tell her you’ve forgiven her, even if you haven’t. At least she’d feel better. Maybe that’d make you feel better too.’
Madame Crommelynck studied her hands, moodily, both sides. ‘Sophistry,’ she pronounced.
I’m not sure what ‘sophistry’ means so I kept shtum.
Far away the butler switched off the Hoover.
‘Robert’s Sextet is now impossible to buy. You encounter his music only by serendipity in vicarages in July afternoons. This is your one chance in your life. You can work this gramophone?’
‘Sure.’
‘Let us listen to the other side, Jason.’
‘Great.’ I turned the record over. Old LPs’re as thick as plates.
A clarinet woke up and danced around the cello from Side A.
Madame Crommelynck lit a new cigarette and shut her eyes.
I lay back on the armless sofa. I’ve never listened to music lying down. Listening’s reading if you close your eyes.
Music’s a wood you walk through.
A thrush warbled on a starry bush. The turntable gave a dying ahhh and the stylus-arm clunked home. Madame Crommelynck’s hand told me to stay where I was when I got up to light her cigarette. ‘Tell me. Who are your teachers?’
‘We’ve got different teachers for different subjects.’
‘I mean, what are the writers you revere most greatly?’
‘Oh.’ I mentally scanned my bookshelf for the really impressive names. ‘Isaac Asimov. Ursula Le Guin. John Wyndham.’
‘Assy-Smurf? Ursular Gun? Wind-’em? These are modern poets?’
‘No. Sci-fi, fantasy. Stephen King, too. He’s horror.’
‘“Fantasy”? Pffft! Listen to Ronald Reagan’s homilies! “Horror?” What of Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Africa? Idi Amin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot? Is not enough horror? I mean, who are your masters? Chekhov?’
‘Er…no.’
‘But you have read Madame Bovary?’
(I’d never heard of her books.) ‘No.’
‘Not even,’ she looked ratty now, ‘Hermann Hesse?’
‘No.’ Unwisely I tried to dampen Madame Crommelynck’s disgust. ‘We don’t really do Europeans at school…’
‘“Europeans”? England is now drifted to the Caribbean? Are you African? Antarctican? You are European, you illiterate monkey of puberty! Thomas Mann, Rilke, Gogol! Proust, Bulgakov, Victor Hugo! This is your culture, your inheritance, your skeleton! You are ignorant even of Kafka?’
I flinched. ‘I’ve heard of him.’
‘This?’ She held up Le Grand Meaulnes.
‘No, but you were reading it last week.’
‘Is one of my bibles. I read it every year. So!’ She frisbeed the hardback book at me, hard. It hurt. ‘Alain-Fournier is your first true master. He is nostalgic and tragic and enchantible and he aches and you will ache too and, best of everything, he is true.’
As I opened it up a cloud of foreign words blew out. Il arriva chez nous un dimanche de novembre 189…‘It’s in French.’
‘Translations are incourteous between Europeans.’ She detected the guilt in my silence. ‘Oho? English schoolboys in our enlightened 1980s cannot read a book in a foreign language?’
‘We do do French at school…’ (Madame Crommelynck made me go on.) ‘…but we’ve only got up to Youpla boum! Book 2.’
‘Pfffffffffffft! When I was thirteen I spoke French and Dutch fluently! I could converse in German, in English, in Italian! Ackkk, for your schoolmasters, for your minister of education, execution is too good! Is not even arrogance! It is a baby who is too primitive to know its nappy is stinking and bursting! You English, you deserve the government of Monster Thatcher! I curse you with twenty years of Thatchers! Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is prison! You have a French dictionary and a grammar, anyhow?’
I nodded. Julia does.
‘So. Translate the first chapter of Alain-Fournier from French to English, or do not return next Saturday. The author needs no parochial schoolchildren to disfigure his truth, but I need you to proof you do not waste my time. Go.’
Madame Crommelynck turned to her desk and picked up her pen.
Once again, I saw myself out of the vicarage. I stuffed Le Grand Meaulnes under my Liverpool FC top. Getting chucked out of Spooks has already sent me to unpopularity prison. Getting caught with a French novel would send me to the electric chair.
It thundered during RE the day school broke up for the summer. By the time we got to Black Swan Green it was pissing it down. Getting off the bus, Ross Wilcox shoved me between my shoulder blades. I arse-flopped into this ankle-deep puddle where the gutter’d flooded. Ross Wilcox and Gary Drake and Wayne Nashend shat themselves laughing. Goosey-goosey girls turned and tittered under their brollies. (Mysterious how girls can always conjure up umbrellas.) Andrea Bozard saw, so of course she nudged Dawn Madden and pointed. Dawn Madden shrieked with laughter like girls do. (Bitch, I didn’t quite dare say.