Nights at the Alexandra (8 page)

“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.

The flush in her cheeks was like the pink that may creep into the petals of a rose that should be purely white. She lay on her sofa, exactly as she had in the past, smoking and dispensing tea. It was a Sunday afternoon.

“I think you understand everything now, Harry?”

I shook my head but today she did not, as in the past, ignore my responses in our conversation. She observed my gesture, and smiled a little. She said:

“Everything here, Harry? All there has been at Cloverhill?”

“No,” I said.

“The cinema will open in a fortnight. With
Rebecca.
Harry, do you know
Rebecca
?”

She spoke lightly and with her usual casualness, but already I knew that death was everywhere in the drawing-room, and when I walked with her in the garden it was present also. The sweet-pea blooms were a trellis of colour—a dozen shades of purple and mauve, reds lightening and deepening, pinks and whites. Yellow hung from the laburnum shrubs, scarlet dotted the rose bushes. Yet the beauty of the Englishwoman chilled the blaze. Like a ghost sensed coldly, the melancholy of time deserting her was everywhere in the garden, as it had been in the drawing-room.

“Sweet-pea is my second favourite,” she said, and I could tell she knew that at last my density had been penetrated. “Sweet-pea in a cut-glass vase, set off by the fern of asparagus.”

We walked slowly among the flower-beds. Occasionally she bent down to pull out a weed. Mignonette was her third favourite, she said, but only because of its fragrance.

“I knew nothing about a garden when first we came to Cloverhill,” she said. “He rescued it for me, you know.”

Brambles had flourished among the rhododendrons and the blue hydrangeas then, cornus was rampant. Fuchsia roots and bamboos had spread beneath the earth, escallonia was smothered. Her husband had dug the flower-beds out; he had discovered lost japonica, he had teased the straggles of jasmine back to health.

“I helped of course, Harry, but sometimes the work was heavy. And there was the farm as well.”

All that had been happening at the time of my first visits to Cloverhill. “Look at that,” Herr Messinger had said once, showing me his hands, begrimed and scratched, nails broken, the pigment of vegetation colouring his palms. And often from the drawing-room window I had seen him dragging from the garden a cart loaded high with the undergrowth he had cut out. I had hardly noticed, I had not been interested; I had passed through the bedraggled garden without respecting its slow recovery.

“It would be nice to have that time again, Harry, I often think. To go back to the first day we arrived at Cloverhill, waiting in the emptiness for our furniture. We walked about the garden and through the fields. ‘There is a world to do,’ he said, and in my happiness I embraced him because I knew he loved to do things. It would be nice to experience again the afternoon you first came here, when Daphie said to me, ‘There is a visitor.’ How shy you were, Harry! You hardly said a thing.”

Our progress had slowed down. She took my arm to lean on. We crossed the gravel sweep and went around the side of the house, finally reaching the lawn on to which the drawing-room French windows opened.

“That may be what heaven is, Harry: dreaming through times that have been. Tea in the drawing-room, and how you listened to my silly life!”

We stepped through the French windows, but she did not move towards the sofa. Instead she held her cheek out for me to kiss, and said when I had done so:

“If heaven is there, Harry.”

I was alone then in the room, and some intuition insisted that I had been with her for the last time, and for the last time had heard her voice. And yet as soon as these thoughts occurred I denied them, for how on earth could I know anything of the kind?

As I made my way down the avenue, Herr Messinger called to me from a field, where he was forking hay with one of his men. I clambered over the white-painted iron railing and crossed to where they worked. He came to meet me as I approached.

“Are you finished now at school, Harry?”

“Yes, I am finished now.”

“Well, that is good. You will work for me when the cinema is ready, heh? A fortnight, Harry” “Yes, I will work for you.”

“It has taken so long. How often I lost heart!”

I tried to say I was glad he hadn’t, because I knew that without his energy and his determination the cinema would still be only half-built. I stumbled in my speech, finding the sentiments difficult to express.

“Ah, well, Harry.” He shook his head and turned away. She had been given a cinema because in such circumstances the giving of a gift had to be as great. And naturally he had wanted it to be swiftly completed. “Herr Messinger,” I called after him, which was something I would have been too shy to do in the past. “Herr Messinger, would you like me to assist you with the hay?”

He nodded very slightly, not turning to face me, and so I remained, working in silence beside him and his employee. When twilight came, and darkened, we did not cease because there was mown hay still lying. At home they would wonder where I was, and would be angry. All unusual behaviour made them angry. But as the moon rose and we piled up the last of the haycocks I didn’t care about any of that.

“Come back to the house, Harry,” Herr Messinger said when he had finished. “You are surely hungry.”

So I accompanied him on the avenue and around to the back of the house, across a yard I had never seen before, and into the kitchen. He lit a lamp because there was no electricity at Cloverhill. He placed it in the centre of the scrubbed wooden table.

“She’ll have gone to bed,” he said. “We’re on our own, Harry.”

His workman had ridden off on a bicycle, and I thought it honourable the way Herr Messinger had thanked him so genuinely for working on a Sunday and had said there would be something extra in his wages. In the kitchen he said it was Daphie’s evening off. There was a potato salad already prepared, he said, and cold meats with lettuce and tomatoes. He hoped that would be sufficient for us. And wine, he remembered, not very good wine, but he had a little in the larder. “The chromium for the foyer is to arrive tomorrow,” Herr Messinger said. “And all the seating at the end of the week.”

We ate cold chicken and pork, and the salad. The wine was the colour of very pale straw, the first wine I had ever tasted; I thought it delicious. “Ever since I knew her, Harry,” Herr Messinger suddenly said.

His square, hard face was solemn, though there were still crinkles of what I’d always taken to be amusement around his eyes. She would be asleep already, he said; she could not manage food in the evenings. He took tiny amounts on his fork, lifting the fork slowly to his mouth and then replacing it for a moment on his plate, sipping his wine.

“An old man marries for the time that is left, Harry. Both of us seemed not to have much time. Well, there you are.”

I was not hungry; I did not any longer want the pale-straw wine. But he, of course, was used to things being as they were, and ate and drank as usual. I had no knowledge of death; I had never experienced its sorrow or its untimely shock. “Well, that was sudden,” my father would say before sitting down in the dining-room, and then reveal the name of a person who had died. “God’s mercy, the Reverend Wauchope’s scratchy voice would plead in the prayers to do with losses in the war. Shops closed their doors when a faneral crept by, the blinds of windows drawn down to honour the flower-laden coffin, the hooves of black-plumed horses the only sound.

Herr Messinger lit one of his small cigars. In silence he made coffee. I lifted from the table the plates off which we had eaten and placed them on the draining-board by the sink. I ran the tap but he said that Daphie would attend to all that when she returned. He spoke again of his wife.

“She will see the cinema open its doors. I know that in my heart and she in hers. She will taste the promise of its nights of pleasure. It worried her that we would only come and go at Cloverhill.”

He handed me my coffee, and pushed the sugar nearer. I saw the tears on her cheeks in the moment when she realised she must not marry the young man who had taken her to the poppy field. Had that broken her heart? I wondered.

“You must not worry yourself, Harry.”

“I’m only sorry.”

“The last months would have been empty if there had not been the building. Emptiness is the enemy.”

Soon after that I left. The night was warm, the moon a clear disc, untroubled by clouds. I had never before seen Cloverhill at night, and when I stopped to look back at the house I did not want to turn my gaze away. A pale sheen lightened the familiar grey facade and, in a way that seemed almost artificial, related trees and stone. Blankly, the dark windows returned my stare, a sightless pattern, elegant in the gloom. Did she suffer pain? I wondered.