My Chocolate Redeemer (7 page)

These pictures offended Uncle Claude particularly. He would pause in front of one of them and demand loudly, ‘But what is the use of it all? We went to these places and interfered. We stirred up the mud and now the mud is coming home to stick. The fair body of France is obliged to suffer the rubbish slung by those who delight in her humiliation. This is what radical politics have reduced us to. France beyond the seas is diminished, France at home is humiliated. Is this what we want, Bella?'

Being perhaps seven or eight at the time, I had no answers to these bitter questions. My mother was always careful to be out when my uncle came to collect me for my summer holiday. She was at that time photographing the female models of famous painters, in their old age. Could anything of their original beauty be found beneath the accumulated grime and varnish of the years?

When my father died somewhere in Africa, and nobody knew anything, we lost our apartment in the rue Vandal, our clothes, our car, our jewels. I continued these summers beside the lake in my grandmother's house, although my role changed and I was no longer the go-between and became instead, in the houses of both Mama and Grand-mère, a hostage. I was never sure until the last moment whether each would release me at the end of my time. My mother hinted darkly at some terrible war-time secret which was the real cause of the rift between Papa and his family, while Grand-mère declared furiously that when my father had died, Mama had stolen away with me to England.

‘Would you run away with a child to Devil's Island, or some grim police state?'

‘But Grand-mère,' I protested, ‘England is not either of those things. Why don't you come and see for yourself? We would love to have you visit us.'

‘Too much coal,' she sniffed. Her beautiful nostrils flexed.

‘She gives the same reason as I believe Renoir's mother used,' my Uncle Claude explained.

I enjoyed being in both places. I liked being with my mother, except during her feminist phase. I enjoyed the freedom of having the little flat in England all to myself, while she was away on her shooting assignments. I studied the life in the little square beneath my window. Besides the boys who played football against the toilet wall, I took particular interest in a man who came most days and sat on a bench drinking from a bottle wrapped in brown paper which he kept in his pocket. His hair was thick and grey and his shoulders under the dark blue donkey jacket were broad. I think he saw himself as king of this little island. And you can't be king unless you advertise. He liked particularly to abuse the passers-by, waving his fists and shrieking incoherently at the mystified pedestrians who blushed and hurried away when his ranting began. He stood swaying on the kerb of the square which I realised presented for him some kind of outer boundary of his territory, bellowing thick, incomprehensible oaths at the reddening necks of retreating locals – who preferred to pretend he did not exist. The boys playing football on the square he demonstratively ignored, perhaps feeling that they were on the island first and therefore native to it. It was those others across the street, the outsiders, the foreigners, invaders whom he wished to repel by his aboriginal war dance. To make his point even clearer still he brought along with him one day an old and rather tattered Union Jack which he flew from the roof of the public lavatory, tying it to a pipe which is there to carry away noxious gases. Each morning he came back to the square, somewhat the worse for wear as his drinking grew heavier and after a while he no longer bothered to hide the paper-wrapped bottle in his pocket but took to swinging it by his side like a club, his thumb rammed down its throat. He put on weight steadily, his face turned mauve and when the boiling hatred inside him bubbled out, he yelled huge oaths. Always a shuffling, lumbering figure, his movements became slower and more painful. One morning he turned up with a walking-frame but still he managed somehow to patrol the perimeters of his island with achingly slow persistence. Quick to spot threats of invasion by housewives out with their shopping, or men walking their dogs, he would manoeuvre the triangular legs of his aluminium walking-frame to the very edge of the kerb, lean on it like a priest in a pulpit, rather in the way that Father Duval does in his pulpit in our village by the lakeside, and trumpet defiance.

One day things were different. A group of youths suddenly turned and faced him across the road. A stone arced through the air and landed beside him. The next hit him in the face. Even from my window I could see the blood. By the time I got downstairs he was bleeding freely from the gash in his face but he still waved his bottle and shrieked at his tormentors. When the boys saw me they ran away. The man smelt of wine and terrifically old cheese. All the time I wiped away the blood from his face he kept up his tirade and took no notice of me. What he shouted was quite incomprehensible, even close up. They were not words, they were bellows of a beast in agony.

