Nights at the Alexandra

ONE

I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.

“Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that.”

That is what I hear most often and with the greatest pleasure: Frau Messinger’s voice as precisely recalled as memory allows, each quizzical intonation reflected in a glance or gesture. I must have replied something, Heaven knows what: it never mattered because she rarely listened. The war had upset the Messingers’ lives, she being an Englishwoman and he German. It brought them to Ireland and to Cloverhill—a sanctuary they most certainly would not otherwise have known.

She explained to me that she would not have found life comfortable in Hitler’s Germany; and her own country could hardly be a haven for her husband. They had thought of Switzerland, but Herr Messinger believed that Switzerland would be invaded; and the United States did not tempt them. No one but I, at that time an unprepossessing youth of fifteen, ever used their German titles: in the town where I’d been born they were Mr. and Mrs. Messinger, yet it seemed to me— affectation, I daresay—that in this way we should honour the strangers that they were.

When first I heard of the Messingers I had just returned from the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory, where I lodged in term-time in order to attend Lisscoe grammar school. My father told me about them. He said the man was twice the woman’s age; he imagined they were Jews since they attended no church. A lot of Jews had slipped away from Germany, he ponderously added.

As a matter of principle, I refused to be interested in anything my father related, but a few days later I saw Frau Messinger stepping out of her husband’s motor-car in Laffan Street and guessed at once who she was. The motor-car was powered by propane gas, a complicated apparatus being mounted where part of the luggage compartment had been removed: no one had petrol to spare during what in Ireland we called the “Emergency,” and energy so ingeniously contrived was rare. A group of loiterers had gathered round the motor-car. Frau Messinger paid them no attention.

“Will you carry something for me?” she said to me, and pointed at the wet battery of a wireless-set on the floor by the passenger seat. “Might I ask you to carry it to the garage, and bring the other back?”

It is odd to think that those were the first words I heard her speak. Other boys had previously undertaken this chore: for some particular reason of her own she chose not to drive into Aldritt’s garage and have the used battery replaced there by the one that had been recharged. Vaguely, she referred to that when she returned to the motorcar with her shopping, something about it being less of a nuisance like this. She opened the passenger door and showed me how to wedge the battery to prevent it from toppling over. “I’d really be most awfully lost without the wireless,” she said, giving me a threepenny-piece.

She was an extremely thin, tall woman, her jet-black hair piled high, her eyes blue, her full lips meticulously painted: I had never seen anyone as beautiful, nor heard a voice that made me so deliciously shiver. You looked for a blemish on her hands, on the skin of her neck or her face, I wrote in a notebook I kept later in my life. There wasn’t one. I could have closed my eyes and listened to that husky timbre for ever.

“There is something that hasn’t come in to Kickham’s,” she said. “It’s due on the bus this afternoon. Might I ask you to bring it out to Cloverhill for me?”

I remember that more distinctly than any other moment in my life. She was already in the car when she spoke, and her tone of voice was not one normally employed when making a request. With a gentle imperiousness, she commanded what she wished, and before she drove away she glanced at me once, a smile flittering across her thin features. The street-corner loiterers watched the slow progress of the car until it was out of sight, and then returned to lean again against the corner of Duggan’s public house. I stood where I was, still aware of tremors dancing beneath my skin.

“What kind of a female is she?” my father enquired when he discovered—not from me—that I’d been addressed by Frau Messinger on the street. He was surprised when I told him that in my opinion she was an Englishwoman. He insisted I was mistaken, just as later he refused to accept that the Messingers were not Jews: in times like these, he said, no Englishwoman in her sane mind would marry a Hun, it stood to reason. “Amn’t I right?” he persuaded my mother, and she—not really listening—said he was of course.

We were a Protestant family of the servant class which had come up in the world, my father now the proprietor of the timberyard where he had once been employed. He was a bulky man, inclined to knock things over; he thought of himself as easygoing and wise. My mother’s hands were swollen and red from washing clothes and floors and dishes; her greying fair hair was forever slipping out of its hairpins. My two grandmothers, who lived with us, had not addressed one another since my parents’ wedding-day. My two brothers, younger than I was, were chunkily-built twins, their identities often confused even within the family. My sister Annie—already working in the office of the timberyard—was jealous because I had been sent away to the grammar school at Lisscoe and she had not, and because my brothers would be sent away also. She resented the dullness of the employment she was so often told she was lucky to have. She wanted to work in a shop in Dublin.

