Nights at the Alexandra

William Trevor

NIGHTS AT THE ALEXANDRA

THE MODERN LIBRARY 

NEW YORK

2001 Modern Library Edition

Copyright © 1987 by William Trevor

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and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in hardcover by Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., in 1987. This edition was published by arrangement with the author.

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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

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?”