‘Pardon me?’ She leant forwards. ‘Who’ (it came out as ‘oo’) ‘is this “vicar”?’
‘This is the vicarage, right?’ I showed her my invitation, uneasy now. ‘It says so on your gatepost. On the main road.’
‘Ah.’ Madame Crommelynck nodded. ‘Vicar, vicarage. You miscomprehend a thing. A vicar lived here once upon a time, doubtless – before him two vicars, three vicars, many vicars’ – her scrawny hand mimed a poof of smoke – ‘but no more. The Anglican Church becomes bankrupter and bankrupter, year by year, like British Leyland cars. My father said, Catholics know how to run the business of religion. Catholics and Mormons. Propagate customers, they tell their congregation, or is the inferno for you! But your Church of England, no. Consequences is, these enchantible rectory houses are sold or rented, and vicars must move to little houses. Only the name “vicarage” is remaining.’
‘But,’ I swallowed, ‘I’ve been posting my poems through your letter box since January. How come they’re printed in the parish magazine every month?’
‘This,’ Madame Crommelynck took such a mighty drag on her cigarette I could see it shrink, ‘should be no mystery to an agile brain. I deliver your poems to the real vicar in his real vicarage. An ugly bungalow near Hanley Castle. I do not charge you for this service. Is gratis. Is a fine exercise for my not-agile bones. But in payment, I read your poems first.’
‘Oh. Does the real vicar know?’
‘I too make my deliveries in darkness, anonymous, so I am not apprehended by the vicar’s wife – oh, she is an hundred times worst than he is. An harpy of tattle-tittle. She asked to use my garden for her St Gabriel’s Summer Fête! “It is tradition,” says Mrs Vicar. “We need space for the human bridge. For the stalls.” I tell her, “Go to the hell! I pay you rent, do I not? Who has need of a divine creator who must sell inferior marmalade?”’ Madame Crommelynck smacked her leathery lips. ‘But at least, her husband publishes your poems in his funny magazine. Perhaps he is redeemable.’ She gestured at a bottle of wine stood on a pearly table. ‘You will drink a little?’
A whole glass, said Unborn Twin.
I could hear Dad saying, You drank what? ‘No thanks.’
Your loss, Madame Crommelynck shrugged.
Inky blood filled her glass.
Satisfied, she rapped on a small pile of Black Swan Green parish magazines by her side. ‘To business.’
‘A young man needs to learn when a woman wishes her cigarette to be lit.’
‘Sorry.’
An emerald dragon wraps Madame Crommelynck’s lighter. I was worried the smell of cigarette smoke’d stick to my clothes and I’d have to make up a story for Mum and Dad about where I’d been. While she smoked, she murmured my poem ‘Rocks’ from May’s magazine.
I felt giddy with importance that my words’d captured the attention of this exotic woman. Fear, too. If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’
Madame Crommelynck did a tiny growl. ‘You imagine blank verse is a liberation, but no. Discard rhyme, you discard a parachute…Sentimentality you mistake for emotion…You love words, yes’ (a pride-bubble swelled up in me) ‘but your words are still the master of you, you are not yet master of them…’ (The bubble popped.) She studied my reaction. ‘But, at least, your poem is robust enough to be criticized. Most so-called poems disintegrate at one touch. Your imagery is here, there, fresh, I am not ashamed to call it so. Now I wish to know a thing.’
‘Sure. Anything.’
‘The domesticity in this poem, these kitchens, gardens, ponds…is not a metaphor for the ludicrous war in the South Atlantic in this year?’
‘The Falklands was on while I was writing the poem,’ I answered. ‘The war just sort of seeped in.’
‘So these demons who do war in the garden, they symbolise General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher. I am right?’
‘Sort of, yes.’
‘But they are also your father and your mother, however. I am right?’
Hesitations’re yeses or nos if the questioner already knows the answer. It’s one thing writing about your parents. Admitting it’s another matter.
Madame Crommelynck did a tobaccoey croon to show her delight. ‘You are a polite thirteen year boy who is too timid to cut his umbilical cords! Except,’ she gave the page a nasty poke, ‘here. Here in your poems you do what you do not dare to do,’ she jabbed at the window, ‘here. In reality. To