‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and very sad.’
‘Sad?’ He is amazed. ‘My dear Miss Bella, I can assure you it is not sad – it is essential!’
‘Why? In order to deceive them even further? To make fools of them and laugh at them behind your hand because you know so much more than them?’
It’s a mistake to get emotional. It brings on the floods of tears. It doesn’t help to weep in a paddle boat. Among other things, it interferes with the essential knee action. To his credit, Monsieur Brown pretends to notice nothing of my distress, and boy am I distressed! He unfolds a huge creamy handkerchief from his pocket with a flap and hands it to me and then, squinting into the sun, he continues as if nothing could be more natural than to be paddling barefoot across a lake with a weeping teenager by your side.
‘It is simply because people have enough to bear without frightening them further with chosen facts, because they have to get by somehow in the world and how can they do that if you bully them with what I call Tuesday’s truth? I call it that because it’s invariably different from Thursday’s truth. Such is the progress of science and politics. Once upon a time a man who insisted on Tuesday’s truth on Tuesday but changed his mind on Thursday could be burned as a heretic, or tortured as a traitor, or beaten as a fool, or put in the stocks until he admitted his mistake. People believed to be true what they were told on Tuesday and you could not go about lightly upsetting them. But nowadays we are told that truth changes with each day of the week and these changes come about as a result of research. But what shall we say to those who died believing in Tuesday’s truth? Or worse still – what shall we say to those we killed for not believing Tuesday’s truth? Who will speak for the dead? Who will apologise to the dead? Ah – sometimes I think that those who reject research and science have hold of a deeper truth. Once Uncle Dickie was president-for-life of Zanj, and all paid tribute to him. Where is he now?’
‘Where is he now?’
Monsieur Brown raises his eyes to the blue, indifferent sky. ‘His souls rest with the ancestors. He symbolised for our country the old times. Good and bad. We remember his reign in Zanj as a sort of innocence. Arcadian times, Miss Bella. At the time the staple crop was the palm-oil tree, the basis of our economy, and our art, and our industry. It provided us with all we needed. Palm fronds for our roofs, brooms were made from the strands, palm wine fired the loins of our young men, the wine when fermented provided yeast which was an efficacious remedy for blindness, so much so that the oldest men tell how the father of my uncle, president-for-life, Richard, was cured by this method and threw away his crutch, cut of course from the palm-oil tree, and walked unaided in his ninetieth year! Oh yes, the palm nuts glowing red like jewels in the upper branches of the tree provided soaps, detergents and dyes for the lovely dresses of Zanjian women. It was an idyll, a garden of Eden …’
Under the pressure of his memories, Monsieur Brown throws himself about in the boat, rocking it violently, and for one or two moments I fear for our safety. But then he calms again and we drift peacefully. He is very much the engine of our boat, so squat, broad and powerful that it is really his legs alone that have been driving us for some time and I have just been pretending to help. But he doesn’t notice.
Above us the hawks sail like black blades. Two small white clouds hang motionless over the twin peaks of St Joan making them look as if they are smoking and giving them the rather menacing contours of volcanoes.
There is something rather phoney about the picture of perfect innocence of the country of Zanj and the benign rule of President Richard, and anyway it’s my experience that when men over forty go on about nuts and trees and lard their conversation with references to the joys of palm wine and the loins of lusty young men, what they really mean is people are getting slammed and women raped. And for all the sweet talk, the man Brown does not seem to be a man entirely given over to the pleasures of palm oil.
‘Who overthrew Uncle Dickie?’
He looks surprised. ‘Why I did, of course. Just as he had chased out the colonial invaders. I won our independence.’
‘You!’
‘Myself. It was my patriotic duty. I formed the Committee of National Redemption. Don’t think that it cost me nothing – after all he was my relative, but I put the good of the country first. My uncle fled to London where he became known for doing social work in the East End. After which he died. Shortly before the end he confessed that he would rather have done social work in the West End. He was a witty man. I miss him.’
