'This is the vicarage, right?' I showed her my invitation, uneasy now. 'It says so on your gatepost. On the main road.'

'Ah.' Madame Crommelynck nodded. 'Vicar, vicarage. You miscomprehend a thing. A vicar lived here once upon a time, doubtless before him two vicars, three vicars, many vicars' her scrawny hand mimed a poof of smoke 'but no more. The Anglican Church becomes bankrupter and bankrupter, year by year, like British Leyland cars. My father said, Catholics know how to run the business of religion. Catholics and Mormons. Propagate customers, they tell their congregation, or is the inferno for you! But your Church of England, no. Consequences is, these enchantible rectory houses are sold or rented, and vicars must move to little houses. Only the name "vicarage" is remaining.'

'But,' I swallowed, 'I've been posting my poems through your letter box since January. How come they're printed in the parish magazine every month?'

'This,' Madame Crommelynck took such a mighty drag on her cigarette I could see it shrink, 'should be no mystery to an agile brain. I deliver your poems to the real vicar in his real vicarage. An ugly bungalow near Hanley Castle. I do not charge you for this service. Is gratis. Is a fine exercise for my not-agile bones. But in payment, I read your poems first.'

'Oh. Does the real vicar know?'

'I too make my deliveries in darkness, anonymous, so I am not apprehended by the vicar's wife oh, she is an hundred times worst than he is. An harpy of tattle-tittle. She asked to use my garden for her St Gabriel's Summer Fete! "It is tradition," says Mrs Vicar. "We need space for the human bridge. For the stalls." I tell her, "Go to the hell! I pay you rent, do I not? Who has need of a divine creator who must sell inferior marmalade?"' Madame Crommelynck smacked her leathery lips. 'But at least, her husband publishes your poems in his funny magazine. Perhaps he is redeemable.' She gestured at a bottle of wine stood on a pearly table. 'You will drink a little?'

A whole glass, said Unborn Twin.

I could hear Dad saying, You drank what? 'No thanks.'

Your loss, Madame Crommelynck shrugged.

Inky blood filled her glass.

Satisfied, she rapped on a small pile of Black Swan Green parish magazines by her side. 'To business.'

'A young man needs to learn when a woman wishes her cigarette to be lit.'

'Sorry.'

An emerald dragon wraps Madame Crommelynck's lighter. I was worried the smell of cigarette smoke'd stick to my clothes and I'd have to make up a story for Mum and Dad about where I'd been. While she smoked, she murmured my poem 'Rocks' from May's magazine.

I felt giddy with importance that my words'd captured the attention of this exotic woman. Fear, too. If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, 'When you're ready.'

Madame Crommelynck did a tiny growl. 'You imagine blank verse is a liberation, but no. Discard rhyme, you discard a parachute...Sentimentality you mistake for emotion...You love words, yes' (a pride-bubble swelled up in me) 'but your words are still the master of you, you are not yet master of them...' (The bubble popped.) She studied my reaction. 'But, at least, your poem is robust enough to be criticized. Most so-called poems disintegrate at one touch. Your imagery is here, there, fresh, I am not ashamed to call it so. Now I wish to know a thing.'

'Sure. Anything.'

'The domesticity in this poem, these kitchens, gardens, ponds...is not a metaphor for the ludicrous war in the South Atlantic in this year?'

'The Falklands was on while I was writing the poem,' I answered. 'The war just sort of seeped in.'

'So these demons who do war in the garden, they symbolise General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher. I am right?'

'Sort of, yes.'

'But they are also your father and your mother, however. I am right?'

Hesitations're yeses or nos if the questioner already knows the answer. It's one thing writing about your parents. Admitting it's another matter.

Madame Crommelynck did a tobaccoey croon to show her delight. 'You are a polite thirteen year boy who is too timid to cut his umbilical cords! Except,' she gave the page a nasty poke, 'here. Here in your poems you do what you do not dare to do,' she jabbed at the window, 'here. In reality. To express what is here.' She jabbed my heart. It hurt.

X-rays make me queasy.

Once a poem's left home it doesn't care about you.

'"Back Gardens".' Madame Crommelynck held up the June edition.

I was sure she thought the title was a killer.

'But why is this title so atrocious?'

'Uh...it wasn't my first choice.'

'So why you christen your creation with an inferior name?'

'I was going to call it "Spooks". But there's this actual gang who're called that. They go nightcreeping round the village. If I called the poem that they might suspect who'd written it and sort of...get me.'

