Nights at the Alexandra

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.

“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.