My Chocolate Redeemer (14 page)

The PNP is the party of reason and progress. It requires of its members only that they be French. Although Monsieur Cherubini is descended from the Dukes of Savoy, who once governed this territory as part of Italy, he wittily turns this to his advantage by stating that he would fight as hard today against ceding France to foreigners as his family once fought against giving the country of Savoy to the French in 1860. He has twice made offers to buy the Priory Hotel and twice André has refused. Monsieur Cherubini's paper
La Liberté
has recently returned to the attack asking ‘…
If the proprietor of our oldest hotel has neither the will to make extensive and imaginative changes, nor the money to restore this old house to its Carthusian prosperity, then has not the time come to yield to one with bolder plans? We trust that, when the owner of the Priory Hotel contemplates a third refusal, he will not hear the cock crow
 …'

When my grandmother sees the Angel she goes pale and loses at least fifteen years. When I see him I want to put on my earphones and listen to something really heavy, something really dead – like Grimm or Oedema, that's the black punk lot with that great transvestite drummer and a rhythm section composed of droids who learned their trade from fakirs and like to pass steel pins through their cheeks on stage. He makes me want to do something quite outrageous, like threading neon lights through my pubic hair, or putting my head in the hands once again of Catherine the Great of Finchley for one of her very special treatments, the one called ‘Rampage'. That's the one where some of the hair gets spiked and the rest is gathered into an armour of steel pellets, where she makes it into a thatch of blazing colours and lets you loose looking like an insane toucan. When the Angel enters a room I don't see him as a soldier, or a sportsman, or a champagne millionaire, or even as a dangerous politician, which is what they say he is. I just see him as bad news, like the early darkness of winter, as a room full of shadows. I think his teeth too metallic, his face too full, his eyes insincere, and by all these things I show myself utterly out of touch with the general opinion of him, for here in La Frisette, and elsewhere, he's a hero. And coming up behind him now is his accomplice, Father Duval, bringing up the rear like his page-boy or acolyte, keeping a couple of steps behind him. This sense of protocol leads Father Duval to be called by some in the village ‘the boat boy', a name he gets from the altar server who accompanies the priest carrying the vessel or ‘boat' of incense which is ladled onto the glowing charcoal within the thurifer. Duval is carrying a large bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane to which beads of water cling like rain on a windscreen. The priest gives them to the Angel and the Angel with a flourish gives them to my grandmother, whose eyes fill with tears. She has trouble speaking.

‘Yellow roses! Like my bridal bouquet!'

The Angel says in his big round voice to me, ‘Welcome back to our village, Miss Bella. Welcome to France! How they shoot up, Madame, these children.' He turns to my grandmother, ‘They're comets. I'm sure my friend the mayor agrees. Racing across our aged skies.' He bends and kisses my hand, a firm warm pressure that sends shivers scurrying up my back and into my hair.

‘It's an apt metaphor,
patron
,' Father Duval agrees. ‘I must say that to me the young sometimes resemble rushing streams. Like those torrents that race down the mountains behind the village after a storm. You see the little rivers running every day and they're quiet and tame and predictable, their pace is sluggish and peaceful. It takes a little rain higher up the mountains and you have a flood, a rampage, where once you had a backwater, the result of some violent storm of which we adults know nothing.'

‘Or perhaps have forgotten,' the Angel suggests. ‘After all, there are people who once believed that children remembered something of the heaven they had recently left and it was only as they grew older that the memories faded. We laugh at these things today. Perhaps we shouldn't. What's the scientific opinion of this? I mean it's at least possible that it is we adults who really do forget the paradise of youth with its emotions comprised of honey and volcanoes. And in forgetting we begin to die. Perhaps the Mayor will tell us?'

