Or not lie, but are maladroit. Clumsy. Your potter has made the vase, yes, but has not made the beauty. Only an object where it resides. Until the vase is dropped and breaks. Who is the ultimate fate of every vase.’
‘But,’ I still wasn’t satisfied, ‘surely some people, somewhere know what beauty is? At a university?’
‘University?’ She made a noise that might’ve been laughter. ‘Imponderables are ponderable, but answerable, no. Ask a philosopher, but be cautious. If you hear, “Eureka!”, if you think, “His answer has captured my question!”, then here is proof he is a counterfeit. If your philosopher has truly left Plato’s cave, if he has stared into that sun of the blind…’ She counted the three possibilities on her fingers. ‘He is lunatic, or his answers are questions who is only masquerading as answers, or he is silent. Silent because you can know or you can say, but both, no. My glass is empty.’
The last drops were the thickest.
‘Are you a poet?’ (I’d nearly said ‘too’.)
‘No. That title is hazardous. But, I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and,’ she uttered the word like a pantomime witch, ‘“elope”! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as…épouvantail, a – how you say the man in a field who frights birds?’
‘Scarecrow?’
‘Scarecrow. Exactly. So I tell him, “Go to the hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!” He consented my logic. Poets are listeners, if they are not intoxicated. But novelists,’ Madame Crommelynck did a yuck face, ‘is schizoids, lunatics, liars. Henry Miller stayed in our colony in Taormina. A pig, a perspiring pig, and Hemingway, you know?’
I’d heard of him so I nodded.
‘Lecherousest pig in the entire farm! Cinematographers? Fffffft. Petits Zeus of their universes. The world is their own film set. Charles Chaplin also, he was my neighbour in Geneva, across the lake. A charming petit Zeus, but a petit Zeus. Painters? Squeeze their hearts dry to make the pigments. No heart remains for people. Look at that Andalusian goat, Picasso. His biographers come for my stories of him, beg, offer money, but I tell them, “Go to the hell, I am not an human juke box. Composers? My father was one. Vyvyan Ayrs. His ears was burnt with his music. I, or my mother, he rarely listened. Formidable in his generation, but now he is fallen from the repertory. He exiled at Zedelghem, south of Bruges. My mother’s estate was there. My native tongue is Flemish. So you hear, English is not an adroit tongue for me, too many – lesses and – lessnesses. You think I am French?’
I nodded.
‘Belgian. The destiny of discreet neighbours is to be confused with the noisy ones next door. See an animal! On the lawn. By the geraniums…’
One moment we were watching the twitch of a squirrel’s heart.
The next, it’d vanished.
Madame Crommelynck said, ‘Look at me.’
‘I am doing.’
‘No. You are not. Sit here.’
I sat on her footstool. (I wondered if Madame Crommelynck’s got a butler ’cause something’s wrong with her legs.) ‘Okay.’
‘Do not hide in your “okay”. Closer. I do not bite off the heads of boys. Not on a full stomach. Look.’
There’s a rule that says you don’t gaze too intently at a person’s face. Madame Crommleynck was ordering me to break it.
‘Look closer.’
Those parma violets, I smelt, fabrics, an ambery perfume, and something rotting. Then something weird happened. The old woman turned into an it. Sags ruckussed its eye-bags and eyelids. Its eyelashes’d been gummed into spikes. Deltas of tiny red veins snaked its stained whites. Its irises misty like long-buried marbles. Make-up dusted its mummified skin. Its gristly nose was subsiding into its skull-hole.
‘You see beauty here?’ it spoke in the wrong voice.
Manners told me to say yes.
‘Liar!’ It pulled back and became Madame Crommelynck again. ‘Forty, thirty years ago, yes. My parents created me in the customary fashion. Like your potter making your vase. I grew to a girl. In mirrors, my beautiful lips told my beautiful eyes, “You are me.” Men made stratagems and fights, worshipped and deceived, burnt money on extravagances, to “win” this beauty. My age of gold.’
Hammering started up in a far-off room.
‘But human beauty falls leaf by leaf. You miss the beginning. One tells one, No, I am tired or The day is bad, that is all. But later,