My Chocolate Redeemer (18 page)

The tea turns out to be chocolate. I can feel the gratitude rising in me, warm and strong.

‘I remembered what you said. That you liked it. I am a great respecter of addictions.'

So we drink chocolate and talk. Talk of one coup leads to another, I find. You drive a Lagonda through somebody's constitution and somebody else drives a tank through yours. That's how it seems to go. And here he is washed up in France. But why the funny little room? Not even a view of the lake. What there is though is a fine view of the front gates of the hotel and beyond them the carpark where the watchers sit in the Citroën, the Renault and the little Deux-Chevaux.

‘I see you are keeping a little eye on my friends, who are keeping an eye on me,' he says.

‘Do they want to hurt you?'

He smiles. ‘On the contrary. They are here to look after me. It's very touching, this concern. But I have tried to tell them it's no good, I'm beyond help. You see the Wouff believe their leader or ruler to be the son of God. They further believe that when he abuses his authority he should be killed, because he shows that he is no longer the son of the great God.' Suddenly he looks like a child, a fat, black, ugly child, his shoulders sink and he blows out his cheeks and his big lips turn downwards. He is for an instant the perfect baby.

Chapter 8

I spend the morning as usual on the private beach by the lakeside but no longer at ease despite the fact that the wooden platform creaks beneath the same weight of oiled, gleaming, familiar flesh as it did yesterday and the day before. My cast of characters on the
plage privée
are settled, named, content. They've not been consulted, I know. But then this is not a democracy. You can tell they like it by their relaxed, easy, affable behaviour; Edith and Alphonse sleep with the sun gleaming in their purple rinses; Wolf is reading the life of Bismarck – his little daughters look happier; the breasts of the Dutch sisters, Ria and Beatrice, are no longer quite so distant. Raoul looks a bit shifty – he knows I have my eye on him … We are at that point in the season where time seems to have stopped and no one is ever going to leave. Early in August the days get this way, the hawks fly higher, the sky is pale and powdery above the breasts of St Joan and it seems as if everything will continue, but I know that the perfect weather cannot last. Summers past are proof of that. The less time left, the faster it runs. These perfect moments mean the end of things. The sun pierces the wooden slats and lets down its dusty, silver nets into the green water but catches nothing. The fish flash past quick as thinking and there is no calling them back.

The fish are hungry and I am famished. Hunger is the mother of knowledge. Thinking is hunting.

My poor, dear Clovis now comes equipped with the new boot that the Angel presented to him.

‘Crystal, Bella!'

‘No, Clovis – plastic.'

Through the transparent boot Clovis' withered little foot in its grey sock shows like a mummy. According to the Angel, beauty through disability is achieved by showing, framing,
exhibiting
the deficiency.

Because I'm eating tonight I starve myself, lock the big silver trunk beneath my bed, that bed now raised most impressively on two bricks beneath each leg to guard against the little black troll who haunts bedrooms … as Monsieur Brown teaches … It's been diet day. I have to be strong. It's worst, the craving, just before a period, I notice, and bad during it (very tender breasts), a burning in the back of the throat tells me to stop, but I can get over that. I take them out of their wrappers first and build branches with them, whole trees, and then eat the trees, twig by twig and the wrappers fall around me like leaves, each one about three hundred calories, and a batch of weird stuff, as Uncle Claude never tires of telling me, caffeine and theobromine for pep, phenylethylmine for love, faint feelings of nausea, but I can live with that, though I can't
bear
to look at the scattered wrappers afterwards, twelve, fifteen, because I know I can't have eaten all those, not one girl on her own, not me! Perhaps two or three, and one for the road, and a nightcap, just a nibble, perhaps …

Yes, Clovis, who has no money and for whom the chances of there being a tomorrow are slight, takes me to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in La Frisette,
Les Dents Sacrés
, because he wants to talk to me about the future! He arrives in his new uniform, on his new bike, wearing his new boot and we eat
fruits de mer
, the little cousins of these same silvery flitters which pass for thoughts in the watery mind of the lake.

I am on view in the new bottle-green, off-the-shoulder velvet dress, a red rose in my hair and, of course, my earphones, briefly occupied by the emissions of four lovely boys in six-inch stiletto heels communally called Ape! They operate at a level that would give a deaf man tinnitus – raunchy guitars and circular riffs being their stock in trade, and singing, sometimes in unison, ‘What do I do to please ya?/You and Mother Theresa!' Actually I only wear the earphones to annoy the
maître
and take them off the moment we sit down and Clovis begins telling me about his future, and love.

