The rain’d gummed a loop of her beautiful hair to her smooth forehead. I’d’ve died if I could’ve taken that loop of hair in my mouth and sucked the rain out.) Even Norman Bates the driver barked one bark of amusement. But I was soaked and humilated and furious. I wanted to tear random bones out of Ross Wilcox’s mutilated body, but Maggot reminded me he’s the hardest kid in the second year and he’d probably just twist both hands off my wrists and lob them over the Black Swan. ‘Oh, really blinking funny, Wilcox.’ (Maggot stopped me saying fucking funny in case Wilcox demanded a scrap.) ‘That’s pathetic—’ But on ‘pathetic’ my voice squeaked like my balls hadn’t dropped. Everyone heard. A fresh bomb of laughter blew me into tiny bits.
I knocked a rhythm on the vicarage knocker and finished off with the doorbell. Worm casts pitted the bubbling lawn like squeezed blackheads and slugs were climbing up walls. The porch roof was dripping. My parka hood was dripping. Mum’s gone to Cheltenham today to speak with builders, so I’d told Dad I’d probably (‘probably’s a word with an emergency ejector seat.) go and play electronic Battleships at Alastair Nurton’s. Dean Moran’s considered a bad influence since the Mr Blake affair. I’d come on my bike ’cause if anyone’d been out I could’ve just said ‘All right?’ and cycled on. If you’re caught on foot you might face an interrogation. But today everyone was watching Jimmy Connors versus John McEnroe on TV. (It’s wet here but it’s sunny in Wimbledon.) Le Grand Meaulnes was wrapped inside two Marks Spencer placky bags stuffed inside my shirt, with my translation. I spent hours on it. Every other word I’d had to look up in the dictionary. Even Julia noticed. She said yesterday, ‘Things slacken off towards the end of term, I thought.’ I answered that I wanted to get my summer homework over and done with. The weird thing is, doing the translation didn’t feel like hours, not once I got going. Bags more interesting than Youpla boum! Le franµais pour tous (French Method) Book 2 about Manuel, Claudette, Marie-France, Monsieur et Madame Berri. I’d’ve liked to’ve asked Miss Wyche our French teacher to check my translation. But getting creep-stained as a model student in a subject as girly as French’d sink what’s left of my middle-ranking status.
Translating’s half-poem and half-crossword and no doddle. Loads of words aren’t actual words you can look up, but screws of grammar that hold the sentence together. It takes yonks to find out what they mean, though once you know them you know them. Le Grand Meaulnes is about this kid Augustin Meaulnes. Augustin Meaulnes’s got an aura, like Nick Yew, that just has an effect on people. He comes to live with a schoolmaster’s son called Franµois as a boarder. Franµois tells the story. We hear Meaulnes’s footsteps, in the room above, before we even see him. It’s brilliant. I’d decided to ask Madame Crommelynck to teach me French. Proper French, not French at school. I’d even started daydreaming about going to France, after my O-levels or A-levels. French kissing’s where you touch with your tongues.
The butler was taking for ever. Even longer than last week.
Impatient for my new future to come, I pressed the doorbell again.
Immediately, a pinky man in black opened up. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
The rain turned up a notch or two.
‘Hello.’
‘Are you the new butler?’
‘Butler?’ The pinky man laughed. ‘Gracious, no! That’s a first! I’m Francis Bendincks. Vicar of St Gabriel’s.’ Only now did I see his dog-collar. ‘And you are?’
‘Oh. I’ve come to see Madame Crommelynck…’
‘Francis!’ Footsteps cronk cronk cronked down the wooden stairs. (Outdoor shoes, not slippers.) A woman’s voice snipped at high speed. ‘If that’s the television licence people, tell them I’ve looked high and low but I think they must’ve carted the thing off—’ She saw me.
‘This young chap’s come to visit Eva, apparently.’
‘Well, this young chap had better step inside, hadn’t he? Till the rain lets up, at least.’
Today the hallway had a behind-a-waterfall gloominess. The guitar’s blue paint’d flaked off like a skin disease. In her yellow frame a dying woman in a boat trailed her fingers in the water.
‘Thanks,’ I managed to say. ‘Madame Crommelynck’s expecting me.’
‘Why that would be, I wonder?’ The vicar’s wife poked her questions rather than asked them. ‘Oh! Are you Marjorie Bishampton’s youngest, here for the sponsored spelling bee?’