My Chocolate Redeemer

by Christopher Hope

  But first we must hear the call, and wake, alone, to face our fear. Through the wooden slats I can see shoals of tiny fish darting past. These little silver fish teem in the lake and are a local delicacy, fruit of the lake, fried and eaten sprinkled with lemon juice and black pepper. The shoal flicks this way and that, nervous, forever vigilant. No doubt they are programmed for this anxious slipperiness. At every moment extinction threatens. A state of useful terror developed by nature preserves the group. Quite right too. For at this moment they are being watched by one who would kill them and eat them. Cheerfully.

  On this warm, wooden, private island human sun-lovers have no such fears. These naked, oily, delectable morsels of flesh fry gently. They know nothing will fall on them and tear their livers. No plague or brimstone will strike. No eagles will drop from the sky. The modern human animal is blithely self-confident. I must say too that the guests of the Priory this summer are more than usually fearless. They are healthy, they are enjoying themselves, they are on holiday and of course they’re rich. They could not afford the Priory otherwise. Two elderly French lizards sit in deckchairs, facing one another, their heads thrown back, eyes closed. They are both excessively burnt and I suspect they have come on here from Sardinia or Monte Carlo. They know the tricks. They apply oil liberally to each other every hour or so. He even rubs some on his bald spot. Clever touch that. Their bodies are almost blue-black and deeply wrinkled after many summers spent tanning their hides. They must be in their late sixties, possibly in their seventies, though it’s hard to tell for they have good crops of blue-white hair. Well versed in this pursuit they constantly move their chairs to catch the full force of the sun, then settle back again and close their eyes. They’re awaiting the call, but it’s only the call to lunch, a buffet in the garden beneath the chestnut trees, pink tablecloths and bottles of chilled rosé …

  I heard the call, just as St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century heard a voice saying to him: Tolle lege, ‘Take up and read!’ Well, maybe it didn’t say exactly that to me because I mean – who uses Latin any more? Except possibly that mega-super group Giuseppe and the Lambs who were so big a few years ago with their reworking of Virgil, a great mix of a capella and skate-punk and wah-wah guitars – ‘Electronic Bucolics’ – in the original Latin, of course. They followed it up with a real winger. You remember. Of course you do!

  Anyway, so I heard this voice and it said something like, ‘OK, what’s the story, baby?’ though not in so many words, and even if sixteen hundred years have passed since the Tolle business back in Hippo, the upshot’s the same when you hear something like that – when the call is for more than lunch.

  It is on this authority that I name the people around me. For instance I name these elderly lizards Alphonse and Edith. Do you approve? It really doesn’t matter. I have named them and the names will stick, not for ever, but for as long as is necessary to make the world make sense, the little world of the private beach. Make is the operative word here. You know that, you who have made us in your image and likeness, you will not mind if I take a leaf from your book. Thus I baptise them Alphonse and Edith in the name of the author of us all, we who populate this little wooden world by the lake for a few weeks each summer.

  Naked we came into the world, naked we go out. Once that was a threat, now we’re just talking suntans. All, that is, except for he who arrived weeks ago and has still to be seen to be believed, but is said to be black! Black as a coal-hatch, according to Father Duval, black as night says my Grand-mère, black as the dark matter which is said to hold together the universe, according to my Uncle Claude, black as the words on the page, say I. Seeing is believing said doubting Thomas, or words to that effect. But between seeing and believing comes saying. You see, I say, they believe. So I say that the elderly lizards turning their leathery skins to the sun are called Alphonse and Edith. Who do you say that they are?

  And I am Bella. Who do you say that I am? In the absence of an answer, I will just have to continue to say I am little Bella, always big for her age, fifteen last September and when I look into the water I see her looking at me: there is a shine to her face that reminds me of cheap plastic: she has reddish hair (not really visible in the water), eyes like hot slate, a whitish grey (also not well reproduced in her watery reflection), good legs, ugly knees, racking period pains and a heavy menstrual gush in one so young (really, it’s a virtual geyser once a month). The hair around my ankles rather worries me. For some reason it grows rather heavily on the lower parts of my legs. I’m scared to shave it in case it encourages growth. From the onset of puberty I have been – well – rather tufty. I always shave before wearing a bikini – even then it’s awkward. I am wearing a pair of headphones which gives her (the Bella I see) a slightly scientific look she certainly doesn’t deserve or want. And she is listening to – but you guessed it! – Giuseppe and the Lambs in their chartbuster from a few years back called – see, you do remember! – simply ‘Blood!’

