Black Swan Green (25 page)

‘Jealous? Why?’

‘My father praised Robert without respite! So my behaviour was disgracious. But such reverences, such empathies that existed between them, they are very combustible. Friendship is a calmer thing. Robert left Zedelghem in winter.’

‘Back to England?’

‘Robert had no home. His parents had uninherited him. He accommodated in an hotel, in Bruges. My mother forbidded me to meet him. Fifty years ago, reputations were important passports. Ladies of pedigree had a chaperone every minute. Anyhow, I did not wish to meet. Grigoire and I were engaged and Robert was sickness in his head. Genius, sickness, flash-flash, storm, calm, like a lighthouse. An isolated lighthouse. He could have eclipsed Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, all of them. But after he completed his
Sextet
he blew his brains out in his hotel bathroom.’

The young pianist was still smiling.

‘Why did he do it?’

‘Has suicide only one cause? His family’s rejection? Despondency? Too much he read my father’s Nietzsche? Robert was obsessed of recurrence eternal. Recurrence is the heart of his music. We live
exactly
the same life, Robert believed, and die
exactly
the same death again, again, again, to the
same
demi-semi-quaver. To eternity. Or else,’ Madame Crommelynck relit her gone-out cigarette, ‘we can blame the girl.’

‘What girl?’

‘Robert loved a silly girl. She did not love him in return.’

‘So he killed himself just because she wouldn’t love him?’

‘A factor, perhaps. How big, how small, only Robert can tell us.’

‘But
killing
himself. Just over a girl.’

‘He was not the first one. He will not be the last one.’

‘
God
. Did the girl, y’know, know about it?’

‘Of course! Bruges is a city who is a village. She knew. And I assure you, fifty years later, the conscience of that girl
still
hurts. Like rheumatism. She would pay any price for Robert not to die. But what can she do?’

‘You’ve kept in touch with her?’

‘It is difficult for us to avoid, yes.’ Madame Crommelynck kept her eyes on Robert Frobisher. ‘This girl wants my forgiveness, before she dies. She begs me, “I was eighteen! Robert’s devotions were just a…a…flattery game for me! How could I
know
a famished heart will eat its mind? Can
kill
its body?” Oh, I pity her. I
want
to forgive her. But here is the truth.’ (Now she looked at me.) ‘I
abhor
that girl! I abhorred her all my life and I do not know how to
stop
to abhor her.’

When Julia’s
really
got on my wick, I vow I’ll
never
talk to her again. But by teatime, often as not, I’ve forgotten it. ‘Fifty years’s a long time to stay angry with someone.’

Madame Crommelynck nodded, glum. ‘I do not recommend it.’

‘Have you tried
pretending
to forgive her?’

‘“Pretending”,’ she looked at the garden, ‘is not the truth.’

‘But you said
two
true things, right? One, you
hate
this girl. Two, you
want
her to feel better. If you decided that the wanting truth’s more important than the hating truth, just
tell
her you’ve forgiven her, even if you haven’t. At least she’d feel better. Maybe that’d make you feel better too.’

Madame Crommelynck studied her hands, moodily, both sides. ‘Sophistry,’ she pronounced.

I’m not sure what ‘sophistry’ means so I kept shtum.

Far away the butler switched off the Hoover.

‘Robert’s
Sextet
is now impossible to buy. You encounter his music only by serendipity in vicarages in July afternoons. This is your one chance in your life. You can work this gramophone?’

‘Sure.’

‘Let us listen to the other side, Jason.’

‘Great.’ I turned the record over. Old LPs’re as thick as plates.

A clarinet woke up and danced around the cello from Side A.

Madame Crommelynck lit a new cigarette and shut her eyes.

I lay back on the armless sofa. I’ve never listened to music lying down. Listening’s reading if you close your eyes.

Music’s a wood you walk through.

A thrush warbled on a starry bush. The turntable gave a dying
ahhh
and the stylus-arm clunked home. Madame Crommelynck’s hand told me to stay where I was when I got up to light her cigarette. ‘Tell me. Who are your teachers?’

