I walked through the town on the first of my journeys to Cloverhill, clutching a soft, brown-paper parcel from Kickham’s. I wondered what it contained and tried to feel beneath the string and the overlap of paper, but was not successful. I felt excited, quickening my stride as I passed the abandoned gasworks and the hospital that was being built, branching to the right at the signpost where the road divided. Ballinadee the signpost said, 2 1/2 miles. The road became narrow then, and there were no cottages all the way to the white gates of Cloverhill, which were set in a crescent sweep bounded by a stone wall. An avenue meandered through fields where sheep grazed except where the land had been ploughed. From the moment I passed through the gates I could see the house in the distance, in grey, stern stone against treeless landscape.
Astride a farm horse, a man rode towards me. “You have come with my wife’s ordering,” he said. “You are good to her.” He was a small, square man, too muscular to be described as fat, with short sandy hair and a drooping eyelid. Agreeably, he asked me my name and where I lived. When I told him my father was the proprietor of the timberyard he replied that that was interesting. He himself, he informed me before he passed on, cultivated sugar-beet mainly.
The fields on either side of the avenue became uncared-for lawns, with flower-beds in them. There was a gravel sweep, steps led to a white hall-door. I pulled the bell-chain and heard, a moment later, the tap of the maid’s heels on the flagged floor of the hall. At Cloverhill, I discovered later, the Messingers lived with this single servant, a girl of seventeen or eighteen with attractively protruding teeth, called Daphie. Two farm-workers, one of them her father, came by day. In the Messingers’ marriage no children had been born.
I was led into the drawing-room, where Frau Messinger was sitting on a green-striped sofa, made comfortable with green-striped cushions bunched into the corner behind her. She was smoking a cigarette. As on all future occasions when I visited her in this room, she wore red, this time a scarlet dress of a soft woollen material, with a black silk scarf knotted loosely at her throat. In other ways, also, it was always just the same: I would enter the elegantly furnished drawing-room and be subjected to wide-eyed, frank appraisal, an examination that was accompanied by a smile. She never said much at first. When the tea was brought she poured it and at once lit a fresh cigarette, then leaned back against her cushions, her eyes not leaving my face, her smile still lingering. Sometimes, for an instant before she settled herself, the black lace hem of her petticoat showed. Then she would tidy her skirt about her knees and the lacy hem would not again be seen.
“This is kindness itself,” she said that first time. “Boys are not often kind.”
I deprecated her compliment, but was ignored. A silence fell. She guessed my age, and said that she herself was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. I did not, at the time, find anything odd in that; I did not think of Frau Messinger as a girl, which is how I remember her now, nor of her husband as an old man, which later he appeared to me to be. All that seemed peculiar to me then was that we just drank tea: there was nothing to eat, not even a sandwich or a biscuit.
“Both of us were born beneath the sign of Sagittarius,” she said. Not that she entirely believed in the astrology notes she read in magazines, yet she could not quite resist them. “Do you like reading just for fun?” she asked and then, not waiting for an answer, described the various German and French magazines that had delighted her when she’d lived in Germany. What she’d enjoyed most of all was drinking afternoon chocolate in a cafe and leafing through the pages of whatever journals were there. She described a cafe in a square in Munster where the daily newspapers were attached to mahogany rods that made them easier to read, and where there were magazines on all the tables. Guessing that I had never been in a theatre, she described the orchestra and the applause, the painted scenery, the make-up and the actors. She described a cathedral in Germany, saying she and Herr Messinger had been married in it. “Harry, do you think you could save me a horrid journey and bring out the wet battery from Aldritt’s on Tuesday?”
This was the indication that my present visit had come to an end. There was the lavish smile, and the assumption that naturally I would agree to carry out the wireless battery. Without hesitation, I said I would.
“I hear you were at Cloverhill,” my father remarked that evening, when all of us were gathered around the dining-table from which we ate our meals. The family atmosphere was as it always was: my grandmothers silent in their dislike of one another, my brothers sniggering, my mother tired, Annie resentful, my father ebullient after an hour or so in the back bar of Viney’s hotel.
“Cloverhill?” Annie said, her lips pouting in a spasm of jealousy. “Were you out at Cloverhill?” “I had a message from Kickham’s.”
“So you’d say they were Jews?” my father said. I shook my head. Since the Messingers had been married in a cathedral it seemed unlikely that they could be Jewish. He came from a village near a town called Munster, I said; she was definitely English.
“Well, I’d say they were Jews.” My father cut a slice of shop bread with the bread-saw, scattering crumbs from the crust over the table-cloth. “The Jew-man goes to the synagogue. There’s no synagogue in this town.”
My father lent his observations weight through his slow delivery of them, his tone suggesting revelations of import yet to come. But invariably this promise remained unfulfilled.
“I’m surprised you were running messages for them,” my sister said.
I did not reply. I would tell my companions at the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory—Mandeville, Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron—about the Messingers: it was clearly no use attempting to convey anything about them to any member of my family. One of my brothers upset a cup of tea, and with a vigour that belied the weariness in her features my mother delivered a slap to the side of his face. The less squat of my grandmothers exclaimed her approval; the other muttered in distaste. The subject of the Messingers did not survive this interruption; my father talked about the war.
On Tuesday I collected the charged battery at Aldritt’s garage and carried it out to Cloverhill. It was made of glass, and fitted into a wire cage with a handle: it wasn’t difficult to carry, nor was it heavy. Frau Messinger gave me a list that afternoon, and the packets and the single parcel I conveyed to Cloverhill two days later were hardly a burden either. Then it was time to collect from Aldritt’s the battery I had myself left there a week before. I even learnt how to connect the wires of the wireless-set to it.
“Harry, I should like to tell you a little about my mother and myself,” Frau Messinger said on the last afternoon of my holidays, a warm afternoon in September when the French windows of her drawing-room were wide open. A bumblebee buzzed intermittently, alighting on one surface after another, silent for a moment before beginning its next flight. The last bumblebee of summer, she said, and added without any change of voice, as though the same subject continued: