Nights at the Alexandra

smiled. Houriskey acquired jokes from an odd-job man on his father’s farm and conveyed a stock of them to the school with each new term. They had to do with honeymoon couples, mislaid clothing, and intimacies concerning the odd-job man’s wife. Raucous laughter emanated from Mahoney-Byron as each anecdote reached its conclusion, but Mandeville always only smiled.

“What’s your man Messinger like?” Mahoney-Byron asked. “Is he a spy?”

I described Herr Messinger. I said I doubted that he was a spy. Mahoney-Byron, who kept photographs of Hitler and Himmler between the pages of his Hall’s Geometry, looked disappointed. “Mr. Churchill’s stupidity,” Mahoney-Byron liked to drawl in the mocking accents of Lord Haw-Haw, “has led his island people to the brink of final destruction. There will not be a city street intact unless this addled old man ceases to feed falsehoods to a weary population.”

The rectory was situated beside the grammar school itself—two unadorned brick buildings in the middle of Lisscoe, which was a town more than twice the size of the one I knew so well but offering a similar provincial ambience. The lower panes of all the ground-floor windows of the school were painted white; in the rectory a smell of damp hung about the bare-board passages and the dining-room. On moist days this dampness penetrated to our bedroom, which was mostly occupied by our four beds and the pitchpine cupboard we kept our clothes in. “We will pray to God,” the elderly Reverend Wauchope had said the first time he led us into this room—an insistence we were to become familiar with, the words demanding that, irrespective of whatever activity was taking place, those involved in it should fall at once to their knees. In her grimy basement kitchen the clergyman’s wife vented a sour disposition on the food she cooked, assisted by a maid called Lottie Belle, whose inordinate stoutness contrasted dramatically with the spare frame of Mr. Conron, the assistant master at the grammar school, who lodged at the rectory also. Mr. Con-ron’s wasted features were twisted in what appeared to be torment; his eyes were shifty.

While I talked about the Messingers in these surroundings and among these people, I sometimes felt I was relating a dream. The open French windows, the bumblebee and the scent of flowers, Herr Messinger astride his farm horse: all of it seemed so remote as to be outside the realms of existence. And why had they taken to me, awkward youth that I was? “It’s good you come, Harry,” Herr Messinger had said. “A visitor is nice for her.” Did she miss me, I wondered, as I missed her? Did she remember me when she connected the wires to the battery?

“Did you never think of winking at the woman?” Houriskey suggested. “You could be sitting there and give a wink that could be an accident.”

“I don’t think she’d like being winked at.”

“God, you bugger!”

The four of us walked slowly around a field where cattle grazed, behind the red-brick rectory. When he’d said Grace in the dining-room that evening the Reverend Wauchope had kept us on our feet to announce the number of RAF planes that had returned from a bombing mission. He always did this when the news was good, permitting us to eat immediately when it was not. “We will pray to God,” he had commanded, and while the grease congealed on the surface of his wife’s mutton soup we sank to our knees, our arms clasped around the backs of our chairs in the manner ordained for dining-room gratitude to the Almighty. Mahoney-Byron’s plea for similar Luftwaffe success was kept low.

“Sure, why wouldn’t he be a spy?” he persisted in the field, reminding me of my father’s refusal to accept that the Messingers were not Jews. It was unlikely that a spy would be married to an Englishwoman, I said, but Mahoney-Byron told me to look for morse-code equipment in a barn, maybe hidden under a load of hay. “There’s a man in Dublin,” he went on, “with his house built in the shape of a swastika so’s a Messerschmidt pilot would know where he was. Have a look in case your man has trees planted in the shape of a swastika. Or fences. Have a gander at the fences.”

We began our second circuit of the field. I could not see how spying might be engaged in from Cloverhill House but I did not say so; nor did I reveal that Herr Messinger had three sons in the Nazi army—for which the war at that time appeared to be going well. Norway and Denmark had capitulated. Holland, Belgium and France had fallen. The Messerschmidts Mahoney-Byron spoke of were clearly inflicting greater damage than radio commentators other than the notorious Lord Haw-Haw admitted: listeners at a distance made allowances for the fear that kept the truth obscure.

“I had a dream last night,” Mandeville murmured, removing his wire-rimmed spectacles and wiping them on the cuff of his jacket. His expression indicated that Cloverhill House and the Messingers were deemed exhausted as a conversational topic, at least for the time being. He coughed softly, which was a way of his. “I was in a room with the King when she came in with a book in her hand. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ he says, only she’s shy because of myself. But afterwards she comes up to me and says it’s a poetry book. There’s nothing she likes better than poetry.”

“Write her a letter,” Houriskey urged. “She’d like to hear you were dreaming about her.”

