Black Swan Green (24 page)

My
huh?
must’ve shown.

‘Eliot! T. S.! Bolívar! Simón!’

‘“Eliot Bolivar” just sounded more…poetic.’

‘What is more
poetic
than ‘Jason’, an Hellenic hero? Who foundationed European literature if not the Ancient Greeks? Not Eliot’s coterie of thiefs of graves, I assure you! And what is a poet if he is not a tailor of words? Poets and tailors join what nobody else can join. Poets and tailors conceal their craft
in
their craft. No, I do not accept your answer. I believe the truth is, you use your pseudonym because your poetry is a shameful secret. I am correct?’

‘“Shameful” isn’t the exact word, exactly.’

‘Oh, so
what
is the exact word, exactly?’

‘Writing poetry’s,’ I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck’s got a tractor beam, ‘sort of…gay.’

‘“Gay”? A merry activity?’

This was hopeless. ‘Writing poems is…what creeps and poofters do.’

‘So you are one of these “creeps”?’

‘No.’

‘Then you are a “
pooof
-ter”, whatever one is?’

‘No!’

‘Then your logic is eluding me.’

‘If your dad’s a famous composer, and your mum’s an aristocrat, you can do things that you can’t do if your dad works at Greenland Supermarkets and if you go to a comprehensive school. Poetry’s one of those things.’

‘
Aha!
Truth! You are afraid the hairy barbarians will not accept you in their tribe if you write poetry.’

‘That’s more or less it, yeah…’

‘More? Or less? Which is the exact word, exactly?’

(She’s a pain sometimes.) ‘That’s it. Exactly.’

‘And you
wish
to become an hairy barbarian?’

‘I’m a
kid
. I’m thirteen.
You
said it’s a miserable age, being thirteen, and you’re right. If you don’t fit in, they make your life a misery. Like Floyd Chaceley or Nicholas Briar.’

‘
Now
you are talking like a real poet.’

‘I don’t
understand
it when you say stuff like that!’

(Mum’d’ve gone,
Don’t talk to
me
in that tone of voice!
)

‘I
mean
,’ Madame Crommelynck almost looked pleased, ‘you are entirely of your words.’

‘What does
that
mean?’

‘You are being quintessentially truthful.’

‘Anyone can be truthful.’

‘About superficialities, Jason, yes, is easy. About pain, no, is not. So you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar who seeks approval of the literary world.’

‘Is that so impossible?’

‘If you wish to be a versifier,’ she whirlpooled her wine, ‘very possible. If you are a true artist,’ she schwurked wine round her mouth, ‘absolutely
never
. If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falsenesses.’

I had no answer for that.

‘Nobody knows of your poems? A teacher? A confidant?’

‘Only you, actually.’

Madame Crommelynck’s eyes’ve got this glint. It’s nothing to do with outside light. ‘You hide your poetry from your lover?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I, uh, don’t.’

‘Don’t hide your poetry or don’t have a lover?’

‘I don’t have a girlfriend.’

Quick as a chess-clock thumper, she said, ‘You prefer boys?’

I still can’t believe she said that. (Yes I can.) ‘I’m normal!’

Her drumming fingers on the pile of parish magazines said,
Normal
?

‘I do like this one girl, actually,’ I blurted out, to prove it. ‘Dawn Madden. But she’s already got a boyfriend.’

‘O
ho
? And the boyfriend of Dawn Madden, he is a poet or a barbarian?’ (She
loved
how she’d tricked Dawn Madden’s name out of me.)

‘Ross Wilcox’s a prat, not a poet. But if you’re going to suggest that I write a poem to Dawn Madden, no
way
. I’d be the village
laughing
-stock.’

‘Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of Cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her “prat” and you justly earn derision. But if a poem is beauty and
truth
, your Miss Madden will treasure your words more than money, more than certificates. Even when she is as old as I.
Especially
when she is as old as I.’

‘But,’ I ducked the subject, ‘don’t heaps of artists use pseudonyms?’

‘Who?’

‘Um…’ Only Cliff Richard and Sid Vicious came to mind.

A phone started ringing.

‘True poetry
is
truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not.’

‘But…truth about what?’