Madame Crommelynck sniffed, under-impressed. Her mouth chanted my lines at quarter-volume. I hoped at least she'd say something about the poem's descriptions of dusk and moonlight and darkness.

'There are many beautiful words in here...'

'Thanks,' I agreed.

'Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right?'

'Sort of.'

'Your "sort of" is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification, please. "Sort of" is an idle loubard, an ignorant vandale. "Sort of" says, "I am ashamed by clarity and precision." So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it is not a poem. I am right?'

'Yes.'

'Yes. Idiots labour in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue. Here-' She read from the fifth verse. '"Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon". The poem has a terminal deflation. Ffffffffft! Dead tyre. Automobile accident. It says, "Am I not a pretty pretty?" I answer, "Go to the hell!" If you have a magnolia in a courtyard, do you paint its flowers? Affix the flashy-flashy Christmas lights? Attach plastic parrots? No. You do not.'

What she said sounded true, but...

'You think,' Madame Crommelynck snorted smoke, '"This old witch is crazy! A magnolia tree exists already. Magnolias do not need poets to exist. In the case of a poem, a poem, I must create it."'

I nodded. (I would've thought that if I'd had a few minutes.) 'You must say what you think, or else spend your Saturday with your head in a bucket and not in conversation with me. You understand?'

'Okay,' I said, nervous that 'okay' wasn't okay.

'Good. I reply, verse is "made". But the word "make" is unsufficient for a true poem. "Create" is unsufficient. All words are unsufficient. Because of this. The poem exists before it is written.'

That, I didn't get. 'Where?'

'T. S. Eliot expresses it so the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art,' she put another cigarette in her mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, 'fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, cliches of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?'

Madame Crommelynck tapped cigarette ash into a ruby blobby ashtray.

'Beauty's...'

She relished my stumpedness. I wanted to impress her with a clever definition, but I kept crashing into beauty's something that's beautiful.

Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Ridout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize 'I Must Go Down to the Seas Again' by John Masefield. We don't have to actually think about stuff.

I admitted, 'It's difficult.'

'Difficult?' (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I saw.) 'Impossible! Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one's new lover in an old cafe, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.'

'But...' I hesitated, wondering if I should say this.

'My one demand,' she said, 'is you say what you think!'

'You just chose natural things. How about paintings, or music. We say, "The potter makes a beautiful vase." Don't we?'

'We say, we say. Be careful of say. Words say, "You have labelled this abstract, this concept, therefore you have captured it." No. They lie. Or not lie, but are maladroit. Clumsy. Your potter has made the vase, yes, but has not made the beauty. Only an object where it resides. Until the vase is dropped and breaks. Who is the ultimate fate of every vase.'

'But,' I still wasn't satisfied, 'surely some people, somewhere know what beauty is? At a university?'

'University?' She made a noise that might've been laughter. 'Imponderables are ponderable, but answerable, no. Ask a philosopher, but be cautious. If you hear, "Eureka!", if you think, "His answer has captured my question!", then here is proof he is a counterfeit. If your philosopher has truly left Plato's cave, if he has stared into that sun of the blind...' She counted the three possibilities on her fingers. 'He is lunatic, or his answers are questions who is only masquerading as answers, or he is silent. Silent because you can know or you can say, but both, no. My glass is empty.'

The last drops were the thickest.

'Are you a poet?' (I'd nearly said 'too'.) 'No. That title is hazardous. But, I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and,' she uttered the word like a pantomime witch, '"elope"! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as...epouvantail, a how you say the man in a field who frights birds?'

'Scarecrow?'

'Scarecrow. Exactly. So I tell him, "Go to the hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!" He consented my logic. Poets are listeners, if they are not intoxicated. But novelists,' Madame Crommelynck did a yuck face, 'is schizoids, lunatics, liars. Henry Miller stayed in our colony in Taormina. A pig, a perspiring pig, and Hemingway, you know?'

I'd heard of him so I nodded.

'Lecherousest pig in the entire farm! Cinematographers? Fffffft. Petits Zeus of their universes. The world is their own film set. Charles Chaplin also, he was my neighbour in Geneva, across the lake. A charming petit Zeus, but a petit Zeus. Painters? Squeeze their hearts dry to make the pigments. No heart remains for people. Look at that Andalusian goat, Picasso. His biographers come for my stories of him, beg, offer money, but I tell them, "Go to the hell, I am not an human juke box. Composers? My father was one. Vyvyan Ayrs. His ears was burnt with his music. I, or my mother, he rarely listened. Formidable in his generation, but now he is fallen from the repertory. He exiled at Zedelghem, south of Bruges. My mother's estate was there. My native tongue is Flemish. So you hear, English is not an adroit tongue for me, too many lesses and lessnesses. You think I am French?'