“The day will come when I’ll be telling her about this place, how I was thinking about her every hour that went by.”

“She’d be interested all right.”

As well as Mandeville’s belief that he would find employment in Buckingham Palace, other vocational ambitions were aired from time to time. Houriskey’s desire was to emigrate to the northern Canadian fishing grounds, a region for which he had developed an affection that puzzled us. Mahoney-Byron wished to pursue a talent he had for throwing his voice, investing inanimate objects, or creatures not normally so gifted, with speech. He believed he would find employment with Duffy’s circus, and had contrived an act in which a number of giraffes engaged one another in conversation. As for myself, all I wanted was not to have to work in the timberyard. I would have readily agreed to become a schoolmaster like Mr. Conron, or a post-office clerk or a meal-office clerk. But the timberyard and my father’s ubiquitous presence in it, the endless whine of the saws, mud pitched up from the wheels of lorries, the rattle of rain on corrugated iron, the bitter odour of resin: that prospect appalled me, and I knew that what would accompany it within myself was the sullenness that had developed in my sister. “Forty-one years I’ve been at it,” my father used to say, appropriately altering the reference as another year passed. He had worked in the yard as a child of ten; his own father had run around the town barefoot, the only Protestant child for twenty-nine miles so ill-clad. I dreaded the day when the hall-door would close behind both of us, when we would walk the few yards together to the timberyard, my sister Annie arriving later because the accounts shed didn’t open until nine. Larchwood, beech, ash, oak dressed or left in its sawn condition, mahogany in short supply because of the Emergency: this would replace the dank corridors of the rectory and the white-painted classroom windows. At one o’clock I would return over the same few yards with my father and my sister, and my father would hold forth while we ate boiled bacon or chops. My grandmothers would ask him to repeat what all of us had already heard only too well; my brothers would snigger. There’d be semolina with a spoonful of blackberry jam, stewed rhubarb in season; there’d be Jacob’s Cream Crackers with butter and Galtee cheese if my father was still hungry. That Jacob’s invented the cream cracker was one of my father’s greatly favoured mealtime statements.

“I have my little dotey with me here.” Man-deville produced from the back pocket of his trousers a grubby newspaper photograph of the princess. “Is there a lovelier creature alive?”

We agreed that there wasn’t and continued our walk in silence, each of us lost in fantasy. I might become a servant at Cloverhill House; I might keep the flower-beds tidy and the grass cut on the lawns; I might work in the fields with Herr Messinger. I wouldn’t mind sitting in the kitchen with the young maid, taking my meals with her, and doing whatever they wanted me to do, growing anemones or lighting the fires every morning.

It snowed, surprisingly, in the autumn of that year. We stood around a coke stove in the hall of the rectory, endeavouring to keep warm, while in his homilies the Reverend Wauchope reminded us that thousands of British soldiers were sheltering under canvas, in temperatures far lower than those we were experiencing. The snow covered the huge hollow in front of the school where the town’s dust carts dumped their cinders, the intention being that one day the level would reach that of the surrounding ground and allow for the laying out of a hockey pitch. Unfortunately the dust lorries occasionally committed the error of depositing a load of garbage, which was an attraction for rats and seagulls. At least the snow held in check the foetid odour of decay that normally drifted into the classrooms.

I imagined Frau Messinger suffering from the cold also, a rug drawn over her knees on the sofa in the drawing-room, the fingers that grasped her magazine so numb that she had to rub the life back into them. “Daphie is good at fires,” she had said, but I guessed that in the big draughty rooms it would be chilly, no matter how vigorously the fires blazed. I imagined her husband in the frost-whitened landscape, felling trees and sawing them into logs. He and one of his men would go about the task in silence, skilfully working the cross-saw. Daphie would appear with a can of tea.

“Whatever’s this stupid nonsense?” the Reverend Wauchope tetchily demanded one evening, sending for me specially. “You’re making yourself important, are you, with reports of German spies? That amounts to falsehood, you know.”

A rumour had got going in the grammar school, I endeavoured to explain. It was without foundation; it was simply that a German had come to live near the town I came from.

“Rumours are grapeshot for the enemy. We will pray to God.” I didn’t listen to his voice, but imagined instead how astonished the Messingers would be if they could see us. She would laugh her tinkling laugh, her head thrown slightly back. He would shrug his shoulders in his expressive way.

“Stand up, man, stand up.” Renewed crossness interrupted my reflections, for I had remained on my knees longer than I should have. “Your stupidity is a mockery of the human race. Go from my sight, boy.”

Castigated on one score by the Reverend Wau-chope, I was approached on another by the assistant master. He sought me out when I was alone in a classroom, spoke first of the cold weather, made enquiries about my family, then said: “There’s talk of a certain nature that goes on between yourself and your friends.”