  In six chairs against a low wall that divides our wooden beach from the lakeside road running behind us, sit the family of Germans. The father is very tall with a substantial belly which he wears proudly. His name is Wolf. He is reading Charlemagne; yesterday it was Frederick the Great. His wife is half his age and looks Scandinavian. She wears her dark hair in a plait and has a square handsome face. I’ve decided her name is Gudrun. Their three daughters sit beside her, surprisingly pale, thin and nervous little girls to come from this confident, wide-hipped young woman and the big man. These little girls, as yet unnamed, do not leap and shout like the other children who come down to the platform and swim and dive. They sit quietly, often wearing blouses or even jerseys over their swimming costumes despite the heat, and they gaze anxiously across the lake. There’s a little boy, as well. He can’t be more than two, very beautiful with thick golden curls, who sometimes sits on the sixth chair and sometimes on his mother’s lap. When she wishes to swim she passes the boy to one of the little girls and he sits on her lap. Then the mother in a solid and stately fashion descends the iron steps into the water and pushes out gracefully. The girls watch their mother unhappily. The father turns the pages of his book and ignores them all.

  Over to the right the Dutch people have their little colony. Father, called Willem but known to his friends as Wim, never swims. He sits in his chair smoking his pipe and reading his paper. His wife, Magda, and daughters, Beatrice and Ria, have beautiful breasts which they display proudly. Watching the girls is a young man with dark greasy hair and an old-fashioned bottle-brush moustache. He has big muscles in his forearms and rather short, thin legs; at least this is so below the knees although they widen beefily and, I must say, rather unpleasantly, around his thighs. The pair of grey trunks he wears are clearly army issue. I have decided that he has escaped from the Foreign Legion. His name is almost certainly Raoul. His eyes are hungry and seldom leave the breasts of the Dutch girls. He pretends to be watching the water-skiers ploughing their watery furrows but I can see through that. Of course he’s wasting his time. Those breasts are not available. They are not for handling, or motherhood or even for show. They are exposed in the interests of uniformity; in order that the upper half of the body may be evenly browned. The young man is barking up the wrong tree, as my poor father once told me. The fashion for going bare-breasted in Europe is cosmetic. It is not derived from any wish to be free.

  ‘Do you see women removing their brassieres in libraries? Of course not! Bear my advice in mind, Bella. If ever you have breasts do not expose them in the presence of the printed word.’

  It set me thinking. Papa was right. You did not see bare breasts in libraries. What could be more provocative than unclothed flesh among books? Words and flesh do not mix. However, in Africa, my father said, many women still uncover their breasts quite naturally. But then, he added, ‘However, though their breasts are free, everything else is in chains.’

  Papa knew about these things. Not even Grand-mère qua
rrelled with his knowledge of Africa. Papa died in Africa three years ago. He’d always wanted to end his life in Africa. So that was lucky, but then I suppose he was a fortunate man. People do not choose where they are born. That’s common enough. What is perhaps not realised is that they seldom choose where they die. I was put in mind of this when we were summoned, Mother and I, to the Foreign Ministry in Paris to be told of Papa’s accident.

  ‘Who are you and what is your function?’

  That was the question I threw at the horrid official who saw us, a sleek robot with a face that showed about as much animation as a shoehorn, with the same smooth sheen. I should add that I wore that day a little black dress and long black lycra gloves, an ensemble suited to the occasion, I thought, enlivened by a choker of amethysts and emeralds (a present from Papa), and that my appearance threw the downstairs flunkies, who took us perhaps for a visiting starlet and her chaperone, into considerable confusion. People do tend to stare at me. A lot. I think it’s the way I walk. The civil servant ignored my challenge and concentrated his attention on my mother.

  ‘I am afraid, Madame, that I must confirm the death of Monsieur Dresseur. He died somewhere in Central Africa. There’ve been political disturbances. Details are sketchy.’

  ‘Philippe?’ My mother shook her head as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Gone?’

  The shoehorn nodded and the light skidded off his cheap plastic forehead.

  Then, still insisting she hadn’t heard: ‘Completely?’ She opened and closed her hands as if to grab hold of something. Then again: ‘Utterly?’ as if the nothing my father had suddenly become was unthinkable. ‘There were absences. He travelled. But we met later, always. Isn’t that so, Bella? We have our own professions, you see.’ She displayed her cameras hopelessly. ‘My subjects are often old; they fade like fruit left too long in a dish.’ A look of panic-stricken cunning appeared in her eyes. ‘There will be a funeral – soon?’

  But he was too smart for this. ‘Utterly,’ he repeated.

  ‘Bella don’t cry,’ my mother said. ‘There must be something still.’

