My Chocolate Redeemer (9 page)

‘He's been here for weeks. But never goes out. I've seen him now for the first time – on the beach.'

‘Not good news. The Priory Hotel is heading for ruin. André can't keep it up. And he knows it. Monsieur Cherubini has made several good offers and met blanket rejection. And now André takes in these odd guests. As if all those little baggage-carriers (so-called) he hires in Lyons were not enough! This black man is some potentate, I believe. If it goes on like this Monsieur Cherubini will take action and I for one will not blame him! Nor will the people of this village. The Mayor's already making enquiries. What does he do, this man – when you see him?'

‘He sunbathes.'

‘Does the pot need more glaze? Has he spoken to you?'

‘He speaks to no one.'

‘What does he look like?'

‘His face is round and rather puffy. His eyes bulge, his jaw is bony, the mouth cruel.'

‘He's ugly?'

‘I've never seen anyone like him. So … otherwise.'

‘You know the hotel is closed to further bookings? It's intolerable! We have all sorts of people coming to the rally on Saturday and we can't put them up at the Priory. André refuses! He gives no reasons.'

Father Duval slaps the face of the sleeping lady in his agitation.

‘As to this business of prayer, Bella, there is another side to it. If you want to pray – pray! Let me assure you, there are many who can't do it. To them I say, if it fails to come easily, don't force it. Prayers from guilt are a bad business. But those that come naturally will do little harm. Will we meet at your grandmama's on Friday night? I hope so. We are invited, Monsieur Cherubini and I. Will you be there? We will practise our English together. Now I must deal with these terrors.'

I watch him walking away, seemingly anxious to assert his authority, but actually keen to get away from me.

‘Kemal, Abdul, Mustapha – come to me! Today we will talk about hell.'

I remember when the most recent attack of the weeping sickness hit me. I can date it because it coincided with an event of pretty well primary importance, the day I had news of the arrival of the stranger.

It happened as I sat watching television in the lounge of the Priory Hotel. Like all other secular pursuits of that holy place, watching TV was an odd business. It took place in a room that had once been the office of the Prior himself. His table stood there still; a sturdy oak affair, a great seamed slab supported by fluted columns which burst into acanthus leaves. The television was placed on the Prior's desk, the heavy honey-coloured curtains were drawn against the fierce sunshine because the room looked out on the garden with its green-and-white umbrellas, and across the lake beyond. In the rather yellow, slightly liquid light which strained through the curtains the guests occasionally sat uneasily to watch selected programmes. This didn't happen often. The lure of sun and water were too strong and perhaps the people themselves were too grand. Usually they tended to watch programmes they'd made themselves, or that featured them. They might also assemble to watch ceremonial displays by branches of European and British royalty: christenings, matings and funerals of televisual idols; presidential inaugurations and papal visits. The sight of the Pope on the windswept tarmac of some foreign airport, stooping to kiss the ground, rising and clutching his hat against the breeze, always drew a sigh of admiration tinged with something that might have been relief. But for the rest of the time the TV lounge was a good place to escape to. Somewhere I could be alone.

I was watching a programme about Aids and the progress made among American homosexuals in alerting them to precautionary measures against the disease. The speaker was a man in a blue suit called Geoff. He wore a black toupee and shone with geniality, not to say gentle mischief. He recommended the condom, he urged its widespread adoption, he took one out of his pocket and stretched it thoughtfully between his hands, he plucked it gently with his tongue producing a plangent, not unpleasant note. Great strides had been made in getting people to use condoms in the United States. He had been working to improve acquaintance with the condom which was so simple in its operation, if properly employed.

‘I used to blow 'em up when I was a kid,' said Geoff. ‘Or we'd fill 'em with water and bomb passers-by. Gone are the days. This is serious. These things work. They could save your life.'

He tossed the musical condom behind him and pulled another from his ear with the stylised fingerplay of a professional magician, lifting an eyebrow and tapping ash off an imaginary cigar in the manner of Groucho Marx. He would like to share with us, he said, a simple procedure needed to operate the condom. From the empty air – I know this sounds melodramatic – but from nothing at all he snatched a large banana, still in its skin. He grinned again, rueful, apologetic, modest, but still with that hint of wickedness that intrigued me.

‘I have here a friendly banana,' said Geoff. ‘Let's give him a name – let's call him Byron. Hullo, Byron.'

