We gather in the dining room. As the sun sinks, the lake grows dark and heavy, closing down for the night, taking on a deserted, shuttered look like the old houses above the little lakeside road. Grandmama is helped to a chair by Father Duval. I want to call Dr Valléry but she won’t have it.
‘My confessor is here, my family is here. And my patron! Enough. Onwards into battle, let’s ride the English down, at last we have a general in the field!’ She turns a softly affectionate glance on Monsieur Cherubini.
‘The patron has such information as makes the ears curl,’ says Father Duval, ‘little scraps of knowledge, even if one needs to put on gloves before handling, the sort of thing that may help us to understand his game.’
‘I don’t want to understand it,’ Grandmama says. ‘The thing to do with Monsieur Brown is not to understand him, it’s to get rid of him.’
‘Spoken like a philosopher!’ Monsieur Cherubini approves.
Father Duval is dressed tonight like a master of ceremonies, or a campaign manager, which is one thing as sure as hell he wants to be. He’s wearing a snappy dark wool suit and cream shirt with terracotta tie and ivory cuff-links. Tonight he’s ringmaster, television floor manager and warm-up man rolled into one pink rotundity.
It is Monsieur Cherubini’s gift and perhaps his genius that he applauds in others all the parts they wish to play. He stands now and acknowledges the applause he hears, though we do not, and acknowledges it with a modest wave and a smile. Part of him is already on the platform receiving the adulation of his followers.
‘I call on Monsieur Cherubini to speak to us!’ announces Father Duval.
‘How pleasant to think that an angel should be deemed worthy of his own annunciation.’
This little jollity so entrances Father Duval that he can’t help applauding. ‘Bravo, Monsieur! Bravo, chief!’
‘But where is the Mayor? We cannot begin without him,’ the Angel says.
‘Upstairs catching comets,’ says Father Duval. It seems that the weather will be perfect for viewing tonight. ‘Bella, please call your uncle. The patron is about to speak. The North African secrets of the funny guest at the Priory Hotel are to be revealed to us, one and all, tonight.’
Up in his attic laboratory at the top of the house, Uncle Claude takes an age to open his door to me. It has at least three locks on it and he makes a tremendous fuss before letting me in and even more of a fuss when I tell him he’s wanted and he looks remarkably distracted, a little shy, almost angry, and oddly embarrassed.
‘Bella, I can’t be disturbed. Tonight, two or three hours after sunset, will give me my best chance in years! I’m on the track of a comet, I think. I really do. I’m pretty sure it’s not a globular cluster or just a faint elliptical galaxy. In a region around 36° of the western horizon. It doesn’t have a tail, as far as I can see. But then on the other hand you don’t always have to see a tail straight off because really what you’re looking at is a kind of chalk mark on the blackboard of the heavens. If you’re looking at a comet at all. But I’ve checked my sky atlas and there’s nothing marked there. So who knows?’
‘Listen, you had better come down. Grand-mère was taken ill at the hotel.’
‘What? You see, I told you she should not have gone there. I knew it! What happened?’
‘She had words with André. She got really mad. I don’t understand exactly what they were talking about, except that they both have stories about each other they’d rather not tell. Or hear. I don’t know which. But they clashed, and then she collapsed and we called Monsieur Cherubini and he came and fetched her in the car. She’s downstairs now and I think she must see the doctor but she won’t let me call him. And now the Angel’s going to tell her more stories about Monsieur Brown. It’s bound to upset her because she thinks of Papa. Come down and put a stop to it.’
‘But Bella I must set up.’
‘Uncle Claude, she might die!’
‘Very well, I’ll come down – but no one can stop this. It’s a reaction which has to run its course. We must face the consequences. But I blame André. He will suffer for it.’
‘Something bad is going to happen.’
‘The truth is never bad.’
