William Trevor - Nights at the Alexandra

“What’s your man Messinger like?” Mahoney-Byron asked. “Is he a spy?”

I described Herr Messinger. I said I doubted that he was a spy. Mahoney-Byron, who kept photographs of Hitler and Himmler between the pages of his Hall’s Geometry, looked disappointed. “Mr. Churchill’s stupidity,” Mahoney-Byron liked to drawl in the mocking accents of Lord Haw-Haw, “has led his island people to the brink of final destruction. There will not be a city street intact unless this addled old man ceases to feed falsehoods to a weary population.”

The rectory was situated beside the grammar school itself—two unadorned brick buildings in the middle of Lisscoe, which was a town more than twice the size of the one I knew so well but offering a similar provincial ambience. The lower panes of all the ground-floor windows of the school were painted white; in the rectory a smell of damp hung about the bare-board passages and the dining-room. On moist days this dampness penetrated to our bedroom, which was mostly occupied by our four beds and the pitchpine cupboard we kept our clothes in. “We will pray to God,” the elderly Reverend Wauchope had said the first time he led us into this room—an insistence we were to become familiar with, the words demanding that, irrespective of whatever activity was taking place, those involved in it should fall at once to their knees. In her grimy basement kitchen the clergyman’s wife vented a sour disposition on the food she cooked, assisted by a maid called Lottie Belle, whose inordinate stoutness contrasted dramatically with the spare frame of Mr. Conron, the assistant master at the grammar school, who lodged at the rectory also. Mr. Con-ron’s wasted features were twisted in what appeared to be torment; his eyes were shifty.

While I talked about the Messingers in these surroundings and among these people, I sometimes felt I was relating a dream. The open French windows, the bumblebee and the scent of flowers, Herr Messinger astride his farm horse: all of it seemed so remote as to be outside the realms of existence. And why had they taken to me, awkward youth that I was? “It’s good you come, Harry,” Herr Messinger had said. “A visitor is nice for her.” Did she miss me, I wondered, as I missed her? Did she remember me when she connected the wires to the battery?

“Did you never think of winking at the woman?” Houriskey suggested. “You could be sitting there and give a wink that could be an accident.”

“I don’t think she’d like being winked at.”

“God, you bugger!”

The four of us walked slowly around a field where cattle grazed, behind the red-brick rectory. When he’d said Grace in the dining-room that evening the Reverend Wauchope had kept us on our feet to announce the number of RAF planes that had returned from a bombing mission. He always did this when the news was good, permitting us to eat immediately when it was not. “We will pray to God,” he had commanded, and while the grease congealed on the surface of his wife’s mutton soup we sank to our knees, our arms clasped around the backs of our chairs in the manner ordained for dining-room gratitude to the Almighty. Mahoney-Byron’s plea for similar Luftwaffe success was kept low.

“Sure, why wouldn’t he be a spy?” he persisted in the field, reminding me of my father’s refusal to accept that the Messingers were not Jews. It was unlikely that a spy would be married to an Englishwoman, I said, but Mahoney-Byron told me to look for morse-code equipment in a barn, maybe hidden under a load of hay. “There’s a man in Dublin,” he went on, “with his house built in the shape of a swastika so’s a Messerschmidt pilot would know where he was. Have a look in case your man has trees planted in the shape of a swastika. Or fences. Have a gander at the fences.”

We began our second circuit of the field. I could not see how spying might be engaged in from Cloverhill House but I did not say so; nor did I reveal that Herr Messinger had three sons in the Nazi army—for which the war at that time appeared to be going well. Norway and Denmark had capitulated. Holland, Belgium and France had fallen. The Messerschmidts Mahoney-Byron spoke of were clearly inflicting greater damage than radio commentators other than the notorious Lord Haw-Haw admitted: listeners at a distance made allowances for the fear that kept the truth obscure.

“I had a dream last night,” Mandeville murmured, removing his wire-rimmed spectacles and wiping them on the cuff of his jacket. His expression indicated that Cloverhill House and the Messingers were deemed exhausted as a conversational topic, at least for the time being. He coughed softly, which was a way of his. “I was in a room with the King when she came in with a book in her hand. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ he says, only she’s shy because of myself. But afterwards she comes up to me and says it’s a poetry book. There’s nothing she likes better than poetry.”

“Write her a letter,” Houriskey urged. “She’d like to hear you were dreaming about her.”

“The day will come when I’ll be telling her about this place, how I was thinking about her every hour that went by.”

“She’d be interested all right.”

As well as Mandeville’s belief that he would find employment in Buckingham Palace, other vocational ambitions were aired from time to time. Houriskey’s desire was to emigrate to the northern Canadian fishing grounds, a region for which he had developed an affection that puzzled us. Mahoney-Byron wished to pursue a talent he had for throwing his voice, investing inanimate objects, or creatures not normally so gifted, with speech. He believed he would find employment with Duffy’s circus, and had contrived an act in which a number of giraffes engaged one another in conversation. As for myself, all I wanted was not to have to work in the timberyard. I would have readily agreed to become a schoolmaster like Mr. Conron, or a post-office clerk or a meal-office clerk. But the timberyard and my father’s ubiquitous presence in it, the endless whine of the saws, mud pitched up from the wheels of lorries, the rattle of rain on corrugated iron, the bitter odour of resin: that prospect appalled me, and I knew that what would accompany it within myself was the sullenness that had developed in my sister. “Forty-one years I’ve been at it,” my father used to say, appropriately altering the reference as another year passed. He had worked in the yard as a child of ten; his own father had run around the town barefoot, the only Protestant child for twenty-nine miles so ill-clad. I dreaded the day when the hall-door would close behind both of us, when we would walk the few yards together to the timberyard, my sister Annie arriving later because the accounts shed didn’t open until nine. Larchwood, beech, ash, oak dressed or left in its sawn condition, mahogany in short supply because of the Emergency: this would replace the dank corridors of the rectory and the white-painted classroom windows. At one o’clock I would return over the same few yards with my father and my sister, and my father would hold forth while we ate boiled bacon or chops. My grandmothers would ask him to repeat what all of us had already heard only too well; my brothers would snigger. There’d be semolina with a spoonful of blackberry jam, stewed rhubarb in season; there’d be Jacob’s Cream Crackers with butter and Galtee cheese if my father was still hungry. That Jacob’s invented the cream cracker was one of my father’s greatly favoured mealtime statements.

“I have my little dotey with me here.” Man-deville produced from the back pocket of his trousers a grubby newspaper photograph of the princess. “Is there a lovelier creature alive?”

We agreed that there wasn’t and continued our walk in silence, each of us lost in fantasy. I might become a servant at Cloverhill House; I might keep the flower-beds tidy and the grass cut on the lawns; I might work in the fields with Herr Messinger. I wouldn’t mind sitting in the kitchen with the young maid, taking my meals with her, and doing whatever they wanted me to do, growing anemones or lighting the fires every morning.