‘We’ve got different teachers for different subjects.’

‘I mean, what are the writers you revere most greatly?’

‘Oh.’ I mentally scanned my bookshelf for the really impressive names. ‘Isaac Asimov. Ursula Le Guin. John Wyndham.’

‘
Assy-Smurf? Ursular Gun? Wind-’em?
These are modern poets?’

‘No. Sci-fi, fantasy. Stephen King, too. He’s horror.’

‘“Fantasy”?
Pffft!
Listen to Ronald Reagan’s homilies! “Horror?” What of Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Africa? Idi Amin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot? Is not enough horror? I
mean
, who are your
masters
? Chekhov?’

‘Er…no.’

‘But you have read
Madame Bovary
?’

(I’d never heard of her books.) ‘No.’

‘Not even,’ she looked ratty now, ‘Hermann Hesse?’

‘No.’ Unwisely I tried to dampen Madame Crommelynck’s disgust. ‘We don’t really do Europeans at school…’

‘“Europeans”? England is now drifted to the Caribbean? Are you African? Antarctican? You
are
European, you illiterate monkey of puberty! Thomas Mann, Rilke, Gogol! Proust, Bulgakov, Victor Hugo! This is your culture, your inheritance, your
skeleton
! You are ignorant even of
Kafka
?’

I flinched. ‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘This?’ She held up
Le Grand Meaulnes
.

‘No, but you were reading it last week.’

‘Is one of my bibles. I read it every year. So!’ She frisbeed the hardback book at me, hard. It hurt. ‘Alain-Fournier is your first true master. He is nostalgic and tragic and enchantible and he aches and you will ache too and, best of everything, he is
true
.’

As I opened it up a cloud of foreign words blew out.
Il arriva chez nous un dimanche de novembre 189
…‘It’s in French.’

‘Translations are incourteous between Europeans.’ She detected the guilt in my silence. ‘O
ho
? English schoolboys in our enlightened 1980s cannot read a book in a foreign language?’

‘We
do
do French at school…’ (Madame Crommelynck made me go on.) ‘…but we’ve only got up to
Youpla boum!
Book 2.’

‘
Pfffffffffffft!
When
I
was thirteen I spoke French and Dutch fluently! I could converse in German, in English, in Italian!
Ackkk
, for your schoolmasters, for your minister of education, execution is too good! Is not even arrogance! It is a baby who is too
primitive
to know its nappy is stinking and bursting! You English, you
deserve
the government of Monster Thatcher! I curse you with
twenty years
of Thatchers! Maybe
then
you comprehend, speaking one language only is
prison
! You have a French dictionary and a grammar, anyhow?’

I nodded. Julia does.

‘So. Translate the first chapter of Alain-Fournier from French to English, or do not return next Saturday. The author needs no parochial schoolchildren to disfigure his truth, but
I
need you to proof you do not waste my time. Go.’

Madame Crommelynck turned to her desk and picked up her pen.

Once again, I saw myself out of the vicarage. I stuffed
Le Grand Meaulnes
under my Liverpool FC top. Getting chucked out of Spooks has already sent me to unpopularity prison. Getting caught with a French novel would send me to the electric chair.

It thundered during RE the day school broke up for the summer. By the time we got to Black Swan Green it was
pissing
it down. Getting off the bus, Ross Wilcox shoved me between my shoulder blades. I arse-flopped into this ankle-deep puddle where the gutter’d flooded. Ross Wilcox and Gary Drake and Wayne Nashend
shat
themselves laughing. Goosey-goosey girls turned and tittered under their brollies. (Mysterious how girls can always conjure up umbrellas.) Andrea Bozard saw, so of course she nudged Dawn Madden and pointed. Dawn Madden shrieked with laughter like girls do. (
Bitch
, I didn’t quite dare say. The rain’d gummed a loop of her beautiful hair to her smooth forehead. I’d’ve
died
if I could’ve taken that loop of hair in my mouth and sucked the rain out.) Even Norman Bates the driver barked one bark of amusement. But I was
soaked
and humilated and
furious
. I wanted to tear random bones out of Ross Wilcox’s mutilated body, but Maggot reminded me he’s the hardest kid in the second year and he’d probably just twist both hands off my wrists and lob them over the Black Swan. ‘Oh,
really
blinking funny, Wilcox.’ (Maggot stopped me saying
fucking funny
in case Wilcox demanded a scrap.) ‘That’s
pathetic
—’ But on ‘pathetic’ my voice squeaked like my balls hadn’t dropped. Everyone heard. A fresh bomb of laughter blew me into tiny bits.

