Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  ‘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.

  ‘But it must’ve been ace having a composer for a father.’

  I held the dragon lighter steady as she lowered the tip of her cigarette into the flame. ‘He made great unhappinesses for my mother.’ She inhaled, then blew out a quivery sapling of smoke. ‘Even today, to forgive is difficult. At your age, I went to school in Bruges and saw my father at weekends only. He had his illness, his music, and we did not communicate. After his funeral, I wished to ask him one thousand things. Too late. Old story. Next to your head is a photographic album. Yes, that one. Pass it.’

  A girl Julia’s age sat on a pony under a big tree, before colour was invented. A strand of hair curled against her cheek. Her thighs clamped the pony’s flank.

  ‘God,’ I thought aloud, ‘she’s gorgeous.’

  ‘Yes. Whatever beauty is, I had it, in those days. Or it had me.’

  ‘You?’ Startled, I compared Madame Crommelynck with the girl in the photo. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Your habit with that word diminishes your stature. Nefertiti was my finest pony. I entrusted her to the Dhondts – the Dhondts were family friends – when Grigoire and I escaped to Sweden seven, eight years after this photograph. The Dhondts were killed in 1942, during occupation by the Nazis. You imagine they are Resistance heroes? No, it was Morty Dhondt’s sports car. His brakes failed, boom. Nefertiti’s destiny, I do not know. Glue, sausages, stews for black market men, for gypsies, for SS officers, if I am realistic. This photograph was taken in Neerbeke in 1929, 1930…behind that tree is Zedelghem Chateau. My ancestor’s home.’

  ‘Do you still own it?’

  ‘It no longer exists. The Germans built an airfield where you see, so the British, the Americans…’ Her hand made a boom gesture. ‘Stones, craters, mud. Now is all little boxes for houses, a gasoline station, a supermarket. Our home who survived half a millennium exists now only in a few old heads. And a few old photographs. My wise friend Susan has written this. “By slicing out this moment and freezing it…”’ Madame Crommelynck studied the girl she’d once been and tapped ash from her cigarette. ‘“…all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”’

  A bored dog barked a garden or two away.

  A bride and groom pose outside a flinty chapel. Bare twigs say it’s winter. The groom’s thin lips say, Look what I’ve got. A top hat, a cane, half fox. But the bride’s half lioness. Her smile’s the idea of a smile. She knows more about her new husband than he knows about her. Above the church door a stone lady gazes up at her stone knight. Flesh-and-blood people in photographs look at the camera, but stone people look through the camera straight at you.

  ‘My producers,’ announced Madame Crommelynck.

  ‘Your parents? Were they nice?’ That sounded stupid.

  ‘My father died of syphilis. Your encyclopaedia did not say that. Not a “nice” death, I recommend you avoid. You see, the era’ (‘era’ was a long sigh) ‘was different. Feelings were not expressed so incontinently. Not in our class of society, anyhow. My mother, oh, she was capable of great affection, but tempestuous anger! She exerted power over all who she chose. No, I think not “nice”. She died of an aneurysm just two years later.’

  I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ like you’re s’posed to, for the first time in my life.

  ‘It was a mercy she did not witness the destruction of Zedelghem.’ Madame Crommelynck raised her glasses to peer closer at the wedding photo. ‘How young! Photographs make me forget if time is forwards or backwards. No, photographs make me wonder if there is a forwards or backwards. My glass is empty, Jason.’

  I poured her wine, with the label showing properly.

  ‘I never comprehended their marriage. Its alchemy. Do you?’

  ‘Me? Do I understand my parents’ marriage?’

  ‘That is my question.’

  I thought hard. ‘I’ve’ (Hangman gripped ‘never’ and wouldn’t let it go) ‘I haven’t thought about it before. I mean…my parents’re just there. They argue quite a lot, I s’pose, but they do a lot of their talking when they’re arguing. They can be nice to each other. If it’s Mum’s birthday and Dad’s away he gets Interflora to bring flowers. But Dad’s working most weekends ’cause of the recession, and Mum’s opening thi
s gallery in Cheltenham. There’s like this cold war over that at the moment.’ (Talking with some people’s like moving up higher screens of a computer game.) ‘If I’d been more like an ideal son like on Little House on the Prairie, if I’d 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 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 schoo
lboys 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. 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.