Here are his fat telescope, his books, his calculations and his experiments. In particular the thoroughly nasty job of work which stands in the corner and has stood in the corner for as long as I can remember. Some people have pot plants, Uncle Claude has his soup, his secret solutions in glass jars, his garden of molecular surprises, conspiracies of simple sugars, nucleotides and phosphates out of which he hopes to grow a living cell, the solutions changed every week according to a new formula, every week a little closer to the secret of life. It is, if you like, Uncle Claude’s very own, very early version of the primal cosmic gruel out of which the microbes came that became us. Bionic fishtank aglow with hope. All Uncle Claude’s life spreads before him in this den. Here he spies out comets, believing that it was in the tails of the comets, or in the arrival of meteorites, that the organic compounds and the lively molecules first migrated to our planet maybe three and a half billion years ago and the magic ingredients fraternized and became life, viruses, microbes. Inanimate salts combining, as he hopes they are combining even now in his fishtanks, tubes and retorts in the corner, and eventually these lucky organisms will grow up to be able to understand the secrets of the universe, relativity, the speed of light, gravity and the Grand Unification Theory which one day (‘I’m utterly confident of this, Bella. Mark my words. You watch and see’) will satisfactorily describe, in mathematical form, the forces which bind the universe: gravity and electro-magnetism, as well as the strong and the weak nuclear forces. (‘Then you just watch and see what will happen to that old figment!’) And my uncle dances across the room, boasting about the figment’s fate, waving his fists like some skinny George Charpentier of the cosmos. My boring, bloody, abysmal, murderous Uncle Claude.
I can tell you that on my trip downstairs I stopped off and tucked into the supplies in the steel trunk beneath my bed and consumed in pretty short order two bars of Côte d’Or Chocolate Extra Superior and a handful of Lindt Bittersweet and thus geared up I prepared to expose myself to the Angel’s sermon.
Downstairs we all assemble, my grandmother is the colour of icing sugar, hard and shining, her hand permanently to her heart. I think for a moment vaguely of plugging in my cans and spinning something like Thomas and the Apostles, you must know their really funky big one called ‘Jesus On The Cheap!’, with their heavy lead guitarist, Raymond Whatsit, who made it big in ‘I Never Went to Paris’ and who treats his instrument like a sailor who’s just been forbidden shore leave. But then of course you know what I mean. And you’ll know what I mean when I say that to complain that T. and the A.s are over the top just because T. tries to couple with his bass guitar is to believe that balls are only for bouncing … I don’t believe that. And yet do I put on the cans, despite being Bella the one-woman walkman, because I can tell that my ears have been lent on my behalf to the Angel for his speech.
‘The man that we know as Brown, Brown according to Bella, not christened, I cannot say that in the presence of the clergy, not sanctified by the Church, no, no, especially not in the light of what is to follow, but named, for convenience, Brown, is as I told you before the dictator of an African country with which France once had dealings. That country has dwindled now to the status of a distant debtor. But until recently it was still a place to which government officials were posted for obscure reasons, some associated with the country for purposes of French prestige, others were there to see to the more mundane need of this client state to pay its way. Now the man that we know as Brown was, until a few years ago, known to his subjects, whom he ruled with whip and sword, as the Redeemer. I apologise to Father Duval for this blasphemy, but it seems the title is not unknown in Africa.’
My grandmama appears to have fallen asleep at this stage and only her flickering eyelids tell me that she is listening, though at what cost, I hate to imagine. Her concentration is quite horribly rewarded when the Angel, holding up his hands to silence, and then joining them together beneath his upper lip in a prayerful gesture, says softly:
‘The charges against him are very impressive: murder, corruption, anthropophagy.’
‘I don’t understand the last,’ says Father Duval.
‘Cannibalism,’ says my uncle.
Grandmama opens her blue eyes, sits bolt upright in her chair and then shrieks and falls back again in a dead faint. There is no question of Monsieur Cherubini going on or of Grandmama being allowed to stay downstairs, but first we must revive her and make her put her head between her knees, her lips are now very white, she has a twitch in her cheek she cannot stop. Uncle Claude and I carry her to her bedroom and I put her to bed and sit with her while Uncle Claude calls the doctor. When her eyes open, she reaches out and strokes my cheek, then with the other hand she strokes her three pictures, her holy trinity, Marshal Pétain, her young husband in his military cap and Joan of Arc astride her horse, sword drawn, a look of ecstasy in her eyes. Taking my cheek between thumb and finger, she gently pulls me down to her and whispers fiercely in my ear, I feel her lips brush my earlobe:
‘If I die it will be another death that our little hotel-keeper will have on his conscience.’