“What kind of talk’s that, Mr. Conron?”

“You know what I’m referring to. Involving women.”

I shook my head, instantly denying this.

“Mr. Wauchope would not discuss things of that nature with you on account of he’s a clergyman. So it falls to myself.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Mandeville carries a photograph of a woman around with him. There’s a certain type of story Houriskey tells. There’s stories you’ve made up yourself apparently.”

“Which stories are those, Mr. Conron?”

He turned his tormented eyes away from me. In one of his trouser pockets he snapped a piece of chalk in half. His fingers emerged with one portion lightly held. He looked at it. Still doing so, he said:

“You have a pretence that you go to a house where there’s a woman.”

“A pretence, Mr. Conron?”

“Something you’d make up in your mind, the same as Mandeville with the photograph in his pocket. When you’d talk about a matter like that it would acquire a reality for you.”

I might have explained that, in fact, the opposite had occurred, but I did not do so. The assistant master said something I didn’t hear and then referred to carnal temptation, enquiring as to my familiarity with it. “Bad thoughts are at the root of carnal temptation. Things you’d pretend about.”

“I understand, sir.”

“It’s best to avoid talk that would lead the way to it.”

“I’ll take your advice, sir.”

Mr. Conron regarded a stain on the boarded floor. In a voice so low that, again, I could hardly hear it he said:

“Did you ever pretend anything about Mrs. Wauchope?”

I imagined, when I repeated this, Houriskey’s and Mahoney-Byron’s raucous laughter, and the intensity developing in Mandeville’s expression. I shook my head. I had never pretended anything about Mrs. Wauchope, I said; nor, since I was asked this too, about the maid, Lottie Belle.

The eyes closed, in relief or otherwise I had no way of knowing. “Avoid anything like that,” Mr. Conron advised, and I felt ashamed that I had ever spoken of Frau Messinger in the rectory or the school.

“Well, I’ll tell you a queer thing,” my father said when I returned home at the end of that term. “You’ll never guess what I’m going to tell you.”

Ponderous head-wagging took place. I said I couldn’t guess.

“There’s talk of a picture house for the town. Did you ever hear the beat of that?”

I said I never had. There was money in a picture house, my father went on. Maguire the auctioneer had been going to build one nine years ago only he dropped dead. In the length and breadth of Ireland there wasn’t a town of the same population that didn’t possess a picture house. Didn’t it take a cute old Hun to put his finger on the shame of it?

“D’you mean he’s going to build it?”

“Sure, we’re a disgrace to the world,” my father said.

On Christmas Eve the town was crowded with people who had come in from the country, people you did not usually see on the streets. An old man in rags was playing an accordion, tinker women begged. Public houses were noisy, and as I walked down Laffan Street on my way to the Ballinadee road there was an air all around me of expectation and excitement. Soft misty rain had begun to fall; my clothes were wringing wet by the time I reached Cloverhill House.

“Stand by the fire,” Frau Messinger urged in the drawing-room. “Oh, Harry, you are foolish! You could catch your death!”

Her husband, wearing riding breeches and gaiters, was crouched on the floor, poring over a mass of papers he had spread out on the fleur-de-lis pattern of the carpet. He was smoking a thin, black cigar and when he greeted me he confirmed what my father had said: he intended to build a cinema. The papers were the plans for its construction. It was a marriage gift for his wife, he said. She had asked for it specially.

“But, Harry, that site they offer me is not good. Too near the slum part of the town.”

Frau Messinger said hardly anything; she never did in her husband’s presence. Instead she smiled with pleasure, delighting in his enthusiasm over the drawings on the carpet. His legs were tucked under him, a stubby finger indicated features of the proposed architecture. In the auditorium the seats would be tiered and there would be a balcony; most important of all, apparently, there would be Western Electric sound.

“On the curtains the pattern will be of butterflies, Harry.”

I did not know much about cinemas. Twice during my years at Lisscoe grammar school the Reverend Wauchope had granted permission for his boarders to attend Hussey’s Picture House under the supervision of Mr. Conron. We had sat enthralled, watching W. C. Fields and Edna May Oliver, and Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty. There’d been no balcony and no curtains such as Herr Messinger described; in the fourpenny seats gangs of ragged urchins had ceaselessly talked and whistled.

“This is where we’ve chosen instead, Harry.” The cinema was to be where the two derelict houses stood in the square. It would transform the square, Herr Messinger promised, with baskets of plants hanging at intervals along the facade. The Alexandra announced towering letters on a sketch. “Well, Harry, what do you think?”

“It’s grand.”

“The idea is it should be grand. The box-office like so, stairs whichever side you prefer to mount to the balcony. Two usherettes.”

