been less sulky, then maybe Mum and Dad’s marriage might’ve been’ (the true word was ‘sunnier’ but Hangman was active today) ‘friendlier. Julia, my’ (Hangman teased me over the next word) ‘sister, she’s ace at poking fun at Dad. Which he loves. And she can cheer Mum up just by rabbiting on. But she’s off to university in the autumn. Then it’ll just be the three of us. I can never get the right words out, not like Julia.’ Stammerers’re usually too stressed to feel sorry for themselves, but a few drops of self-pity fell on me. ‘I can never get any words out.’
Far off, the butler switched on his Hoover.
‘Ackkk,’ Madame Crommelynck said, ‘I am an inquisitive old witch.’
‘No you’re not.’
The old Belgian lady gave me a pointy glare over her glasses.
‘Not all the time.’
A young pianist sat on his piano stool, relaxed, smiling, smoking. His hair was quiffed waxy like old-fashioned film stars, but he didn’t look toffish. He looked like Gary Drake. Nails in his eyes, wolf in his grin.
‘Meet Robert Frobisher.’
‘He’s the one,’ I checked, ‘who wrote that incredible music?’
‘Yes, he is the one who wrote that incredible music. Robert revered my father. Like a disciple, a son. They shared a musical empathy, who is an empathy more intimate than the sexual.’ (She said ‘sexual’ like it was any other word.) ‘It is thanks to Robert my father could compose his final masterpiece, Die todtenvogel. In Warsaw, in Paris, in Vienna, for a brief summer, the name of Vyvyan Ayrs was restored to glory. Oh, I was a jealous demoiselle!’
‘Jealous? Why?’
‘My father praised Robert without respite! So my behaviour was disgracious. But such reverences, such empathies that existed between them, they are very combustible. Friendship is a calmer thing. Robert left Zedelghem in winter.’
‘Back to England?’
‘Robert had no home. His parents had uninherited him. He accommodated in an hotel, in Bruges. My mother forbidded me to meet him. Fifty years ago, reputations were important passports. Ladies of pedigree had a chaperone every minute. Anyhow, I did not wish to meet. Grigoire and I were engaged and Robert was sickness in his head. Genius, sickness, flash-flash, storm, calm, like a lighthouse. An isolated lighthouse. He could have eclipsed Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, all of them. But after he completed his Sextet he blew his brains out in his hotel bathroom.’
The young pianist was still smiling.
‘Why did he do it?’
‘Has suicide only one cause? His family’s rejection? Despondency? Too much he read my father’s Nietzsche? Robert was obsessed of recurrence eternal. Recurrence is the heart of his music. We live exactly the same life, Robert believed, and die exactly the same death again, again, again, to the same demi-semi-quaver. To eternity. Or else,’ Madame Crommelynck relit her gone-out cigarette, ‘we can blame the girl.’
‘What girl?’
‘Robert loved a silly girl. She did not love him in return.’
‘So he killed himself just because she wouldn’t love him?’
‘A factor, perhaps. How big, how small, only Robert can tell us.’
‘But killing himself. Just over a girl.’
‘He was not the first one. He will not be the last one.’
‘God. Did the girl, y’know, know about it?’
‘Of course! Bruges is a city who is a village. She knew. And I assure you, fifty years later, the conscience of that girl still hurts. Like rheumatism. She would pay any price for Robert not to die. But what can she do?’
‘You’ve kept in touch with her?’
‘It is difficult for us to avoid, yes.’ Madame Crommelynck kept her eyes on Robert Frobisher. ‘This girl wants my forgiveness, before she dies. She begs me, “I was eighteen! Robert’s devotions were just a…a…flattery game for me! How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?” Oh, I pity her. I want to forgive her. But here is the truth.’ (Now she looked at me.) ‘I abhor that girl! I abhorred her all my life and I do not know how to stop to abhor her.’
When Julia’s really got on my wick, I vow I’ll never talk to her again. But by teatime, often as not, I’ve forgotten it. ‘Fifty years’s a long time to stay angry with someone.’
Madame Crommelynck nodded, glum. ‘I do not recommend it.’
‘Have you tried pretending to forgive her?’
‘“Pretending”,’ she looked at the garden, ‘is not the truth.’
‘But you said two true things, right? One, you hate this girl. Two, you want her to feel better. If you decided that the wanting truth’s more important than the hating truth, just