Nights at the Alexandra Read Online Free PDF Page A

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