Nights at the Alexandra Read online

  On the way to church he greeted people he knew among the Catholics coming back from late Mass, the women grasping their prayerbooks, men with collars and ties. You could tell at a glance they were different from us: they didn’t often walk in a family as we did, but in ones and twos, with occasionally a huge bunch of children on their own, sprawled all over the street, chattering busily. The children eyed us, but because of my father and mother they didn’t shout “Proddy-woddy-green-guts” or “dolled-up-heathens.” Our pace was slow because of the two old women, and we always had to leave the house early in order to allow for this. In the church it took them ages to sit down, fumbling and making certain they were as far away from one another as possible. Neither of them stood up for the psalm or the hymns, only for the Creed.

  On that particular Sunday, while we progressed through the town and stood waiting in the aisle for my grandmothers to settle themselves, and later while my brothers fidgeted and poked at one another during the service, I continued to be aware of the impression of my mother’s hand on the side of my face. I was not a child, I thought, to be struck so; I could not imagine Houriskey or Mahoney-Byron, or even Mande-ville, undergoing such humiliation. And again I thought: what right had she to go searching under my drawer-paper?

  I listened to my father mumbling the responses and wondered if she hit him in anger also; was a blow ever struck when they had their bedroom disagreements? I doubted it: her sharp tongue would do the work for her, it was children who were hit. Hundreds of times during my childhood I had planned to run away after receiving such punishment; here in this pew, not listening to the pulpit admonitions, I had seen myself arriving in a harbour town and slipping under a pile of canvas on a deck. They would be sorry then. I would be carried away, and white-faced and grief-stricken they would pray for my return.

  “You’ll go out with it this afternoon,” my mother said on the walk home from church. “And that’ll be the end of the matter.”

  She would find it no matter where I put it; not trusting me, she would search high and low. So I hid it at Cloverhill. I dropped it down a crevice between the hall-door steps, and then I pulled the bell-chain. I was shown into the drawing-room and soon afterwards tea was brought in by Da-phie. I smoked three cigarettes.

  That spring, at school, I received my first letter from Frau Messinger. Her handwriting was neat and sloping, slender loops on the letters that demanded them, dots and cross-strokes where they belonged. It is such excitement, Harry! We drive in every day. I had not known that building anything could be so much fun. Steel reinforcements were bathed in concrete, walls rose, rubble was levelled and floors laid down, rain fell on the workmen, the roof went on. It has brought such joy to my husband, Harry, that so many people should come and stand by him and are pleased at what is happening. But, oh, how I long for it all to be finished, to sit and watch the screen! “Will the war be over first, or your picture house complete?" a man said to my husband the other day. Once upon a time people were slow to mention the war to him, he being a German, but now all that has gone.

  I still have all her letters of that time, and when I read them now, as often I do, I believe I see Cloverhill as she had come to see it, and the town as she saw it also. In retrospect it is as easy to pass with her from room to room at Cloverhill as it is to keep company with the lanky child who visited the country houses of Sussex in the company of her diminutive mother, or the girl who met in Munster the old man she was to love. She told me once that all her life she had never slept well and as a child had always risen earlier than the servants in those well-servanted households, to explore places she did not have the courage to explore by day. Clearly, I see her. Her solitary figure wanders the morning streets of Munster. She is the first customer in a cafe; she reaches down a newspaper from its rack. I watch her unlocking the big hall-door of Cloverhill; I watch her descending the three steps on to the gravel sweep; the lawns on either side of it glistening with frost. Harry will come today: I have wondered, too, if that anticipation ever flickered in her mind as she strolled among the flower-beds, different in each season. A boy from the town: did she write that down in a letter to someone she once knew? Any boy would have done, or any girl: I don’t delude myself. Yet so very poignantly I remember her kiss that Christmas Eve, and feel the coldness of the tie-pin passed into my hand. Once I gave her a present myself: two packets of American cigarettes. I bought them from a boy at the grammar school who used to sell such things, cigarettes having become excessively hard to obtain. “Oh, Harry darling,” she said.

  Often I am affected by memories of the Messingers together, memories that are theirs, not mine, as if the thrall they held me in has bequeathed such a legacy. Opposite one another at their teak dining-table, they seem quite dramatically an old man and a girl, he entertaining her with an account of the work there has been on the farm that day, her turn now to listen. In their bedroom, they undress and fold their clothes away, the summer twilight not yet night. In their breakfast-room he opens letters while they drink black coffee. Logs blaze and crackle; the sun warms the conservatory that opens off the room. There is music on their wireless.

  Later, wrapped up against the weather, they move through the void of the building they have talked about, their footsteps echoing. For the interior walls they choose the shades of amber that later became familiar to me, darker at the bottom, lightening to dusty paleness as the colour spreads over the ceiling. These walls must be roughly tex-tured, they decree, the concave ceiling less so, the difference subtly introduced. Four sets of glass swing-doors catch a reflection of the marble steps that so astonished my father: the doors between the foyer and the auditorium are of the warm mahogany supplied by our timberyard. Long before the building is ready for it, they choose the blue-patterned carpet of the balcony, and the scarlet cinema-seats.