“Usherettes?”

“We have planned the dress: blue with gold on it, epaulettes to the shoulder.”

He showed me a sketch of a girl in such a uniform, then showed me other details: the mechanism that allowed the seats to fold back when they were not in use, the lighting arrangement that caused the butterfly curtains to change colour, the removable ashtrays. When we had perused all that, he gathered the plans and the sketches into a roll and secured them with a rubber band.

“The town will be the better,” Frau Messinger murmured, so softly that the remark was almost lost. People would delight in the cinema, she went on, her tone becoming a little louder. It would be a centre of life, as a church was. From miles around people would ride in on their bicycles for a few hours of relaxation; they would come in traps and jaunting-cars, and when the Emergency was over they would come in motorcars.

“And, Harry, there is employment for you,”

Herr Messinger interrupted. “When you have finished at that school of yours.”

I looked astonished. He laughed.

“Why not, heh? Would you object to work for me? You choose instead to spend your lifetime with planks of wood? You have a brother, Harry?” When I replied that I had two he nodded and went on doing so, one eye invisible behind the drooping lid. Since I had two brothers, he pointed out, there was a double reason why I should not be required in my father’s business.

“I would place you in the box-office, Harry, to sell the tickets. Later on maybe to oversee the cleaning. To pay the wages of the usherettes. Soon you would learn, Harry. Soon we would learn together.”

My mother would consider that selling tickets in a cinema was inferior to taking my place in the timberyard. My mother’s tongue became sharp in anger: having suffered pain and inconvenience bringing four children into the world she demanded sensibleness in return. My father would be bewildered and confused, as he was by any deviation from his own assumptions. “Errah, get on with you, girl,” he’d said when Annie had wanted to go to Dublin to sell dresses in Arnott’s or Switzer’s. Wasn’t she the luckiest girl in the town to have a decent position waiting for her in the accounts shed, with old Miss McLure ready to retire? My mother had been more forceful: she’d given Annie what she called “a dressing down,” pointing out that shop-work was on a par with being a skivvy, that the rest of the family would not be able to hold their heads above the disgrace of it. For days there’d been the sound of Annie’s weeping and her blotched face at mealtimes. And, ever since, the sullenness had been part of her.

“So we are arranged,” Herr Messinger said, with confidence. “Always, since we married, I have dreamed to make a gift like this. Imagine it, Harry, she married an old tortoise like me!” He laughed and kissed her. She clung to him for a moment, whispering something I could not hear. They laughed together; he lit another cigar. He said:

“She wants it to be nice for everyone. I want it to be nice for her. That is how a gift must be.” He went away with his roll of plans, and after a moment his wife offered me a cigarette. I leaned forward so that the flame of her circular cigarette-lighter might catch the tip of it. The brief touch of her fingers was as cold as marble. She said:

“I could not give him children.” Her smile continued to indulge him after he had left the room. Her own name was Alexandra, which was something I had not known before: even though she had failed him, he was offering her a gift which was to be created as she wished, to bring pleasure to strangers. All he asked was that, it seemed: the fulfilment of a whim in her.

“We can live without anything but love, Harry. Always remember that.”

Daphie brought in the tea, and it was poured. I was made to continue standing by the fire, although my clothes were dry by now and in any case would become damp again on my journey home. All the time, while she talked once more about her past, I thought about the offer that had been made to me. I could feel the cosy claustrophobia of the tiny office of the plans, the window in the glass, hands offering money. For the first time—I think the only time—I hardly listened to the childhood incidents related to me, to the speculations about her unknown father’s appearance, the journeying through England and through Germany, and Bach mellifluous on the organ in that candlelit cathedral. There would be green tickets, and red and grey, and I would tear them off singly or in twos and threes; I would dole out pleasure to patrons of all ages.

Before I left that day she asked me to kiss her because it was Christmas Eve. I touched her cheek with my lips, and for a moment she slipped her hand into mine. Christmas would be quiet at Cloverhill, she said: she and her husband would exchange presents, and there were presents for Daphie and the workmen. They would sit together by the fire. “And I have this for you, Harry.”

She gave me a tie-pin, a slender bar of gold. She’d found it years ago, she said, on one of her early-morning strolls about Munster. She’d seen it gleaming on a paving-stone, where someone had lost it the night before. “I used to wonder about that person,” she said, “but I haven’t for a long time now. It’s time I gave this away.”

She showed me how to pin it into my collar, beneath my tie, but on the way home I took it out in case it should again work itself loose. I have never worn it, fearing its loss, but often I take it from my dressing-table drawer and slip it for a moment into my collar before returning it to safety. Of all I have, it is my most treasured possession.