We drift and the water slaps the rusty cylinders beneath us with a hollow tinkle. In this corner of quiet water lies a small, brown, rather ugly little yacht with a skinny scrap of dirty grey flag drooping from her mast. We are close enough to read her name, Minnie III, and close enough to see her deck where two figures lie and because our boat is drifting and we are not pedalling and there is no sound at all the couple on her deck do not hear us even though they cannot be more than twenty metres away. But we can hear their harsh breathing, the man and woman coiled like golden snakes, their naked bodies glittering in the sun.
I simply don’t know where to look and in my confusion, because I can think of nothing else to do, I begin paddling furiously and at the sound of the water beneath our boat the couple on the deck stop, freeze, aware suddenly of our presence and then she slides from under him and vanishes over the side into the water, out on the far side where I can’t see her, while he turns his back on us and sits quite naked on the deck. Whether Monsieur Brown has seen them or not I can’t tell because the blind sweep of black glass over his eyes gives nothing away, but I can see them and I know who they are: Raoul the escapee from the Foreign Legion and, unless I am very much mistaken, she is the youngest of the Dutch daughters, whom I call Ria. I can see the sweat shining on Raoul’s back. On the far side of the boat I can hear her splashing in the water and although I do not like what I see and try to put the pictures out of my head I can see as well the semen drifting from her as she swims, floating in milky ribbons through the green water.
It is Monsieur Brown who finds another subject to interest him, pointing to the plaques screwed into the rock of a cliff face that drops sheer into the water. ‘What is that? What are “plongeurs”?’
‘Are you saying that you lived under French occupation for years without learning a word of the language?’
He looks delighted. ‘Yes. But I know when I’m being insulted. You can tell the boatman that if he were in Zanj I would puncture his jugular vein and paint the walls of my palace with his blood. Now what are “plongeurs”?’
‘They mark the places where people jumped from the rocks, divers. You see, each gives the date: 1917, 1924, 1933. They drowned and their families marked the spot. Sometimes you find flowers here, underneath the plaques, or perhaps drifting in the water. It’s very sad. Nowadays nobody uses this spot for diving, but once it must have been popular. I can’t think why.’
‘It must have been the desire on the part of young men to prove their strength. Their manhood. Some kind of initiation ceremony. Yes, I’m quite sure that’s what it was.’
Monsieur Brown’s capacity for being quite sure, even absolutely sure, of things which I knew he understood very little about, and often nothing at all, and his willingness to declare his certainty with a great flourish of his head and a tone of utter and complete conviction is one of those irritating qualities about him which makes me suspect that I am going to dislike him intensely.
‘We should head back to the jetty. Our time is nearly up.’
‘I must say I admire the pendant you wear around your neck.’
I touch the diamond. ‘Yes.’
‘Is it a gift?’
‘From my father. He brought it from Africa.’
‘He has good taste. I admire a man who knows how to choose a stone.’
‘You know about diamonds?’
He nods. ‘In my cou
ntry we began with palm-nut oil and avoided cocoa. Later it was discovered that we also had diamonds.’
For some reason the tears come again and out comes his hankie and the rains pour down so hard the shoreline disappears. This time he pats my knee, a big black baseball glove swallows my kneecap and oddly enough I find it rather comforting. The floods pass.
‘I’m sorry. I was thinking of my papa who is dead. I loved him, Monsieur Brown. Very much.’
‘And so did I,’ he says.
I turn cold and a buzzing begins in my ears. My finger tips are cold and I blow on them. The buzzing gets louder. I can feel the sun on my body, but it’s like paint, it doesn’t warm me.
‘Are you saying you knew my father?’
He does not look at me but he gives this smile – big, trusting, happy.
‘Come and have tea with me. I’ll tell you about it.’
‘When?’
‘Any time you like. You just come down to the hotel and ask for me. I’ll be waiting.’
Chapter 6
‘Imagine my surprise when I saw little Bella, floating on the lake, with a stranger,’ says Uncle Claude, ‘sailing across my field of view like a swan.’