‘Such expressions passed for philosophy in the nineteenth century,' says my uncle, ‘but they are utterly discredited now. The extraordinary picture, for example, that the newborn child comes down to earth stepping from some fairy heaven, clothed in clouds of immortality. What a cruel pretence! Tell it to the woman dying of childbirth. Tell it to the peasant who has ten kids already and can't feed any of them! You know sometimes I get the feeling that until the late-nineteenth century mankind was caught in a long dream, the victim of the most vulgar witchcraft. Imagine: for these past seventeen thousand years, ever since sensible beings first began exploring their environment using stone tools – and I'm referring of course to the older form of primitive man, archaic homo sapiens – right up to the time just a century ago, the long sleep continued. And then suddenly Darwin shouted: “Mankind awake!” '

‘Please,
patron
, sit here. Claude, do not bellow so.' My grandmother ushers the Angel to the head of the table.

‘But no, no. That place is for the Mayor. Please, Monsieur le Maire, take your rightful place!'

For a moment I think my grandmother is going to weep at this display of modesty.

‘But
patron
, my son yields his place to you in his own house. It is right, surely?'

But he will have none of it and Uncle Claude is obliged to take up his position at the head of the table where he sits rather uneasily and I know he'll be happier upstairs peering through his telescope or inspecting the tank of water in the corner of his den into which are mixed a variety of substances duplicating, so my uncle believes, the early soup that covered the earth at the beginning of time and out of which life crawled. Or studying the photographic plates, artfully coloured, which he sends for from some scientific lending library, showing vivid subatomic particles arcing through the darkness of a cloud chamber, the curious scratchings on phenomenally expensive cave walls tracing the brief careers and invisible appearances of protons, lamdas, neutrinos and pi-zeros. I don't think he'd be mayor if the Angel and Grand-mère weren't so insistent; in fact I think he'd hardly ever emerge into the light at all.

Despite the pain in her joints, my grandmother insists on helping me to serve and will not sit until the men have their plates well heaped. It is very good, the poached salmon perfect, the mousseline sauce winning high praise and the Chablis perfectly cold. The Angel is quick to compliment her on her Venetian glasses.

‘I got them from a little shop in the Cours de Verdun. I doubt it's still there. Like so many good things gone a long time, I fear.'

‘But I remember it well!' cries Father Duval. ‘Two doors away from the railway station entrance. It was popular with German soldiers during the Occupation.'

‘Say what you like about Germans,' the Angel announces, ‘they appreciate fine glass.'

‘It's precisely because there are so many things gone that the
Parti National Populaire
is determined to restore to France something of her former greatness and integrity,' says Uncle Claude suddenly.

‘Bravo!' cries Father Duval, raising his glass. ‘I give you Monsieur Cherubini, our
patron
, founder of the PNP and, if I may say so, hope of the nation!'

The toasts are coming thick and fast. The Angel is on his feet, beaming around the table.

‘I'd like to reply to that generous, gracious salutation from Father Duval, with an official toast, or shall I call it a promise? At any rate a message. The message at the heart of our Party is quite simply: France, Motherhood, Liberty! We must never again allow history to tell us the terrible tales that came from the Hotel Terminus. Tales which we may see, in the words of the Bible, as we gaze into these beautiful Venetian goblets, through a glass darkly.'

This is all Greek to me. I haven't a clue what he means, but they talk in speeches, those men. It's like being caught in a sudden downpour and there is nothing to do but wait until it's over, and then attack.

‘What was there about the Hotel Terminus that makes people so odd when they talk about it? What else did you find there?'

They stiffen at my question, and the Angel immediately stops talking and sits. He begins to slice his cheese with fanatical precision, measuring the angles by fractional adjustments of his knife. Father Duval clears his throat and shifts in his seat.

‘Bella!' My grandmother is anguished. ‘You've eaten next to nothing. You've barely touched your food. You've played with your salad. Surely it can be said, in all fairness, that my poached salmon passes muster? Even if I must be entirely objective and say that I think the mousseline sauce is perhaps a shade too bland.'

‘The sauce is superb, Madame,' the Angel insists, breaking bread and mopping his plate with relish.

‘The trouble is that my granddaughter takes too much chocolate,' says Grand-mère. ‘She is fixated. It kills the appetite.'