‘Grandmama, what is this talk about the Hotel Terminus? What happened there, in the war?’
Her blue eyes now are full of rage. ‘It’s best not to ask, my little Bella. Best not to know. There are horrible secrets of the Hotel Terminus. Third floor, suite fifty-eight. The father of our little hotelier knew it well. He was a knower of such things, a money man. You know he moved down from Paris after the Fall and he took root in our part of the world, like a weed. It was to Lyons that he came, because that was, until November 1942, part of Free France, the zone libre. The country of opportunity for some, of death for many. André’s father came south when the Bourse closed in Paris and he found business to do in this part of the world. First as a passeur, one who arranged the flight of refugees across the Swiss border, frightened people, often loaded with gold and jewels; he took shares in their safe passage. Sometimes they didn’t make it. And nor did their gold. Escaping was as dangerous as being caught. It was an expanding industry. Then, when the Germans marched into Lyons, the zone libre was finished, but the passeurs were busier than ever. And you must realise that the factories ran, and the offices and the industries. It was all business as usual and it needed managing. André’s papa had shown himself to be a fine manager. It was not long before the new guests at the Hotel Terminus employed him.’
‘Germans?’
‘Gestapo. And when the war was over, what did he say to explain his role? He denied ever having collaborated with the Germans. Collaboration? Never! All he had done was to liaise. The reward of his profitable liaison was to die in bed with his socks on, leaving a fortune to his little son, while those who had given their lives for their country died like dogs in the early morning rain and people spat on their faces –’
And here she lets me go and sighs deeply and her eyes fix for a moment on the photograph of her young husband before filling with tears.
At last I begin to understand her anger and grief. Her husband in the Resistance, captured, and shot.
And André? I know now the riddle behind the Beast of the Bourse and his offices in Lyons. It was not in fact André but his father who was the monster, and the offices were not his, but belonged to the Gestapo, they were not for dealing in stocks and shares, but belonged to a business that ran on blood.
The doctor arrives, little Dr Valléry, our local socialist, a man of hair the colour of beer, and thick glasses. Entering our house is a trial for him: he’s going into the lion’s den; he pales visibly at the sight of Marshal Pétain in the silver frame and I know just by looking at him that his medical skills are undermined by his political shivers. He can’t wait to leave. As it is, he is one of those who has tried to rally support against the Angel and his new party. But in the village of La Frisette, everybody worth mentioning is Angel-bound to a degree that nothing will shift and the voices of the opposition are faint, they may mock and jeer, but do not carry. Valléry’s position is weakened still further by the fact that he has recently abandoned his wife and taken up with Louise, the brunette with the prodigious cleavage who works in the tabac. She’s one of those women so utterly sexual that she resembles more a running stream than a person of flesh and bone, and she presented to the doctor something like the sight of a bubbling brook on a stifling day and he no sooner set eyes on her than he flung himself into her and was carried away. Since the good doctor drowned himself in liquid Louise, his wife has taken to attending the Church of the Resurrection like a reproachful, straight-backed ghost. Poor woman! As if angry virtue would somehow recompense her or punish the philanderer, when, in fact, his utter surrender to the lubricious Louise (legend holds she partnered Clovis at one time and is known as a watery wonder in whom even that demented boy once dipped a toe, or some other appendage) is enough to rust the doctor’s political reputation, from which all other assessments in La Frisette proceed. To fall is one thing, to leap another and to drown something else entirely, and such was Dr Valléry’s immersion, so utterly comprehensive his seduction, that it played hell with his standing as a socialist. Even now as he comes into the room and takes my grandmother’s pulse, I can feel, tell, almost smell that he’s come from the warmth of Louise and his tousled irritation signals that he yearns to be back there as soon as possible. I’ll bet he floats in her the way Uncle Claude says the sea creatures do, who may be our real ancestors, the blind red tubeworms who cruise the sandy bottom of the Gulf of Mexico where the searing magma of the earth’s hot heart bleeds and congeals, veiled in steam and gas, thousands of metres under the sea. Give the giant red tubeworm a pair of thick glasses and a cheesy wink and you’ve got Dr Valléry to the life. No wonder I go downstairs, no wonder I can’t go on looking at him, his politics undermined, his doctoring deeply suspect, and all that remains a quivering desire so palpable it’s positively embarrassing.