‘Hullo, Geoff,' said Byron.

Geoff, it seemed, besides being a magician was also no mean ventriloquist.

‘You know what this is, Byron?' He dangled the condom.

‘Sure, Geoff, that's a condom.'

‘Slip it on, Byron.'

Geoff did just that, easing the rubber along the yellow curve of Byron's body.

‘How you doing there, Byron?'

‘Just fine, Geoff.' The banana's voice was muffled.

I had to admire Geoff's professionalism. The man was a perfectionist. I suppose if that was as far as it went, that would have been OK. But there had been that slightly mad gleam in Geoff's eye and the reason now became clear. He held the banana tightly in one hand. With the other he stroked it gently, grinning and muttering to himself.

‘It's safe, it's easy, it's fun,' crooned Geoff. Then his eyes misted over and he held the banana close to his cheek. ‘You just love it, don't you?'

But Byron had fallen silent. I can't say I blamed him. The spectacle we were witnessing was embarrassing. When Geoff started kissing Byron I couldn't watch any longer. It was the coy glances he kept shooting at the viewer that did it for me. I switched off the set.

My legs were shaking and I sank to my knees and buried my head in my hands and began crying – for myself, for Geoff, for the fucking banana, I couldn't be sure. But there I was on my knees in the TV room, with the cooling grey eye of the dead TV set beaming down upon me from its perch on the Prior's old table, praying my head off: ‘Lord God in Heaven help me! Save me from the world that turns into particles and collapses. From the Angel who is fat and disgusting. Save my mother, too, wherever she is. And my father, even if he's dead. And help Clovis, because if he goes on taking that stuff it's the end of him … And help me. To eat properly, to go for long walks and not start crying, to stop worrying about whether there's enough dark matter in the universe to keep it open or make it close, because I don't really care for either of those possibilities. When I tell Uncle Claude that I won't accept that we're just bits in a bubble of nothingness, he tells me not to disparage myself for I am the sum of all the accidents of matter that have occurred since the universe began and that is a pretty impressive end-product. But I'm not having that – and neither should you. Because it's you he's after, crunching ever closer to the precipice where you are clinging by your fingernails. He talks to me, but that's because he can't talk to you. He knows that I'll pass on the message. He believes he has the law on his side, the law of science, and he's going to have the law on you. He's out for blood. Help me, Lord. Above all, help me to help you.'

I was disturbed by a faint noise behind me and for a minute (well for a split second) I almost thought – well, enough to say that in my terror I clutched at the twisted leg of the Prior's table and almost brought the television set crashing down on top of me.

‘Bella, what has happened? You look as if you've seen a ghost.'

André was smiling at me from the doorway, faintly and apologetically. He had materialised from nowhere. In his eyes was a look of tenderness and pity, though he also seemed slightly embarrassed at having walked in on a private moment. He was wearing a white apron. I got slowly to my feet and rubbed my knees. He stood framed in the doorway with his arms held out, palms exposed. I think it was then that I began to notice that there was something increasingly monkish about André.

‘I thought I heard a cry,' he said.

‘I was watching television.'

‘Ah well, that explains it. One sees such terrible things on television.'

‘I turned it off.'

‘Have you been crying, Bella?'

‘I've stopped.'

‘Good. Deluges can be exhausting. Like the falling sickness. Or someone given to fits. You fear not only the embarrassment you cause others, but the shock to your own system. And yet you can't help yourself. Oh yes, I sympathise. I went through something similar, years ago, when I was on the Bourse in Paris. Well, you can just imagine how embarrassing tears were in such circumstances. What my colleagues said! The clerks on the floor are a tough lot, financial hoodlums of a sort. And their controllers in their suits back in the offices are no better. So it does not help to liquefy in front of them. Tears are never appreciated in the arena.'

I had seen pictures of the yelling, barging young men howling their prices on the floor of the Stock Exchange.

‘When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse.'

‘Exactly, Bella. Well put.'

André peered at the dead television screen, grey as a corpse with tiger stripes of sunlight across its blank face. His face loosened in that alarming way I had noticed on other occasions, as if the shell protecting the flesh had been hit too hard and fractured into thousands of hair-thin cracks and might at any minute slip from his head; and perhaps that was the reason why he went and sat down in one of the rather horrid mustard chairs available for the telly viewers and placed his fragile head in his hands.

