Free Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor

longer want the pale-straw wine. But he, of course, was used to things being as they were, and ate and drank as usual. I had no knowledge of death; I had never experienced its sorrow or its untimely shock. “Well, that was sudden,” my father would say before sitting down in the dining-room, and then reveal the name of a person who had died. “God’s mercy, the Reverend Wauchope’s scratchy voice would plead in the prayers to do with losses in the war. Shops closed their doors when a faneral crept by, the blinds of windows drawn down to honour the flower-laden coffin, the hooves of black-plumed horses the only sound.
    Herr Messinger lit one of his small cigars. In silence he made coffee. I lifted from the table the plates off which we had eaten and placed them on the draining-board by the sink. I ran the tap but he said that Daphie would attend to all that when she returned. He spoke again of his wife.
    “She will see the cinema open its doors. I know that in my heart and she in hers. She will taste the promise of its nights of pleasure. It worried her that we would only come and go at Cloverhill.”
    He handed me my coffee, and pushed the sugar nearer. I saw the tears on her cheeks in the moment when she realised she must not marry the young man who had taken her to the poppy field. Had that broken her heart? I wondered.
    “You must not worry yourself, Harry.”
    “I’m only sorry.”
    “The last months would have been empty if there had not been the building. Emptiness is the enemy.”
    Soon after that I left. The night was warm, the moon a clear disc, untroubled by clouds. I had never before seen Cloverhill at night, and when I stopped to look back at the house I did not want to turn my gaze away. A pale sheen lightened the familiar grey facade and, in a way that seemed almost artificial, related trees and stone. Blankly, the dark windows returned my stare, a sightless pattern, elegant in the gloom. Did she suffer pain? I wondered.
    “Where d’you get to, boy?” my father enquired, calling out to me from the dining-room. “What time of the night is this to be coming in?”
    I stood in the doorway. I could hear my mother rattling dishes in the kitchen, and a moment later she entered the dining-room with a tray of cups and saucers for the breakfast. My father was slouched in one of the old rexine-covered chairs by the fire-place, his slippered feet resting on the grate. Newspaper and kindling would remain unlit in the grate until October, when this positioning of my father’s feet would not be possible. Sometimes he forgot and scorched his slippers.
    “Your mother’s beside herself, boy. Were you drinking or what?”
    “Frau Messinger’s dying,” I said, but neither of them responded. My food had been ready at halfpast six, my mother said; every day, Sundays included, that was the time. She wasn’t a maid in her own house, she said; she wasn’t a servant. “Half-six,” my father repeated. “If you want your grub half-six is the hour, boy.”
    My mother took the saucers singly from the pile on her tray, and placed on each an inverted cup. She took cork mats from a drawer in the sideboard and laid the table with knives and forks and side plates. She didn’t say anything, but listened while my father repeated what had been established already. He informed me that a meal had been fried for me and had sat in the oven until it was burnt. A waste of food that had already been paid for, he said, and hadn’t my mother more to do than pander to the comings and goings of a youth? He reminded me it was a Sunday, the day of the week when my mother might be given an easy time. With painful deliberation he pressed open a packet of ten Sweet Afton and withdrew a cigarette, appearing to select one. “Where were you drinking?” he said.
    “I wasn’t drinking.”
    “You have drink taken, boy. You brought a smell of it into the house.”
    “I had a glass of wine.”
    My father scraped a match along the sandpaper