Nights at the Alexandra (5 page)

“I’ll take your advice, sir.”

Mr. Conron regarded a stain on the boarded floor. In a voice so low that, again, I could hardly hear it he said:

“Did you ever pretend anything about Mrs. Wauchope?”

I imagined, when I repeated this, Houriskey’s and Mahoney-Byron’s raucous laughter, and the intensity developing in Mandeville’s expression. I shook my head. I had never pretended anything about Mrs. Wauchope, I said; nor, since I was asked this too, about the maid, Lottie Belle.

The eyes closed, in relief or otherwise I had no way of knowing. “Avoid anything like that,” Mr. Conron advised, and I felt ashamed that I had ever spoken of Frau Messinger in the rectory or the school.

“Well, I’ll tell you a queer thing,” my father said when I returned home at the end of that term. “You’ll never guess what I’m going to tell you.”

Ponderous head-wagging took place. I said I couldn’t guess.

“There’s talk of a picture house for the town. Did you ever hear the beat of that?”

I said I never had. There was money in a picture house, my father went on. Maguire the auctioneer had been going to build one nine years ago only he dropped dead. In the length and breadth of Ireland there wasn’t a town of the same population that didn’t possess a picture house. Didn’t it take a cute old Hun to put his finger on the shame of it?

“D’you mean
he’s
going to build it?”

“Sure, we’re a disgrace to the world,” my father said.

On Christmas Eve the town was crowded with people who had come in from the country, people you did not usually see on the streets. An old man in rags was playing an accordion, tinker women begged. Public houses were noisy, and as I walked down Laffan Street on my way to the Ballinadee road there was an air all around me of expectation and excitement. Soft misty rain had begun to fall; my clothes were wringing wet by the time I reached Cloverhill House.

“Stand by the fire,” Frau Messinger urged in the drawing-room. “Oh, Harry, you are foolish! You could catch your death!”

Her husband, wearing riding breeches and gaiters, was crouched on the floor, poring over a mass of papers he had spread out on the fleur-de-lis pattern of the carpet. He was smoking a thin, black cigar and when he greeted me he confirmed what my father had said: he intended to build a cinema. The papers were the plans for its construction. It was a marriage gift for his wife, he said. She had asked for it specially.

“But, Harry, that site they offer me is not good. Too near the slum part of the town.”

Frau Messinger said hardly anything; she never did in her husband’s presence. Instead she smiled with pleasure, delighting in his enthusiasm over the drawings on the carpet. His legs were tucked under him, a stubby finger indicated features of the proposed architecture. In the auditorium the seats would be tiered and there would be a balcony; most important of all, apparently, there would be Western Electric sound.

“On the curtains the pattern will be of butterflies, Harry.”

I did not know much about cinemas. Twice during my years at Lisscoe grammar school the Reverend Wauchope had granted permission for his boarders to attend Hussey’s Picture House under the supervision of Mr. Conron. We had sat enthralled, watching W. C. Fields and Edna May Oliver, and Charles Laughton in
Mutiny on the Bounty.
There’d been no balcony and no curtains such as Herr Messinger described; in the fourpenny seats gangs of ragged urchins had ceaselessly talked and whistled.

“This is where we’ve chosen instead, Harry.” The cinema was to be where the two derelict houses stood in the square. It would transform the square, Herr Messinger promised, with baskets of plants hanging at intervals along the facade.
The Alexandra
announced towering letters on a sketch. “Well, Harry, what do you think?”

“It’s grand.”

“The idea is it should be grand. The box-office like so, stairs whichever side you prefer to mount to the balcony. Two usherettes.”

“Usherettes?”

“We have planned the dress: blue with gold on it, epaulettes to the shoulder.”

He showed me a sketch of a girl in such a uniform, then showed me other details: the mechanism that allowed the seats to fold back when they were not in use, the lighting arrangement that caused the butterfly curtains to change colour, the removable ashtrays. When we had perused all that, he gathered the plans and the sketches into a roll and secured them with a rubber band.

“The town will be the better,” Frau Messinger murmured, so softly that the remark was almost lost. People would delight in the cinema, she went on, her tone becoming a little louder. It would be a centre of life, as a church was. From miles around people would ride in on their bicycles for a few hours of relaxation; they would come in traps and jaunting-cars, and when the Emergency was over they would come in motorcars.

“And, Harry, there is employment for you,”

Herr Messinger interrupted. “When you have finished at that school of yours.”

I looked astonished. He laughed.

“Why not, heh? Would you object to work for me? You choose instead to spend your lifetime with planks of wood? You have a brother, Harry?” When I replied that I had two he nodded and went on doing so, one eye invisible behind the drooping lid. Since I had two brothers, he pointed out, there was a double reason why I should not be required in my father’s business.

“I would place you in the box-office, Harry, to sell the tickets. Later on maybe to oversee the cleaning. To pay the wages of the usherettes. Soon you would learn, Harry. Soon we would learn together.”

