Nights at the Alexandra Read Online Free PDF Page B

she had to rub the life back into them. “Daphie is good at fires,” she had said, but I guessed that in the big draughty rooms it would be chilly, no matter how vigorously the fires blazed. I imagined her husband in the frost-whitened landscape, felling trees and sawing them into logs. He and one of his men would go about the task in silence, skilfully working the cross-saw. Daphie would appear with a can of tea.
    “Whatever’s this stupid nonsense?” the Reverend Wauchope tetchily demanded one evening, sending for me specially. “You’re making yourself important, are you, with reports of German spies? That amounts to falsehood, you know.”
    A rumour had got going in the grammar school, I endeavoured to explain. It was without foundation; it was simply that a German had come to live near the town I came from.
    “Rumours are grapeshot for the enemy. We will pray to God.” I didn’t listen to his voice, but imagined instead how astonished the Messingers would be if they could see us. She would laugh her tinkling laugh, her head thrown slightly back. He would shrug his shoulders in his expressive way.
    “Stand up, man, stand up.” Renewed crossness interrupted my reflections, for I had remained on my knees longer than I should have. “Your stupidity is a mockery of the human race. Go from my sight, boy.”
    Castigated on one score by the Reverend Wau-chope, I was approached on another by the assistant master. He sought me out when I was alone in a classroom, spoke first of the cold weather, made enquiries about my family, then said: “There’s talk of a certain nature that goes on between yourself and your friends.”
    “What kind of talk’s that, Mr. Conron?”
    “You know what I’m referring to. Involving women.”
    I shook my head, instantly denying this.
    “Mr. Wauchope would not discuss things of that nature with you on account of he’s a clergyman. So it falls to myself.”
    “I understand, sir.”
    “Mandeville carries a photograph of a woman around with him. There’s a certain type of story Houriskey tells. There’s stories you’ve made up yourself apparently.”
    “Which stories are those, Mr. Conron?”
    He turned his tormented eyes away from me. In one of his trouser pockets he snapped a piece of chalk in half. His fingers emerged with one portion lightly held. He looked at it. Still doing so, he said:
    “You have a pretence that you go to a house where there’s a woman.”
    “A pretence, Mr. Conron?”
    “Something you’d make up in your mind, the same as Mandeville with the photograph in his pocket. When you’d talk about a matter like that it would acquire a reality for you.”
    I might have explained that, in fact, the opposite had occurred, but I did not do so. The assistant master said something I didn’t hear and then referred to carnal temptation, enquiring as to my familiarity with it. “Bad thoughts are at the root of carnal temptation. Things you’d pretend about.”
    “I understand, sir.”
    “It’s best to avoid talk that would lead the way to it.”
    “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