Nights at the Alexandra Read online

  “Sweet-pea is my second favourite,” she said, and I could tell she knew that at last my density had been penetrated. “Sweet-pea in a cut-glass vase, set off by the fern of asparagus.”

  We walked slowly among the flower-beds. Occasionally she bent down to pull out a weed. Mignonette was her third favourite, she said, but only because of its fragrance.

  “I knew nothing about a garden when first we came to Cloverhill,” she said. “He rescued it for me, you know.”

  Brambles had flourished among the rhododendrons and the blue hydrangeas then, cornus was rampant. Fuchsia roots and bamboos had spread beneath the earth, escallonia was smothered. Her husband had dug the flower-beds out; he had discovered lost japonica, he had teased the straggles of jasmine back to health.

  “I helped of course, Harry, but sometimes the work was heavy. And there was the farm as well.”

  All that had been happening at the time of my first visits to Cloverhill. “Look at that,” Herr Messinger had said once, showing me his hands, begrimed and scratched, nails broken, the pigment of vegetation colouring his palms. And often from the drawing-room window I had seen him dragging from the garden a cart loaded high with the undergrowth he had cut out. I had hardly noticed, I had not been interested; I had passed through the bedraggled garden without respecting its slow recovery.

  “It would be nice to have that time again, Harry, I often think. To go back to the first day we arrived at Cloverhill, waiting in the emptiness for our furniture. We walked about the garden and through the fields. ‘There is a world to do,’ he said, and in my happiness I embraced him because I knew he loved to do things. It would be nice to experience again the afternoon you first came here, when Daphie said to me, ‘There is a visitor.’ How shy you were, Harry! You hardly said a thing.”

  Our progress had slowed down. She took my arm to lean on. We crossed the gravel sweep and went around the side of the house, finally reaching the lawn on to which the drawing-room French windows opened.

  “That may be what heaven is, Harry: dreaming through times that have been. Tea in the drawing-room, and how you listened to my silly life!”

  We stepped through the French windows, but she did not move towards the sofa. Instead she held her cheek out for me to kiss, and said when I had done so:

  “If heaven is there, Harry.”

  I was alone then in the room, and some intuition insisted that I had been with her for the last time, and for the last time had heard her voice. And yet as soon as these thoughts occurred I denied them, for how on earth could I know anything of the kind?

  As I made my way down the avenue, Herr Messinger called to me from a field, where he was forking hay with one of his men. I clambered over the white-painted iron railing and crossed to where they worked. He came to meet me as I approached.

  “Are you finished now at school, Harry?”

  “Yes, I am finished now.”

  “Well, that is good. You will work for me when the cinema is ready, heh? A fortnight, Harry” “Yes, I will work for you.”

  “It has taken so long. How often I lost heart!”

  I tried to say I was glad he hadn’t, because I knew that without his energy and his determination the cinema would still be only half-built. I stumbled in my speech, finding the sentiments difficult to express.

  “Ah, well, Harry.” He shook his head and turned away. She had been given a cinema because in such circumstances the giving of a gift had to be as great. And naturally he had wanted it to be swiftly completed. “Herr Messinger,” I called after him, which was something I would have been too shy to do in the past. “Herr Messinger, would you like me to assist you with the hay?”

  He nodded very slightly, not turning to face me, and so I remained, working in silence beside him and his employee. When twilight came, and darkened, we did not cease because there was mown hay still lying. At home they would wonder where I was, and would be angry. All unusual behaviour made them angry. But as the moon rose and we piled up the last of the haycocks I didn’t care about any of that.

  “Come back to the house, Harry,” Herr Messinger said when he had finished. “You are surely hungry.”

  So I accompanied him on the avenue and around to the back of the house, across a yard I had never seen before, and into the kitchen. He lit a lamp because there was no electricity at Cloverhill. He placed it in the centre of the scrubbed wooden table.

  “She’ll have gone to bed,” he said. “We’re on our own, Harry.”

