Nights at the Alexandra

THREE

In the new year, workmen began the demolition of the two empty houses in the square and my brothers and I watched from a distance. Stones and bricks were carried away in lorries, the silver-painted railings that had rusted in front of the two gardens suddenly weren’t there any more.

“Oh, the Hun boys don’t let the grass grow,” my father said, knocking pepper over a plate of sausages in the dining-room. The timber for the new building was to be supplied from our yard, and for that he was naturally pleased, but he had not yet come to terms with Herr Messinger’s decision to supply a town in which he was a stranger with a cinema. Between moments of attention paid to his sausages, he remarked upon the swift determination with which the German had acted. “And isn’t it a surprising thing, the way he’d have got the money out of Germany?”

“Did he send for it?” my mother enquired, without much interest.

“Errah, how could he, for God’s sake? Isn’t there a war raging over there?”

My mother never seemed offended by such scorn, appearing to accept it as her due, even nodding her agreement with it. But just occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year, her pusillanimity gave way to protest and in the privacy of their bedroom she could be heard spiritedly shouting abuse at my father, calling him uncouth and unclean, bitterly asserting she’d rather share a bed with an animal. His own voice in reply was always so mumbling and low that you couldn’t hear properly what he said; but his tone suggested that he didn’t deny her accusations, perhaps even promised to do better in the future.

“Is it she that has the money, boy? Did the woman ever tell you?”

I shook my head. I said I had obtained no knowledge of the Messingers’ financial arrangements, or the source or distribution of their wealth. I was not telling the truth since I knew

Frau Messinger to have been a poor relation, and her husband to be a member of a well-to-do family. None of that seemed anyone’s business except their own; certainly it was not a titbit to be carried into the back bar of Viney’s hotel.

“There’s money there somewhere,” my father said.

We sat around the dining-room table, all of us eating sausages and fried bread, my grandmothers silently cantankerous with one another, my father airing his views. News he had heard during the day’s business was imparted at this hour, anecdotes repeated, deaths and births announced.

“They were saying in Viney’s,” he reported now, “that there’s marble on order for the front steps. Did you ever meet the beat of that, marble steps for a picture house!”

“Is it the Connemara marble?” my mother enquired.

“What else would it be? What’s the price of Connemara, Annie?”

It was a delusion of my father’s that because she kept the timberyard accounts Annie was conversant with the price of any commodity that had to do with the building trade. “Corrugated, Annie?” he had a way of saying in the diningroom. “What would I give for a three by six?” Further resentment in Annie would fester then, her face becoming even heavier in her resistance to all that was being foisted on her. “Ah, sure, she’s settled in well to the accounts,” I had heard him telling a man on the street one day. “Sure, what more could she want?”

“When they have the picture house built,” one of my brothers asked, “will they charge much to go in there?”

My mother told him not to speak with his mouth full of bread because no one could hear him properly. My father, to whom the same objection might have been put, said:

“I’d say they would. I’d say your man would need a big return on his money. What would he charge, Annie, to make sense of the thing?”

My sister said she had no idea. Briefly, she closed her eyes, endeavouring to dispose of my father and the ability she had ages ago been invested with as regards swift calculation. My father did not pursue the matter. Completing the consumption of another sausage, he turned to me.

“Did you ever find out are they Jews?”

“She’s a Protestant. They were married in a Catholic cathedral.”

“I’d say you had it wrong.”

At that time of my life, harshly judging my father’s opinions and statements, his dress, his clumsiness, his paucity of style, his manner of lighting a cigarette, I found it perhaps more difficult than I might have to forgive him for dismissing the answers I offered to his questions. In retrospect, of course, forgiveness is easier.

“That man’s not rough enough to be a Catholic,” my mother put in.

The squatter of my two grandmothers asked us what we were talking about. In a raised voice my father replied that the man out at Cloverhill was going to build a new picture house for the town. “I’ve nothing against ajew-man,” he said. “He has a head for business.”

“Isn’t Colonel Hardwicke out at Cloverhill?” my grandmother asked. “Running after the maids there?”

“Colonel Hardwicke’s dead,” my father shouted, and my other grandmother nodded disdainfully. “Dead as a doornail,” said my father.

My mother cut more bread. She poured tea into my father’s cup. “There’s a picture they’re after making in America that’s four hours long,” he said. “Did you hear about that one, Annie?”

