My Chocolate Redeemer (19 page)

‘What do you mean I can't come in? That is ridiculous!'

My uncle's voice is high and hateful. You can hear it, can't you? It really is most terribly shrill and he is clearly hopping mad and I can't for the life of me think why they are holding him up at the gate, and I shan't look either.

My uncle's face is a horribly neat little assemblage, with its light blue eyes, rosebud lips, soft sooty eyebrows and firm pink clean flesh. Uncle Claude is not one of those about whom you can say that he does not have very much upstairs, he has too much upstairs for his own good and it all goes on in this sort of attic behind his forehead where I think he is building a kind of partition made of this lousy material which, in cerebral terms, you might call the flimsiest plywood around, the sort of thing they make walls from in cheap hotels, the sorts of walls which shiver when the heroine slams the door on soap-opera sets. And up in this room, in the attic in his head which he is partitioning, lies the divine figment chained to the bed, I suppose, like some poor hostage in Lebanon, fearing every minute will be his last. In the other little room he keeps his idea of Monsieur Brown, whom I think he sees as a kind of alien lodger from Mars and who grows daily more sinister and dangerous. I notice that, from time to time, Uncle Claude, though I am sure he is unaware of it, lifts his shapely hand and bangs himself on his forehead and when he does this I get the idea that he is bent on knocking down the partition between the rooms in the attic, allowing figment and alien to flow together and become one.

‘But I insist on going through! Kindly get out of my way. Don't you know who I am? I am the mayor! Aha, I can see you did not know that. Where are you from? I can tell you're not from around here or you would know who I am.'

The loud and astonished voice of my Uncle Claude. If you lifted your head just a little and turned over ever so slightly to your right, you would be able to see him out of the corner of your eye. But you do not look up, you do not even – what is the word – ah yes,
deign
(thank you), you do not even deign to look up, do you?

‘Very well, if you won't permit me to pass in an ordinary, civilised manner, you will oblige me by taking a message to the manager.'

A few minutes later André is standing above me wearing bright peach colours that do not suit him and I would swear from his red eyes that he has been weeping. Hyppolyte has replaced Tertius as desk clerk and stands beside him dressed in a pair of very brief silvery shorts, a horribly cheap gold chain and crucifix. He doesn't wear a shirt and his muscles move under his thatch of chest hair like snakes in a sack. He scratches the black hair of his chest with the crucifix and yawns.

‘We were asleep and the goons at the gate started yelling. Surely you heard them? They've been making enough of a row.'

‘It is the mayor,' André whispers, feeling this is the sort of news he must deliver privately. It seems you have an appointment. He is asking for you, at the gate.'

‘I bet she heard him,' Hyppolyte grumbles. ‘Go on, admit it, Bella. How could you not have heard him – he's been yelling his head off! You just turned a deaf ear, didn't you?'

All around me they're listening though they don't move; everybody on the beach is deathly quiet, carefully not staring at André and Hyppolyte, not noticing that they've just woken up, though Hyppolyte goes on giving his ridiculously exaggerated yawn and stretching, not noticing that André has forgotten to button his trousers. Everybody keeps looking elsewhere. The Dutch family oil themselves, I can hear the edge of Beatrice's hand strike each vertebra as it glides down Ria's spine. The German family huddle and Gudrun peers across the water as if waiting for some Viking to sail into view. Raoul, the deserter, is rapt in a study of his balding knees. The lizards, Edith and Alphonse, turn in the sun the fleshy dials of their body clocks. They're all pretending to be characters in other people's paintings. Wise move. You don't expect sense from oil on canvas. Hidden in their frames, they pretend not to hear my uncle arguing with the men who will not let him through. And I guess they need this period of silence and reflection because, among other things, they want to get over the shock of learning that (a) the guys at the gate who've been clogging up the drive for the past few days are not simply impoverished tourists who have to sleep in their cars and (b) that Monsieur Brown is under guard and (c) so are they … Someone somewhere has decided that people may leave the hotel; however nobody but the guests are allowed in.

When Uncle Claude walks me home I can tell he is good and mad because he talks about numbers. He talks about something called fractals, which he says will provide future models of reality because they allow us to get round one of the problems of a purely mechanistic interpretation of phenomena: the view that reduces everything to plain quantum mechanics and then can't explain the complexity of certain systems, like networks, and the odd way the universe seems to organise itself, despite the command of Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics that says it should be running down everywhere.

‘Don't get me wrong,' says Uncle Claude firmly. ‘I still believe in entropy. Ultimately. And absolutely. But first you have to deal with this problem of order. A tap drips, OK? So you get some disorder. But speed it up a little and it flows. Then there's water which boils, but doesn't fly apart. Or heat a gas, and it lights up. Push it way past its stable equilibrium, where each atom is acting for itself, and what happens? Does it go crazy? Certainly not. Pump up the atoms and zillions of them suddenly fall into step giving out their waves of light like a marching regiment thousands of miles long, and you've got a laser! The thing is, Bella, that things left alone don't fall apart. First they are organised. But they organise themselves.'

‘Why have you come to fetch me? Why have you pulled me away from the beach?'

‘It's the fourth of August. And also Monsieur Cherubini has made certain discoveries about the black man.'

‘What discoveries?'

‘Those men at the gate who wouldn't let me pass. They're not just watchers. Those guys are warders and this place is a gaol. Those gorillas are the keepers in what is fast becoming a sinister zoo. This whole business smells of something and I tell you what: it smells of Paris. They're cops. Supercops. You can be sure that the local gendarmes know nothing about them. They are letting people leave, I noticed that. The guests can come and go. But nobody else can go in.'

‘But I went in.'

‘Yes.' He gives me an odd look.

We walk up the hill to our house on the square and most of the houses we pass are shuttered against the heat. The sun stands small and brightly powdered in an ashy blue sky and seems to burn into the top of my head. I barely hear Uncle Claude who is talking angrily. One word I do catch is ‘fractals' and then he says ‘Feigenbaum's Constants' several times. They sound like criminal charges.

My grandmother is beside herself with anger. ‘Ah, Bella, Claude found you. Come, we go walking. It is my saint's day – remember, August the fourth?' She's in pain, I can see it, it seizes her heart. ‘I wish to talk to Monsieur André. His behaviour towards us, towards Monsieur Cherubini, is an insult!'

Nothing we can say will calm her. She clutches at her heart in her beautiful blouse of violet watered silk and her nostrils quiver; this agony is due as much to the feeling that an act of discourtesy has been committed, an act of
lèse majesté
towards the Angel, the Priest and the Mayor.

‘Please, Maman, it really doesn't matter.' Uncle Claude makes her sit in the chair. ‘Besides, we drank the
pineau
on the way home! So we enjoyed it even if he did not.'

‘And Father Duval laid his blessing upon us. I suspect we probably need it more than the owner of the Priory Hotel,' says the Angel in a show of magnanimity.

But my grandmother will have none of it. She snorts and orders me upstairs. ‘Bella, kindly change your clothes into something suitable for our saint's day promenade. Let me tell you, Monsieur Cherubini, that André has more than enough to answer for, some of us remember, oh yes!, those of us who were once prominent in Lyons at the time of his father, we recall very well the former associations of that family, when they had offices in Lyons, not far from the Hotel Terminus.'

Upstairs in my room I change and then raid my supplies in the silver trunk under the bed, where it is dark and cool. I change into a lily-green crêpe button-through dress and black stockings. I take as well, for a little show, a mint-green straw hat with a scarlet band and a group of three rather sugary roses like jewels on the crusty scarlet velvet hatband. Clearly this must please somebody, because when I get downstairs the Angel compliments me rather confusingly.

‘You sparkle like lakewater.'

‘Perhaps she ought to be told what we know about her Monsieur Brown?' my uncle enquires anxiously. ‘They've stopped people entering the hotel. They wouldn't even let me in. The guards at the gate are stepping up security. Tell her,
patron
, what you've found out.'

