NIGHTS
AT THE
ALEXANDRA
ONE
I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.
“Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that.”
That is what I hear most often and with the greatest pleasure: Frau Messinger’s voice as precisely recalled as memory allows, each quizzical intonation reflected in a glance or gesture. I must have replied something, Heaven knows what: it never mattered because she rarely listened. The war had upset the Messingers’ lives, she being an Englishwoman and he German. It brought them to Ireland and to Cloverhill—a sanctuary they most certainly would not otherwise have known.
She explained to me that she would not have found life comfortable in Hitler’s Germany; and her own country could hardly be a haven for her husband. They had thought of Switzerland, but Herr Messinger believed that Switzerland would be invaded; and the United States did not tempt them. No one but I, at that time an unprepossessing youth of fifteen, ever used their German titles: in the town where I’d been born they were Mr. and Mrs. Messinger, yet it seemed to me— affectation, I daresay—that in this way we should honour the strangers that they were.
When first I heard of the Messingers I had just returned from the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory, where I lodged in term-time in order to attend Lisscoe grammar school. My father told me about them. He said the man was twice the woman’s age; he imagined they were Jews since they attended no church. A lot of Jews had slipped away from Germany, he ponderously added.
As a matter of principle, I refused to be interested in anything my father related, but a few days later I saw Frau Messinger stepping out of her husband’s motor-car in Laffan Street and guessed at once who she was. The motor-car was powered by propane gas, a complicated apparatus being mounted where part of the luggage compartment had been removed: no one had petrol to spare during what in Ireland we called the “Emergency,” and energy so ingeniously contrived was rare. A group of loiterers had gathered round the motor-car. Frau Messinger paid them no attention.
“Will you carry something for me?” she said to me, and pointed at the wet battery of a wireless-set on the floor by the passenger seat. “Might I ask you to carry it to the garage, and bring the other back?”
It is odd to think that those were the first words I heard her speak. Other boys had previously undertaken this chore: for some particular reason of her own she chose not to drive into Aldritt’s garage and have the used battery replaced there by the one that had been recharged. Vaguely, she referred to that when she returned to the motorcar with her shopping, something about it being less of a nuisance like this. She opened the passenger door and showed me how to wedge the battery to prevent it from toppling over. “I’d really be most awfully lost without the wireless,” she said, giving me a threepenny-piece.
She was an extremely thin, tall woman, her jet-black hair piled high, her eyes blue, her full lips meticulously painted: I had never seen anyone as beautiful, nor heard a voice that made me so deliciously shiver. You looked for a blemish on her hands, on the skin of her neck or her face, I wrote in a notebook I kept later in my life. There wasn’t one. I could have closed my eyes and listened to that husky timbre for ever.
“There is something that hasn’t come in to Kickham’s,” she said. “It’s due on the bus this afternoon. Might I ask you to bring it out to Cloverhill for me?”
I remember that more distinctly than any other moment in my life. She was already in the car when she spoke, and her tone of voice was not one normally employed when making a request. With a gentle imperiousness, she commanded what she wished, and before she drove away she glanced at me once, a smile flittering across her thin features. The street-corner loiterers watched the slow progress of the car until it was out of sight, and then returned to lean again against the corner of Duggan’s public house. I stood where I was, still aware of tremors dancing beneath my skin.
“What kind of a female is she?” my father enquired when he discovered—not from me—that I’d been addressed by Frau Messinger on the street. He was surprised when I told him that in my opinion she was an Englishwoman. He insisted I was mistaken, just as later he refused to accept that the Messingers were not Jews: in times like these, he said, no Englishwoman in her sane mind would marry a Hun, it stood to reason. “Amn’t I right?” he persuaded my mother, and she—not really listening—said he was of course.
We were a Protestant family of the servant class which had come up in the world, my father now the proprietor of the timberyard where he had once been employed. He was a bulky man, inclined to knock things over; he thought of himself as easygoing and wise. My mother’s hands were swollen and red from washing clothes and floors and dishes; her greying fair hair was forever slipping out of its hairpins. My two grandmothers, who lived with us, had not addressed one another since my parents’ wedding-day. My two brothers, younger than I was, were chunkily-built twins, their identities often confused even within the family. My sister Annie—already working in the office of the timberyard—was jealous because I had been sent away to the grammar school at Lisscoe and she had not, and because my brothers would be sent away also. She resented the dullness of the employment she was so often told she was lucky to have. She wanted to work in a shop in Dublin.
Our house was the last building in Laffan Street except for the sheds and concrete stores of the timberyard next door. It was a pale brown house, of painted stucco, without railings to separate it from the pavement and without steps in front of its hall-door. The windows of its three storeys had net curtains as well as heavier curtains and blinds. The narrow, steep stairway that ascended from the hall to the attics was a central vein, supplying access to trim, short landings on the first and second floors. There was an upstairs sitting-room that was never used, the kitchen and the dining-room forming between them the household’s heart. My brothers spread their schoolbooks out on the dining-room table, as Annie and I had once upon a time done also. The kitchen adjoined, with a hatch in the wall for convenience. My grandmothers sat in two armchairs by the dining-room window, watching the people going by on the street; in cold weather they sat on either side of the fire, not looking at one another.
When we were small Annie and I used to share a bedroom, but now we had one each: patterned linoleum on the floor, an iron bedstead, wash-stand and cupboard, just like our parents’ bedroom and our brothers’.
These rooms, the steep stairway and the landings, the square backyard you could see from the bedroom windows, its red outhouse doors and the sloping roof of its turf shed: all that constituted my familiar childhood world, and the town that lay beyond this territory of home reflected it in many ways, though at the time I did not notice this. It was a scrappy, unimportant little town, a handful of shops and public houses in narrow streets, its central square spoilt by two derelict houses and a statue to a local martyr. Bridge Quay and Bridge Lane ran off Laffan Street; Nagle Street was where Reilly’s Cafe and the two better grocers’ shops were, separated by Kickham’s drapery. The Wolfe Tone Dance-hall resembled a repository for agricultural implements—a relentless cement facade halfway up Wolfe Tone Hill, with a metal grille drawn across by day, the week’s band announced on a bill stuck to a nearby telegraph pole. On the outskirts of the town was the Church of Our Lady, and at the end of St. Alnoth Street the slender spindle of the Protestant Church of St. Alnoth was dark against the sky.