  Herr Messinger drives the gas-powered car back to Cloverhill; she leans a little tiredly on his arm as together they enter the house. In the town they have bought things for their lunch. “We often have just a tin of sardines. Meals should be picnics, don’t you think, Harry?”

  Time passed. At school the same jokes continued. In the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory fat Lottie Belle waddled the same plates of unpleasant food from the kitchen to the discoloured oilcloth spread over the dining-table. At home my father’s conversation was changelessly pursued. “We like this friendship we have made,” Frau Messinger said in her drawing-room.

  One April day, when I returned from Lisscoe more than a year after work had first begun on the cinema, I sensed that something was wrong. The building appeared to have reached a standstill. I did not question my father or Annie about this, as I might have done, but instead, continuing to ignore my mother’s strictures, walked out to Cloverhill. “She’s sick,” Daphie said, opening the white hall-door to me. “She’s taken to her bed.” There was no sign of Herr Messinger in the fields or on the avenue and when I returned a week later, to be met by the same response, he was not in evidence either. Nor, to my surprise, did he once appear in the square, though he had regularly done so in the past. Frau Messinger’s last letter had not mentioned illness, but had referred as usual to their visiting the building works together. In my frustration I became depressed, was chided by my father for being down-in-the-mouth and made to shovel sawdust in the timber-yard, which he said would cheer me up. Then, on the day before I was to return to school, I heard Herr Messinger’s voice as I passed his halfcompleted building. “But always I wait,” he was protesting disconsolately. “Always I say make haste and always you promise. You are letting me down when I cannot come in every day.”

  The builder, a companion of my father’s in the back bar of Viney’s, began his reassurances. He was doing his best in every hour God sent him; the only trouble was there was an Emergency in the country. Materials could not be obtained in the usual manner or at the usual speed. If he’d been asked to construct a cinema five years ago the entire population of the neighbourhood would have been watching Mickey Mouse
within a six-month.

  “This is moving from the point, though. Since I haven’t been able to visit the site your men have slowed down, heh?”

  “There’s no better men in the land, sir.”

  “If they could just be a little swifter on their feet, maybe?”

  Turning away for a moment, perhaps to hide his exasperation, Herr Messinger saw me standing there. He nodded, but didn’t smile or address me. I’d never known him so uncommunicative.

  “I’ll tell you what, sir.” Thoughtfully the builder passed a hand over the stubble of his jaw. “Come back on Thursday and you won’t know the place.”

  He was a bigger man than Mr. Messinger and having completed the massage of his jaw he placed the same hand on the German’s shoulder, bending a little to do so. A smile of satisfaction rippled the ham-like complacency of his features. “I had to pacify the old Hun,” I imagined him saying to my father in the back bar. “Sure, haven’t the poor men only the one pair of legs to each of them?” My father would be duly sympathetic: in the dining-room he had often related how he had similarly extricated himself from the complaints of a customer about a delay due to some oversight in the timberyard.

  Herr Messinger said he would return before Thursday; he would return tomorrow; not a day would pass from now on without a visit from him at the building site. In a way that reminded me of my father also, the builder said he’d be welcome. Wasn’t it the man who pays the piper that calls the tune? he amiably remarked. When he’d ambled off Herr Messinger spoke to me.

  “Well, Harry, so you are back again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harry, she is not well. The early months she hates before spring comes. Well, that is wrong, so she says: it is the early months that don’t like her. January, February, March too. And this year she was determined to watch the building. So the months took their revenge, Harry.”

  “Is she getting better?”

  “When you return for the summer you will see for yourself.” He smiled at me; gold glistened in his teeth. “Oh, Harry, these labourers do not advance much. And then of course it is true: commodities are hard to come by in the Emergency. The architect does not arrive because he has no petrol, and I myself—well, I like to be with her when she is not all right.”

  “Please thank her for her letters.”

  “When you go back to your school she will write a few more. As she improves, so summer comes again.”

  “I’d write back only it’s hard to get stamps where I am.”

  “Don’t worry about writing back.”

  “She never said she was ill.”

  “That wouldn’t be her way, Harry.”

  He strode away, dapper in his German clothes, the shine of his gaiters catching the sunlight. Later that morning, in Nagle Street, he waved to me from his car. I wished he’d said that I might visit her in her bedroom. I had thought he might say that: it would be ages now before I saw her.

  For her sake I welcomed the mild weather of spring that year, and the warmth of early summer. During the dragging weeks of June there was a heatwave. Was it in June that anemones came? I had no idea.

  “You will remember for ever your days in the rectory,” the Reverend Wauchope finally predicted, which were the words of his parting to all the pupils who boarded there. He was, of course, right. “We will pray to God,” he said, and together he and I did so, he speaking for me, requesting guidance and the blessing of humility in the days of my future. “I am to understand that you have failed to find affinity with scholarship,” he remarked. “Nor have you otherwise achieved distinction. Your father is a draper, is he?”

  “He has a timberyard, sir.”

  “And a place for yourself in it? You are most fortunate. More fortunate than most.”

  I did not reply. After we have died, the first letter I received during that term had asked, do you believe there will be a heaven? Subsequent letters referred to the possibility of this future also; the past, always previously her subject, was not touched upon. Nor was the present: for all the mention there was of it, the building of the cinema might have been defeated by the builder’s lassitude and the shortages of the Emergency. The more I searched the lines of the letters for any hint of progress the more I experienced bleak dismay. Instead, repeated often, Frau Messinger had written: I have never understood how it is we shall be separated, some of us for heaven, some for hell.

  “I have asked you a question,” the Reverend Wauchope said.

  “I'm sorry, sir.”

  “Do you intend to honour me with an answer?” “I did not hear the question, sir.”

  Only three letters had come; all had to do with life after death. A week ago the last one had arrived, urging a visit from me as soon as I returned.

  The sweet-pea will be in flower and we might walk in the garden.

  “You appear to be inane,” the Reverend Wauchope said. His dry, scratchy voice querulously dismissed me without my having said—as I think I had intended to—that the timberyard did not attract me. But the silence surrounding the Alexandra cinema made me apprehensive about continuing to consider it an alternative. Already I had convinced myself that it had been abandoned because of the illness that was not mentioned. Herr Messinger had lost heart in his gift.

  “You are suitable for work with timber,” was the clergyman’s final insult, the last thing he ever said to me.

  With my three companions of the rectory I walked around the field where the cows grazed, Mandeville confessing that he’d been offered a position in a seed firm, Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron that they’d be going on to their fathers’ farms. “Oh yes, the timberyard,” I said. Mandeville wondered if we’d ever meet again: we thought we probably wouldn’t.

  Later, in an empty classroom of the school, I gathered together the dog-eared textbooks that had also been my companions for so long and returned them to Mr. Conron. Staring hard at some point of interest on the floor, he warned me to be careful in Dublin if one day I should visit it. “Take care with the women of the quays. Don’t be tempted by quayside women.” With these words he offered an explanation for the torment that haunted his features. He lived with shame, yet some part of him was obliged surreptitiously to display its source, half proud confession, half punishment of himself. “I’ll take care all right,” I promised.

  I tipped Lottie Belle the two shillings the Reverend Wauchope laid down as a suitable sum for all his boarders to pass on to her, the accumulation of such amounts reputed to constitute the major part of her wages. Mrs. Wauchope, who had not addressed me during my years in the rectory, did not do so now.

  On a morning in the middle of that same June heatwave I left Lisscoe for ever. The bus halted to drop off bundles of newspapers or to pick up the passengers who stood waiting at a crossroads or outside wayside public houses, or nowhere in particular. Towns passed through were similar to my own or just a little larger. Cattle drowsed in the fields, familiar landmarks slipped by. The bus was dusty and hot, its air pungent with the fumes of petrol; once it stopped because a woman was feeling sick. I wondered if I would ever make a journey anywhere again, if I was seeing for the last time the ruins by the river, the bungalow embedded with seaside shells, the green advertisement for Raleigh bicycles on the gable-end of a house: my father boasted that he was none the worse for having never in his life been on a bus. We live and then we are forgotten, she had written. Surely that cannot be the end of us? In the bus I reread the three letters I had most recently received, phrases and paragraphs already known to me by heart. A gravestone gathers lichen, flowers rot in the grave-vase. In her drawing-room I could not recall her having once even touched upon this subject. She had not, for instance, speculated on the after-life of her dead mother, even though it was apparent from all she said that she had been more than ordinarily fond of her. She had not, when deploring the deaths of so many young soldiers in the war, ever wondered if that was truly the end of them.

  The bus drew up by the martyr’s statue in the square, tak
ing me unawares because the melancholy nature of my thoughts still absorbed me. The bus conductor handed down my single, heavy suitcase from the luggage rack on the roof, and then I was aware of the reddish tinge of a building that made the square seem different. In bright sunlight I gazed at a fa9ade that was exactly as it had been on the architect’s sketch, the baskets of flowers hanging from a hugely jutting ledge that formed a roof above the marble steps. The Alexandra proclaimed stylish blue letters, as if her hand had written them across the concrete.

  * * *

  * * *

  FOUR

  The flush in her cheeks was like the pink that may creep into the petals of a rose that should be purely white. She lay on her sofa, exactly as she had in the past, smoking and dispensing tea. It was a Sunday afternoon.

  “I think you understand everything now, Harry?”

  I shook my head but today she did not, as in the past, ignore my responses in our conversation. She observed my gesture, and smiled a little. She said:

  “Everything here, Harry? All there has been at Cloverhill?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The cinema will open in a fortnight. With Rebecca. Harry, do you know Rebecca?”

  She spoke lightly and with her usual casualness, but already I knew that death was everywhere in the drawing-room, and when I walked with her in the garden it was present also. The sweet-pea blooms were a trellis of colour—a dozen shades of purple and mauve, reds lightening and deepening, pinks and whites. Yellow hung from the laburnum shrubs, scarlet dotted the rose bushes. Yet the beauty of the Englishwoman chilled the blaze. Like a ghost sensed coldly, the melancholy of time deserting her was everywhere in the garden, as it had been in the drawing-room.