one cannot contradict the mirror. Day by day by day it falls, until this vieille sorcière is all who remains, who uses cosmetician’s potions to approximate her birth-gift. Oh, people say, “The old are still beautiful!” They patronize, they flatter, maybe they wish to comfort themselves. But no. Eating the roots of beauty is a—’ Madame Crommelynck sank back into her creaky throne, tired out. ‘An, how you say, the snail who has no house?’
‘A slug?’
‘Insatiable, undestructible slug. Where in the hell are my cigarettes?’
The box’d slipped to her feet. I passed them to her.
‘Leave now.’ She looked away. ‘Return next Saturday, three o’clock, I tell you more reasons why your poems fail. Or do not return. An hundred other works are waiting.’ Madame Crommelynck picked up Le Grand Meaulnes, found her place and started reading. Her breathing’d got whistlier and I wondered if she was ill.
‘Thanks, then…’
My legs’d got pins and needles.
As far as Madame Crommelynck was concerned, I’d already left the solarium.
Druggy pom-pom bees hovered in the lavender. The dusty Volvo was still in the drive, still needing its wash. I didn’t tell Mum or Dad where I was going today, either. Telling them about Madame Crommelynck’d mean (a) admitting I was Eliot Bolivar, (b) twenty questions about who she is I can’t answer ’cause she’s an unnumbered dot-to-dot, (c) being told not to pester her. Kids aren’t s’posed to visit old ladies if they’re not grandmothers or aunts.
I pressed the bell.
The vicarage took ages to swallow up the chime.
Nobody. Had she gone out for a walk?
The butler hadn’t taken this long last week.
I banged the knocker, sure it was useless.
I’d pedalled like mad over here ’cause I was thirty minutes late. Madame Crommelynck’d have a field marshal’s attitude to punctuality, I reckoned. All for nothing, it appeared. I’d got The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway from the school library, just ’cause Madame Crommelynck’d mentioned him. (The introduction said the book’d made Americans burst into tears when it was read on the radio. But it’s just about an old guy catching a monster sardine. If Americans cry at that they’ll cry at anything.) I rubbed some lavender in my palms and snuffed. Lavender’s my favourite smell, after Tipp-Ex and bacon rind. I sat down on the steps, not sure where to go next.
A July afternoon yawned.
Mirage-puddles’d shimmered on the Welland road as I rode here.
I could’ve gone to sleep on the baked doorstep.
Little naked ants.
A bolt slid like a rifle and the old butler opened up. ‘You are back for more.’ Today he wore a golf jersey. ‘You may remove your shoes.’
‘Thanks.’ As I prised off my trainers I heard a piano, joined by a quiet violin. I hoped Madame Crommelynck didn’t have a visitor. Once you have three people you may as well have a hundred. The stairway needed fixing. A knackered blue guitar’d been left on a broken stool. In the gaudy frame a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond. Once again, the butler led me to the solarium. (I looked ‘solarium’ up. It just means ‘an airy room’.) The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distances’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.
That music was swelling.
A Jules Verne hi-fi, all silvery knobs and dials, occupied one corner of the solarium. Madame Crommelynck sat on her cane throne, eyes shut, listening. As if the music was a warm bath. (This time I knew she wouldn’t be speaking for a while, so I just sat down on the armless sofa.) A classical LP was playing. Nothing like the rumpty-tump-tump stuff Mr Kempsey plays in Music. Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to.
The piano’d vanished. Now a flute’d joined the violin.
An unfinished letter going on for pages lay on Eva Crommelynck’s desk. She must have put on this LP when she couldn’t think of its next sentence. A fat silver pen rested on the page she’d stopped writing. I batted off an urge to pick it up and read it.
The stylus-arm clunked in its cradle. ‘The inconsolable,’ Madame Crommelynck said, ‘is so consoling.’ She didn’t look very pleased