My Chocolate Redeemer (15 page)

Then I take out of my bag my tomato-blush lipliner and apply it confidently around my lips and pout at my reflection. Catherine the Great of Finchley cut my hair very short at special request before I left England and it testifies to her ability that the style has held well in the weeks I have spent in La Frisette. I go on to repair my navy-blue mascara and to deepen the rather nice plummy shade around my eyes. Because I find my cheeks have a round peachiness to them, which I hate, I slush on tons of strawberry blusher to soften the offending peaches and to give a better line. This wanton display of face paint can always be relied upon to enrage my French family. They sit there pretending to be eating their fruit and cheese, but I think my little scene makes its point. Besides, I believe that the urge to beautify oneself often disconcerts pupils of scientific certainty. To them – what else? – it's all so pointless. That's why I think there is something rather vulgar, yes
gross
, a willingness to lead with the chin, which you will find among possessors of the one true faith, whether they believe in pixies or molecules. There's always something about them that's so horribly forward. Of course Uncle Claude knows who this is aimed at and he takes diversionary action, reaching for the facts like a man going for his guns. Flesh always disconcerts him.

Now Father Duval is on his feet, taking from his inside pocket a large yellow envelope which he waves. ‘
Patron
, as you know, our parishioners of the Church of the Resurrection have been collecting for a year now to begin to repair the fabric of our beloved edifice. It looks a bit threadbare, I know, a bit patched. But we also know that God is eternal, which means he can wait, but you,
patron
, are dealing with more pressing problems, they cry out for our attention! For that reason I would like to present you, on behalf of our parish, with the money we have gathered.' And he formally presents the Angel with the large yellow envelope.

My grandmother sobs quietly and she comes over to me and puts her arm round my shoulder and leads me back to the table and makes me sit and she keeps lifting her hand and opening it and gesturing towards the Angel as if there is something she wants to say or to give him but which she can't express, only symbolise by the movement of the open hand.

The Angel gets to his feet now. ‘Monsieur le Curé, you may absolutely and entirely rely on us. And on the PNP. We're not taking this money from you, we're merely holding it in trust. We remember that we owe it to you and to the Church. I assure you that in accepting this gift we stand ready to repay our debt because one day when your old church is threatened with more than damp and neglect, we'll be there to save it.'

And then he sits down and carefully eats an orange with a delicacy unexpected in such a square, hearty man. And Father Duval feasts on lychees which he eats with a sucking sound and a little shake of the head as the flesh goes down.

‘Did you know,
patron
, that Bella has seen our very own Ethiopian, the wandering one, who's settled in La Frisette,' Grand-mère announces. The Angel takes me in with interested eyes, my canary yellow and very baggy shorts, my sloppy Joe shirt, my green sneakers.

‘I don't think he's an Ethiopian, Madame.'

‘Well he's from Africa, we know that,' says my Uncle Claude. ‘Our chocolate chum who's moved into the Priory Hotel. You've met him, Bella, you tell the
patron
about him.'

The Angel is suddenly very attentive and his voice gentle. ‘Yes, tell me, my dear.'

‘My uncle is right, he is exactly the colour of chocolate. And the texture. He's dark and glistening. I wonder what he tastes like?'

‘Bella!' My uncle is scandalised. ‘Don't be absurd!'

‘Come, come, the child likes confection. You know how she feels about chocolate. It's only natural,' my grandmother remonstrates gently. ‘Black and bitter, I imagine, that's what he tastes like, my Bella. There's not much sugar in that one.'

‘Have you seen him then, Grand-mère?'

She taps her forehead with her finger. ‘Only in here.'

‘He's so ugly. You cannot imagine how superbly ugly he is. Do you think he'd soften if he stayed in the sun too long?'

‘Well, what would you say?'

‘Certainly, I say that he would. Besides, one shouldn't expose chocolate to a naked flame. I want to tell him that each time I see him lying there on the private beach. I notice it when he's been in the sun for a little time, he begins sweating and shining and it makes him look as if he really is – you know …'

‘Melting?'

