My Chocolate Redeemer (3 page)

Chapter 2

Each glittering summer in the house high above the lake, between the church and the Bellevue Hotel, overlooking the village square; ever since I was a tiny girl I have come to the house in July, on my own, and been welcomed by my French family of Grand-mère and Uncle Claude.

When I was little Grand-mère carried up the stairs every night a cup of hot chocolate with which I was soothed before going to sleep. She cupped it in her palms and this made the steam seem to rise from her hands. Long before she entered my bedroom, long before I even heard her feet on the stairs, the milky fragrance reached me, the warm sweet genie left the mug and communicated with me. On the cup, which was white with a thick lip and a generous ear, there appeared the picture of a man in a top hat leading a bear on a chain. The bear was muzzled, and padded behind the plump gentleman in his frock coat who put his feet down with complete confidence. When I saw the picture I always felt sad for the bear, but then I would drink my hot chocolate and drowsiness soaked up sorrow like blotting paper. All that was human was to be found in the downcast face of that plodding bear; everything that was most beastly in the fat proud man, beginning with the hard shine on his top hat and going right down to the hatefully confident angle of his little feet. I believe that had it not been for the chocolate I would have tossed and turned and dreamed of the bear. But however much that picture moved me, the chocolate took away my worries and I never dreamed of the bear.

I dream now. Sometimes I think that if only we could return to those times, those evenings, my grandmother and I, then the dreams would stop. I eat large amounts of chocolate but this does not have a soothing effect, in fact, quite the opposite, for the taste of the chocolate, sweet or bitter, reminds me that the cup, the man and the bear are forever out of my reach. When my father died and it was announced that my mother was selling the apartment in Paris and moving to England, my Uncle Claude broke the cup.

He dropped it on the stone floor of the dining room, a complex pattern of octagonal black-and-white tiles that reminded me, when I was younger, of the eye of a fly I saw hugely magnified in the photographic exhibition held to celebrate the opening of the old Mairie, restored by Monsieur Cherubini in the days when he still spent his money on restoring old monuments and did not give it all to that disgusting party of which he is the principal benefactor and guardian angel.

The
Parti National Populaire
is, against all expectation, increasingly successful and claims it will win seats in the National Assembly at the next election. It has already found favour in our village. Party backing ensured that my Uncle Claude received the nomination for mayor. It was in fact on the day that he was installed in office and took up his sash in the newly renovated
mairie
that he dropped my bear cup on the kitchen floor, where it did not so much smash but exploded with a dull crump. That day also happened to be my tenth birthday. It was the only time that Uncle Claude actually marked my birthday. In a few weeks' time I will turn sixteen and I can tell you I won't be surprised if Uncle Claude celebrates by burning my clothes or hiding my tapes. He insists that I attend the big rally to be held in the village square by Monsieur Cherubini on Saturday. Monsieur Cherubini, says my uncle, is the true guardian angel of the Party and a model for any young person.

‘A paragon of strength, purposeful and honest, a vital force,' remarked Uncle Claude. ‘A simple, passionate follower of science and truth.'

Men are the fools boys grow into. It's not enough that Uncle Claude should have spent his life shut away, contemplating the mysterious origins of the universe and then one day think he is fitted for the job of mayor. But he is also determined to woo converts. From his bedroom in my grandmother's house, where he still lives, he has been catapulted into the brutally refurbished
mairie
, an elegant house built before the Revolution into which the Guardian Angel has introduced his ideas of preservation. A steel brace supports the roof, great glass panels prevent access to the central courtyard though they allow a glimpse of the gleaming interior, polished like a tooth; the façade is stripped to what he insists is its original severe purity. It looks like the face of an ancient actress caught in the cold light of dawn before she could apply her make-up. It's cruel, what they've done to the old house, even picking out its birth date, 1673, in gold paint on its scrubbed face. My Uncle Claude goes to that place every morning and pretends to be busy. There really is nothing to do. He places the cards showing the temperatures of the day in their wooden slot; he squares off the maps of the lake and the mountains; the timetable for the ferries that cruise between the villages around the lake is moved a little to the left or the right; the prices of the tennis courts and the times of the church services are similarly adjusted and then he sits in his new office for a few hours signing papers. At twelve o'clock he goes to his room and his real work.