Father Duval wades in. ‘We had a little talk today, Bella and I. Perhaps she is inclined to overdo things a bit.'

‘The tears,' says my grandmother.

‘The prayers,' says Uncle Claude.

‘I deduced that perhaps she is suffering from a mild form of religious discomfort,' says Father Duval and begins delicately to peel a peach.

‘Mania,' Uncle Claude breaks in. ‘In my opinion, she's God-fixated.'

The slippery yellow globe of the skinned peach spins in Duval's fingers like a tiny planet. ‘Let me be honest. I'm not a Shaman, a psychiatrist or a faith-healer. I am simply a village priest and Bella came to me for help. I never promised to cure everything or anything. But I did what I could to reassure her. I think she is probably confusing psychological stress with religious aspirations. She tells me that she feels that God is speaking to her.'

‘He is,' I say, ‘all the time. He never stops.'

‘This sort of disturbance is not uncommon in young people,' says Father Duval smoothly. ‘Perhaps it has something to do with adolescence. Then the girl has been, and you all have been, cruelly bereaved. Perhaps she seeks some sort of presence to replace the father she's lost. It's also possible that the removal to England and her rude introduction to the Protestant temper of things has had the paradoxical effect of stimulating her Catholic faith to a somewhat overheated degree.'

‘But why the chocolate?' Uncle Claude demands.

‘It's possible that her diet is being affected by her psychological condition. She's in need of reassurance. Above all, she needs to cheer up. Remember, Bella, God loves a cheerful heart. Morbidity has no place in our faith.'

Seeing that his bright, glassy chatter doesn't impress my uncle, Father Duval spreads his hands and gives his most Pol Pottish smile. ‘After all, Claude, we're talking of chocolate, a mixture of ground cocoa beans and sugar. There are far worse substances, surely?'

‘You miss my point,' my uncle says crossly. ‘It's just as well to note the fact that chocolate is the food of the lovelorn. Did you know it contains a chemical also found in the brain, called phenylethylamine? A natural substance similar to amphetamines. It can trigger surges of joy, troughs of depression, emotional highs and lows. According to the literature, which I've consulted, people with a history of depressive illness and a taste for amphetamines quite often go on chocolate bashes. Like Bella. The phenylethylamine stokes them up. You could call them chocolate junkies.'

Imagine my reaction. No, on second thoughts, don't bother, because you've already done it, haven't you? Both foreseen and predicted my reaction. But I don't have that advantage. You reserve that to yourself.

‘Why am I being discussed like some kind of lunatic gerbil who has offended with her lack of house training?'

I can feel the tears coming on and I don't want that so I get up and make for the Spanish mirror, because in the face of these sorts of inquisitions that presume I'm not here I only know one answer and that is to insist that I am here by showing myself, straightening an eyelash, flicking a curl, consulting the image in the mirror.

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?'

This question from the Angel is so unexpected and so inappropriate that everybody stops talking and eventually he has to explain.

‘It's the question asked by the Wicked Queen, the nasty story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'

Uncle Claude immediately takes refuge in science. ‘It's an interesting sideline on fairytales that they were once dismissed as childish nonsense. But researchers have found them to be therapeutic in the treatment of people who have been badly traumatised, shocked and abused. I suppose the most famous example is in the treatment of former concentration camp victims. It seems that there is something in all of us that makes us long to see the mighty put down from their seats, the evil punished. The child in us longs to see the wicked stepmother destroyed. The savage in us wants to see the irrational, illogical, indifferent universe made to conform to comforting patterns of rewards and punishments.'

‘In my opinion,' says Father Duval, ‘stories of the concentration camps have been exaggerated to serve the purposes of special interest groups.'

‘What I want to know,' I say loudly, still examining myself in the mirror and making minor adjustments to body, face and costume, ‘is why is it that women always get the bad press in fairytales? Why always wicked queens and cruel stepmothers? Why are there no men doing the damage? Like depraved uncles, for instance? Or poisonous nephews? After all, in the real world it's generally men who abuse children, and little girls in particular. Left alone with them, when no one is looking …'