Volvos’ve got roll-bars so you don’t get Garibaldi-biscuited if a juggernaut slams you down a motorway embankment.)
I was half hoping nobody’d answer. The vicarage’s a serious place, the opposite of where kids should be. But when I’d crept here under cover of darkness last week, an envelope’d been Sellotaped over the letter box. FOR THE ATTENTION OF ELIOT BOLIVAR, POET. Inside was a short letter written in lilac ink on slate-grey paper. It invited me to come to the vicarage to discuss my work at three o’clock on Sunday. ‘Work’. Nobody’s ever called Eliot Bolivar’s poems ‘work’.
I kicked a pebble down the drive.
A bolt slid like a rifle and an old man opened up. His skin was as blotched as a dying banana. He wore a collarless shirt and braces. ‘Good afternoon?’
‘Hi, uh, hello.’ (I meant to say ‘Good afternoon’ but Hangman’s keen on G-words lately.) ‘Are you the vicar?’
The man glanced round the garden, as if I might be a decoy. ‘I am certainly not a vicar. Why?’ A foreign accent, sourer than French. ‘Are you?’
I shook my head. (Hangman wouldn’t even let me say ‘No’.) ‘But the vicar invited me.’ I showed him the envelope. ‘Only, he didn’t sign his’ (I couldn’t even say ‘name’) ‘he didn’t sign it.’
‘Yah, aha.’ The non-vicar hasn’t been surprised by anything for years. ‘Come to the solarium. You may remove your shoes.’
Inside smelt of liver and soil. A velvet staircase sliced sunlight across the hall. A blue guitar rested on a sort of Turkish chair. A bare lady in a punt drifted on a lake of water lilies in a gold frame. The ‘solarium’ sounded ace. A planetarium for the sun instead of stars? Maybe the vicar was an astronomer in his spare time.
The old man offered me a shoehorn. I’m not sure how to use them, so I said, ‘No thanks,’ and prised my trainers off the usual way. ‘Are you a butler?’
‘Butler. Yah, aha. A good description of my role in this house, I think. Follow me, please.’
I thought only archbishops and popes were posh enough for butlers, but vicars can obviously have them too. The worn floorboards ribbled the soles of my feet through my socks. The hallway wound past a boring lounge and a clean kitchen. The high ceilings had cobwebby chandeliers.
I nearly bumped into the butler’s back.
He’d stopped, and spoke around a narrow door. ‘A visitor.’
This solarium didn’t have any scientific apparatus in it, though its skylights were big enough for telescopes. The huge window framed a wild garden of foxgloves and red-hot pokers. Bookcases lined the walls. Midget trees stood in mossy pots round the unused fireplace. Cigarette smoke hazed everything like in a TV flashback.
On a cane throne sat an old toady lady.
Old but grand, like she’d stepped out of a portrait, with silver hair and a royal purple shawl. I guessed she was the vicar’s mother. Her jewels were big as Cola Cubes and Sherbert Lemons. Maybe she was sixty, maybe seventy. With old people and little kids you can’t be sure. I turned to look at the butler but the butler’d gone.
The old lady’s rivery eyeballs chased the words across the pages of her book.
Should I cough? That’d be stupid. She knew I was there.
Smoke streamed upwards from her cigarette.
I sat down on an armless sofa till she was ready to talk. Her book was called Le Grand Meaulnes. I wondered what Meaulnes meant and wished I was as good at French as Avril Bredon.
The clock on the mantelpiece shaved minutes into seconds.
Her knuckles were as ridged as Toblerone. Every now and then her bony fingers swept ash off the page.
‘My name is Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck.’ If a peacock had a human voice, that’d be hers. ‘You may address me as Madame Crommelynck.’ I guessed her accent was French without being sure. ‘My English friends, an endangered species in these days, they say to me, “Eva, in Great Britain your ‘Madame’ is too onions-and-beret. Why not simply ‘Mrs’ Crommelynck?” And I say, “Go to the hell! What is wrong with onions-and-berets? I am Madame and my “e” is strongly attached!” Allons donc. It is three o’clock, a little after, so you are Eliot Bolivar the poet, I presume?’
‘Yes.’ (‘Poet’!) ‘Very pleased to meet you…Madame Crommylenk?’
‘Crom-mel-ynck.’
‘Crommelynck.’
‘Bad, but better. You are younger than I estimated. Fourteen? Fifteen?’
It’s ace being mistaken for an older kid. ‘Thirteen.’
‘Ackkk, a wonderful, miserable age. Not a boy, not a teenager. Impatience but timidity too. Emotional incontinence.’