We wait for the medical opinion without any hope that it will be anything more than conventional. But that’s wrong. Because when the little doctor scampers downstairs he has clearly thought about his diagnosis. He’s considered his position and is determined that both should be respected.
‘Angina, arthritis, old age. You’ll appreciate I can’t do much more than alleviate any of these conditions. She’s old, sick, stubborn. She won’t listen to me. So I tell you that if she’s too excited or overly stressed it may be fatal. No, I correct myself, it will be fatal.’
Terse and even impressive as this is, it doesn’t help him much. One cannot threaten an angel with death and a physicist devoted to entropy is used to such things and Father Duval long ago dissociated himself from death as a form of political scandal. So Monsieur Cherubini’s silent nod is also a gesture of dismissal and the little doctor scurries away back to his big wide bed where Louise waits for him willing, warm and wet.
‘Well, we’ve decided, Bella,’ the Angel announces, ‘you will have to go to the man whom you call Brown and find out what he’s doing here.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re the only one he’s willing to see. He’s invited you to take tea with him. We didn’t even get past the door,’ says Uncle Claude. ‘The family honour depends on it.’
‘He’s up to something, Bella. We know that,’ says Father Duval.
‘Go,’ says my uncle shortly.
‘But I thought you had objections. You don’t like me seeing him. And Monsieur Cherubini says he’s a cannibal.’
‘He was and maybe still is,’ says the Angel. ‘The world is full of strange tastes. Only time will tell. I admit my information is disturbing.’
‘Tell her about the lions,’ says Father Duval.
‘He fed his opponents to the lions,’ the Angel says. ‘And then one day he tried to feed their keeper to them. But the animals recognised their friend and refused the morsel offered.’
‘And so he fed the keeper to his crocodiles instead – what d’you say to that?’ asks Uncle Claude, with a look very like satisfaction.
‘It sounds too good to be true. Stories to frighten children.’
‘Bella, this man killed without compunction. He’s a monster. An animal. He sliced his opponents into pieces and kept some of them in the refrigerator to adorn the presidential menus. Human corpses stuffed with rice and ready to be served. Prepared meals, you might say. He killed children, and first he poked their eyes out. There was nothing he wouldn’t do!’
When Father Duval tells me this he walks about throwing his hands to left and right as if getting rid of the little bits of the Redeemer’s menu that have somehow stuck to his fingers.
‘He was a good friend of my papa’s.’
‘Bella, Bella’ – the Angel is all kindness and at his most reptilian when he softens into kindness – ‘it is precisely this connection with your father that worries me. If he involved your father in any of his attempts at bribing officials, if this news came out, here, now, it wouldn’t look good. It would kill your grandmother.’
‘You mean it wouldn’t look good for you. And for Uncle Claude, the Mayor. For your rally on Saturday. And for your new party. You talk of my family – what family? My father’s dead and my mother is missing somewhere in America. And then I make a friend of Monsieur Brown, who is kind to me, and who knew Papa, they were very dear friends, together almost to the last. But my uncle warns me about him, he tells me to keep away from him. Now you tell me he eats people and in the same breath you say I must go and find him and see what he knows. I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t want to be blamed for my brother’s errors of judgement,’ says Uncle Claude. ‘This is guilt by association and I am not guilty. But someone has made the connection. Who do you think those men at the gate of the hotel are? They come from Paris! Government people. There’s something dark and troubling about this. I don’t like it, I don’t like the way that he has some kind of official protection, a bodyguard maybe. They’re tough guys sitting in the parking lot. They’re after something. We’ve had trouble in the family, we don’t want any more.’
‘They’ve taken everything already, our apartment in Paris, my mother’s jewels, even my Bapuna mask which Papa brought for me. Gone. What more can they possibly want from us?’