I knocked a rhythm on the vicarage knocker and finished off with the doorbell. Worm casts pitted the bubbling lawn like squeezed blackheads and slugs were climbing up walls. The porch roof was dripping. My parka hood was dripping. Mum’s gone to Cheltenham today to speak with builders, so I’d told Dad I’d probably (‘probably’s a word with an emergency ejector seat.) go and play electronic Battleships at Alastair Nurton’s. Dean Moran’s considered a bad influence since the Mr Blake affair. I’d come on my bike ’cause if anyone’d been out I could’ve just said ‘All right?’ and cycled on. If you’re caught on foot you might face an interrogation. But today everyone was watching Jimmy Connors versus John McEnroe on TV. (It’s wet here but it’s sunny in Wimbledon.)
Le Grand Meaulnes
was wrapped inside two Marks & Spencer placky bags stuffed inside my shirt, with my translation. I spent
hours
on it. Every other word I’d had to look up in the dictionary. Even Julia noticed. She said yesterday, ‘Things slacken off towards the end of term, I thought.’ I answered that I wanted to get my summer homework over and done with. The weird thing is, doing the translation didn’t
feel
like hours, not once I got going.
Bags
more interesting than
Youpla boum! Le franµais pour tous (French Method)
Book 2 about Manuel, Claudette, Marie-France, Monsieur
et
Madame Berri. I’d’ve liked to’ve asked Miss Wyche our French teacher to check my translation. But getting creep-stained as a model student in a subject as girly as French’d sink what’s left of my middle-ranking status.

Translating’s half-poem and half-crossword and no doddle. Loads of words aren’t actual words you can look up, but screws of grammar that hold the sentence together. It takes
yonks
to find out what they mean, though once you know them you know them.
Le Grand Meaulnes
is about this kid Augustin Meaulnes. Augustin Meaulnes’s got an aura, like Nick Yew, that just has an effect on people. He comes to live with a schoolmaster’s son called Franµois as a boarder. Franµois tells the story. We hear Meaulnes’s footsteps, in the room above, before we even see him. It’s brilliant. I’d decided to ask Madame Crommelynck to teach me French. Proper French, not French at school. I’d even started daydreaming about going to France, after my O-levels or A-levels. French kissing’s where you touch with your tongues.

The butler was taking
for ever
. Even longer than last week.

Impatient for my new future to come, I pressed the doorbell again.

Immediately, a pinky man in black opened up. ‘
Hel
lo.’

‘Hello.’

The rain turned up a notch or two.

‘Hel
lo
.’

‘Are you the new butler?’

‘Butler?’ The pinky man laughed. ‘Gracious, no! That’s a first! I’m Francis Bendincks. Vicar of St Gabriel’s.’ Only now did I see his dog-collar. ‘And you are?’

‘Oh. I’ve come to see Madame Crommelynck…’

‘Francis!’ Footsteps
cronk cronk cronk
ed down the wooden stairs. (Outdoor shoes, not slippers.) A woman’s voice snipped at high speed. ‘If that’s the television licence people, tell them I’ve looked
high
and
low
but I think they must’ve carted the thing off—’ She saw me.

‘This young chap’s come to visit Eva, apparently.’

‘Well, this young chap had better step inside, hadn’t he? Till the rain lets up, at least.’

Today the hallway had a behind-a-waterfall gloominess. The guitar’s blue paint’d flaked off like a skin disease. In her yellow frame a dying woman in a boat trailed her fingers in the water.