“My mother was a poor relation, Harry. From my earliest childhood that was an expression that accompanied us everywhere we went. Often, in Sussex, my mother would wave one of her tiny hands at the landscape and announce that it was the family’s. I also distinctly recall her doing so on the seafront at Bognor Regis, implying with her delicate little wave all the houses of the promenade, and the seashore as well.”
She handed me the stub of her cigarette and asked me to take it to the garden and throw it away, out of sight somewhere, poked down into a flower-bed, she suggested. It was the first time she made this request of me, but she was often to make it in the future: the smell of stale cigarettes was unpleasant in a room, she explained, answering the bewilderment on my face.
“You naturally wonder about my father,” she said when I returned. “Who he was and why he was never with us. Well, I’ll tell you, Harry: I never knew my father. I never so much as laid an eye on him or heard his voice or even saw a photograph. My father was a dark horse. My mother wore a wedding ring, but I am honestly not sure that she did so with any title. I rather believe my father was something dreadful, like a pantryman.”
I did not know what a pantryman was, nor do I to this day. But I could tell from the lowered voice accompanying the revelation that in Frau Messinger’s view a pantryman was a long way down the scale from a butler, or even a footman. Her mother had become enamoured of a lesser servant.
“My mother, no matter what else she was, Harry, was a very foolish little person. If she had not been foolish about some tedious investment she would not have become a poor relation. She was taken in by a solicitor in Sevenoaks who claimed he could make a fortune for her. She was lucky to have ended up with anything at all left. But not enough for my education.”
Her cigarette-lighter was round, like a polished gold coin. Sometimes she played with it while she talked. Sometimes she took a cigarette from her yellow Gold Flake packet, then changed her mind and returned it, tidily folding the silver paper as it had been folded before.
“My mother stayed in people’s houses: that’s how we lived. We went from house to house, in a circle all over Sussex, and when we arrived at a certain point we began all over again. Governesses taught me, Harry. I was passed from schoolroom to schoolroom in the houses where we stayed, from Miss Kindle to Miss D’Arcy, to Miss Moate, to Miss Hindhassett, on to Miss Binding and Miss Gubbins. To tell the truth, Harry, I’m hardly educated at all. I mean, a smattering. I have nothing more.”
I formed a picture of the existence she described, of arriving with her mother and their luggage in this house or that, endlessly beholden. I saw her as the child she’d been, much taller than her mother, just as she was taller than her husband: a thin, lanky child was what she’d said, not very happy. I knew nothing of the kind of houses she spoke of, and imagined palaces in soft English countryside, with gardeners and parlour maids. She and her mother travelled by train, and someone met them at the railway station. Often it wasn’t actually a railway station but a special stopping place in the middle of nowhere, a “halt,” she called it, used only by the people of the nearby estate.
Even now, so very long afterwards, I can clearly see the clothes she described to me: her favourite dress when she was twelve, in forget-me-not blue with tiny white dots that were flowers when you looked closer, and plain white buttons; her favourite dress when she was fifteen, of crimson velvet, the first of her red dresses; the lace stole she was given once; green shoes she’d had. Furniture in the houses she’d visited remained vivid in her recollection, and has passed into mine: a Queen Anne dressing-glass of inlaid rosewood, so delicately finished that she had always had difficulty in drawing her eyes away from it; a gold-faced clock on a mantelpiece in a hall; pale Chippendale chairs around an oval table. On the day after her eighteenth birthday a young man had proposed marriage to her, and she wept because she loved him but even so rejected him. They had walked together through a meadow where poppies bloomed, then by a river and an apple orchard. That year she had learnt Italian. That year she had tried particularly to be good at tennis, which she had always wanted to be. At nineteen she had become religious, and had wondered about the Virgin Mary and the mystery of the Annunciation.
“You will wonder why we were in Germany, Harry. Well, it’s the same kind of thing as staying in other people’s houses. Mrs. Marsh-Hall needed a companion to travel with, her sister having died the previous year. So she took my mother with her as well as a maid, and of course I was permitted to go along. Otherwise I would never have met my husband.”
When she spoke of that time Frau Messinger uttered a few words in German before returning to English to tell me about her husband’s many sisters and his cousin who was unable to speak because of a stroke, his niece who’d been a singer and lived with the family in their Schloss. Herr Messinger had been left a widower seven or eight years ago; he had three sons in Hitler’s army.
“None of it is nice for him, Harry. ‘You must buy land with the house in Ireland,’ I said. ‘You must be occupied.’ For my husband, idleness is a penance.”
She offered me a cigarette, the first time she had done so. She held out the packet casually, appearing not to consider it unusual that a boy of fifteen should smoke. I accepted it because at the grammar school I often smoked behind the lavatories.
“My mother died, Harry, or else you would have met her. She would have come here with us, I think.”
Her tone was not melancholy. She seemed happy to have only Herr Messinger. People had come to call when she had first arrived at Cloverhill, women mainly, bearing visiting cards to represent their husbands, since husbands tended to be occupied at that time of day.
“Of course I returned the calls, Harry. Well, really, it would be rude not to.”
But social life ended there. There were invitations to bridge and whist parties, but neither Frau Messinger nor her husband had any interest in card-playing.
“Yet of course we were right, Harry, to come to Ireland. We are proved right every day. Adolf Hitler apologised, you know, when a bomb fell out of one of his aeroplanes on to a creamery somewhere—in Co. Tipperary, was it?”
She didn’t care for Adolf Hitler, nor did Herr Messinger, even though his sons were fighting for the Nazis. She had fallen in love with Germany and almost overnight Germany had become a tragedy.
“Old women sat in the cafes of Munster, Harry, their faces crinkled in despair at what they read in the newspapers and the magazines. And then the horrible Brownshirts would go by, goose-stepping with their legs. You couldn’t help loving the manners of the Germans, but what good were manners then?”
I held my cigarette as nonchalantly as I could, dangling it as she was dangling hers.
“It’s such a disappointment, Harry, that people can be so silly. Don’t you think it is?”
She went on talking, not waiting for my response. Herr Messinger could hardly bear even to think about the sadness that had befallen Germany. “And poor England, too, Harry—those horrid bombs coming out of the darkness!”
The houses she had visited in Sussex were maybe in ruins by now. People lived on a rasher of bacon a month, and eggs made from powder. In England clothing wasn’t warm enough. In Germany the elderly died.
“We’re creatures of absurdity, you realise, my husband and myself. Creatures of ridicule, Harry, sitting out two countries’ conflict.”