  His workman had ridden off on a bicycle, and I thought it honourable the way Herr Messinger had thanked him so genuinely for working on a Sunday and had said there would be something extra in his wages. In the kitchen he said it was Daphie’s evening off. There was a potato salad already prepared, he said, and cold meats with lettuce and tomatoes. He hoped that would be sufficient for us. And wine, he remembered, not very good wine, but he had a little in the larder. “The chromium for the foyer is to arrive tomorrow,” Herr Messinger said. “And all the seating at the end of the week.”

  We ate cold chicken and pork, and the salad. The wine was the colour of very pale straw, the first wine I had ever tasted; I thought it delicious. “Ever since I knew her, Harry,” Herr Messinger suddenly said.

  His square, hard face was solemn, though there were still crinkles of what I’d always taken to be amusement around his eyes. She would be asleep already, he said; she could not manage food in the evenings. He took tiny amounts on his fork, lifting the fork slowly to his mouth and then replacing it for a moment on his plate, sipping his wine.

  “An old man marries for the time that is left, Harry. Both of us seemed not to have much time. Well, there you are.”

  I was not hungry; I did not any longer want the pale-straw wine. But he, of course, was used to things being as they were, and ate and drank as usual. I had no knowledge of death; I had never experienced its sorrow or its untimely shock. “Well, that was sudden,” my father would say before sitting down in the dining-room, and then reveal the name of a person who had died. “God’s mercy, the Reverend Wauchope’s scratchy voice would plead in the prayers to do with losses in the war. Shops closed their doors when a faneral crept by, the blinds of windows drawn down to honour the flower-laden coffin, the hooves of black-plumed horses the only sound.

  Herr Messinger lit one of his small cigars. In silence he made coffee. I lifted from the table the plates off which we had eaten and placed them on the draining-board by the sink. I ran the tap but he said that Daphie would attend to all that when she returned. He spoke again of his wife.

  “She will see the cinema open its doors. I know that in my heart and she in hers. She will taste the promise of its nights of pleasure. It worried her that we would only come and go at Cloverhill.”

  He handed me my coffee, and pushed the sugar nearer. I saw the tears on her cheeks in the moment when she realised she must not marry the young man who had taken her to the poppy field. Had that broken her heart? I wondered.

  “You must not worry yourself, Harry.”

  “I’m only sorry.”

  “The last months would have been empty if there had not been the building. Emptiness is the enemy.”

  Soon after that I left. The night was warm, the moon a clear disc, untroubled by clouds. I had never before seen Cloverhill at night, and when I stopped to look back at the house I did not want to turn my gaze away. A pale sheen lightened the familiar grey facade and, in a way that seemed almost artificial, related trees and stone. Blankly, the dark windows returned my stare, a sightless pattern, elegant in the gloom. Did she suffer pain? I wondered.

  “Where d’you get to, boy?” my father enquired, calling out to me from the dining-room. “What time of the night is this to be coming in?”

  I stood in the doorway. I could hear my mother rattling dishes in the kitchen, and a moment later she entered the dining-room with a tray of cups and saucers for the breakfast. My father was slouched in one of the old rexine-covered chairs by the fire-place
, his slippered feet resting on the grate. Newspaper and kindling would remain unlit in the grate until October, when this positioning of my father’s feet would not be possible. Sometimes he forgot and scorched his slippers.

  “Your mother’s beside herself, boy. Were you drinking or what?”

  “Frau Messinger’s dying,” I said, but neither of them responded. My food had been ready at halfpast six, my mother said; every day, Sundays included, that was the time. She wasn’t a maid in her own house, she said; she wasn’t a servant. “Half-six,” my father repeated. “If you want your grub half-six is the hour, boy.”

  My mother took the saucers singly from the pile on her tray, and placed on each an inverted cup. She took cork mats from a drawer in the sideboard and laid the table with knives and forks and side plates. She didn’t say anything, but listened while my father repeated what had been established already. He informed me that a meal had been fried for me and had sat in the oven until it was burnt. A waste of food that had already been paid for, he said, and hadn’t my mother more to do than pander to the comings and goings of a youth? He reminded me it was a Sunday, the day of the week when my mother might be given an easy time. With painful deliberation he pressed open a packet of ten Sweet Afton and withdrew a cigarette, appearing to select one. “Where were you drinking?” he said.

  “I wasn’t drinking.”

  “You have drink taken, boy. You brought a smell of it into the house.”

  “I had a glass of wine.”

  My father scraped a match along the sandpaper of a matchbox. He examined the flame before raising it to his cigarette.

  “Wine?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were out with those people,” my mother said.

  “Where’re you going now for yourself?” my father demanded, noticing that I had made a move.

  “Up to bed.”

  “Will you listen to that! As cool as water and the whole house after being in a turmoil!”

  “You gave me a promise you wouldn’t go out there.” My mother had suddenly become still. With a fork in her hand, her eyes hotly probed mine.

  “I didn’t promise anything,” I said.

  I could see her deciding to cross the room to hit me, then deciding against it. My father said I’d had a good education, that money he couldn’t spare had been spent on me. That food was taken out of the oven at twenty past eight,” he said. “There isn’t a dog in the town would have thanked you for it.”

  “You promised me that day.” My mother did not take her eyes off me; I thought she hated me because I could feel something like hatred coming across the room from her.

  “I nearly went down to the Guards,” my father said. My grandmothers couldn’t touch their fried eggs, so that was more food wasted. It was the worst evening of my grandmothers’ lives.

  “There was an understanding between us.” She would stand there for ever, I thought, looking at me like that, as still as stone while my father tediously gabbled.

  Keep off the drink, boy,” he commanded, having issued other orders, as well as warnings and advice. “You’re too young for that game.”

  “I’m going to work in the picture house.”

  The vituperation I had anticipated burst simultaneously out of them, scornful and immediate. Their faces reddened. My father pushed himself on to his feet.

  “I don’t like it in the timberyard,” I said.

  “What don’t you like, boy?”

  “I don’t like any of it.”

  “You’re a young pup. Haven’t you caused enough damage for one day? Go up and knock on your grandmothers’ doors and tell them you’re safe and sound. The other stuff you’re talking about is rubbish.”

  I went away, glad to be allowed to do so. Obediently I knocked on my grandmothers’ doors, but there was no response from either of them, as I had known there wouldn’t be. In my own room I sat on the edge of my bed and within a few moments I felt tears on my cheeks. In the diningroom they would be deploring my defiance, saying they could not control me, that I had always been like that, a bad example to my brothers. There had been pain in my father’s eyes, and in the bluster of his voice when he’d called me a young pup, but I didn’t care; I didn’t care in the least how much I hurt them. It was like a nightmare, that she was going to die.

  * * *

  * * *

  FIVE

  Slowly, carefully, she passed upstairs to the balcony, holding on to her husband’s arm. And when Rebecca came to an end they left the cinema in the same unhurried manner. There was, I realise now, nothing she might have said to me, and I could tell from her expression that she found it difficult to smile. “Please wait,” Herr Messinger had requested when he’d set out my duties for that evening. He returned some time later, and together we locked up his property. “One day I shall place you in charge of the Alexandra,” he said. He paused, and added: “That is her wish, and my own too.”

  I would have carried the wireless battery out to Cloverhill as I had before, but that was not suggested. At a quarter past ten every night Herr Messinger arrived in his gas-powered motor-car and stood on the marble steps, ready to say goodnight to his customers when the film ended. I be lieve, although I cannot be certain, that she asked him to. When everyone had gone I would give him the cash-box and he would drive away again.