“Gone with the Wind. ”

“What’s that, girl?”

“The name of the film is Gone with the Wind." “It was young Gerrity was telling me when he came into the yard. I’d say it was called something else.”

“ Gone with the Wind is the only picture that’s as long as that. It’s coming to the Savoy in Dublin. There’s people going up to see it.”

“Cripes!” one of my brothers exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t it be great to be in the pictures for four hours!”

Sharply, my mother told him not to say “Cripes” in the dining-room. She reminded him that she’d given a warning in this respect before. My brothers were getting rougher with every day that went by, she said, glaring at both of them.

“Mr. Wauchope’ll knock it out of them.” My father confidently wagged his head, at the same time turning it in my direction. He winked at me. “What’s that big stick you were telling me about, that Mr. Wauchope has in a cupboard?”

I looked at him dumbly, extreme denseness in my eyes. “What stick’s that?”

“Hasn’t he a blackthorn for beating the living daylights out of any young fellow who’d misbehave himself?” He released a guffaw, winking at me a second time.

“He has a rod for closing the windows with. You can’t reach the top part of the windows,” I explained to my brothers, “so old Wauchope has to hook the end of a rod into them.”

“Is it Mr. Conron I’m thinking of in that case?” my father persevered, his hand held up to disguise further winking from my brothers. One of my grandmothers asked him what the matter was, but he didn’t answer her. “Is it Mr. Conron that lays into you with the blackthorn?”

“Conron wouldn’t have the strength to hit anyone.” I paused, leisurely dividing a piece of fried bread into triangular segments. I imagined myself in the box-office, telling people who asked me that Gone with the Wind wouldn’t end till one o’clock in the morning. “Conron’s a type of loony,” I told my brothers.

My father was taken aback. The grin that had been twitching about his lips gradually evaporated. Before I’d been sent to lodge in the rectory he used to read from a letter he’d received from the Reverend Wauchope which itemised the attractions of the boarding arrangements for Lisscoe grammar school. Around this same dining-table we had listened to elaborate inaccuracies about well-heated rooms and plentiful supplies of fresh vegetables from the rectory’s own garden. The assistant master lodged at the rectory also, the letter said, so that discipline was maintained.

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life,” my father muttered crossly.

“A boy from Enniscorthy says Conron was in the loony place they have there. He used to roll a hoop along the road. He thought he was Galloping O’Hogan.”

“That’s eejity talk, boy Don’t take any notice of it,” my father sternly advised my brothers.

“I’m only saying what I was told,” I said. “You’d be sorry for poor Conron.”

“What’s the trouble?” one of my grandmothers demanded, and I began to repeat all over again what I’d just told my brothers, but my father interrupted me and shouted at my grandmother not to waste her energy listening. “No man could teach in a classroom if he was a lunatic. We’ve heard enough of it.” he said to me. “Annie, did the pine come in?”

There was a film Houriskey had seen in which the main actor was employed in the box-office of a theatre when all the time he wanted to be on the stage. To make matters worse, he fell in love with an actress who passed by the box-office every night. That was the kind of thing you’d have to be careful about. You could become so familiar with a film actress on the screen that before you knew where you were you’d be in love with her, suffering like the actor, or poor Mandeville over the royal princess.

“What’s this?” my mother demanded, two days after my slandering of the assistant master. She held in the palm of her hand Frau Messinger’s Christmas present. I had hidden it under the drawer-paper in my bedroom.

“It’s a tie-pin. You put it in your collar.” “Where d’you get it?”

“I found it on the street.”

“That’s a lie.”

“I found it outside Kickham’s on Christmas Eve.”

“That isn’t true.”

Tears pressed against my eyelids. I didn’t know why they had come so suddenly, or why so urgently they demanded to be released. I realise now they were tears of anger.

“Why are you telling me lies?”

“They’re not lies. Someone dropped the thing on the street.”

“Don’t tell me lies on a Sunday, Harry. Did you steal it? Did you take it off someone at school?”

“I’m telling you I didn’t.”

She stood there in her Sunday clothes, two patches of scarlet spreading on her cheeks, the way they always did when she was cross. I had entered the bedroom I’d once shared with Annie and now had for myself. She’d been there, with the drawer still open. What right had she to go looking in my drawers?