I got the worst of the blood off his face and then still muttering, he limped away. He never came back to the square. Maybe he died of his injuries, or the drink. His flag hung there for months, getting drabber and limper until one day the lavatory attendant tore it down and used it to polish the copper pipes which came up beautifully, in a pinky-orange glow.

One saw so much through the window of my flat on the square during our time in north London that I didn't really think of myself as lonely, even though Mama was away so often. Sometimes it seemed that, rather than my staying with her, she was the occasional visitor who popped in from time to time and stayed with me. In this she began to resemble my father and I suppose in a way I was used to it. Mama was always slightly guilty about her absences and tried to make up for it by organising small soirées to which she invited friends whom she imagined might keep me company when she was off somewhere else. We went and had our hair done by
Catherine the Great of Finchley: Premier Hair Care!
She did wonders for my slightly greasy hair with dried Moroccan mud. Best damn hairdresser in the world. Not Russian at all, actually. Cypriot!

I knew Mama meant well when she gave these little parties, but then she had such high standards that whenever I caught the eye of one of the guests she would immediately warn me off: ‘Yes, darling, he's friendly enough. But I'm afraid he's one of those bitter, sex-starved English atheists who unaccountably turns to poetry and writes verses about cricket and dog-shit …'

I suppose the truth was that we missed Papa horribly. Sometimes I caught her eye while we were washing up after one of these parties and we fell into each other's arms and howled like wolves.

The weeks go by in a daze of sunshine at my grandmother's little house at the top of the village, with its fine view of the square and the Church of the Immaculate Conception where that fat despot, Father Duval, presides. How I detest him, puffed up on his perch like a vulture above a burning ghat. Since my mother disappeared Grand-mère looks on my perhaps permanent return to her as a sacred gift: she is to reclaim me for France. There are times when I think she considers my father's death as part of the price he paid for deserting his family and compromising his country by marrying my mother.

‘Poor Philippe. Your papa was such a dreamer. French women were not good enough for him, he had to choose an English girl. France herself was too small for him. He had to lose himself in Africa. Our village was too suffocating, he must have Paris.'

My grandmother lay in bed surrounded by the holy trinity; she smoothed her silky white hair and spoke to me of my uncle with tears of pride in her pale blue eyes. At first I thought this was because he had stayed at home and obeyed her. But even when he got involved with the Angel, she doted upon him. She believed that Monsieur Cherubini felt for him the ‘strong love of father for son'. Her mind moved to and fro in time like a butterfly, touching on this and that. Never staying long. War memories. The bombing of the French fleet at Meriel–Kabir by the treacherous English. The nobility of Marshal Pétain, that ‘man of iron'.

‘He said to us: “I make you the gift of my person.” Some of us felt it an honour to return the gift – in the service of the Marshal, at the service of France.'

Increasingly Monsieur Cherubini, successful, fanatical, sensible – with his nougat and his Turks and his big plans – takes over her mind.

‘Work, family, motherland! That's the way, Bella!'

‘Who says so, Grandmama – Monsieur Cherubini?'

She thinks for a moment. ‘No, the Marshal. But he is a wonderfully public-spirited man, that Cherubini. Rich, of course, but delicate. Claude responds to his quiet gravity. Although it is true that just like his poor brother, Philippe, my Claude has his head in the clouds and longs to discover worlds as different from ours as Jesus Christ is from Buddha, yet, I am proud to say, he has a sense of duty. A man of iron. He serves his country. He has heard the call of Monsieur Cherubini and he comes!'

Well, that's a matter of opinion. I mean anybody can hear a call, there's nothing so wonderful about that. But what of the nature of the calling? There's the rub! At a whistle from Monsieur Cherubini my uncle leaves his study of the universe, of everything that exists, of the immense void in which swirling clouds of stardust, ghosts of long-dead suns, materialise into new suns and solar systems, flare into life, shine a few billion years, swell, glare and explode, consuming moons and melting planets, and then die to icy black cinders; or, over periods so long the teeth ache to think of them, in regions so far away the ears ring with their remoteness, inflate to red giants, or collapse into tiny bodies so heavy that a teaspoonful would weigh more than the earth, white dwarves, or neutron stars, or simply disappear altogether into black holes. All this my uncle puts down the way a kid puts down a book, or a dog drops a ball – and runs away to play with the Angel, games of running and jumping and fists called ‘Protecting France for Future Generations!'