We are waiting for the arrival of Monsieur Cherubini in the dining room, where the floor is like the eye of a fly, black-and-white diamonds standing on their points and where Uncle Claude broke my chocolate cup. Grand-mère is preparing salmon in the kitchen for our special dinner. The table dazzles with the best silver. Fruit reposes in its crystal bowl, a waxy pyramid. The papaya lies down with the blushing mango and the dainty kumquats circle, keeping their aromatic distance. I’d like to believe the grapes, in their lustrous purple bruising, are poisoned and Monsieur Cherubini will slip beneath the table at the first taste or fall forward with his forehead in the butter. A wonderful selection of cheeses is on the sideboard, some so ripe and soft they seem to throb within the glass walls of the bell beneath which they have been arranged, like a flower with irregular buttery petals, an after-dinner bouquet for the Angel. Some say keeping a cat is relaxing. But if I could I would keep a soft fat cheese – in a cage – and try to imitate its lovely, happy ooze.
‘I tell myself,’ my uncle drones in that silly way, in a tone I call audio-reflective, pretending to be talking to himself, ‘that Bella is with someone. I look closer and find he is none other than the visitor to our village! The black man. And so I say to myself – now hold on! – that’s the type everyone is talking about, the man who has bought his way onto two floors of André’s hotel. There he is, out on the lake, in a pedal boat with our little Bella. Fancy that!’
I walk over and examine myself in the Spanish mirror that hangs above the sideboard; in the mirror the cheeses are reflected from above, seeming to swim in yellow light, like fish in an aquarium. The mirror is somewhat spotted and was bought in Spain, I think, years ago and is in a frame of some savage foliage, the tousled leaves roughly entwined, rudely fashioned from tin and studded with garnets. Looking at myself in the mirror is a riposte to my uncle. In the language of our family I am making a gesture of defiance. But I wish the grapes were poisoned instead.
My grandmother emerges flushed and harrassed.
‘Come, Bella, leave yourself alone,’ she begs, ‘help me with the salmon. It is after all for you that we eat fish instead of meat tonight. Come into the kitchen.’
We have this language of our own because without it we’ve no means of getting in touch with each other. Our aims are so different. My grandmother, for example, cares only to protect me from corruption and win me for France and likes me to look up to her in the way that Bernadette looked up to our Lady of Lourdes, as a repository of dignity and grace. For his part, my uncle inhabits such distant reaches of outer space that the only way of making contact with him, if at all, is by sending out a series of systematic pulses, rather as scientists will beam radio signals to the stars, in the hopes of convincing distant listeners of our existence. Only when my uncle can read my pulses as being mathematically coherent will he believe that there is intelligent life somewhere inside the dark spaces of my cranium. Without such signals we would be locked within our own universes, my grandmother inhabiting a world which begins with Joan of Arc and ends with Marshal Pétain; my uncle who sees people only as molecular clouds; and me, wandering some vale of tears, addicted to chocolate, hooked on cheap lyrics and a slave to style.
‘What are you talking about?’ my grandmother demands.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘The stranger. Down at the Priory,’ says my uncle.
‘I believe he is Algerian,’ says my grandmother, holding up a wineglass to the light and frowning. ‘These are not suitable, I am afraid. It is Monsieur Cherubini who dines with us, after all.’
‘And I regret, Maman, they are our best glasses.’
My grandmother leaves the room and returns with goblets of heavy Venetian crystal with a lovely toothed, or chewed texture to them, a glass with the look of leather, bitten by old women to give it soft, supple lines. ‘A wedding present from my husband, God rest his dear soul. Bought in a little shop on the Cours de Verdun in Lyons in 1920. Doubtless the little place has gone now. So much has gone. A relic of former times, a sign of grace, wrecked and pillaged.’
‘That’s the fate of relics, Maman – to be stolen by the faithful. Think of St Theresa of Avila, her body was dismembered almost before it was cold. And it was done by her confessor! What demented times they must have been, when the faithful scrabbled for the thumb or the knee of a saint, because they believed it was a lifeline to paradise. Or a kind of jeton to be inserted into a slot machine for admission to the gates of heaven!’