“Frau Messinger gave it to me at Christmas.” “Mrs. Messinger:

“Out at Cloverhill—”

“I know where the woman lives. Are you telling me the truth now?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she give you a Christmas present for?” “She just gave it to me.”

“She gives you cigarettes too. You come back smelling of cigarettes.”

“I smoke the odd one.”

“If your father heard this he’d take the belt to you.”

I did not reply, and it was my mother who wept, not I. In her navy-blue, Sunday clothes she soundlessly wept and I watched the tears come from her eyes and run into the powder of the face she had prepared for going to church. Like Annie and like myself, she was tired of this house, of the two deaf old women who would not civilly address one another, of my father’s lugubrious conversation, and my brothers’ sniggering. I know that now, but at the time I had no pity for my mother’s tears, and no compassion for her trapped existence. I wanted to hurt her because a secret I valued had been dirtied by her probing.

“You will give it back,” she commanded, her voice controlled, her tears wiped away with the tips of her fingers. “You will give it back to the woman.”

“Why would I?”

“Because I’m telling you to. Because I’m ashamed of you, Harry, as you should be yourself.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“A woman that’s not related to a young boy doesn’t give him a present. I’m ashamed you would have taken it.”

“There’s no harm in a tie-pin.”

My mother hit me. She slapped me across the face, the way she used to when I was younger than my brothers. A sting of pain lingered on the side of my cheek; my whole face tingled hotly.

“You’ll give that back to her.”

I blinked, determined not to cry, looking away from her. The tie-pin was a present, I repeated. You couldn’t give back a present.

“You’ll give it back and you’ll have done with going out to that house.” My mother went on talking, fast and angrily, calling Frau Messinger a wanton and a strumpet. “Oh, a great time she has for herself, with young boys coming out to visit her. Amn’t I the queer fool not to have known?”

I remained silent. I had no intention of return-ing the tie-pin, nor did I intend to discontinue my visits to Cloverhill. If my father knew about this, my mother said, he’d go out there himself and abuse the pair of them.

That wasn’t true. My father would never have gone out to Cloverhill House in such a frame of mind, any more than he would have thrashed me with his belt. All during our childhood there had been this threat of my father’s violence, but whenever some misdemeanour was reported to him he’d been bewildered and at a loss for words. He had taken no action whatsoever.

“Get ready for church,” my mother said.

Later, as we walked up through the town—my father and my brothers, Annie with my grandmothers—my mother said to me that none of them must know what had occurred, or hear anything whatsoever about the tie-pin. It would upset my brothers and sister, and worry my grandmothers; my father would be beside himself for a month. “You’ll be ashamed when you think about it in church,” she said.

I stared stonily ahead, at my father’s back. On Sundays he wore a blue serge suit with a waistcoat, and a collar and tie, and an overcoat when it was cold. It was the only day of the week he looked like a Protestant, a respectable timberyard proprietor who had made his way up in the world, who carried coins in his pocket to distribute among us at the church gates. On other days he wore working clothes, since only they were suitable for the dust and grime of the yard. He still loaded timber himself, and worked the saws and planes. Occasionally he drove one of the lorries.

On the way to church he greeted people he knew among the Catholics coming back from late Mass, the women grasping their prayerbooks, men with collars and ties. You could tell at a glance they were different from us: they didn’t often walk in a family as we did, but in ones and twos, with occasionally a huge bunch of children on their own, sprawled all over the street, chattering busily. The children eyed us, but because of my father and mother they didn’t shout “Proddy-woddy-green-guts” or “dolled-up-heathens.” Our pace was slow because of the two old women, and we always had to leave the house early in order to allow for this. In the church it took them ages to sit down, fumbling and making certain they were as far away from one another as possible. Neither of them stood up for the psalm or the hymns, only for the Creed.

On that particular Sunday, while we progressed through the town and stood waiting in the aisle for my grandmothers to settle themselves, and later while my brothers fidgeted and poked at one another during the service, I continued to be aware of the impression of my mother’s hand on the side of my face. I was not a child, I thought, to be struck so; I could not imagine Houriskey or Mahoney-Byron, or even Mande-ville, undergoing such humiliation. And again I thought: what right had she to go searching under my drawer-paper?