‘Yes. And I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't tell him that he's in danger of liquefying and running between the cracks of the jetty and disappearing.'

The others listen in silence to our conversation. Such is the silence I can hear Uncle Claude moving in his clothes. The dining room commands a fine view of the lake and the warm watery breeze stirs the lace curtains carrying on it very faintly the distant growl of motorbikes. As the sun sets, the surface of the water has a dark, glassy appearance and shadows begin spreading swiftly, mingling like ink with the water. Opposite us on the further shore of the lake stand the two conical mountains, one slightly behind the other, which we know in these parts as the breasts of St Joan. I never could see why. They look more like volcanoes. The clarity of the day is always to be judged by the view across the lake and when the breasts of St Joan stand up above the water in perfectly sharp detail, you know the day has been good, and you know that you are looking at least thirty kilometres across the water.

My grandmother goes on considering the black man melting between the cracks on the jetty. Eventually she nods and sighs, ‘It serves him right.'

The Angel's broad face takes on a look of simple dignity that is really quite beautiful. It's the sort of look which leads to descriptions of him which are flamboyant to say the least.
La Liberté
, his own paper, speaks of him in intoxicated terms which actually are not all that inaccurate because they catch something of the curious attractiveness of the man.
La Liberté
speaks of the look of a ‘sportsman and a soldier', it raves about his bluff and attractive directness, his natural manner and it says that he is perhaps ‘
somewhere between a saviour and a hunter, easy and generous yet formidable in the smoke of battle. Someone who destroys without compunction the foolish and the idiotic. A lithe hunter who despatches his prey with precision, yet who turns to a woman or a child with touching sincerity and manly gentility
 …'

‘Madame, I know I speak for many when I assure you that I am a simple patriot. I make no secret of the fact that I prefer my own family to my neighbour's. I prefer my neighbours to the English tourists. However I prefer the English tourists to those members of an alien culture who are unable, or unwilling, to respect the duties of citizens even while claiming the rights of native-born Frenchmen. One does not have to be racialist or a xenophobe to believe that the French are entitled to claim France as their own.'

‘I met old Laval in the village earlier today and he told me that the man at the Priory has taken thirty rooms!' says Father Duval.

‘He told Bella his name is Brown,' my uncle chips in. ‘I find that unlikely – although appropriate.'

‘I didn't say that he told me his name was Brown. I said that I called him Brown. I think that's his name. At any rate it's my name for him.'

‘My niece has a habit of subverting reality in this way. She believes words carry the capacity to change things. She lives in a world of imagination where stones speak and rivers dance, but no one knows how to add up or subtract. Bella has an aversion to facts, figures, details, accuracy. She has an allergy to the truth. She believes she has only to name a thing and it becomes whatever she likes. She assumes the powers of the defunct Creator. She believes in magics, spells, witcheries whereby people shape and govern the world and by which other people are enchanted. You can see it in everything she does, the rather vulgar and perverse attachment to emotion, the prayers, the tears, the devotion to the animal spirits of popular music, the hatred of what must be verified or what can be analysed. It is as if looks alone are enough for her. Sensation. She behaves as if one can give to things whatever shape one finds pleasing. How things look to you. Worse still, how you look to the world is everything. She wants to sweep away the power of reason and have everybody run mad!'

My uncle takes an apple and squeezes it till the bruises show and then he stabs it with his knife.

‘She's got the sort of looks that may very well do that,' says the Angel calmly and he looks very hard at my breasts. ‘You're a very pretty girl, my dear Bella,' he says with a directness that no one dares to contradict since he is the
patron
and directness is his strong point.

‘Well said,
patron
! I warned her about Leda. Or at least I asked Claude to do so,' says my grandmother. ‘You see,
patron
, she was out in the boat on the lake with this Brown man. I felt she should be reminded of what happened between Leda and Zeus.'

‘I'm the only one who knows what happened, it seems,' I say. ‘Uncle Claude doesn't.'

