Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor Read Free Book Online Page A

the strength to hit anyone.” I paused, leisurely dividing a piece of fried bread into triangular segments. I imagined myself in the box-office, telling people who asked me that Gone with the Wind wouldn’t end till one o’clock in the morning. “Conron’s a type of loony,” I told my brothers.
    My father was taken aback. The grin that had been twitching about his lips gradually evaporated. Before I’d been sent to lodge in the rectory he used to read from a letter he’d received from the Reverend Wauchope which itemised the attractions of the boarding arrangements for Lisscoe grammar school. Around this same dining-table we had listened to elaborate inaccuracies about well-heated rooms and plentiful supplies of fresh vegetables from the rectory’s own garden. The assistant master lodged at the rectory also, the letter said, so that discipline was maintained.
    “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life,” my father muttered crossly.
    “A boy from Enniscorthy says Conron was in the loony place they have there. He used to roll a hoop along the road. He thought he was Galloping O’Hogan.”
    “That’s eejity talk, boy Don’t take any notice of it,” my father sternly advised my brothers.
    “I’m only saying what I was told,” I said. “You’d be sorry for poor Conron.”
    “What’s the trouble?” one of my grandmothers demanded, and I began to repeat all over again what I’d just told my brothers, but my father interrupted me and shouted at my grandmother not to waste her energy listening. “No man could teach in a classroom if he was a lunatic. We’ve heard enough of it.” he said to me. “Annie, did the pine come in?”
    There was a film Houriskey had seen in which the main actor was employed in the box-office of a theatre when all the time he wanted to be on the stage. To make matters worse, he fell in love with an actress who passed by the box-office every night. That was the kind of thing you’d have to be careful about. You could become so familiar with a film actress on the screen that before you knew where you were you’d be in love with her, suffering like the actor, or poor Mandeville over the royal princess.
    “What’s this?” my mother demanded, two days after my slandering of the assistant master. She held in the palm of her hand Frau Messinger’s Christmas present. I had hidden it under the drawer-paper in my bedroom.
    “It’s a tie-pin. You put it in your collar.” “Where d’you get it?”
    “I found it on the street.”
    “That’s a lie.”
    “I found it outside Kickham’s on Christmas Eve.”
    “That isn’t true.”
    Tears pressed against my eyelids. I didn’t know why they had come so suddenly, or why so urgently they demanded to be released. I realise now they were tears of anger.
    “Why are you telling me lies?”
    “They’re not lies. Someone dropped the thing on the street.”
    “Don’t tell me lies on a Sunday, Harry. Did you steal it? Did you take it off someone at school?”
    “I’m telling you I didn’t.”
    She stood there in her Sunday clothes, two patches of scarlet spreading on her cheeks, the way they always did when she was cross. I had entered the bedroom I’d once shared with Annie and now had for myself. She’d been there, with the drawer still open. What right had she to go looking in my drawers?
    “Frau Messinger gave it to me at Christmas.” “Mrs. Messinger:
    “Out at Cloverhill—”
    “I know where the woman lives. Are you telling me the truth now?”
    “Yes.”
    “What’d she give you a Christmas present for?” “She just gave it to me.”
    “She gives you cigarettes too. You come back smelling of cigarettes.”
    “I smoke the odd one.”
    “If your father heard this he’d take the belt to you.”
    I did not reply, and it was my mother who wept, not I. In her navy-blue, Sunday clothes she soundlessly wept and I watched the tears come from her eyes and run into the powder of the face she had prepared for