I listened to my father mumbling the responses and wondered if she hit him in anger also; was a blow ever struck when they had their bedroom disagreements? I doubted it: her sharp tongue would do the work for her, it was children who were hit. Hundreds of times during my childhood I had planned to run away after receiving such punishment; here in this pew, not listening to the pulpit admonitions, I had seen myself arriving in a harbour town and slipping under a pile of canvas on a deck. They would be sorry then. I would be carried away, and white-faced and grief-stricken they would pray for my return.

“You’ll go out with it this afternoon,” my mother said on the walk home from church. “And that’ll be the end of the matter.”

She would find it no matter where I put it; not trusting me, she would search high and low. So I hid it at Cloverhill. I dropped it down a crevice between the hall-door steps, and then I pulled the bell-chain. I was shown into the drawing-room and soon afterwards tea was brought in by Da-phie. I smoked three cigarettes.

That spring, at school, I received my first letter from Frau Messinger. Her handwriting was neat and sloping, slender loops on the letters that demanded them, dots and cross-strokes where they belonged. It is such excitement, Harry! We drive in every day. I had not known that building anything could be so much fun. Steel reinforcements were bathed in concrete, walls rose, rubble was levelled and floors laid down, rain fell on the workmen, the roof went on. It has brought such joy to my husband, Harry, that so many people should come and stand by him and are pleased at what is happening. But, oh, how I long for it all to be finished, to sit and watch the screen! “Will the war be over first, or your picture house complete?" a man said to my husband the other day. Once upon a time people were slow to mention the war to him, he being a German, but now all that has gone.

I still have all her letters of that time, and when I read them now, as often I do, I believe I see Cloverhill as she had come to see it, and the town as she saw it also. In retrospect it is as easy to pass with her from room to room at Cloverhill as it is to keep company with the lanky child who visited the country houses of Sussex in the company of her diminutive mother, or the girl who met in Munster the old man she was to love. She told me once that all her life she had never slept well and as a child had always risen earlier than the servants in those well-servanted households, to explore places she did not have the courage to explore by day. Clearly, I see her. Her solitary figure wanders the morning streets of Munster. She is the first customer in a cafe; she reaches down a newspaper from its rack. I watch her unlocking the big hall-door of Cloverhill; I watch her descending the three steps on to the gravel sweep; the lawns on either side of it glistening with frost. Harry will come today: I have wondered, too, if that anticipation ever flickered in her mind as she strolled among the flower-beds, different in each season. A boy from the town: did she write that down in a letter to someone she once knew? Any boy would have done, or any girl: I don’t delude myself. Yet so very poignantly I remember her kiss that Christmas Eve, and feel the coldness of the tie-pin passed into my hand. Once I gave her a present myself: two packets of American cigarettes. I bought them from a boy at the grammar school who used to sell such things, cigarettes having become excessively hard to obtain. “Oh, Harry darling,” she said.

Often I am affected by memories of the Messingers together, memories that are theirs, not mine, as if the thrall they held me in has bequeathed such a legacy. Opposite one another at their teak dining-table, they seem quite dramatically an old man and a girl, he entertaining her with an account of the work there has been on the farm that day, her turn now to listen. In their bedroom, they undress and fold their clothes away, the summer twilight not yet night. In their breakfast-room he opens letters while they drink black coffee. Logs blaze and crackle; the sun warms the conservatory that opens off the room. There is music on their wireless.

Later, wrapped up against the weather, they move through the void of the building they have talked about, their footsteps echoing. For the interior walls they choose the shades of amber that later became familiar to me, darker at the bottom, lightening to dusty paleness as the colour spreads over the ceiling. These walls must be roughly tex-tured, they decree, the concave ceiling less so, the difference subtly introduced. Four sets of glass swing-doors catch a reflection of the marble steps that so astonished my father: the doors between the foyer and the auditorium are of the warm mahogany supplied by our timberyard. Long before the building is ready for it, they choose the blue-patterned carpet of the balcony, and the scarlet cinema-seats.

Herr Messinger drives the gas-powered car back to Cloverhill; she leans a little tiredly on his arm as together they enter the house. In the town they have bought things for their lunch. “We often have just a tin of sardines. Meals should be picnics, don’t you think, Harry?”

Time passed. At school the same jokes continued. In the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory fat Lottie Belle waddled the same plates of unpleasant food from the kitchen to the discoloured oilcloth spread over the dining-table. At home my father’s conversation was changelessly pursued. “We like this friendship we have made,” Frau Messinger said in her drawing-room.