‘What more do you have to give?’ the Angel asks. ‘Because if one thing is clear about this it is that someone has got something that someone wants.’
Before we can work out the interesting convolutions of this last comment the door opens and Clovis enters in fine high spirits, clapping his hands and beaming. He’s been helping the police plan the parking arrangements for Saturday’s rally and insists on telling us everything immediately.
‘The plan is proceeding wonderfully, patron. Clovis is in control! We’ve been having a full dress rehearsal tonight with the fire brigade standing by and a band, a great big band blowing brass instruments, made up of all the local hunters. We’ve worked out how many cars may be parked by the lakeside so as to keep all traffic from the centre of town. The dais on which you will speak is draped in red and blue and there are patterns on it arranged in chevrons and many flowers of different kinds are ordered. Poinsettias and lilies predominate, according to your orders. We’re now ready to check your position on the platform for security and for camera angles. Clovis is here to escort you, chief!’
And with that he does a strange thing, he balls his hands into fists, crosses his arms at the wrists and bangs himself on the chest. Once, twice, bou-boum! For a hollow-chested boy he gives off quite an echo. It’s some sort of salute, I realise, and I don’t like it. Not one bit.
‘Not now, not now,’ Uncle Claude snaps, waving him away, ‘come back later.’
‘No, no,’ says Father Duval coming forward, ‘he’s been told to escort Monsieur Cherubini to the podium and it would be very bad for his rehabilitation if he were to be encouraged to disregard orders. Can’t he perhaps just wait awhile? Can’t he go upstairs?’
I can see Uncle Claude is about to refuse when the Angel says, ‘Yes, it will be better if we briefed Miss Bella in private and the parking must wait until that’s done. She must go and she must be told what to do.’
‘Yes, she must be briefed,’ says Father Duval, ‘it’s a special mission.’
At the mention of the words ‘brief’ and ‘mission’ I can see my Uncle Claude stiffen slowly to attention. Perhaps it’s because scientists always must stand passive before the workings of the universe unable to do anything more than observe helplessly, however happily, the immutable operations of unshakable laws, that they must sometimes ache to push somebody around.
‘Very well, young man,’ Uncle Claude says to Clovis, ‘you may continue on up the stairs, go to the very top of the house and there you’ll find my den. Go quietly, mind, for Madame is ill and may not be disturbed. And nor may any of the equipment in my study. It’s all very important. Top secret. Dangerous! It can kill silly people who touch it!’ And here Uncle Claude throws up his arms and locks them, fingers rigid and hisses like a cat, his blue eyes wild and staring, then his body shudders as if he’s having a fit. It is his way of warning Clovis what will happen if he messes around with his equipment. It’s really strange that he should go into this man-in-the-electric-chair routine to suggest danger. I mean, why doesn’t he just draw a skull and cross-bones on the door of his room? And anyway what is a man who understands the significance of Feigenbaum’s Constants and the mysteries of Quantum Chromodynamics doing putting on this show as if Clovis were some brain-damaged monkey instead of a very intelligent, if somewhat flighty boy with a bad limp. Indeed my Uncle Claude’s horror of sex and disease are such as to make me wonder whether modern scientists are not perhaps plunged so deeply into the miasma of superstition and dogma as to make the most hide-bound medieval theologian seem positively skittish by comparison.
But all this is happily lost on Clovis who, with a skip and a grin, dances, no flies up the stairs, his salmon-pink overall clashing so weirdly with his staring white face beneath the glowing pampas of hair, and his flashing perspex boot, which hits the wooden walls of the staircase as he ascends with a hard, satisfying sound, and, leaving behind him a trailing and cheerful ‘Yessir!’ he disappears aloft.
‘Now, Bella, let’s talk,’ says the Angel. ‘Let’s go through the factors that make it essential that you do as I ask. Something very strange is happening. The man you call Brown, the dictator of Zanj, as we know, was until recently retired in the South of France, where he has lived since his overthrow. Without family as far as I know, without friends. In all that time he’s not been heard of. He dropped out of sight, went underground, disappeared. I suspect the politics from which he emerged makes it essential that he keeps his head down. If you spend a good deal of time murdering your opponents and stripping bare the treasury of your country, then I suppose there are always going to be those who wish to complain.