But the Angel is not to be rushed. ‘Walk first, talk later,' he says.

And so we progress down to the lakeside for our annual promenade, Grandmama and I. It's something she only does once a year now since arthritis made walking increasingly difficult, and besides she hates the pleasure resort for what it has become. But she always makes this exception, on the fourth of August each year when we go down to the waterside, unsuitably and formally dressed. Today she wears a silk blouse with a high collar and several pieces of her rich collection of costume jewellery, much of it cast in the form of insects: butterflies with ruby eyes and a giant scarab, whose body is a cool, fat emerald, upon her shoulder. Her eyes scan the glittering surface of the lake as if there might appear around the corner some pirate rig, or as if she were some anxious wife awaiting the return of her sailor husband. But there is nothing to be seen except the noisy play of pleasure craft, the water-skiers ploughing the surface of the lake, a few speedboats and the windsurfers. My grandmother sometimes shakes herself when we go down to the lakeside as if she has just woken up from a dream and found herself walking among guests or Sunday trippers or pockets of Japanese tourists, and when this happens she raises her eyebrows at their excellent French with a kind of frowning perplexity, as if she has just heard children discussing their expense accounts. She averts her eyes from the girls sunning their breasts and touches her hands to her ears when the speedboats rocket past.

‘Today, Bella dear, we commemorate the feast of our beloved St John Vianney, once said to be the most stupid priest in Lyons. But do you think that he allowed this insult to overcome him? Of course not! He went on to become the world-famous Curé of Ars. Thousands made the pilgrimage to hear him preach or to kneel in his confessional. To repent their sins. To receive his forgiveness. Such was his saintliness it was said he could see right into their souls. So great the boldness and humility of the man that he overcame the whole world. When he was young he was called up for the army. Can you believe it? But he was sickened by the excesses of the French Revolution and so turned his back on war and went off to fight for Christ. These are the qualities of the old Lyons, my dear Bella. The Lyons into which upstarts such as André's father came and made their name and their money. But in the Curé of Ars you have a real child of France. In Monsieur Cherubini there is another.'

My grandmother gazes at the pleasure-seekers thronging the waterside and says bitterly: ‘As for these, they ought to be locked up.'

We began these walks in the years before Papa died, when I was still a child and when Grand-mère's only worries were that I would dirty my white dress or eat too many apricots. That is to say, before she decided that I had become a woman and was thus a danger to myself and others. I have always thought it strange that my grandmother should worry so much about me and so little about my uncle. I wondered how, with her strong simple faith, she managed to cope with Uncle Claude's wish to polish off God. Gradually I realised that however much they might have disagreed about some things, mother and son came together in their political feelings: both wished to do something very violent to someone else. And quite possibly my Uncle Claude was careful to keep his dream of deicide to himself. He was, as they taught me to say at the North London Academy for Girls, a canny bugger. Grand-mère also quite happily ignored his attempts to molest me with his loose talk of subatomic particles. It really got him going, did the talk of particles, he was the only man I knew who would come out in goose-flesh when he tried to explain to me how a phototube in a bubble chamber detects the arrival of a particle called a pi-zero. To talk of the neutrino gave him a patch of extremely bumpy and not very pretty goose-flesh stretching from his collar to his earlobe in which the little hairs stood up like anaemic grass. And merely to mention quarks made his lips tremble and excited a curious circular motion in the area of the knees and thighs, which as a young child used to amuse me, until I grew up and then it frightened me.

My grandmother's method for deciding that I had passed from my girlhood was pretty clinical. She had a checklist. I had menstruated? I had breasts? I had lost my father? Very well, it remained only for me to think of Joan of Arc and all that she had already accomplished by the time she got to my age, and I would willingly grasp my destiny. Joan had already heard her ‘voices' commanding her to save France from the accursed English. Before her lay glory, martyrdom, sainthood. Quite how I was to achieve this great goal was not made clear, though the expectation was there.

The men in the cars at the front gate of the Priory Hotel look hard at me but make no attempt to stop us. André is behind the desk when we enter.