My mother would consider that selling tickets in a cinema was inferior to taking my place in the timberyard. My mother’s tongue became sharp in anger: having suffered pain and inconvenience bringing four children into the world she demanded sensibleness in return. My father would be bewildered and confused, as he was by any deviation from his own assumptions. “Errah, get on with you, girl,” he’d said when Annie had wanted to go to Dublin to sell dresses in Arnott’s or Switzer’s. Wasn’t she the luckiest girl in the town to have a decent position waiting for her in the accounts shed, with old Miss McLure ready to retire? My mother had been more forceful: she’d given Annie what she called “a dressing down,” pointing out that shop-work was on a par with being a skivvy, that the rest of the family would not be able to hold their heads above the disgrace of it. For days there’d been the sound of Annie’s weeping and her blotched face at mealtimes. And, ever since, the sullenness had been part of her.

“So we are arranged,” Herr Messinger said, with confidence. “Always, since we married, I have dreamed to make a gift like this. Imagine it, Harry, she married an old tortoise like me!” He laughed and kissed her. She clung to him for a moment, whispering something I could not hear. They laughed together; he lit another cigar. He said:

“She wants it to be nice for everyone. I want it to be nice for her. That is how a gift must be.” He went away with his roll of plans, and after a moment his wife offered me a cigarette. I leaned forward so that the flame of her circular cigarette-lighter might catch the tip of it. The brief touch of her fingers was as cold as marble. She said:

“I could not give him children.” Her smile continued to indulge him after he had left the room. Her own name was Alexandra, which was something I had not known before: even though she had failed him, he was offering her a gift which was to be created as she wished, to bring pleasure to strangers. All he asked was that, it seemed: the fulfilment of a whim in her.

“We can live without anything but love, Harry. Always remember that.”

Daphie brought in the tea, and it was poured. I was made to continue standing by the fire, although my clothes were dry by now and in any case would become damp again on my journey home. All the time, while she talked once more about her past, I thought about the offer that had been made to me. I could feel the cosy claustrophobia of the tiny office of the plans, the window in the glass, hands offering money. For the first time—I think the only time—I hardly listened to the childhood incidents related to me, to the speculations about her unknown father’s appearance, the journeying through England and through Germany, and Bach mellifluous on the organ in that candlelit cathedral. There would be green tickets, and red and grey, and I would tear them off singly or in twos and threes; I would dole out pleasure to patrons of all ages.

Before I left that day she asked me to kiss her because it was Christmas Eve. I touched her cheek with my lips, and for a moment she slipped her hand into mine. Christmas would be quiet at Cloverhill, she said: she and her husband would exchange presents, and there were presents for Daphie and the workmen. They would sit together by the fire. “And I have this for you, Harry.”

She gave me a tie-pin, a slender bar of gold. She’d found it years ago, she said, on one of her early-morning strolls about Munster. She’d seen it gleaming on a paving-stone, where someone had lost it the night before. “I used to wonder about that person,” she said, “but I haven’t for a long time now. It’s time I gave this away.”

She showed me how to pin it into my collar, beneath my tie, but on the way home I took it out in case it should again work itself loose. I have never worn it, fearing its loss, but often I take it from my dressing-table drawer and slip it for a moment into my collar before returning it to safety. Of all I have, it is my most treasured possession.

In the new year, workmen began the demolition of the two empty houses in the square and my brothers and I watched from a distance. Stones and bricks were carried away in lorries, the silver-painted railings that had rusted in front of the two gardens suddenly weren’t there any more.

“Oh, the Hun boys don’t let the grass grow,” my father said, knocking pepper over a plate of sausages in the dining-room. The timber for the new building was to be supplied from our yard, and for that he was naturally pleased, but he had not yet come to terms with Herr Messinger’s decision to supply a town in which he was a stranger with a cinema. Between moments of attention paid to his sausages, he remarked upon the swift determination with which the German had acted. “And isn’t it a surprising thing, the way he’d have got the money out of Germany?”

“Did he send for it?” my mother enquired, without much interest.

“Errah, how could he, for God’s sake? Isn’t there a war raging over there?”

My mother never seemed offended by such scorn, appearing to accept it as her due, even nodding her agreement with it. But just occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year, her pusillanimity gave way to protest and in the privacy of their bedroom she could be heard spiritedly shouting abuse at my father, calling him uncouth and unclean, bitterly asserting she’d rather share a bed with an animal. His own voice in reply was always so mumbling and low that you couldn’t hear properly what he said; but his tone suggested that he didn’t deny her accusations, perhaps even promised to do better in the future.

“Is it she that has the money, boy? Did the woman ever tell you?”

I shook my head. I said I had obtained no knowledge of the Messingers’ financial arrangements, or the source or distribution of their wealth. I was not telling the truth since I knew