I believe we exist in order that the universe should have someone to register it. The universe exists in order that we should have somewhere to project our fantasies. ‘Nothing but physics and necessity!' says Uncle Claude when asked about the nature of the cosmos. He might as well reply, ‘Baseball bats and knuckle-dusters!' Or is it that the universe exists in order that Uncle Claude can make people do as they are told? Five billion years since the birth of the sun and all that time spent preparing for Uncle Claude to bully the rest of us. It seems such a waste really.

‘Bella,' says Grand-mère, ‘why are you crying again?'

‘I'm sorry, I can't help it.'

‘But you must help it! Imagine what would have happened if Joan of Arc reacted as you do when she stood before Orleans? Or Pétain at Verdun? Or your dear brave grandfather when he faced the firing squad?' And she waves a hand at the holy trinity on her bedside table.

My grandmother's holy trinity comprises a lovely small statue of Sèvres porcelain in which blessed Joan of Arc sits astride a white horse and lifts her sword to the skies, the divine maid about to charge into battle and rout the accursed English. There is also a large photograph of a man wearing lots of medals, whom Grand-mère touches with a finger, a slim white finger like a wafer of ice, in a kind of tender salute and who she says is Marshal Pétain; and there is a young man in sepia who looks somewhat blurrily out into the world, as if the photographer took him by surprise just as he was on his way elsewhere. Because he wears a uniform and cap it is not possible to see much of him anyway, except that he is dark with a fine curved nose and bold eyebrows, in his early twenties. Grand-mère was deeply in love with him, she tells me, and in deference to her feelings I have never pressed her as to why he died in this savage fashion. But I did once ask her if she had been desolated by his death and she said: ‘Absolutely. I loved him more than the world. But, alas, he loved honour and his country more.'

I was less sparing in the case of Uncle Claude. He is the sort of person who needs hard questions asked of him, so one day I said: ‘Does anyone know why Grandpapa was executed by firing squad?' To this my uncle gave a surprising answer. ‘For reasons of loyalty.' He added: ‘His molecules are now dispersed in new patterns, that is all.'

What can anyone do with a man like that? What I want to know is: where are the new blasphemers, those who spit on the certainties of science? I mean, it's common enough, even boringly familiar, to encounter entire phalanxes of people who take for granted the non-existence of God. So tell me, where are the
new
atheists? Where are the black masses performed by naked research assistants upon the tomb of Einstein? Who practises self-abuse in a particle accelerator? Who has been known to mock the muon, the gluon or the quark? Why does no one deny the existence of Rutherford?

Well, then, is it any wonder that I go around most of the day with a pair of earphones playing pretty loud sounds of one or the other heavy mob, like In Extremis, who are simply great! Do you hear that …
great
! I don't care what the papers say about their being into sadomasochism, and I don't believe all that rubbish about that dead girl fan being found in the toilet or wherever it was with whip weals, or chain marks, as the papers say. In Extremis are heart's core stuff, the heaviest metal in the universe!

My grandmother lies back on her pillows and closes her eyes, but her mouth is open wide. ‘For heaven's sake, consult Father Duval, child, he will help you to stop this incessant precipitation which waters no flowers and grows no leeks. And listen how you make me raise my voice!'

It is only when I take off my earphones that I realise she is raising her voice.

‘When was Grandpapa killed, Grandmama?'

‘At that most predictable of times, at dawn. Just as it is done in books. Believe me there is no way crueller of killing people than as it is done in books. He was taken into a square in a village not far from here, in the closing days of the war, and tied to a stake. We were all there, the families of the men to be executed. We crammed the viewing area which was roped off. It was like a farm show! The poor victims were led out like cattle and tied to their stakes. Everyone was there, the De La Salle sisters, old Brest, dead these twenty years now, father of the present young Brest, the butcher, and of course the entire family Gramus who in those days were still the undertakers for folks in these parts. They were at ease with death, collectors of it, and this was a variety they had not seen before. Death by firing squad. I knew then what the friends of the condemned felt during the Revolution when they watched the business of the guillotine. Young Old Laveur was with me that dawn. He nearly married me once, you know, and he was so gallant. He said: ‘If I could take the place of Victor, I would do so, Justine, my dear.' It was raining that morning. Hard. Even the shots sounded wet.'