familiar with a film actress on the screen that before you knew where you were you’d be in love with her, suffering like the actor, or poor Mandeville over the royal princess.

  “What’s this?” my mother demanded, two days after my slandering of the assistant master. She held in the palm of her hand Frau Messinger’s Christmas present. I had hidden it under the drawer-paper in my bedroom.

  “It’s a tie-pin. You put it in your collar.” “Where d’you get it?”

  “I found it on the street.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I found it outside Kickham’s on Christmas Eve.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  Tears pressed against my eyelids. I didn’t know why they had come so suddenly, or why so urgently they demanded to be released. I realise now they were tears of anger.

  “Why are you telling me lies?”

  “They’re not lies. Someone dropped the thing on the street.”

  “Don’t tell me lies on a Sunday, Harry. Did you steal it? Did you take it off someone at school?”

  “I’m telling you I didn’t.”

  She stood there in her Sunday clothes, two patches of scarlet spreading on her cheeks, the way they always did when she was cross. I had entered the bedroom I’d once shared with Annie and now had for myself. She’d been there, with the drawer still open. What right had she to go looking in my drawers?

  “Frau Messinger gave it to me at Christmas.” “Mrs. Messinger:

  “Out at Cloverhill—”

  “I know where the woman lives. Are you telling me the truth now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d she give you a Christmas present for?” “She just gave it to me.”

  “She gives you cigarettes too. You come back smelling of cigarettes.”

  “I smoke the odd one.”

  “If your father heard this he’d take the belt to you.”

  I did not reply, and it was my mother who wept, not I. In her navy-blue, Sunday clothes she soundlessly wept and I watched the tears come from her eyes and run into the powder of the face she had prepared for going to church. Like Annie and like myself, she was tired of this house, of the two deaf old women who would not civilly address one another, of my father’s lugubrious conversation, and my brothers’ sniggering. I know that now, but at the time I had no pity for my mother’s tears, and no compassion for her trapped existence. I wanted to hurt her because a secret I valued had been dirtied by her probing.

  “You will give it back,” she commanded, her voice controlled, her tears wiped away with the tips of her fingers. “You will give it back to the woman.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because I’m telling you to. Because I’m ashamed of you, Harry, as you should be yourself.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “A woman that’s not related to a young boy doesn’t give him a present. I’m ashamed you would have taken it.”

  “There’s no harm in a tie-pin.”

  My mother hit me. She slapped me across the face, the way she used to when I was younger than my brothers. A sting of pain lingered on t
he side of my cheek; my whole face tingled hotly.

  “You’ll give that back to her.”

  I blinked, determined not to cry, looking away from her. The tie-pin was a present, I repeated. You couldn’t give back a present.

  “You’ll give it back and you’ll have done with going out to that house.” My mother went on talking, fast and angrily, calling Frau Messinger a wanton and a strumpet. “Oh, a great time she has for herself, with young boys coming out to visit her. Amn’t I the queer fool not to have known?”

  I remained silent. I had no intention of return-ing the tie-pin, nor did I intend to discontinue my visits to Cloverhill. If my father knew about this, my mother said, he’d go out there himself and abuse the pair of them.

  That wasn’t true. My father would never have gone out to Cloverhill House in such a frame of mind, any more than he would have thrashed me with his belt. All during our childhood there had been this threat of my father’s violence, but whenever some misdemeanour was reported to him he’d been bewildered and at a loss for words. He had taken no action whatsoever.

  “Get ready for church,” my mother said.

  Later, as we walked up through the town—my father and my brothers, Annie with my grandmothers—my mother said to me that none of them must know what had occurred, or hear anything whatsoever about the tie-pin. It would upset my brothers and sister, and worry my grandmothers; my father would be beside himself for a month. “You’ll be ashamed when you think about it in church,” she said.

  I stared stonily ahead, at my father’s back. On Sundays he wore a blue serge suit with a waistcoat, and a collar and tie, and an overcoat when it was cold. It was the only day of the week he looked like a Protestant, a respectable timberyard proprietor who had made his way up in the world, who carried coins in his pocket to distribute among us at the church gates. On other days he wore working clothes, since only they were suitable for the dust and grime of the yard. He still loaded timber himself, and worked the saws and planes. Occasionally he drove one of the lorries.