Nights at the Alexandra

TWO

At the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory, in the bedroom I shared with Mandeville and Houris-key and Mahoney-Byron, I journeyed again to Cloverhill, as I do in my memories to this day. At the grammar school my inability to learn what I was required to learn was soothed by possessive daydreams, my failure to make sense of mathematical abstractions lightened. Although later I wished I had not, I described to my companions at the rectory Frau Messinger’s flawless skin and the way she had of smiling when she looked at you, and her jet-black hair. I mentioned her perfectly painted lips. “Holy Jesus!” Mandeville whispered, his voice reverent with envy; Houriskey wanted to know if I ever got a look up her skirts. At Lisscoe grammar school there was a lot of talk like that; all humour was soiled, double meanings were teased out of innocence. When I described the clothes Frau Messinger wore I could see from Mahoney-Byron’s expression that, one by one, he lifted the garments from her body.

“You haven’t a snap of her?” Mandeville asked quietly.

“There are only the wedding photographs in her bedroom.”

“Were you in her bedroom?”

“She showed me one time.”

“Jesus Christ, man!” Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron shouted, perfectly in unison, but Mande-ville’s reaction was more intense and private. Mandeville was an emaciated boy with spectacles, the ravages of a departed acne still evident about his nose and chin. He had wavy fair hair that he brushed back from his forehead, with a central parting. Mandeville was besotted by the younger of the two English princesses, an infatuation that had developed in him the ambition to find employment of some kind in Buckingham Palace. Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron were bigger, heavier boys, the sons of farmers.

“What’d she show you in the bedroom?” Houriskey asked.

“Nothing; only what it was like. She showed me every room in the house one time.”

“Why’d she do that?”

“Because she’s bored, I suppose.”

“God, you bugger!”

It had not occurred to me until that moment that she was bored. “Harry, would you like to see the house?” she had said, then led the way from room to room, pausing longest in the bedroom she shared with her husband. “You can lie in bed, Harry, and listen to the birds.” It was a room in which, apart from a trouser-press and the pillow on which he rested his head, there was little trace of Herr Messinger. Her hairbrushes and her scent bottles were arranged among the silverframed wedding photographs on the dressing-table; her dresses hung in a wardrobe which she opened; a row of her shoes stretched between the two windows, their toes neatly in line; her nightdress, silkily pale-green, lay on the candlewick eiderdown; perfume scented the air.

“If she took you into her bedroom she was on for it,” Houriskey said. He laughed coarsely, at the same time as Mahoney-Byron. Mandeville