Nights at the Alexandra Read Free Page B

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