One April day, when I returned from Lisscoe more than a year after work had first begun on the cinema, I sensed that something was wrong. The building appeared to have reached a standstill. I did not question my father or Annie about this, as I might have done, but instead, continuing to ignore my mother’s strictures, walked out to Cloverhill. “She’s sick,” Daphie said, opening the white hall-door to me. “She’s taken to her bed.” There was no sign of Herr Messinger in the fields or on the avenue and when I returned a week later, to be met by the same response, he was not in evidence either. Nor, to my surprise, did he once appear in the square, though he had regularly done so in the past. Frau Messinger’s last letter had not mentioned illness, but had referred as usual to their visiting the building works together. In my frustration I became depressed, was chided by my father for being down-in-the-mouth and made to shovel sawdust in the timber-yard, which he said would cheer me up. Then, on the day before I was to return to school, I heard Herr Messinger’s voice as I passed his halfcompleted building. “But always I wait,” he was protesting disconsolately. “Always I say make haste and always you promise. You are letting me down when I cannot come in every day.”

The builder, a companion of my father’s in the back bar of Viney’s, began his reassurances. He was doing his best in every hour God sent him; the only trouble was there was an Emergency in the country. Materials could not be obtained in the usual manner or at the usual speed. If he’d been asked to construct a cinema five years ago the entire population of the neighbourhood would have been watching Mickey Mouse within a six-month.

“This is moving from the point, though. Since I haven’t been able to visit the site your men have slowed down, heh?”

“There’s no better men in the land, sir.”

“If they could just be a little swifter on their feet, maybe?”

Turning away for a moment, perhaps to hide his exasperation, Herr Messinger saw me standing there. He nodded, but didn’t smile or address me. I’d never known him so uncommunicative.

“I’ll tell you what, sir.” Thoughtfully the builder passed a hand over the stubble of his jaw. “Come back on Thursday and you won’t know the place.”

He was a bigger man than Mr. Messinger and having completed the massage of his jaw he placed the same hand on the German’s shoulder, bending a little to do so. A smile of satisfaction rippled the ham-like complacency of his features. “I had to pacify the old Hun,” I imagined him saying to my father in the back bar. “Sure, haven’t the poor men only the one pair of legs to each of them?” My father would be duly sympathetic: in the dining-room he had often related how he had similarly extricated himself from the complaints of a customer about a delay due to some oversight in the timberyard.

Herr Messinger said he would return before Thursday; he would return tomorrow; not a day would pass from now on without a visit from him at the building site. In a way that reminded me of my father also, the builder said he’d be welcome. Wasn’t it the man who pays the piper that calls the tune? he amiably remarked. When he’d ambled off Herr Messinger spoke to me.

“Well, Harry, so you are back again?”

“Yes.”

“Harry, she is not well. The early months she hates before spring comes. Well, that is wrong, so she says: it is the early months that don’t like her. January, February, March too. And this year she was determined to watch the building. So the months took their revenge, Harry.”

“Is she getting better?”

“When you return for the summer you will see for yourself.” He smiled at me; gold glistened in his teeth. “Oh, Harry, these labourers do not advance much. And then of course it is true: commodities are hard to come by in the Emergency. The architect does not arrive because he has no petrol, and I myself—well, I like to be with her when she is not all right.”

“Please thank her for her letters.”

“When you go back to your school she will write a few more. As she improves, so summer comes again.”

“I’d write back only it’s hard to get stamps where I am.”

“Don’t worry about writing back.”

“She never said she was ill.”

“That wouldn’t be her way, Harry.”

He strode away, dapper in his German clothes, the shine of his gaiters catching the sunlight. Later that morning, in Nagle Street, he waved to me from his car. I wished he’d said that I might visit her in her bedroom. I had thought he might say that: it would be ages now before I saw her.

For her sake I welcomed the mild weather of spring that year, and the warmth of early summer. During the dragging weeks of June there was a heatwave. Was it in June that anemones came? I had no idea.

“You will remember for ever your days in the rectory,” the Reverend Wauchope finally predicted, which were the words of his parting to all the pupils who boarded there. He was, of course, right. “We will pray to God,” he said, and together he and I did so, he speaking for me, requesting guidance and the blessing of humility in the days of my future. “I am to understand that you have failed to find affinity with scholarship,” he remarked. “Nor have you otherwise achieved distinction. Your father is a draper, is he?”