Love for Clovis is summed up in a single word, ‘her'. It is with her that he has been riding around the village, the Dutch peach, on his pillion, his grassy wedge of hair is newly retouched in spanking apple-green, wearing his salmon-pink overall, issued by the Angel's party to its association of communications workers, of which Clovis represents the first, and only, member, the sole recruit of the Postal Workers for the Fatherland, as well as being the favourite son of the Angel's ‘beauty through disability brigade', and, again, its entire membership.

The restaurant lies close by the water. Swans float by, their necks curving into question marks as they put on speed. The waiters mutter to themselves as they step over Clovis' new boot which sticks out proudly beneath the table. They stare at his freshly painted hair.

‘Did you know, Bella, that your shoulders are very like the chocolate mousse you're eating? I see things so much more clearly since I met “her”.'

‘I don't think you must take everything you believe about “her” to be true. Well, not absolutely everything.'

‘Of course it's all true. If it wasn't I'd die. Because if you lose your salvation what is the point of saving your life? You should look to yourself, Bella. What is going to happen if your mother doesn't come back for you? Will you stay here? For good?'

‘Never!'

‘Then where will you go?'

‘I don't know. Somewhere. Maybe I'll ask the new guest at the Priory if I can go home with him?'

‘Don't be ridiculous. He's not going anywhere, that one. Haven't you seen the watchers at the gate, in the cars? They never sleep. They're his guards, Bella. He's a guest maybe, like a prisoner is the guest of the state.'

‘Who told you?'

‘Pesché, of course. We're on the best of terms, the chief and I. Did you know that I'm in charge of the forward planning for the Saturday rally? They can use me. The PNP give me work, trust me. I owe all this to the Angel.'

‘And that ridiculous pink overall? And the plastic boot?'

‘Not pink – salmon. And the boot is crystal.'

‘Why should the Angel give you a crystal boot?'

‘Because he's a generous soul. And he loves beauty.'

‘It's not even practical, a glass boot. What would happen if you smashed it?'

‘I've been issued with this boot by the PNP. If I break it or lose it I have only to tell Monsieur Cherubini and he will issue another one.'

‘Listen, the PNP is the creation of three men: the Angel, who hates immigrants, strangers, foreigners; Father Duval; and my Uncle Claude, who is frightened of people who aren't quite right.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The physically handicapped.'

‘You mean cripples – don't you, Bella? But my very employment shows that's false. The Party wants what is its own. Sure. Own family, nation, country. Anyone who accepts this may join. We'll become the party of the future because we want what is modern.'

‘And what's modern?'

‘A computer for everyone. A video phone. Information storage and retrieval, the facts of life collated, stored, accessible so that society can be made orderly. A census each year. Statistics of everyday life, income, illness, age, debts, beliefs, crimes, all registered. Monitoring of the destitute and the dangerous. Online concern for the underdog, electronic surveillance of offenders. Are you coming to the rally? I'll be there – with her!'

Of ‘her' Clovis speaks in reverent terms. She has saved him, he says and his voice is full of devotion. He adores her in the way that savages once worshipped the moon, when the moon was still cold, naked and unattainable, before men began shooting things into her and dumping garbage on the rocky beaches of her empty seas. At one point in his litany he touches my knee beneath the tablecloth.

‘Beat it!'

‘I've been cured by her, Bella. No more drugs. No more heartbreak. See?'

Three hypos gripped in his fist beneath the tablecloth, a quiver full of miniature rockets. This is Clovis! He has not snorted, shot or swallowed a noxious substance in three days. He does not ask me for money. In fact he says he will pay for our dinner! And this a boy who has been ingesting whatever dust came his way with a perfectly American abandon for as long as anyone can remember. A miracle!

‘For heaven's sake, put those damn things away!'

From the vantage point of my white chocolate mousse I watch him ploughing his way through
Galatine de Canard
stuffed with pork, veal, truffles and pistachios. My mousse is excellent, flavoured with a hint of cinnamon, just a delicate touch, like a fragrance of woodsmoke at dawn.

‘Poor Bella, you look sad. Would you like to tell me about it? Would you like to consult your analyst? Have you heard from your mama?'

‘She writes to me. Or rather she sends me notes.'

‘That's nice. What does she say?'

‘She doesn't say anything. I don't mean she writes notes. She sends me banknotes. Sometimes she writes on the banknote: “I hope you got my last note?” She's in America with her camera, searching for beauty. When she finds it she will bring back pictures.'

‘I understand,' Clovis nods, ‘it's like people going with cameras to photograph the Yeti in the Himalayas, to prove he exists.'

‘That boot is not crystal.'

‘It is.'

‘Very well, we'll conduct an experiment. You know how the roof of this place reaches down almost to the ground on the other side of the building?'

‘Sure. You can climb up there. We used to do it as kids.'