  ‘You will be informed if anything comes to light,’ said the plastic man. ‘He was attacked, we understand, somewhere in the bush. There were dissidents in the area. Soldiers. The new regime had severed relations with France. Communication is difficult. We will know more in a week or so. Perhaps.’

  ‘I might be in Chicago,’ said my mother vaguely, ‘or L.A.’

  That was when I put my question again. ‘Are you a wave or a particle?’ It derived, as I’m sure you know, from quantum theory and the study of the atom. I had stolen it from Uncle Claude who used to pursue me with the question when he still thought there was a chance of my salvation for science. The particles that make up the atom may be thought of as two things at once, points or waves. An atom is composed of a nucleus orbited by electrons. When studied at rest an electron, say, can be thought of as a round little globe, like a ball-bearing or a billiard ball. But when it’s moving we must think of it as a wave, as a little packet of energy, as a field of force smeared around the nucleus. Now that was the purloined thought behind the question I put to the shoehorn. Was he a wave or a point?

  ‘I am a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Mademoiselle,’ was his wet and boring answer.

  It didn’t much matter. I had already marked him down for a particle. He could only be considered a wave if you thought of him as part of the onrushing momentum carrying Mama and I towards our destiny.

  ‘Then speak to us,’ I demanded.

  But the interview was over, though I noticed that he looked at my amethyst and emerald choker with little piggy eyes.

  My mother took the news with terrible composure. She was, at the time, about to fly out on a new project in which she would be photographing film stars for an American magazine and her schedule was hectic. Nonetheless she found time to wind up my father’s estate, sell off our apartment in Paris, remove me from the local school and take me with her to England where I was enrolled in the North London Academy for Girls to the great pain and chagrin of my dear Grand-mère, who regarded the removal of a twelve-year-old ‘daughter of France’ to England to be nothing short of kidnapping. She referred thereafter to my mother as the ‘child stealer’. No doubt, she said, this was how Joan of Arc had been stolen by the Goddams. The Goddams was her way of referring to the English.

  ‘There are mothers walking across Europe who have seen their children stolen by their Algerian husbands. They walk to draw attention to the theft. I will join them to protest at the taking of Bella to England.’

  ‘But Maman,’ Claude protested, ‘your arthritis!’

  ‘Very well, I shall go by wheelchair, and you may push me. No, on second thoughts, you are too busy. You are Mayor now – and mayors cannot go walking whenever they please.’

  I remember asking Mama if there was to be a funeral and she explained that without a body this was not possible. However, she promised me that on her return from New York she would arrange a memorial service for friends and family. Sadly, she was delayed in the States where her project, brilliantly transformed into a photographic essay on the oldest female film stars in America, ‘The Eye of Aquinas’, was a great success and when she returned to London some months later she confessed that she had forgotten all about the memorial service.

  ‘Your Papa would have understood, my little Bella.’

  We took a flat on the northern heights of London overlooking a square. It went by the name of Pond Square though it was neither watery nor square but was in fact an ovoid of solid earth covered with tarmac and surrounded by elderly plane trees. Boys played football against the wall of the public convenience which stood rather proudly at one corner having about it the air of an old auberge, rather comfortable and welcoming, or perhaps the sort of modest bar you’d find in some small, out-of-the-way French village.

  Appearances deceive. That is their function, particularly in England. I have gathered together a number of useful proverbs which attest to this truth during the course of my English classes at the Academy where I have made reasonable progress over the past three years since we moved to London. I know for instance that beauty is only skin deep, that it is in the eye of the beholder; that handsome is as handsome does. I make my annual visit to my grandmother in the thin house at the top of the village of La Frisette, every July. ‘French leave’ Mama calls it. Like many English expressions it disturbs my grandmother. And when I translate these for her she treats them with disbelief and loathing. Her lips tighten and compress into a hard, thin line, a crack so narrow it would not admit even a coin, and when she sniffs, short and hard, her nostrils pinch together. Her skin is very fine and she looks like a delicate creature flinching when she does that. Anemones, or butterflies’ wings, are not more delicate than the little indentations of distaste registered on my grandmother’s nostrils when I come out with such expressions.

  Now I’m back in La Frisette for the duration. Ever since Mama disappeared into America. I suppose she must have found herself – and lost me. She communicates regularly; I get dollar bills, sometimes pretty large denominations, from Tampa and Dallas. She used to scrawl a few lines across the notes: ‘Beauty is always so appropriate – but so fast. Must rush!’ Or: ‘We will have the funeral, one day. Promise.’ But soon the messages stopped and just the bills arrived. I keep the money in the silver trunk under my bed, with my chocolate supplies. I’m saving up, for something.

  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.