world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falsenesses.’
I had no answer for that.
‘Nobody knows of your poems? A teacher? A confidant?’
‘Only you, actually.’
Madame Crommelynck’s eyes’ve got this glint. It’s nothing to do with outside light. ‘You hide your poetry from your lover?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I, uh, don’t.’
‘Don’t hide your poetry or don’t have a lover?’
‘I don’t have a girlfriend.’
Quick as a chess-clock thumper, she said, ‘You prefer boys?’
I still can’t believe she said that. (Yes I can.) ‘I’m normal!’
Her drumming fingers on the pile of parish magazines said, Normal?
‘I do like this one girl, actually,’ I blurted out, to prove it. ‘Dawn Madden. But she’s already got a boyfriend.’
‘Oho? And the boyfriend of Dawn Madden, he is a poet or a barbarian?’ (She loved how she’d tricked Dawn Madden’s name out of me.)
‘Ross Wilcox’s a prat, not a poet. But if you’re going to suggest that I write a poem to Dawn Madden, no way. I’d be the village laughing-stock.’
‘Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of Cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her “prat” and you justly earn derision. But if a poem is beauty and truth, your Miss Madden will treasure your words more than money, more than certificates. Even when she is as old as I. Especially when she is as old as I.’
‘But,’ I ducked the subject, ‘don’t heaps of artists use pseudonyms?’
‘Who?’
‘Um…’ Only Cliff Richard and Sid Vicious came to mind.
A phone started ringing.
‘True poetry is truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not.’
‘But…truth about what?’
‘Oh, the life, the death, the heart, memory, time, cats, fear. Anything.’ (The butler didn’t seem to be answering the phone either.) ‘Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees, even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and worst, television. Despicable machine. Television was here in my solarium. When I arrived. I throwed it in the cellar. It was watching me. A poet throws all but truth in the cellar. Jason. There is a matter?’
‘Er…your phone’s ringing.’
‘I know a phone is ringing! It can go to the hell! I am talking to you!’ (My parents’d run into a burning asbestos mine if they thought there was a phone in there ringing for them.) ‘One week before, we agreed “What is beauty?” is a question unanswerable, yes? So today, a greater mystery. If an art is true, if an art is free of falsenesses, it is, a priori, beautiful.’
I tried to digest that.
(The phone finally gave up.)
‘Your best poem in here,’ she rifled through the parish magazines, ‘is your “Hangman”. It has pieces of truth of your speech impediment, I am right?’
A familiar shame burnt from my neck, but I nodded.
Only in my poems, I realized, do I get to say exactly what I want.
‘Of course I am right. If “Jason Taylor” was the name here, and not “Eliot Bolivar, PhD, OBE, RIP, BBC”’ – she biffed the page with ‘Hangman’ on it – ‘the truth will make the greatest mortification with the hairy barbarians of Black Swan Green, yes?’
‘I might as well hang myself.’
‘Pfff! Eliot Bolivar, he can hang. You, you must write. If you still fear to publish in your name, is better not to publish. But poetry is more resilient than you think. For many years I assisted for Amnesty International.’ (Julia’s often on about them.) ‘Poets survive in gulags, in detention blocks, in torture chambers. Even in that misery hole there is poets working, Merdegate, no, where in the hell, on the Channel, I always am forgetting…’ (She rapped her forehead to knock loose the name.) ‘Margate. So believe me. Comprehensive schools are not so infernal.’
‘That music, when I came in. Was that your dad’s? It was beautiful. I didn’t know there was music like that.’
‘The sextet of Robert Frobisher. He was an amanuensis for my father, when my father was too old, too blind, too weak to hold a pen.’
‘I looked up Vyvyan Ayrs in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at school.’
‘Oh? And how does this authority venerate my father?’
The entry’d been short enough to memorize. ‘“British composer, born 1870 Yorkshire; died 1932 Neerbeke, Belgium. Noted works: Matruschyka Doll Variations, Untergehen Violinkonzert and Tottenvogel—”’
‘—Die TODtenvogel! TODtenvogel!’
‘Sorry. “Critically respected in Europe during his lifetime, Ayrs is now rarely referred to outside the footnotes of twentieth-century music.”’
‘That is all?’
I’d expected her to be impressed.
‘A majestic encomium.’ She said it flat as a glass of Coke left out.