‘That rings a bell…Kingfisher Meadows! Helena Taylor’s youngest. Poor Mrs Castle’s neighbours. Father a big cheese at Greenland Supermarkets, right? Sister off to Edinburgh this autumn. I met your mother at the art exhibition last year, in the village hall. She was taken with an oil painting of Eastnor Castle, though I’m sorry to say she never came back. Half the profits went to Christian Aid.’
She wasn’t getting a ‘Sorry’ from me.
‘Well, Jason,’ said the vicar. ‘Mrs Crommelynck has been called away. Rather unexpectedly.’
Oh. ‘Will she be back any time—’ (The wife brought on my stammer like an allergy. I was stuck on ‘soon’.)
‘“Soon?”’ The wife gave me a can’t pull the wool over my eyes smile that mortified me. ‘Hardly! They’re gone as in Gone! It happened—’
‘Gwendolin.’ The vicar raised his hand like a shy kid in class. (I recognized the name ‘Gwendolin Bendincks’ from the parish magazine. She writes half of it.) ‘I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to be—’
‘Nonsense! It’ll be all round the village by teatime. Truth will out. We have some perfectly dreadful news, Jason.’ Gwendolin Bendincks eyes’d lit up like fairy lights. ‘The Crommelyncks have been extradited!’
I wasn’t too sure what that meant. ‘Under arrest?’
‘I’ll jolly well say so! Goose-stepped back to Bonn by the West German police! Their lawyer contacted us this morning. He refused to tell me why they’d been extradited, but, putting two and two together – the husband retired from the Bundesbank six months ago – it’s some sort of financial scam. Embezzlement. Bribery. Lots of that goes on in Germany.’
‘Gwendolin,’ the vicar had a wheezy smile, ‘perhaps it’s premature to—’
‘Mind you, she once mentioned a few years spent in Berlin. Suppose she was spying for the Warsaw Pact? I told you, Francis, I always felt they kept themselves to themselves more than was natural.’
‘But perhaps they’re—’ (Hangman choked the ‘not’ of ‘not guilty’.)
‘“Not guilty”?’ Gwendolin Bendincks’s lips twitched. ‘The Home Secretary wouldn’t let Interpol whisk them away if he wasn’t jolly well sure of his facts, would he? But it’s an ill wind, I always say. Now we can use the lawn for our fête, after all.’
‘What,’ I asked, ‘about their butler?’
For two whole seconds Gwendolin Bendincks was stopped in her tracks. ‘Butler? Francis! What’s this about a butler?’
‘Grigoire and Eva,’ said the vicar, ‘didn’t have a butler. I assure you.’
I saw it. What a dildo I am.
The butler was the husband.
‘I made a mistake,’ I said, sheepishly. ‘I’d better go now.’
‘Not yet!’ Gwendolin Bendincks hadn’t finished. ‘You’ll get soaked to your skin! So tell us, what was your connection with Eva Crommelynck?’
‘She was sort of teaching me.’
‘Is that a fact? And what might she have been teaching you about?’
‘Er…’ I couldn’t admit to poetry. ‘French.’
‘How cosy! I remember my first summer in France. Nineteen, I would have been. Or twenty. My aunt took me to Avignon, you know, where there’s the song about dancing on the bridges. The English mademoiselle caused quite a stir among the local bees…’
The Crommelyncks will be in German police cells, right now. A stammering thirteen-year-old kid in deathliest England’ll be the last thing on Mrs Crommelynck’s mind. The solarium’s gone. My poems are crap. How could they not be? I’m thirteen. What do I know about Beauty and Truth? Better bury Eliot Bolivar than let him carry on churning out shite. Me? Learn French? What was I thinking? God, Gwendolin Bendincks talks like fifty TVs all on at once. The mass and density of her words are bending space and time. A brick of loneliness is reaching terminal velocity inside me. I’d like a can of Tizer and a Toblerone, but Mr Rhydd’s shop’s shut on Saturday afternoons.
Black Swan Green’s shut on Saturday afternoons.
All pissing England’s shut.
Souvenirs
‘So while I’m slaving away,’ Dad pulled a face to shave round his lips, ‘in a sweaty conference room, covering in-store promotions with this year’s crop of’ – Dad jutted out his chin to shave a tricky bit – ‘Einsteins, you get to swan round Lyme Regis in the sun. All right for some, eh?’ He unplugged his shaver.
‘Guess so.’
Our room looked over roofs down to where this funny quay crooks into the sea. Gulls dived and screamed like Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Over the English Channel the sticky afternoon was as turquoise as Head and Shoulders shampoo.
‘Ah, you’ll have a whale of a time!’ Dad hummed a bendy version of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’. (The bathroom door’d opened by itself,