‘Zeus got Leda pregnant, I seem to remember. She laid an egg,' says the Angel.

‘And from that egg were hatched Helen, Castor and Polydeuces,' Father Duval counts them off on his fingers. ‘And afterwards Leda was given a place among the stars. She became the goddess Nemesis. I really can't help feeling that the delightful embroideries of the Greek gods are so much more inventive than our Christian monotheism.'

‘I gave him the name Brown. The name is mine.'

‘There you are,' says my uncle excitedly. ‘There is exactly the process of naming to which she always gives way. It's no good discussing the world with Bella. For Bella's world is one continuous selfish invention.'

‘But my name does very well. You see, the important thing about my name is that the man in question answers to it. What do you say about that!'

The Angel looks at me with those bright blue eyes and I get the feeling that he thinks that I am some kind of smart but weird child, a sly kid, full of tricks and surprises, one with odd tastes in clothes and appalling leanings in music. I've got my earphones round my neck, they are my necklace and I want to lift them up now and put them on. But I promised Grandmère. It's hard though with the sonic interference reaching the pitch it does with me in a world where everybody is beaming signals the whole time, wanting me to do this and that, and I wish I had my phones on right now and was gassing it with someone like Garotte, the new Hispanic trio from Cologne, synthesisers and plainchant, really just the usual ‘blood on the ceiling, blood on the floor' boys, who actually sincerely want to be very, very rich. But OK listening for about ten minutes. Then just as you get to the point of melting them back into the industrial waste from whence they came, you hear something in their voices which tells you that they've just shown the bishop what the choirboy has got under his frock, and suddenly you don't feel so bad about being exploited by three kids who learnt their American English by numbers and you don't feel sorry for the bishop, just glad there are people too bent ever to straighten out, who are beyond Uncle Claude and the Angel, who is now eating a peach. Would you look at him eating this peach which is so terrified by the experience it doesn't dare drip off his chin but slips between his lips like it has been expensively trained. Look!

But then you are looking. You're looking at the Angel who's looking at me and you know what's coming next.

‘I'm not talking about the name of our visitor,' says the Angel softly. ‘I'm talking about somebody else, a friend of Bella's Monsieur Brown, back in his country of Zanj. I've heard that the country is rich in diamonds, in nothing else, but its jewels are highly prized. I understand that this little state is amongst the poorest in Africa. France gives considerable amounts in aid. It's a custom in that country to make presents of diamonds to those who are regarded as friends. It's whispered that certain Zanjian leaders tried to further relations with certain French officials …'

‘It's plain now,' Uncle Claude cuts in. ‘Bribery! Are you listening to this, Bella? Well now – I forbid you to have any more to do with this man until we get to the bottom of this.'

‘Let's agree to call them gifts,' says the Angel. ‘For the moment, at least.'

‘Very well, let's call them gifts,' says Father Duval. ‘So this man, this official, during his tenure in this benighted country, or land, Zand or Gang, or whatever you call it, bribed some French official with diamonds?'

‘One official in particular. A government employee who travelled extensively in the country and knew its ruling figures and, it seems, enjoyed excellent relations with the dictator of Zanj himself.'

I reach up and touch my diamond pendant. It has a curious cold and warm feeling all at once. The way I felt in the paddle boat. Then I see the Angel is watching. It's all horribly obvious now, hideously clear. The visit my mother and I had paid to Paris, the uneasiness of the official with the face like a shoehorn who could tell us nothing and would give us no explanation. The loss of our house, the reclamation of my mother's jewels.

‘I think we can guess the name,' says Uncle Claude. ‘Perhaps now is not the time –'

But he is too late. My grandmother begins to moan. ‘My poor, poor boy. Dead among savages and thieves!'

Then she gets up and comes round to the Angel, goes down on her knees and lays her head on his lap. ‘
Patron
, what must I do?'

No one answers.

It's much later that I leave my grandmother, when I'm sure she is sleeping. I can hear the men up in my uncle's den. I find them clustered around the telescope. They've been drinking brandy.