‘Beat it!’
‘I’ve been cured by her, Bella. No more drugs. No more heartbreak. See?’
Three hypos gripped in his fist beneath the tablecloth, a quiver full of miniature rockets. This is Clovis! He has not snorted, shot or swallowed a noxious substance in three days. He does not ask me for money. In fact he says he will pay for our dinner! And this a boy who has been ingesting whatever dust came his way with a perfectly American abandon for as long as anyone can remember. A miracle!
‘For heaven’s sake, put those damn things away!’
From the vantage point of my white chocolate mousse I watch him ploughing his way through Galatine de Canard stuffed with pork, veal, truffles and pistachios. My mousse is excellent, flavoured with a hint of cinnamon, just a delicate touch, like a fragrance of woodsmoke at dawn.
‘Poor Bella, you look sad. Would you like to tell me about it? Would you like to consult your analyst? Have you heard from your mama?’
‘She writes to me. Or rather she sends me notes.’
‘That’s nice. What does she say?’
‘She doesn’t say anything. I don’t mean she writes notes. She sends me banknotes. Sometimes she writes on the banknote: “I hope you got my last note?” She’s in America with her camera, searching for beauty. When she finds it she will bring back pictures.’
‘I understand,’ Clovis nods, ‘it’s like people going with cameras to photograph the Yeti in the Himalayas, to prove he exists.’
‘That boot is not crystal.’
‘It is.’
‘Very well, we’ll conduct an experiment. You know how the roof of this place reaches down almost to the ground on the other side of the building?’
‘Sure. You can climb up there. We used to do it as kids.’
‘Right. So we climb up there tonight and drop the boot.’
‘What if it smashes?’
‘Then you’ve won. And, like you said, the Angel will issue you with a new one.’
‘Right,’ says Clovis. ‘And he will, too. You are really crazy. I wish I could help.’
Sympathy amid the duck and the mousse and the waiters who stare at me and glare at Clovis is difficult to take. What you love becomes beautiful, Papa said, and that is assuredly so. Clovis loves the Dutch girl – but does she love him? Certainly she walks with him and rides on his bike and talks with him, but equally surely she does not sail with him. For not only can Clovis not swim but I have already seen her sailor and swimmer on the deck of the Minnie III on the day that the Redeemer and I went for our voyage on the lake and the Foreign Legion plucked the Dutch peach and the little fish fed on the remainders, on the seed that fell by the waterside. Shall I rephrase, Papa? What you love becomes beautiful, if it isn’t beautiful already. Or maybe it’s when you love that you become beautiful? Mama would know perhaps, but then she is not here either.
‘Happy boy,’ I tell Clovis later that night as we stand on the roof of Les Dents Sacrés and prepare to drop his boot. ‘I am glad for you, and of course for Ria.’
‘Who?’ Clovis asks, and drops the boot. It doesn’t even chip. I am sorry I made him do it now. He has set his heart on it being crystal. It prompts me to think that maybe I have something of my Uncle Claude in me and that makes me very unhappy. There is nothing in the least useful about the snappy identification of molecular structures. It leads only to trouble and heartbreak. Even so, Clovis irritates me by pretending not to know the name of the Dutch peach is Ria.
‘Her name is Sophie,’ Clovis insists.
‘Plastic,’ I say cruelly, ‘your boot is made of plastic.’
Thursday morning shows early signs of being remarkable. Take, for example, the Redeemer’s toes. They are what I see first when he comes out in his robe to take the sun, making his ritual appearance on our private beach. Though we’ve taken chocolate together, we don’t talk about it, at least not in public. But word has been spreading that there is something strange about Monsieur Brown. You can tell by the way the other guests ignore him. He remains lofty, silent and apparently blind to the cordon sanitaire which now exists between the other flavours of humanity and his sainted, soft, brown, sweet self. Several metres of wooden beach are now the stranger’s territory and we all respect what politicians call its sovereignty. The distinction is as sharp as it would be if we had drawn our boundaries in spit or garlic, menstrual blood or sacred salt. The border could not be more clearly set if it were built of bricks and topped with barbed wire. This has come to pass since the guests of the Priory discovered that plain Monsieur Brown was once a president and a dictator. He has now become the dark continent, to be avoided at all costs, the subject of a hundred horror stories.
Only I am in possession of the facts. At least some of the facts. And you, of course, I suppose, you who made us, all creatures great and small. What I know is that he once had gaps between his front teeth, and that the gap was bridged years ago by a Boston dentist when he studied in that city, back in the years when the French ruled his country of Zanj and Uncle Dickie was still planning to lead the country to independence, and thus claim the Leopard Throne, whose legs were piles of the skulls of slave enemies. I know that he is the ninth child and not the first – and the significance of this:
‘Because, Bella, in our culture, the first child is somewhat dim. My uncle was a first child. Do you say dim? Yes, the third then is pretty go-ahead, the ninth brings luck and the tenth misfortune. I was number nine. The day of the week is also important and the newborn child is named accordingly for the weekday of his birth. In the Wouff language I am named Wednesday.’
Wednesday Brown!
But as I say, take his toes. His toes are unexpected, especially in view of the other marvels of which he is compounded, that is to say the startlingly pouting, toady features, the luscious, Bourneville sheen to his skin, his three souls, the blood soul, the clan soul and the platonic soul – otherwise known as the male soul. However, it is his toes that I now see, curved and powerful like the toes of an anteater lying so beautifully stacked within a hair’s breadth of my right arm as I stretch out on the warm wooden beach planks and hear the red and grey canvas of his chair creak, for the Redeemer is moving into a more comfortable position above me and I watch and see a drop of sweat gather in the curiously soft fine hairs of his leg it swells and hangs trembling until gravity calls and it disappears leaving only its gleaming trail. I come as close as I can without touching, crossing a line the others have drawn, while I know that above me the cruel, rubbery face behind its dark glasses turns this way and that, staring out across the lake. My basking lizard, my lighthouse-keeper! His toes, unlike his fingers, are properly formed and though he can’t wear rings on his fingers they wouldn’t fall off his toes. This is something I intend to take up with him when we next speak. I hope there’s time for that because something occurred to me when we talked together. He doesn’t intend to stick around for very long. He’s just waiting for something.
‘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 figm
ent 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, wha
t 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 Chocolate Redeemer Page 16