Uncle Claude is an atheist and a cosmologist. The order is important because the first depends for proof on the second. He studies the latest developments in the search for the origins of the universe with great excitement. His talk is all of the Higgs Transition. He is determined to prove that belief in God is so much ‘intellectual excrement'. This is Uncle Claude's mission in life.

‘I have now advanced to the point where it seems to be clear, and will seem to everyone else undeniable, that God has been beaten back to the very rim of time and is clinging there by his fingernails. A terminal figment. It cannot be much longer before he is released from his misery and drops unlamented into the abyss. And the further the faster!'

I do not like this view of things. Taking a different tack, I hear noises, I hear his scream. It changes pitch as he falls. This is called the Doppler effect. A similar observation, applied to the movement of galaxies by the astronomer Hubble, showed the famous red shifts. The red shift told Hubble the galaxies were rushing apart at many thousands of kilometres a second. The most distant galaxies were travelling at the greatest velocities – or, in Uncle Claude's words: ‘The further, the faster!' Another is: ‘The earlier, the smaller!' This refers to the fact that as we trace the inflation of the early universe back through the first few minutes, it becomes smaller and smaller until it gets to a point so tiny it may not exist at all.

What concerns cosmologists is what they call the first four minutes of creation, beginning at zero time, or T equals nought, when the very young universe begins to expand furiously, fifteen to twenty billion years ago. During this very early, fabulous period of expansion there was created all the matter in the universe which became in time the great swirling clouds of gas and dust from which evolved all the galaxies, all the stars, suns, comets, asteroids, planets, all the solar systems, all the heavenly bodies (if we can still use this phrase without embarrassment), all the worlds that are or ever will be. Zero time marks the point when there occurred the unimaginably violent primary explosion known with rather affecting understatement as the ‘Big Bang'. This is the chosen field of Uncle Claude's enquiry. But in a sense, the bulk of these four minutes is not very interesting to him, for while the most extraordinary things happened in that time the actual business of creation was already under way, the show was running, the clock had started and most of the really important developments took place in a period of time so brief it is quite impossible to imagine. Uncle Claude will say that it was about a millionth of the time it takes light to cross a photon, or the first billion trillionth of a second after Big Bang. But then that's Uncle Claude's opinion and of no use to anyone. At any rate the really important thing, it seems, is to get back to the moment when it all begins, to push back through the four minutes to that fragment of time, that alpha point at which absolutely nothing very suddenly became something. It is essential to press back towards this point in order to deal with religious fanatics who claim that no matter how big the bang, someone had to set it off. Who demand to know why there should be anything at all and not just nothing.

‘Childish, metaphysical ignorance! We will answer them once and for all when we can push back to the earliest moments. We can get back now to the fragment of time when the universe was about a millionth of a second old. But that's very late in the day, Bella. By then, the universe is already about the size of our solar system. The time of the quarks. But we must get back further, to the very first beginnings of the flash. Then we will find answers to what we already know to be the case. The unity of all the forces.'

Uncle Claude believes that in the beginning there was GUT, and in GUT there were contained the four Universal Forces: the ‘weak' and ‘strong' nuclear forces, the electromagnetic and gravitational which, in the old times, were one. GUT is also called Grand Unification Theory. Before the creation of the universe and before the beginning of time unity existed in the divine speck of nothing, or next to nothing. And only then. When the speck exploded, GUT went with it, the four forces of the apocalypse broke up and galloped all over the universe. Ever since then people like my Uncle Claude have been trying to put the forces together again.

‘When we do that, we'll have TOE! The Theory Of Everything! What do you think of that, Bella?'

I think I'd like to smack his face.

