William Trevor - Nights at the Alexandra

“I am ashamed of my country when I think of that, Harry. As my husband is of his. That the innocent should be ill-treated, even allowed to die, in the glorious name of war: what kind of world have we made for ourselves?”

He had tried to persuade his sisters, and all the household of the Schloss, to accompany them to Ireland; his sons would not have been allowed to. But it was easier for his sisters to continue with the familiar than to embark upon the strangeness of a country they had scarcely heard of. And they were getting on in years, and less pessimistic about the future than their brother.

“So we came alone to our sanctuary, and live with the guilt of it, Harry There is always guilt in running away.”

Listening to her voice, I found myself wondering what happened in the drawing-room after my afternoon visits. Did she lie for a little longer on the sofa and then rise from it to prepare a meal for her husband? It was hard to imagine her with her sleeves rolled up and an apron tied over her dress. She did not appear to belong in a kitchen, with meat and vegetables and bread-soda. Yet Daphie did not strike me as someone capable of preparing meals: Daphie belonged more with brushes and dusters and tins of Brasso. A long time later I discovered that Herr Messinger did all the cooking at Cloverhill.

“Always be gentle with my husband, Harry Not just his country, but a way of life, has been destroyed by criminals. That is not pleasant for any man to bear, you know.”

She had never before spoken of Herr Messinger in this manner, and certainly I had not thought of him as someone with whom it was necessary to be gentle. Yet now, so long afterwards, I understand, for the pictures that filled his mind—his sons engaged in futile battles, the Schloss a barracks, the old women weeping in the cafes—must daily have felt like a canker consuming him.

“When I was young, Harry, far younger than you are now, I used to wonder what life was going to be like.” She smiled in her sudden way, her evenly-arranged teeth whitely glistening. She had imagined an existence in the English countryside, watching her mother growing old, collecting bone china. “I always loved pretty things, Harry. Thimbles and tiny mantelpiece ornaments. Such little objects were always in the houses we stayed at, but of course they were never mine. My husband has made up for that.” She showed me a cabinet fall of objets d’art that I had hardly noticed before, in the corner of the drawing-room. Some of the china was German, some English. “Cheek by jowl, Harry, making the silly war seem sillier.”

In a small garden she would have grown anemones, which were her favourite flower. “I did not see how I could marry, yet later I did of course.” She smiled but did not explain that further: why it was she had chosen Herr Messinger, having rejected the young Englishman whom I had so very clearly seen walking with her in the poppied meadow on the day after her eighteenth birthday, when there were tears on her cheeks because she was in love. Herr Messinger, with his lined, square face and his drooping eyelid, was different in every way from the dark-haired figure in a white cotton suit and panama hat I had imagined. “It was impossible that my husband and I should not marry,” was all she said.

I left her reluctantly on the last day of my holidays, wondering who would fetch the glass batteries for her until I returned, hoping no one would. Her eyes smiled her own particular farewell at me as she lay languid on the sofa, a cigarette she had not yet lit between her fingers. The bumblebee was still in the room, darting between the two brass lamps that hung from the ceiling, settling on one glass globe and then the other, before again becoming restless.

As I walked through dwindling sunshine, down the avenue and out on to the empty road, strange fantasies possessed me. I saw with vividness the Messingers’ marriage in the German cathedral, candles alight on the altar, guests mysterious in a twilight gloom. I heard the singing of a choir, and then the bridal couple were in their honeymoon bedroom, she still in her wedding-dress, he pouring champagne into glasses. They ate slices of their wedding cake and laughed in their happiness, defying the war that already threatened to deprive them of it.

TWO

At the Reverend Wauchope’s rectory, in the bedroom I shared with Mandeville and Houris-key and Mahoney-Byron, I journeyed again to Cloverhill, as I do in my memories to this day. At the grammar school my inability to learn what I was required to learn was soothed by possessive daydreams, my failure to make sense of mathematical abstractions lightened. Although later I wished I had not, I described to my companions at the rectory Frau Messinger’s flawless skin and the way she had of smiling when she looked at you, and her jet-black hair. I mentioned her perfectly painted lips. “Holy Jesus!” Mandeville whispered, his voice reverent with envy; Houriskey wanted to know if I ever got a look up her skirts. At Lisscoe grammar school there was a lot of talk like that; all humour was soiled, double meanings were teased out of innocence. When I described the clothes Frau Messinger wore I could see from Mahoney-Byron’s expression that, one by one, he lifted the garments from her body.

“You haven’t a snap of her?” Mandeville asked quietly.

“There are only the wedding photographs in her bedroom.”

“Were you in her bedroom?”

“She showed me one time.”

“Jesus Christ, man!” Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron shouted, perfectly in unison, but Mande-ville’s reaction was more intense and private. Mandeville was an emaciated boy with spectacles, the ravages of a departed acne still evident about his nose and chin. He had wavy fair hair that he brushed back from his forehead, with a central parting. Mandeville was besotted by the younger of the two English princesses, an infatuation that had developed in him the ambition to find employment of some kind in Buckingham Palace. Houriskey and Mahoney-Byron were bigger, heavier boys, the sons of farmers.

“What’d she show you in the bedroom?” Houriskey asked.

“Nothing; only what it was like. She showed me every room in the house one time.”

“Why’d she do that?”

“Because she’s bored, I suppose.”

“God, you bugger!”

It had not occurred to me until that moment that she was bored. “Harry, would you like to see the house?” she had said, then led the way from room to room, pausing longest in the bedroom she shared with her husband. “You can lie in bed, Harry, and listen to the birds.” It was a room in which, apart from a trouser-press and the pillow on which he rested his head, there was little trace of Herr Messinger. Her hairbrushes and her scent bottles were arranged among the silverframed wedding photographs on the dressing-table; her dresses hung in a wardrobe which she opened; a row of her shoes stretched between the two windows, their toes neatly in line; her nightdress, silkily pale-green, lay on the candlewick eiderdown; perfume scented the air.

“If she took you into her bedroom she was on for it,” Houriskey said. He laughed coarsely, at the same time as Mahoney-Byron. Mandeville

smiled. Houriskey acquired jokes from an odd-job man on his father’s farm and conveyed a stock of them to the school with each new term. They had to do with honeymoon couples, mislaid clothing, and intimacies concerning the odd-job man’s wife. Raucous laughter emanated from Mahoney-Byron as each anecdote reached its conclusion, but Mandeville always only smiled.