  Three times a week I fetched the films in their metal cases from the railway station and returned those that had been shown, the smaller cases con taining the newsreels and the shorts, another episode of Flaming Frontiers or The Torture ( '.ham ber of Doctor R. Every evening, and during the Sunday matinee, I sat in the projection room with the old man who had been the projectionist in some other town, whom Herr Messinger had brought back into employment. When the old man’s stomach gave him trouble and he wasn’t able to come in I took his place, as soon as there was no further custom at the box-office.

  “For the sake of your mother,” my father pleaded, “wouldn’t you have a bit of sense for yourself?”

  He meant wouldn’t I stop doing what I was content to do and return to the drabness of the timberyard. I was becoming a queer type of a fellow, he told me, which wasn’t a good thing for a mother to have to see. “Come into Viney’s one day and we’ll have a bottle of stout over it,” he invited, forgetting his advice to me with regard to drinking in public houses.

  Politely, I thanked him and said I’d look into Viney’s when I had a moment to spare, not intending to and in fact never doing so. On the balcony stairs there were framed photographs of William Powell and Myrna Loy, of Loretta Young and Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer, of Franchot Tone and Lew Ayres. I could see some of them from the box-office and used to watch people stopping to examine them, couples arm in arm, the girls’ voices full of wonder. In the mornings I opened the exit doors at the back, on either side of the screen, in order to let the fresh air in for an hour or two. When the woman who swept the place out didn’t arrive I did it myself; I mopped the foyer and the steps, and went over the carpets with the suction cleaner. Often in the mornings I would press the switch that caused the yellow and green curtains that obscured the screen to open, the butterflies of the pattern disappearing as the curtains moved. When the daylight came in through the exit doors the amber shading of the walls seemed different.

  People loved the Alexandra. They loved the things I loved myself—the scarlet seats, the lights that made the curtains change colour, the usherettes in uniform. People stood smoking in the foyer when they’d bought their tickets, not in a hurry because smoking and talking gave them pleasure also. They loved the luxury of the Alexandra, they loved the place it was. Urney bars tasted better in its rosy gloom; embraces were romantic there. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers shared their sophisticated dreams, Deanna Durbin sang. Heroes fell from horses, the sagas of great families yielded the riches of their secrets. Night after night in the Alexandra I stood at the back, aware of the pleasure I dealt in, feeling it all around me. Shoulders slumped, heads touched, eyes w
ere lost in concentration. My brothers did not snigger in the Alexandra; my father, had he ever gone there, would have at last been silenced. Often I imagined the tetchiness of the Reverend Wauchope softening beneath a weight of wonder, and the sour disposition of his wife lifted from her as she watched All This and Heaven Too. Often I imagined the complicated shame fading from the features of Mr. Conron. “I have told her you are happy,” Herr Messinger said.

  Annie began to come to the cinema with young Phelan from Phelan’s grocery, in whose presence she was less sullen. She showed him off, one eye on me in the box-office, pausing on the balcony stairs and calling out loudly to people she knew. She had begun to wear different shades of lipstick, and had her hair done in a different way. For all my good fortune in being sent away to school, and my escape from the timberyard, she would outdo me in the end. She was outdoing me already, her manner implied, standing close to young Phelan.

  A month before the war ended the death took place at Cloverhill House. Herr Messinger did not mention it but I knew it had occurred because he arrived at the cinema in mourning, and two days later there was the funeral, her body taken to our Protestant graveyard. He made arrangements about the sale of his land and the running of the cinema, placing certain matters in the hands of McDonagh and Effingham, the solicitors, others in the care of the Munster and Leinster Bank. It was not clear then that one day I would become the cinema’s proprietor, that arrangements had been made in this respect also. “I’d say you landed on your feet,” my father grudgingly remarked when the big attendances the cinema had begun to attract showed no sign of abating, but my mother never forgave me for rejecting my heritage in favour of selling tickets, and for ignoring her wishes. When my mother lay dying in 1961 she referred again to Frau Messinger as a wanton and a strumpet, whose grave she knew I tended, growing anemones on the humped earth.