“Your mother’s beside herself, boy. Were you drinking or what?”
“Frau Messinger’s dying,” I said, but neither of them responded. My food had been ready at halfpast six, my mother said; every day, Sundays included, that was the time. She wasn’t a maid in her own house, she said; she wasn’t a servant. “Half-six,” my father repeated. “If you want your grub half-six is the hour, boy.”
My mother took the saucers singly from the pile on her tray, and placed on each an inverted cup. She took cork mats from a drawer in the sideboard and laid the table with knives and forks and side plates. She didn’t say anything, but listened while my father repeated what had been established already. He informed me that a meal had been fried for me and had sat in the oven until it was burnt. A waste of food that had already been paid for, he said, and hadn’t my mother more to do than pander to the comings and goings of a youth? He reminded me it was a Sunday, the day of the week when my mother might be given an easy time. With painful deliberation he pressed open a packet of ten Sweet Afton and withdrew a cigarette, appearing to select one. “Where were you drinking?” he said.
“I wasn’t drinking.”
“You have drink taken, boy. You brought a smell of it into the house.”
“I had a glass of wine.”
My father scraped a match along the sandpaper of a matchbox. He examined the flame before raising it to his cigarette.
“Wine?”
“Yes.”
“You were out with those people,” my mother said.
“Where’re you going now for yourself?” my father demanded, noticing that I had made a move.
“Up to bed.”
“Will you listen to that! As cool as water and the whole house after being in a turmoil!”
“You gave me a promise you wouldn’t go out there.” My mother had suddenly become still. With a fork in her hand, her eyes hotly probed mine.
“I didn’t promise anything,” I said.
I could see her deciding to cross the room to hit me, then deciding against it. My father said I’d had a good education, that money he couldn’t spare had been spent on me. That food was taken out of the oven at twenty past eight,” he said. “There isn’t a dog in the town would have thanked you for it.”
“You promised me that day.” My mother did not take her eyes off me; I thought she hated me because I could feel something like hatred coming across the room from her.
“I nearly went down to the Guards,” my father said. My grandmothers couldn’t touch their fried eggs, so that was more food wasted. It was the worst evening of my grandmothers’ lives.
“There was an understanding between us.” She would stand there for ever, I thought, looking at me like that, as still as stone while my father tediously gabbled.
Keep off the drink, boy,” he commanded, having issued other orders, as well as warnings and advice. “You’re too young for that game.”
“I’m going to work in the picture house.”
The vituperation I had anticipated burst simultaneously out of them, scornful and immediate. Their faces reddened. My father pushed himself on to his feet.
“I don’t like it in the timberyard,” I said.
“What don’t you like, boy?”
“I don’t like any of it.”
“You’re a young pup. Haven’t you caused enough damage for one day? Go up and knock on your grandmothers’ doors and tell them you’re safe and sound. The other stuff you’re talking about is rubbish.”
I went away, glad to be allowed to do so. Obediently I knocked on my grandmothers’ doors, but there was no response from either of them, as I had known there wouldn’t be. In my own room I sat on the edge of my bed and within a few moments I felt tears on my cheeks. In the diningroom they would be deploring my defiance, saying they could not control me, that I had always been like that, a bad example to my brothers. There had been pain in my father’s eyes, and in the bluster of his voice when he’d called me a young pup, but I didn’t care; I didn’t care in the least how much I hurt them. It was like a nightmare, that she was going to die.
FIVE
Slowly, carefully, she passed upstairs to the balcony, holding on to her husband’s arm. And when Rebecca came to an end they left the cinema in the same unhurried manner. There was, I realise now, nothing she might have said to me, and I could tell from her expression that she found it difficult to smile. “Please wait,” Herr Messinger had requested when he’d set out my duties for that evening. He returned some time later, and together we locked up his property. “One day I shall place you in charge of the Alexandra,” he said. He paused, and added: “That is her wish, and my own too.”
I would have carried the wireless battery out to Cloverhill as I had before, but that was not suggested. At a quarter past ten every night Herr Messinger arrived in his gas-powered motor-car and stood on the marble steps, ready to say goodnight to his customers when the film ended. I be lieve, although I cannot be certain, that she asked him to. When everyone had gone I would give him the cash-box and he would drive away again.
Three times a week I fetched the films in their metal cases from the railway station and returned those that had been shown, the smaller cases con taining the newsreels and the shorts, another episode of Flaming Frontiers or The Torture ( '.ham ber of Doctor R. Every evening, and during the Sunday matinee, I sat in the projection room with the old man who had been the projectionist in some other town, whom Herr Messinger had brought back into employment. When the old man’s stomach gave him trouble and he wasn’t able to come in I took his place, as soon as there was no further custom at the box-office.
“For the sake of your mother,” my father pleaded, “wouldn’t you have a bit of sense for yourself?”
He meant wouldn’t I stop doing what I was content to do and return to the drabness of the timberyard. I was becoming a queer type of a fellow, he told me, which wasn’t a good thing for a mother to have to see. “Come into Viney’s one day and we’ll have a bottle of stout over it,” he invited, forgetting his advice to me with regard to drinking in public houses.
Politely, I thanked him and said I’d look into Viney’s when I had a moment to spare, not intending to and in fact never doing so. On the balcony stairs there were framed photographs of William Powell and Myrna Loy, of Loretta Young and Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer, of Franchot Tone and Lew Ayres. I could see some of them from the box-office and used to watch people stopping to examine them, couples arm in arm, the girls’ voices full of wonder. In the mornings I opened the exit doors at the back, on either side of the screen, in order to let the fresh air in for an hour or two. When the woman who swept the place out didn’t arrive I did it myself; I mopped the foyer and the steps, and went over the carpets with the suction cleaner. Often in the mornings I would press the switch that caused the yellow and green curtains that obscured the screen to open, the butterflies of the pattern disappearing as the curtains moved. When the daylight came in through the exit doors the amber shading of the walls seemed different.
People loved the Alexandra. They loved the things I loved myself—the scarlet seats, the lights that made the curtains change colour, the usherettes in uniform. People stood smoking in the foyer when they’d bought their tickets, not in a hurry because smoking and talking gave them pleasure also. They loved the luxury of the Alexandra, they loved the place it was. Urney bars tasted better in its rosy gloom; embraces were romantic there. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers shared their sophisticated dreams, Deanna Durbin sang. Heroes fell from horses, the sagas of great families yielded the riches of their secrets. Night after night in the Alexandra I stood at the back, aware of the pleasure I dealt in, feeling it all around me. Shoulders slumped, heads touched, eyes were lost in concentration. My brothers did not snigger in the Alexandra; my father, had he ever gone there, would have at last been silenced. Often I imagined the tetchiness of the Reverend Wauchope softening beneath a weight of wonder, and the sour disposition of his wife lifted from her as she watched All This and Heaven Too. Often I imagined the complicated shame fading from the features of Mr. Conron. “I have told her you are happy,” Herr Messinger said.