‘Right. So we climb up there tonight and drop the boot.'

‘What if it smashes?'

‘Then you've won. And, like you said, the Angel will issue you with a new one.'

‘Right,' says Clovis. ‘And he will, too. You are really crazy. I wish I could help.'

Sympathy amid the duck and the mousse and the waiters who stare at me and glare at Clovis is difficult to take. What you love becomes beautiful, Papa said, and that is assuredly so. Clovis loves the Dutch girl – but does she love him? Certainly she walks with him and rides on his bike and talks with him, but equally surely she does not sail with him. For not only can Clovis not swim but I have already seen her sailor and swimmer on the deck of the
Minnie III
on the day that the Redeemer and I went for our voyage on the lake and the Foreign Legion plucked the Dutch peach and the little fish fed on the remainders, on the seed that fell by the waterside. Shall I rephrase, Papa? What you love becomes beautiful, if it isn't beautiful already. Or maybe it's when you love that you become beautiful? Mama would know perhaps, but then she is not here either.

‘Happy boy,' I tell Clovis later that night as we stand on the roof of
Les Dents Sacrés
and prepare to drop his boot. ‘I am glad for you, and of course for Ria.'

‘Who?' Clovis asks, and drops the boot. It doesn't even chip. I am sorry I made him do it now. He has set his heart on it being crystal. It prompts me to think that maybe I have something of my Uncle Claude in me and that makes me very unhappy. There is nothing in the least useful about the snappy identification of molecular structures. It leads only to trouble and heartbreak. Even so, Clovis irritates me by pretending not to know the name of the Dutch peach is Ria.

‘Her name is Sophie,' Clovis insists.

‘Plastic,' I say cruelly, ‘your boot is made of plastic.'

Thursday morning shows early signs of being remarkable. Take, for example, the Redeemer's toes. They are what I see first when he comes out in his robe to take the sun, making his ritual appearance on our private beach. Though we've taken chocolate together, we don't talk about it, at least not in public. But word has been spreading that there is something strange about Monsieur Brown. You can tell by the way the other guests ignore him. He remains lofty, silent and apparently blind to the
cordon sanitaire
which now exists between the other flavours of humanity and his sainted, soft, brown, sweet self. Several metres of wooden beach are now the stranger's territory and we all respect what politicians call its sovereignty. The distinction is as sharp as it would be if we had drawn our boundaries in spit or garlic, menstrual blood or sacred salt. The border could not be more clearly set if it were built of bricks and topped with barbed wire. This has come to pass since the guests of the Priory discovered that plain Monsieur Brown was once a president and a dictator. He has now become the dark continent, to be avoided at all costs, the subject of a hundred horror stories.

Only I am in possession of the facts. At least some of the facts. And you, of course, I suppose, you who made us, all creatures great and small. What I know is that he once had gaps between his front teeth, and that the gap was bridged years ago by a Boston dentist when he studied in that city, back in the years when the French ruled his country of Zanj and Uncle Dickie was still planning to lead the country to independence, and thus claim the Leopard Throne, whose legs were piles of the skulls of slave enemies. I know that he is the ninth child and not the first – and the significance of this:

‘Because, Bella, in our culture, the first child is somewhat dim. My uncle was a first child. Do you say dim? Yes, the third then is pretty go-ahead, the ninth brings luck and the tenth misfortune. I was number nine. The day of the week is also important and the newborn child is named accordingly for the weekday of his birth. In the Wouff language I am named Wednesday.'

Wednesday Brown!

But as I say, take his toes. His toes are unexpected, especially in view of the other marvels of which he is compounded, that is to say the startlingly pouting, toady features, the luscious, Bourneville sheen to his skin, his three souls, the blood soul, the clan soul and the platonic soul – otherwise known as the male soul. However, it is his toes that I now see, curved and powerful like the toes of an anteater lying so beautifully stacked within a hair's breadth of my right arm as I stretch out on the warm wooden beach planks and hear the red and grey canvas of his chair creak, for the Redeemer is moving into a more comfortable position above me and I watch and see a drop of sweat gather in the curiously soft fine hairs of his leg it swells and hangs trembling until gravity calls and it disappears leaving only its gleaming trail. I come as close as I can without touching, crossing a line the others have drawn, while I know that above me the cruel, rubbery face behind its dark glasses turns this way and that, staring out across the lake. My basking lizard, my lighthouse-keeper! His toes, unlike his fingers, are properly formed and though he can't wear rings on his fingers they wouldn't fall off his toes. This is something I intend to take up with him when we next speak. I hope there's time for that because something occurred to me when we talked together. He doesn't intend to stick around for very long. He's just waiting for something.