Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor

Author:William Trevor [Trevor, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375504716
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THREE

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

Frau Messinger to have been a poor relation, and her husband to be a member of a well-to-do family. None of that seemed anyone’s business except their own; certainly it was not a titbit to be carried into the back bar of Viney’s hotel.

“There’s money there somewhere,” my father said.

We sat around the dining-room table, all of us eating sausages and fried bread, my grandmothers silently cantankerous with one another, my father airing his views. News he had heard during the day’s business was imparted at this hour, anecdotes repeated, deaths and births announced.

“They were saying in Viney’s,” he reported now, “that there’s marble on order for the front steps. Did you ever meet the beat of that, marble steps for a picture house!”

“Is it the Connemara marble?” my mother enquired.

“What else would it be? What’s the price of Connemara, Annie?”

It was a delusion of my father’s that because she kept the timberyard accounts Annie was conversant with the price of any commodity that had to do with the building trade. “Corrugated, Annie?” he had a way of saying in the diningroom.

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