Uncle Claude only asks questions to which he knows there are answers. The answers send him crunching towards the ‘shivering figment' clinging to the precipice of time by his fingernails. The tread of Uncle Claude's boots echoed through my dreams. In my dreams I saw them cruelly studded, nearing the edge of the cliff where the fingers clutched, the blood blushing beneath the divine nails. I heard the cry as the poor figment plunged into the abyss and I woke sweating and crying and Grand-mère would bustle up the stairs in her pink flannel gown and sit by my side smoothing my hair until I had calmed down. To add further to my fear Uncle Claude made sure that I knew from a very early stage that the universe was not infinite, nor was it eternal. Our sun would one day run out of nuclear fuel, grow into a huge red giant and incinerate all life; eventually it would shrink and grow cool and dark and dead. So would we. Then also there was no point in snatching at some dream of the universe as expanding forever, infinite in size, unending in its glory. The universe had an edge. Astronomers were reaching out further and further with the electronic cameras and would soon be bumping up against the very limit of the universe, millions of light years away.

But what is this edge? Is it what a fly must feel when it is trapped in a bottle and bumps against the sides?

‘Bella, stop being foolish. With you everything is birds or flowers or bees! There is no bottle. There is no fly.'

‘Then what is there?'

‘There is nothing. The universe simply runs out.'

This is it then. At the beginning, according to Uncle Claude, there had been nothing and then the next minute there was something. There was a speck of matter, which exploded, then there was a lump of matter about the size of a grapefruit which kept on inflating and suddenly everything came into being. At the end of space time, says Uncle Claude, where there was something, there will suddenly be nothing.

‘That's it. There we are. Or rather, there you are.'

He gives an impish smile when he says this, as if his pronouncements contain a delicious irony, but one which can be savoured only by atheist uncles.

‘You ask stupid questions, Bella,' says Uncle Claude. ‘It's as well you have your looks, my girl. Because you're going to need them. There is nothing beyond the edge. Nothing!'

It was in this mood of spiteful glee that Uncle Claude abused me when I was small. Not physically but arithmetically, not with his fingers but with figures. He would watch me slyly, sneaking up on me when I was playing with my doll, Gloria, and he knew I was utterly absorbed. Gloria was a plump, porcelain creature with silly red hair, much darker than mine, and grass-green eyes, perfectly lashed. She was also far older than me and some accident had robbed her of three fingers on her right hand. I played hospital with her, being both the doctor who gravely shook his head and called for bandages at the sight of Gloria's poor hand, and the nurse who put her to bed and bound the injury. I would feel Uncle Claude's presence before I saw him because his shadow fell on me as I played in a corner of the garden beneath the great chestnut tree. I wore white often in those days – it made me feel medicinal and Grand-mère would tie my blue sash around my waist in a plump bow, with a matching ribbon in my hair.

My darling Gloria! She lost her fingers in not one but in a series of tragic accidents. Once she had been sailing on a lagoon in Tahiti, leaning back on the purple cushions of a barge and trailing her hand in the water when a shark had taken the fingers. Then she had been waylaid in a dark wood on the way home after selling her grandmother's last pig at the market, a silver coin clutched in her hand. She ran home to the hovel where her poor, ailing grandmother lay in bed calling weakly for the soup that would save her life when suddenly a cutpurse, reeking of woodsmoke and onions, stepped from the shadows and seized the coin. Gloria bravely resisted and the thief sliced off her fingers with a razor. Finally, she had also been a violin prodigy until a mysterious wasting illness infected her hand and the doctors were forced to amputate – oh! how dreadful! Whenever she heard the Beethoven Violin Concerto her fingers miraculously bled. I began unrolling my precious strip of bandage, rather grubby I fear, and retaining only the merest hint of its old antiseptic aroma. The doctor (whom I became) gave instructions to the nurse (whom I would become) and Gloria's green eyes shone with love and gratitude.

‘Would you like some of these?' Uncle Claude's familiar words when he proposed an assault. And what were ‘these'? These were always the same: golden coins stamped with the head of Napoleon and the frieze of the Arc de Triomphe all silvered with sugar button eyes, or bicycles with spokes so fine you felt they had been spun by spiders – but always
chocolate
: white, brown, dark, sweet or bitter. He chose his moment. He knew my weakness. How could it be otherwise? Each summer I sailed through the blazing months like some tiny craft on an ocean huge and empty, glittering like a mirror in which I saw few faces but my own. Papa was in Africa, Mama was photographing America and Gloria was ill with a damaged hand. Of course he knew his moment.