‘Well, all of a sudden, out of his hidey-hole he pops, he takes off one day and comes here, to La Frisette. Why, and more to the point, why now? What does he want? We know that Paris know that he’s here because it is undoubtedly they who have effectively commandeered the Priory Hotel where dear André plays the unwilling host to the Redeemer. Paris have also supplied a guard. Which means that they must worry about his safety. Paris also know, and would prefer to keep quiet, the links between this Redeemer Brown and your Papa. We know something happened out in Zanj and we know it’s something that our government wants to conceal. Remember that they were sufficiently worried to move in on you and your mother after your father’s death; as you pointed out, they forced the sale of your apartment, they took your mother’s jewels. And here I have to point out that we must remember that diamonds are one of the few treasures of the curious country of Zanj. The clear implication of all this is that this man had some hold on your father, perhaps some unpaid debt. And now maybe he’s run out of money. So he comes here, looking for the family. He wants something, Bella. You must find out what it is.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we can fight him,’ says Father Duval. ‘The patron has plans.’
I have returned to the Priory to find out why he is here. Not for the Angel, but for my own sake. I’ve taken the precaution of dressing carefully for the part I’m to play: the innocent enquirer. I’m wearing a dress of blush-pink velvet with a low neck, flat white shoes, and my hair is elaborate but chic. It’s a style damn difficult to fix on your own; first it has to be spritzed then scrunched, moussed and dried naturally, and finished with a little wax rubbed through it for control. Two tortoiseshell combs complete the effect. It took all of an hour with Uncle Claude and the Angel muttering impatiently downstairs while they waited to drive me to the Priory. It was only when we got to the Priory that I remembered Clovis, upstairs in Uncle Claude’s den.
‘I locked him inside,’ says Uncle Claude.
‘He won’t come to any harm,’ the Angel promises as I leave the car. ‘Father Duval is standing guard.’
André shows little surprise when I tell him what I know about Monsieur Brown.
‘They may plan to fight the Redeemer,’ André says solemnly, ‘but first they want to finish with me. Have you seen this?’
He holds up a copy of La Liberté, the house organ of the Parti National Populaire, and with a trembling finger he points to an unsigned editorial:
a strange perfume from
the garden of the carthusians?
… A troubling, foreign and unhealthy cosmopolitanism has begun to invade the precincts of our dear village. Not only do strangers from abroad find it increasingly easy to take up employment in the local industries, such as the nougat factory, thus depriving native-born Frenchmen of their rights of employment, but there now comes from the garden of the Carthusians a most provocative scent, a perfume androgynous, unhealthy and, moreover, one which would not be recognised by the good fathers who once inhabited the holy house by the lakeside. The present Prior of this establishment has a somewhat unusual taste in novices, or acolytes, a band of mendicants drawn from the lesser suburbs of Lyons, who together practise a brand of heresy which once drew down on its protagonists the cleansing fires of the stake …
‘It’s sad, Bella. The old cures for sin and suffering are not available any more. This ancient monastery, once the house of Carthusians, had its little punishments, its flagellations, its mortifications, its routes to salvation. All off limits to us now. You know the story of St Benedict, who founded the Cistercian Order? It was said that he was very troubled by lust and when his lust became apparent in company –’
‘Do you mean he had an erection?’
‘Yes. He cured himself of it by jumping into a bed of nettles. It never troubled him again. The simplicity of the very holy ones is quite frightening, isn’t it? Everything final seems too easy. After all,’ – his smile is awful – ‘it’s not the fault of the dear boys who come to work for me in the summer – all the way from Lyons. They’re good boys …’
I can’t resist it, I say: ‘I’m glad some good comes out of Lyons.’
‘So you know my family story? Your grandmother has told you about our branch in Lyons?’
I nod. ‘You should have told me yourself. I wouldn’t have blamed you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it wasn’t your fault.’
André’s eyes roll and he begins to tear the newspaper.