“He has a timberyard, sir.”

“And a place for yourself in it? You are most fortunate. More fortunate than most.”

I did not reply. After we have died, the first letter I received during that term had asked, do you believe there will be a heaven? Subsequent letters referred to the possibility of this future also; the past, always previously her subject, was not touched upon. Nor was the present: for all the mention there was of it, the building of the cinema might have been defeated by the builder’s lassitude and the shortages of the Emergency. The more I searched the lines of the letters for any hint of progress the more I experienced bleak dismay. Instead, repeated often, Frau Messinger had written: I have never understood how it is we shall be separated, some of us for heaven, some for hell.

“I have asked you a question,” the Reverend Wauchope said.

“I'm sorry, sir.”

“Do you intend to honour me with an answer?” “I did not hear the question, sir.”

Only three letters had come; all had to do with life after death. A week ago the last one had arrived, urging a visit from me as soon as I returned.

The sweet-pea will be in flower and we might walk in the garden.

“You appear to be inane,” the Reverend Wauchope said. His dry, scratchy voice querulously dismissed me without my having said—as I think I had intended to—that the timberyard did not attract me. But the silence surrounding the Alexandra cinema made me apprehensive about continuing to consider it an alternative. Already I had convinced myself that it had been abandoned because of the illness that was not mentioned. Herr Messinger had lost heart in his gift.

“You are suitable for work with timber,” was the clergyman’s final insult, the last thing he ever said to me.

With my three companions of the rectory I walked around the field where the cows grazed, Mandeville confessing that he’d been offered a position in a seed firm, Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron that they’d be going on to their fathers’ farms. “Oh yes, the timberyard,” I said. Mandeville wondered if we’d ever meet again: we thought we probably wouldn’t.

Later, in an empty classroom of the school, I gathered together the dog-eared textbooks that had also been my companions for so long and returned them to Mr. Conron. Staring hard at some point of interest on the floor, he warned me to be careful in Dublin if one day I should visit it. “Take care with the women of the quays. Don’t be tempted by quayside women.” With these words he offered an explanation for the torment that haunted his features. He lived with shame, yet some part of him was obliged surreptitiously to display its source, half proud confession, half punishment of himself. “I’ll take care all right,” I promised.

I tipped Lottie Belle the two shillings the Reverend Wauchope laid down as a suitable sum for all his boarders to pass on to her, the accumulation of such amounts reputed to constitute the major part of her wages. Mrs. Wauchope, who had not addressed me during my years in the rectory, did not do so now.

On a morning in the middle of that same June heatwave I left Lisscoe for ever. The bus halted to drop off bundles of newspapers or to pick up the passengers who stood waiting at a crossroads or outside wayside public houses, or nowhere in particular. Towns passed through were similar to my own or just a little larger. Cattle drowsed in the fields, familiar landmarks slipped by. The bus was dusty and hot, its air pungent with the fumes of petrol; once it stopped because a woman was feeling sick. I wondered if I would ever make a journey anywhere again, if I was seeing for the last time the ruins by the river, the bungalow embedded with seaside shells, the green advertisement for Raleigh bicycles on the gable-end of a house: my father boasted that he was none the worse for having never in his life been on a bus. We live and then we are forgotten, she had written. Surely that cannot be the end of us? In the bus I reread the three letters I had most recently received, phrases and paragraphs already known to me by heart. A gravestone gathers lichen, flowers rot in the grave-vase. In her drawing-room I could not recall her having once even touched upon this subject. She had not, for instance, speculated on the after-life of her dead mother, even though it was apparent from all she said that she had been more than ordinarily fond of her. She had not, when deploring the deaths of so many young soldiers in the war, ever wondered if that was truly the end of them.

The bus drew up by the martyr’s statue in the square, taking me unawares because the melancholy nature of my thoughts still absorbed me. The bus conductor handed down my single, heavy suitcase from the luggage rack on the roof, and then I was aware of the reddish tinge of a building that made the square seem different. In bright sunlight I gazed at a fa9ade that was exactly as it had been on the architect’s sketch, the baskets of flowers hanging from a hugely jutting ledge that formed a roof above the marble steps. The Alexandra proclaimed stylish blue letters, as if her hand had written them across the concrete.