Nights at the Alexandra Hardcover - 2001

Excerpt

One

I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.

"Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that."

That is what I hear most often and with the greatest pleasure: Frau Messinger's voice as precisely recalled as memory allows, each quizzical intonation reflected in a glance or gesture. I must have replied something, Heaven knows what: it never mattered because she rarely listened. The war had upset the Messingers' lives, she being an Englishwoman and he German. It brought them to Ireland and to Cloverhill-a sanctuary they most certainly would not otherwise have known. She explained to me that she would not have found life comfortable in Hitler's Germany; and her own country could hardly be a haven for her husband. They had thought of Switzerland, but Herr Messinger believed that Switzerland would be invaded; and the United States did not tempt them. No one but I, at that time an unprepossessing youth of fifteen, ever used their German titles: in the town where I'd been born they were Mr. and Mrs. Messinger, yet it seemed to me-affectation, I daresay-that in this way we should honour the strangers that they were.

When first I heard of the Messingers I had just returned from the Reverend Wauchope's rectory, where I lodged in term-time in order to attend Lisscoe grammar school. My father told me about them. He said the man was twice the woman's age; he imagined they were Jews since they attended no church. A lot of Jews had slipped away from Germany, he ponderously added.

As a matter of principle, I refused to be interested in anything my father related, but a few days later I saw Frau Messinger stepping out of her husband's motor-car in Laffan Street and guessed at once who she was. The motor-car was powered by propane gas, a complicated apparatus being mounted where part of the luggage compartment had been removed: no one had petrol to spare during what in Ireland we called the "Emergency," and energy so ingeniously contrived was rare. A group of loiterers had gathered round the motor-car. Frau Messinger paid them no attention.

"Will you carry something for me?" she said to me, and pointed at the wet battery of a wireless-set on the floor by the passenger seat. "Might I ask you to carry it to the garage, and bring the other back?"

It is odd to think that those were the first words I heard her speak. Other boys had previously undertaken this chore: for some particular reason of her own she chose not to drive into Aldritt's garage and have the used battery replaced there by the one that had been recharged. Vaguely, she referred to that when she returned to the motor-car with her shopping, something about it being less of a nuisance like this. She opened the passenger door and showed me how to wedge the battery to prevent it from toppling over. "I'd really be most awfully lost without the wireless," she said, giving me a threepenny-piece.

Media reviews

"As his master Chekhov did, William Trevor simply, patiently, truthfully allows life to present itself, without preaching; he is the master of the small movements of conscience that worry away at the human imagination and our passions."
-- V. S. Pritchett

"Trevor writes of the piercing tragedies and grand dramas of everyday life in a tone through which the echoes of Chekhov and Maupassant are clearly audible. Like theirs, Trevor's view of the world is melancholy and unsparing... But like them, too, his work is supported by a fundamental optimism, a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit and rare sustaining power of love."
--The Sunday Telegraph (London)