‘Oh, the life, the death, the heart, memory, time, cats, fear. Anything.’ (The butler didn’t seem to be answering the phone either.) ‘Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees, even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion,
ennui
, and worst, television. Despicable machine. Television was here in my solarium. When I arrived. I throwed it in the cellar.
It
was watching
me
. A poet throws all but truth in the cellar. Jason. There is a matter?’

‘Er…your phone’s ringing.’

‘I know a phone is ringing! It can go to the hell! I am talking to
you
!’ (My parents’d run into a burning asbestos mine if they thought there was a phone in there ringing for them.) ‘One week before, we agreed “What is beauty?” is a question unanswerable, yes? So today, a greater mystery. If an art is
true
, if an art is
free of falsenesses
, it is, a priori, beautiful.’

I tried to digest that.

(The phone finally gave up.)

‘Your best poem in here,’ she rifled through the parish magazines, ‘is your “Hangman”. It has pieces of truth of your speech impediment, I am right?’

A familiar shame burnt from my neck, but I nodded.

Only in my poems, I realized, do I get to say
exactly
what I want.

‘Of course I am right. If “Jason Taylor” was the name here, and not “Eliot Bolivar, PhD, OBE, RIP, BBC”’ – she biffed the page with ‘Hangman’ on it – ‘the truth will make the greatest mortification with the hairy barbarians of Black Swan Green, yes?’

‘I might as well hang myself.’

‘
Pfff!
Eliot Bolivar,
he
can hang. You,
you
must
write
. If you still fear to publish in your name, is better not to publish. But poetry is more resilient than you think. For many years I assisted for Amnesty International.’ (Julia’s often on about them.) ‘Poets survive in gulags, in detention blocks, in torture chambers. Even in that misery hole there is poets working,
Merde
gate, no, where in the hell, on the Channel, I always am forgetting…’ (She rapped her forehead to knock loose the name.) ‘
Mar
gate. So believe me. Comprehensive schools are not so infernal.’

‘That music, when I came in. Was that your dad’s? It was beautiful. I didn’t know there
was
music like that.’

‘The sextet of Robert Frobisher. He was an amanuensis for my father, when my father was too old, too blind, too weak to hold a pen.’

‘I looked up Vyvyan Ayrs in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
at school.’

‘Oh? And how does this authority venerate my father?’

The entry’d been short enough to memorize. ‘“British composer, born 1870 Yorkshire; died 1932 Neerbeke, Belgium. Noted works:
Matruschyka Doll Variations
,
Untergehen Violinkonzert
and
Tottenvogel
—”’

‘—
Die
TOD
tenvogel
! TOD
tenvogel
!’

‘Sorry. “Critically respected in Europe during his lifetime, Ayrs is now rarely referred to outside the footnotes of twentieth-century music.”’

‘That is all?’

I’d expected her to be impressed.

‘A majestic encomium.’ She said it flat as a glass of Coke left out.

‘But it must’ve been
ace
having a composer for a father.’

I held the dragon lighter steady as she lowered the tip of her cigarette into the flame. ‘He made great unhappinesses for my mother.’ She inhaled, then blew out a quivery sapling of smoke. ‘Even today, to forgive is difficult. At your age, I went to school in Bruges and saw my father at weekends only. He had his illness, his music, and we did not communicate. After his funeral, I wished to ask him one thousand things. Too late. Old story. Next to your head is a photographic album. Yes, that one. Pass it.’

A girl Julia’s age sat on a pony under a big tree, before colour was invented. A strand of hair curled against her cheek. Her thighs clamped the pony’s flank.

‘God,’ I thought aloud, ‘she’s gorgeous.’

‘Yes. Whatever beauty is, I had it, in those days. Or it had me.’

‘You?’ Startled, I compared Madame Crommelynck with the girl in the photo. ‘Sorry.’

‘Your habit with that word diminishes your stature. Nefertiti was my finest pony. I entrusted her to the Dhondts – the Dhondts were family friends – when Grigoire and I escaped to Sweden seven, eight years after this photograph. The Dhondts were killed in 1942, during occupation by the Nazis. You imagine they are Resistance heroes? No, it was Morty Dhondt’s sports car. His brakes failed,
boom
. Nefertiti’s destiny, I do not know. Glue, sausages, stews for black market men, for gypsies, for SS officers, if I am realistic. This photograph was taken in Neerbeke in 1929, 1930…behind that tree is Zedelghem Chateau. My ancestor’s home.’

