Nights at the Alexandra Read Free Page A

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:
    “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