Nights at the Alexandra

56 Pages·2001·0.39 MB·English

by  William Trevor

W T
ILLIAM REVOR
NIGHTS AT THE ALEXANDRA
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
2001 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1987 by William Trevor
M L and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,
ODERN IBRARY
Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Harper Collins Publishers,
Inc., in 1987. This edition was published by arrangement with the author.
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
WILLIAM TREVOR
William Trevor, the acclaimed Anglo-Irish short story writer, novelist, and
dramatist, was born on May 24, 1928, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, of middle-
class Protestant parents. He experienced an unsettled childhood; his family
relocated frequently throughout the south of Ireland. He attended a variety of
schools before entering St. Columba’s College, Dublin, in 1942. “That constant
moving has left me something of an outsider and a loner,” reflected Trevor. “I
never think of a particular home in Ireland, but always of Ireland itself as being
home.” Shortly after graduating in 1950 from Trinity College, Dublin, he
accepted a position teaching art in England and later abandoned a successful
career as a sculptor to pursue writing. A member of the Irish Academy of
Letters, Trevor was named honorary Commander of the British Empire in 1977
in recognition of his services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times
Award for Literary Excellence, and in 1999 he was awarded the prestigious
David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime of literary
achievement. William Trevor lives in Devon, England.
“Trevor is one of the very best writers of our era,” judged The Washington
Post Book World. He made an auspicious literary debut in 1964 with the
publication of The Old Boys, a satire about English public schools that earned
him the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. He soon consolidated his reputation
with The Boarding-House (1965), a sprawling Dickensian tale centered around a
group of misfits who share lodgings in suburban London, and The Love
Department (1966), a contemporary moral fable about love and marriage.
Trevor’s next three novels, Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Miss Gomez
and the Brethren (1971), and Elizabeth Alone (1973), reflect his fascination with
the lives of women. He garnered the Whitbread Literary Award for both The
Children of Dynmouth (1976), the tale of a small seaside town that is harshly
exposed by the prurient curiosity of a sadistic teenager, and Fools of Fortune
(1983), his first full-length treatment of the Anglo-Irish conflict. Other novels
include Other People's Worlds (1980), a compassionate portrait of a talented
sociopath and his victims; The Silence in the Garden (1988), an unraveling of
Ireland’s cruel secrets; Felicia’s Journey (1994), a chilling psychological thriller
that won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award; and Death in Summer (1998),
a sympathetic depiction of the sadness and damage that lie at the heart of some
lives. In addition he has written Nights at the Alexandra (1987), the tender story
of a provincial Irish town in the 1940s, and Two Lives (1991), comprising the
paired novellas My House in Umbria and Reading Turgenev, which was short-
listed for the 1991 Booker Prize. “ Two Lives demonstrates the grace and
assurance of a writer at the peak of his powers,” said Anne Tyler. Juliet’s Story,
his first novel for children, was published in 1991. “I think of Trevor as being
among the best writers we have in English,” declared Mary Gordon. And
novelist Thomas Flanagan observed: “William Trevor is wonderful, lyrical,
hilarious when he wants to be, graced with endless powers of laconic and precise
observation, shamefully charming, and, in the end, heartbreaking.”
Trevor has earned equal praise for his short stories, many of which have
appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. “There is no better short story
writer in the English-speaking world,” said The Wall Street Journal, and V. S.
Pritchett deemed Trevor “one of the finest short story writers at present writing
in the Anglo-Irish modes.” His many collections of short fiction include The Day
We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Angels at the
Ritz (1975), Lovers of Their Time (1978), Beyond the Pale [\9 81), The News
from Ireland (1986), Family Sins (1990), After Rain (1996), and The Hill
Bachelors (2000). “Trevor is probably the greatest living writer of short stories
in the English language,” stated The New Yorker upon publication of The
Collected Stories (1992), his magnum opus of short fiction. “His sixties stories
have a wondrous sense of sixtiesness, of youth-quake and space-out and sexual
abandon; his seventies stories darken and brood, and the cloud that hangs over
them is often the troubles in Northern Ireland, which cleave relationships
hundreds of miles away as surely as a newly revealed adultery. His more recent
stories take him to the past, often an Irish past, and Trevor increasingly seems to
take the long view, watching the way family curses infect generations, the way
national curses continue over centuries.” And Reynolds Price noted: “With this
new immense collection, William Trevor has filed in serene selftrust the results
of years of work of impeccable strength and a piercing profundity that’s very
seldom surpassed in short fiction.”
“William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly
incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence,” said The New York Times Book
Review. Though best known for his novels and short stories he has also
published A Writer's Ireland (1984), an informal history of Irish literary
achievement, and Excursions in the Real World (1993), a volume of memoirs.
His several plays, which have been staged in both London and Dublin, include
The Old Boys (1971), Going Home (1972), Marriages (1973), and Scenes from
an Album (1981). “I don’t know who now has most right to claim Mr. Trevor,
England or Ireland,” said John Fowles. “It is clear to me that his excellence
comes from a happy marriage of central values in both traditions. Art of this
solidity and quality cannot be written from inside frontiers. It is, in the best sense
of the word, international.”
“Trevor amazes me with the variety of his subjects,” remarked novelist and
critic Doris Grumbach. “What a good writer, what a superb story-teller, and he
has gone on for so long being so good.” The Sunday Telegraph (London) noted:
“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.” V. S.
Pritchett agreed: “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.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “one of the finest writers now at
work in our language,” and The Washington Post Book World concluded: “To be
a master of the story and a master of the novel is a distinction achieved by
precious few writers, but such a master is William Trevor.”

NIGHTS
AT THE
ALEXANDRA
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
motorcar in Laffan Street and guessed at once who she was. The motorcar 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 motorcar. 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 motorcar 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.
She was an extremely thin, tall woman, her jet-black hair piled high, her eyes
blue, her full lips meticulously painted: I had never seen anyone as beautiful, nor
heard a voice that made me so deliciously shiver. You looked for a blemish on
her hands, on the skin of her neck or her face, I wrote in a notebook I kept later
in my life. There wasn’t one. I could have closed my eyes and listened to that
husky timbre for ever.
“There is something that hasn’t come in to Kickham’s,” she said. “It’s due
on the bus this afternoon. Might I ask you to bring it out to Cloverhill for me?”
I remember that more distinctly than any other moment in my life. She was
already in the car when she spoke, and her tone of voice was not one normally
employed when making a request. With a gentle imperiousness, she commanded
what she wished, and before she drove away she glanced at me once, a smile
flittering across her thin features. The street-corner loiterers watched the slow
progress of the car until it was out of sight, and then returned to lean again
against the corner of Duggan’s public house. I stood where I was, still aware of
tremors dancing beneath my skin.
“What kind of a female is she?” my father enquired when he discovered—
not from me—that I’d been addressed by Frau Messinger on the street. He was
surprised when I told him that in my opinion she was an Englishwoman. He
insisted I was mistaken, just as later he refused to accept that the Messingers