‘My dear Claude, if I thought that this discussion of the bones of saints means you have softened in your scorn and scepticism about the mysteries of God, then I would pause to talk about it.’ Grand-mère shows him a sweet smile only slightly tinged with irony. ‘But I’m more concerned, just now, with my mousseline sauce. If Bella knows the visitor at the Priory, perhaps she can tell us if he is an Arab? What is his name?’
‘Monsieur Brown.’
‘English!’ My grandmother is appalled.
‘African, Maman,’ says Uncle Claude, ‘and he’s taken a dozen rooms.’
‘Two dozen,’ I say. ‘And I tell you his name is Brown.’
‘At five hundred francs a night? His bill must be astronomical! On top of that there are the suites. There are at least six of those, and they cost a thousand each. Six thousand francs a night, just for the suites! This means six plus twelve …!’ – he shakes his head disbelievingly – ‘Eighteen thousand a night!’
But grandmama is already moving back to the kitchen; she has more important things to think about. ‘I can’t hear unless you speak loudly. But I hate to be shouted at. No doubt he has an entourage, tribes of offspring? Perhaps he has numbers of wives? Do they wear veils? I’m sure they kill chickens in their bathrooms and practise the unsettling dietary rites required for their cuisine. Signs of the times. And portents. All I can say is, thank God for Monsieur Cherubini!’
Her gown is black velvet with a high silver collar, two fat milky pearls swing from the lobes of her ears and her eyes are shining. They always shine when Monsieur Cherubini is expected to appear. When he moves into her vicinity, she lights up like a star; seventy-nine years old and she switches on whenever the Angel pays a visit. There is something about this pompous slug that so appeals to her that she spontaneously ignites whenever he sets foot in the house, she becomes skittish, she won’t use her stick, she blushes and she even tries to disguise her limp. In short, Monsieur Cherubini restores her to life.
So why is it then that we think of the life-giver as beautiful? He might look like a snail. To see my grandmother scooting about the house, checking on the coolness of the wine and on her precious poached salmon with a gleam of adoration in her eyes is to know that she finds him utte
rly beautiful. We know that when the Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary that a Saviour was on the way he took a human form, but do we have to think of that form as pink and rounded and Italian with long hair and almond eyes? Maybe the angel who appeared to Mary looked like a pork butcher, or a brush salesman, or maybe he had the brilliantly shifty look of a small-time dictator. Beauty surprises not because it is beautiful, but because it is surprising, out of the ordinary – and it’s out of the ordinary, because everything about it is astonishingly, fatally, appropriate. Just for once, however oddly, everything fits. Not to everyone else, perhaps, not in anyone else’s eyes, but to you who look on it, the lucky observer, it is shockingly surprising to find everything so perfectly in place. So when the Angel knocked on the Virgin Mary’s door and said, ‘By the way, I am the Angel Gabriel …’, maybe he then went on to say, ‘… and I am running for mayor. Can I count on your support?’ And when that message went down really well, then he turned to the frightened girl in front of him and he whispered in her ear, sweet and low, ‘And you’re in the family way, my dear,’ and Mary knew he was telling the truth because he said what she, in a sense, had known all along. But it didn’t have to do with his looks, necessarily. Let somebody real and very ugly approach with an astonishing message that exhilarates and suddenly, by magic, the messenger is lovely. My grandmother and Monsieur Cherubini are locked in that embrace. She talks all the time of his open, cordial, honest look, the look, she says, of a sportsman and a soldier. Yet there is nothing of those qualities to be seen in the man, not a trace. So I begin to think that maybe we can know nothing of what others know, that there are for each of us universes beyond universes, much in the same way that Uncle Claude suggests that ours is quite possibly not the only cosmos but that we occupy one of a countless number, a foaming plenitude of universes, like bubbles in a head of beer. Or in an Aero chocolate bar …
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