Nights at the Alexandra (7 page)

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.