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 girclass="underline" 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.”