Our house was the last building in Laffan Street except for the sheds and concrete stores of the timberyard next door. It was a pale brown house, of painted stucco, without railings to separate it from the pavement and without steps in front of its hall-door. The windows of its three storeys had net curtains as well as heavier curtains and blinds. The narrow, steep stairway that ascended from the hall to the attics was a central vein, supplying access to trim, short landings on the first and second floors. There was an upstairs sitting-room that was never used, the kitchen and the dining-room forming between them the household’s heart. My brothers spread their schoolbooks out on the dining-room table, as Annie and I had once upon a time done also. The kitchen adjoined, with a hatch in the wall for convenience. My grandmothers sat in two armchairs by the dining-room window, watching the people going by on the street; in cold weather they sat on either side of the fire, not looking at one another.

When we were small Annie and I used to share a bedroom, but now we had one each: patterned linoleum on the floor, an iron bedstead, wash-stand and cupboard, just like our parents’ bedroom and our brothers’.

These rooms, the steep stairway and the landings, the square backyard you could see from the bedroom windows, its red outhouse doors and the sloping roof of its turf shed: all that constituted my familiar childhood world, and the town that lay beyond this territory of home reflected it in many ways, though at the time I did not notice this. It was a scrappy, unimportant little town, a handful of shops and public houses in narrow streets, its central square spoilt by two derelict houses and a statue to a local martyr. Bridge Quay and Bridge Lane ran off Laffan Street; Nagle Street was where Reilly’s Cafe and the two better grocers’ shops were, separated by Kickham’s drapery. The Wolfe Tone Dance-hall resembled a repository for agricultural implements—a relentless cement facade halfway up Wolfe Tone Hill, with a metal grille drawn across by day, the week’s band announced on a bill stuck to a nearby telegraph pole. On the outskirts of the town was the Church of Our Lady, and at the end of St. Alnoth Street the slender spindle of the Protestant Church of St. Alnoth was dark against the sky.

I walked through the town on the first of my journeys to Cloverhill, clutching a soft, brown-paper parcel from Kickham’s. I wondered what it contained and tried to feel beneath the string and the overlap of paper, but was not successful. I felt excited, quickening my stride as I passed the abandoned gasworks and the hospital that was being built, branching to the right at the signpost where the road divided. Ballinadee the signpost said, 2 1/2 miles. The road became narrow then, and there were no cottages all the way to the white gates of Cloverhill, which were set in a crescent sweep bounded by a stone wall. An avenue meandered through fields where sheep grazed except where the land had been ploughed. From the moment I passed through the gates I could see the house in the distance, in grey, stern stone against treeless landscape.

Astride a farm horse, a man rode towards me. “You have come with my wife’s ordering,” he said. “You are good to her.” He was a small, square man, too muscular to be described as fat, with short sandy hair and a drooping eyelid. Agreeably, he asked me my name and where I lived. When I told him my father was the proprietor of the timberyard he replied that that was interesting. He himself, he informed me before he passed on, cultivated sugar-beet mainly.

The fields on either side of the avenue became uncared-for lawns, with flower-beds in them. There was a gravel sweep, steps led to a white hall-door. I pulled the bell-chain and heard, a moment later, the tap of the maid’s heels on the flagged floor of the hall. At Cloverhill, I discovered later, the Messingers lived with this single servant, a girl of seventeen or eighteen with attractively protruding teeth, called Daphie. Two farm-workers, one of them her father, came by day. In the Messingers’ marriage no children had been born.

I was led into the drawing-room, where Frau Messinger was sitting on a green-striped sofa, made comfortable with green-striped cushions bunched into the corner behind her. She was smoking a cigarette. As on all future occasions when I visited her in this room, she wore red, this time a scarlet dress of a soft woollen material, with a black silk scarf knotted loosely at her throat. In other ways, also, it was always just the same: I would enter the elegantly furnished drawing-room and be subjected to wide-eyed, frank appraisal, an examination that was accompanied by a smile. She never said much at first. When the tea was brought she poured it and at once lit a fresh cigarette, then leaned back against her cushions, her eyes not leaving my face, her smile still lingering. Sometimes, for an instant before she settled herself, the black lace hem of her petticoat showed. Then she would tidy her skirt about her knees and the lacy hem would not again be seen.

“This is kindness itself,” she said that first time. “Boys are not often kind.”

I deprecated her compliment, but was ignored. A silence fell. She guessed my age, and said that she herself was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. I did not, at the time, find anything odd in that; I did not think of Frau Messinger as a girl, which is how I remember her now, nor of her husband as an old man, which later he appeared to me to be. All that seemed peculiar to me then was that we just drank tea: there was nothing to eat, not even a sandwich or a biscuit.

“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 wondered 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.