‘We lived in the tenth arrondissement just where it borders on the ninth, a place of brothels, churches and newspapers. In the thirties it was no longer a fashionable area, it had been going down. Actually it had been going down since the First War. It was close to the Bourse you see, so my father decided to stay on although everybody else, of our sort that is, had left. The
boursicotiers
, the jobbers, the
agents de change
, the brokers had been going, well, to tell you the truth, they'd been clearing out since the turn of the century, going west, where it was smarter. Round our way it hadn't been smart since the Third Republic when the brokers dressed in bowler hats, spats and coats with fur trim and puffed fat cigars. My father kept a set of old caricatures of the great tycoons hanging on the wall in our house. We were in a place midway between the public baths, the old Neptuna and the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre. There we sat, my father and I, because that's where they had sat, my father and his father, because this had always been the stockbroking quarter and my father believed that a gentleman should always be able to walk to his place of employment, and it was an easy stroll to the Bourse. There we lived. There was no question of moving.'

‘Where was your mother?'

‘Dead.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘So am I. I think we would still be there if the war hadn't come. June 1940 and France fell. People left in droves, Paris became silent, nobody seemed to speak, except my father, he was as usual optimistic. “The Marshal has in mind a plan to protect the historic destiny of France,” he announced, almost as if he were the Marshal himself.'

André turned his sad eyes on me. ‘I think for every child, at a certain age, fourteen, say, or fifteen, there should be a ceremony in which the child is allowed to repudiate one parent. Or both.'

‘What about uncles?'

‘Parents are more generally available.'

‘Not in every case.'

‘Shall we say one close relative?'

‘Good.'

‘War evoked a spirit of declaration in my father. “Business as usual,” he cried. Though the Bourse was still functioning, it was a charade. Then one day he told me he'd heard that there were opportunities in Lyons. In the
zone libre
. The Bourse in Lyons was doing business! Do you hear the word, Bella – opportunity? Watch out! Such words are dangerous. Language is the mask of life! I went to stay with a cousin in the country. My father wrote to me of his great opportunity. He sent us money and food. He was busy opening a branch of our offices in Lyons, he said. I never saw him again. In 1945 he died.'

‘What did he die of?'

‘The war. When the war was over I went to work in the old office in Paris. I heard no more from Lyons. My father had died there. I thought no more about the branch. It died with him. At least no more was heard of it. I began to wonder if there really had been a branch at all. I put the talk of it down to my father's loose manner in the age of declarations. I became a broker like him. Only later I found the truth about our Lyons operation.'

‘Is that when you became a terror?'

André gave a ghastly little grin and shook his head. ‘Not then. Later. A beast. What did you say – when the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, that's well put.'

‘That's not me. It's from a poet, an English poet, we read at school.'

‘Ah poetry.' He looked crestfallen. ‘Forgive me, but I don't touch poetry.' He spoke in the tone of a man refusing a drink. ‘I'm afraid I steer clear of music, too. And I never look at paintings. It's not that I don't love them, on the contrary, but they're distractions. After my years in Paris, I simply haven't the time, and after discovering how I had lived off the profits of our offices in Lyons – well, I didn't have the stomach for these things. Take heed for you know not the day, nor the hour, sayeth the Lord. The absolute preciousness of the little time available to us to learn how to be saved is conveyed to me every year with wonderful simplicity and fierce dedication by the good fathers at the Monastery of St Bruno, up in the mountains. You know that's where I make my winter retreat. There is nothing fiercer or madder than doing just one simple thing, Bella. I look at the monks and I'm appalled. Horrified! I love what they do, but it terrifies me. Every day, every minute is measured. Like athletes they drive their bodies without ceasing. Gentle fanatics training for the perfection to come! Life by the bell – rise at two-fifteen, Vigils, Prime, Sext, dinner, then work again, supper, Compline, prayer, bed by six. There it is. All day and all night, prayer, penitence. I stay three weeks, it's as long as I can manage, when the hotel is closed in the late autumn. I want more –
months
perhaps, but the fathers don't think that's a good idea. “No, no, André,” they say to me, “you've got your own place. If you come into our monastery, who will look after yours?” Except, of course, they don't really say that, or anything else, because they don't speak, Bella, as I'm sure you know. But this I take to be their advice, and I abide by it. Not my will but thine be done. Sometimes I dream that I'm keeping the Priory open for their return one day. I tell myself I'm merely the caretaker.'