'Thanks.' As I prised off my trainers I heard a piano, joined by a quiet violin. I hoped Madame Crommelynck didn't have a visitor. Once you have three people you may as well have a hundred. The stairway needed fixing. A knackered blue guitar'd been left on a broken stool. In the gaudy frame a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond. Once again, the butler led me to the solarium. (I looked 'solarium' up. It just means 'an airy room'.) The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I'll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars're rooms. So are woods. Skies're ceilings. Distances're walls. Wombs're rooms made of mothers. Graves're rooms made of soil.

That music was swelling.

A Jules Verne hi-fi, all silvery knobs and dials, occupied one corner of the solarium. Madame Crommelynck sat on her cane throne, eyes shut, listening. As if the music was a warm bath. (This time I knew she wouldn't be speaking for a while, so I just sat down on the armless sofa.) A classical LP was playing. Nothing like the rumpty-tump-tump stuff Mr Kempsey plays in Music. Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn't need to.

The piano'd vanished. Now a flute'd joined the violin.

An unfinished letter going on for pages lay on Eva Crommelynck's desk. She must have put on this LP when she couldn't think of its next sentence. A fat silver pen rested on the page she'd stopped writing. I batted off an urge to pick it up and read it.

The stylus-arm clunked in its cradle. 'The inconsolable,' Madame Crommelynck said, 'is so consoling.' She didn't look very pleased to see me. 'What is that advertisement you are wearing on your chest?'

'What advertisement?'

'That advertisement on your sweater!'

'This is my Liverpool FC top. I've supported them since I was five.'

'What signifies "HITACHI"?'

'The FA've changed the rules so football teams can wear sponsors' logos. Hitachi's an electronics firm. From Hong Kong, I think.'

'So you pay an organization to be their advertisement? Allons donc. In clothes, in cuisine, the English have an irresistible urge to self-mutilation. But today you are late.'

Explaining the ins and outs of the Mr Blake Affair would've taken too long. I've lost count of how many times Mum and Dad and even Julia (when she's feeling vicious)'ve said We'll say no more about it, then dredge it up five minutes later. So I just told Madame Crommelynck I've got to do the washing-up on my own for a month to pay for something I'd broken, and it'd been a late lunch 'cause Mum'd forgotten to defrost the leg of lamb.

Madame Crommelynck got bored before I finished. She gestured at the bottle of wine on her pearly table. 'Today you drink?'

'I'm only allowed a thimbleful, on special occasions.'

'If an audience with me does not qualify as "special", pour my glass.'

(White wine smells of Granny Smiths, icy meths and tiny flowers.) 'Always pour so the label is visible! If the wine is good, your drinker should know so. If the wine is bad, you deserve shame.'

I obeyed. A drop dribbled down the bottle's neck.

'So. Do I learn today your true name, or do I still give hospitality to a stranger who hides behind a ridiculous pseudonym?'

Hangman was even stopping me saying 'Sorry'. I got so het up and desperate and angry I blurted out 'Sorry!' anyway, but so loud it sounded really rude.

'Your elegant apology does not answer my question.'

I mumbled, 'Jason Taylor,' and wanted to cry.

'Jay who? Pronounce it clearly! My ears are as old as me! I do not have microphones hidden to collect every little word!'

I hated my name. 'Jason Taylor.' Flavourless as chewed receipts.

'If you are an "Adolf Coffin", or a "Pius Broomhead", I comprehend. But why hide "Jason Taylor" under an inaccessible symbolist and a Latin American revolutionary?'

My huh? must've shown.

'Eliot! T. S.! Bolivar! Simon!'

'"Eliot Bolivar" just sounded more...poetic.'

'What is more poetic than 'Jason', an Hellenic hero? Who foundationed European literature if not the Ancient Greeks? Not Eliot's coterie of thiefs of graves, I assure you! And what is a poet if he is not a tailor of words? Poets and tailors join what nobody else can join. Poets and tailors conceal their craft in their craft. No, I do not accept your answer. I believe the truth is, you use your pseudonym because your poetry is a shameful secret. I am correct?'

'"Shameful" isn't the exact word, exactly.'

'Oh, so what is the exact word, exactly?'

'Writing poetry's,' I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck's got a tractor beam, 'sort of...gay.'

'"Gay"? A merry activity?'

This was hopeless. 'Writing poems is...what creeps and poofters do.'

'So you are one of these "creeps"?'

'No.'

'Then you are a "pooof-ter", whatever one is?'

'No!'

'Then your logic is eluding me.'

'If your dad's a famous composer, and your mum's an aristocrat, you can do things that you can't do if your dad works at Greenland Supermarkets and if you go to a comprehensive school. Poetry's one of those things.'

'Aha! Truth! You are afraid the hairy barbarians will not accept you in their tribe if you write poetry.'

'That's more or less it, yeah...'

'More? Or less? Which is the exact word, exactly?'

(She's a pain sometimes.) 'That's it. Exactly.'

'And you wish to become an hairy barbarian?'

'I'm a kid. I'm thirteen. You said it's a miserable age, being thirteen, and you're right. If you don't fit in, they make your life a misery. Like Floyd Chaceley or Nicholas Briar.'

'Now you are talking like a real poet.'

'I don't understand it when you say stuff like that!'

(Mum'd've gone, Don't talk to me in that tone of voice!) 'I mean,' Madame Crommelynck almost looked pleased, 'you are entirely of your words.'

'What does that mean?'

'You are being quintessentially truthful.'

'Anyone can be truthful.'

'About superficialities, Jason, yes, is easy. About pain, no, is not. So you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar who seeks approval of the literary world.'

'Is that so impossible?'

'If you wish to be a versifier,' she whirlpooled her wine, 'very possible. If you are a true artist,' she schwurked wine round her mouth, 'absolutely never. If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falsenesses.'

I had no answer for that.

'Nobody knows of your poems? A teacher? A confidant?'

'Only you, actually.'

Madame Crommelynck's eyes've got this glint. It's nothing to do with outside light. 'You hide your poetry from your lover?'

'No,' I said. 'I, uh, don't.'

'Don't hide your poetry or don't have a lover?'

'I don't have a girlfriend.'

Quick as a chess-clock thumper, she said, 'You prefer boys?'

I still can't believe she said that. (Yes I can.) 'I'm normal!'

Her drumming fingers on the pile of parish magazines said, Normal?

'I do like this one girl, actually,' I blurted out, to prove it. 'Dawn Madden. But she's already got a boyfriend.'

'Oho? And the boyfriend of Dawn Madden, he is a poet or a barbarian?' (She loved how she'd tricked Dawn Madden's name out of me.) 'Ross Wilcox's a prat, not a poet. But if you're going to suggest that I write a poem to Dawn Madden, no way. I'd be the village laughing-stock.'

'Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of Cupids and cliche, 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.'