‘Do you still own it?’

‘It no longer exists. The Germans built an airfield where you see, so the British, the Americans…’ Her hand made a
boom
gesture. ‘Stones, craters, mud. Now is all little boxes for houses, a gasoline station, a supermarket. Our home who survived half a millennium exists now only in a few old heads. And a few old photographs. My wise friend Susan has written this. “By slicing out
this
moment and freezing it…”’ Madame Crommelynck studied the girl she’d once been and tapped ash from her cigarette. ‘“…all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”’

A bored dog barked a garden or two away.

A bride and groom pose outside a flinty chapel. Bare twigs say it’s winter. The groom’s thin lips say,
Look what
I’
ve got
. A top hat, a cane, half fox. But the bride’s half lioness. Her smile’s the idea of a smile. She knows more about her new husband than he knows about her. Above the church door a stone lady gazes up at her stone knight. Flesh-and-blood people in photographs look at the camera, but stone people look through the camera straight at you.

‘My producers,’ announced Madame Crommelynck.

‘Your parents? Were they nice?’ That sounded stupid.

‘My father died of syphilis. Your encyclopaedia did not say that. Not a “nice” death, I recommend you avoid. You see, the era’ (‘
era
’ was a long sigh) ‘was different. Feelings were not expressed so incontinently. Not in our class of society, anyhow. My mother, oh, she was capable of great affection, but tem
pes
tuous anger! She exerted power over all who she chose. No, I think not “nice”. She died of an aneurysm just two years later.’

I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ like you’re s’posed to, for the first time in my life.

‘It was a mercy she did not witness the destruction of Zedelghem.’ Madame Crommelynck raised her glasses to peer closer at the wedding photo. ‘How young! Photographs make me forget if time is forwards or backwards. No, photographs make me wonder if there
is
a forwards or backwards. My glass is empty, Jason.’

I poured her wine, with the label showing properly.

‘I never comprehended their marriage. Its alchemy. Do you?’

‘Me? Do I understand my parents’ marriage?’

‘That is my question.’

I thought hard. ‘I’ve’ (Hangman gripped ‘never’ and wouldn’t let it go) ‘I haven’t thought about it before. I mean…my parents’re just there. They argue quite a lot, I s’pose, but they do a lot of their talking when they’re arguing. They
can
be nice to each other. If it’s Mum’s birthday and Dad’s away he gets Interflora to bring flowers. But Dad’s working most weekends ’cause of the recession, and Mum’s opening this gallery in Cheltenham. There’s like this cold war over
that
at the moment.’ (Talking with some people’s like moving up higher screens of a computer game.) ‘If I’d been more like an ideal son like on
Little House on the Prairie
, if I’d been less sulky, then maybe Mum and Dad’s marriage might’ve been’ (the true word was ‘sunnier’ but Hangman was active today) ‘friendlier. Julia, my’ (Hangman teased me over the next word) ‘sister, she’s ace at poking fun at Dad. Which he loves. And she can cheer Mum up just by rabbiting on. But she’s off to university in the autumn. Then it’ll just be the three of us. I can never get the right words out, not like Julia.’ Stammerers’re usually too stressed to feel sorry for themselves, but a few drops of self-pity fell on me. ‘I can never get
any
words out.’

Far off, the butler switched on his Hoover.

‘
Ackkk
,’ Madame Crommelynck said, ‘I am an inquisitive old witch.’

‘No you’re not.’

The old Belgian lady gave me a pointy glare over her glasses.

‘Not
all
the time.’

A young pianist sat on his piano stool, relaxed, smiling, smoking. His hair was quiffed waxy like old-fashioned film stars, but he didn’t look toffish. He looked like Gary Drake. Nails in his eyes, wolf in his grin.

‘Meet Robert Frobisher.’

‘He’s the one,’ I checked, ‘who wrote that incredible music?’

‘Yes, he is the one who wrote that incredible music. Robert revered my father. Like a disciple, a son. They shared a musical empathy, who is an empathy more intimate than the sexual.’ (She said ‘sexual’ like it was any other word.) ‘It is thanks to Robert my father could compose his final masterpiece,
Die todtenvogel
. In Warsaw, in Paris, in Vienna, for a brief summer, the name of Vyvyan Ayrs was restored to glory.
Oh
, I was a jealous
demoiselle
!’