I nodded.

'Belgian. The destiny of discreet neighbours is to be confused with the noisy ones next door. See an animal! On the lawn. By the geraniums...'

One moment we were watching the twitch of a squirrel's heart.

The next, it'd vanished.

Madame Crommelynck said, 'Look at me.'

'I am doing.'

'No. You are not. Sit here.'

I sat on her footstool. (I wondered if Madame Crommelynck's got a butler 'cause something's wrong with her legs.) 'Okay.'

'Do not hide in your "okay". Closer. I do not bite off the heads of boys. Not on a full stomach. Look.'

There's a rule that says you don't gaze too intently at a person's face. Madame Crommleynck was ordering me to break it.

'Look closer.'

Those parma violets, I smelt, fabrics, an ambery perfume, and something rotting. Then something weird happened. The old woman turned into an it. Sags ruckussed its eye-bags and eyelids. Its eyelashes'd been gummed into spikes. Deltas of tiny red veins snaked its stained whites. Its irises misty like long-buried marbles. Make-up dusted its mummified skin. Its gristly nose was subsiding into its skull-hole.

'You see beauty here?' it spoke in the wrong voice.

Manners told me to say yes.

'Liar!' It pulled back and became Madame Crommelynck again. 'Forty, thirty years ago, yes. My parents created me in the customary fashion. Like your potter making your vase. I grew to a girl. In mirrors, my beautiful lips told my beautiful eyes, "You are me." Men made stratagems and fights, worshipped and deceived, burnt money on extravagances, to "win" this beauty. My age of gold.'

Hammering started up in a far-off room.

'But human beauty falls leaf by leaf. You miss the beginning. One tells one, No, I am tired or The day is bad, that is all. But later, one cannot contradict the mirror. Day by day by day it falls, until this vieille sorciere is all who remains, who uses cosmetician's potions to approximate her birth-gift. Oh, people say, "The old are still beautiful!" They patronize, they flatter, maybe they wish to comfort themselves. But no. Eating the roots of beauty is a-' Madame Crommelynck sank back into her creaky throne, tired out. 'An, how you say, the snail who has no house?'

'A slug?'

'Insatiable, undestructible slug. Where in the hell are my cigarettes?'

The box'd slipped to her feet. I passed them to her.

'Leave now.' She looked away. 'Return next Saturday, three o'clock, I tell you more reasons why your poems fail. Or do not return. An hundred other works are waiting.' Madame Crommelynck picked up Le Grand Meaulnes, found her place and started reading. Her breathing'd got whistlier and I wondered if she was ill.

'Thanks, then...'

My legs'd got pins and needles.

As far as Madame Crommelynck was concerned, I'd already left the solarium.Druggy pom-pom bees hovered in the lavender. The dusty Volvo was still in the drive, still needing its wash. I didn't tell Mum or Dad where I was going today, either. Telling them about Madame Crommelynck'd mean (a) admitting I was Eliot Bolivar, (b) twenty questions about who she is I can't answer 'cause she's an unnumbered dot-to-dot, (c) being told not to pester her. Kids aren't s'posed to visit old ladies if they're not grandmothers or aunts.

I pressed the bell.

The vicarage took ages to swallow up the chime.

Nobody. Had she gone out for a walk?

The butler hadn't taken this long last week.

I banged the knocker, sure it was useless.

I'd pedalled like mad over here 'cause I was thirty minutes late. Madame Crommelynck'd have a field marshal's attitude to punctuality, I reckoned. All for nothing, it appeared. I'd got The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway from the school library, just 'cause Madame Crommelynck'd mentioned him. (The introduction said the book'd made Americans burst into tears when it was read on the radio. But it's just about an old guy catching a monster sardine. If Americans cry at that they'll cry at anything.) I rubbed some lavender in my palms and snuffed. Lavender's my favourite smell, after Tipp-Ex and bacon rind. I sat down on the steps, not sure where to go next.

A July afternoon yawned.

Mirage-puddles'd shimmered on the Welland road as I rode here.

I could've gone to sleep on the baked doorstep.

Little naked ants.

A bolt slid like a rifle and the old butler opened up. 'You are back for more.' Today he wore a golf jersey. 'You may remove your shoes.'