‘When a child discovers his inheritance is a death sentence, he must go on living under it! And he must live on it! Won’t you even allow me to feel pain? To refuse to help those who suffer is never kind, but to refuse to allow someone to suffer! – Bella, is that why you’ve come, to bait the bear?’
‘I’d like to see Monsieur Brown. If he’ll see me.’
‘Of course. He’s always willing to see you. I think that’s why the men at the gate let you in without a challenge. It’s a funny thing, Bella, but I would say that you are continually expected.’
André throws the bits of newspaper into the air and the little scraps rain down on us.
And certainly he does seem to be expecting me because my soft knock on the door of his cell is answered instantly. He is dressed in red shirt and green trousers and carries a copy of the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, it’s a book in a loud red cover. On the table beside his bed is a tin of drinking chocolate with a picture of La Belle Chocolatière carrying her tray of drinking chocolate, a lovely homely picture of a plump pretty girl in cap and apron who comes bearing her hot, dark, sweet, blissful sleeping draught in just the way my grandmother would carry it to me each night in bed in the days before my father died and my mother fled, before my doll Gloria was kidnapped, before my uncle broke my mug with the intelligent bear being led by the fat man, a picture in which all the beastliness seemed concentrated in the man.
‘Still with those funny earphones on, still listening to your music. What is it this time?’
I give him the earphones.
‘Who are they – witches?’
Actually it’s that three-woman group Vulpine who made it big with ‘Trauma’, last year sometime – they all wear blonde wigs and black leather, bicycle-chain belts. The usual S & M lookalikes. They’re a gothic triad, a middle- to heavyweight metallic lot who fell out of the air somewhere above Ealing last winter, like space debris, and made a bit of a splash when they came down.
‘This is the barbarism of the West,’ Monsieur Brown says. ‘Doesn’t this noise make it difficult for you to hear what people are saying?’
‘That’s the idea. Have you started making yourself hot chocolate in the evenings? I see that La Belle Chocolatière keeps you company.’
He smiles. ‘No, the tin is empty. But the dear proprietor, for whom my every whim is his command, as he often tells me, seeing that I admired the portrait of the girl with the tray, gave it to me. But I can see you know her. Who is she, please?’
‘She lived quite a time ago. She’s known as La Belle Chocolatière and she was a real person, Anna Baltauf, a girl who worked in a chocolate house in Vienna. Each day the Prince came down to the chocolate house because he loved the liquid of the gods, the fashionable new drink, and he fell in love with the waitress Anna who served him and he carried her off and married her. For a wedding present he had her painted in the same uniform she had worn when she was just a humble chocolate server.’
‘She is …’ he searched for the word, ‘just right. Beautiful.’
I look at La Belle Chocolatière and I see that what makes for beauty is the yoking together of unlikely things that suddenly become appropriate. To make them seem as if they could never have been otherwise. To create necessity from the elements of chance meetings. The union of the most unlikely is brilliantly vindicated. Sense and necessity are born.
‘It’s a chocolate fairytale!’ He claps his hands like a child. ‘A marriage born of the sacred bean. If I were in Zanj tomorrow I would have someone painted like the girl on the chocolate tin.’
‘Which wife would you use?’
He doesn’t answer, just gives me his big, slow smile and sits me down on the little green chaise longue. ‘Now you must tell me why you’ve come to see me. Is there something I can do for you?’
I look at him then, this solid, dark slab of a man with his wide, turned-down mouth, the waxy ridges of jaw bone, the corduroy quality of his skin close up, the flapping ears and the heavy jowls. Behind him is a photograph of him in all his glory. No doubt another portrait taken by delayed-action camera. And he is so ridiculous in this picture, in his white uniform blazing with medals like hub-caps, and braid, epaulettes and insignia, a broad snowy belt studded with jewels around his plump middle, the peaked cap crazed with gold; here are the familiar heavy round harsh black glasses, and behold also he carries a thick wand, or a baton, or a club, or maybe a truncheon, of midnight blue flecked with silver stars held up before him in his hand, neat in a white glove. This is the man who killed and ate his enemies. Kept them in the fridge. I should be frightened. I want to be frightened. But I’m not. All I want to know is – did he cook them first? Before he served them up with rice? I take off the diamond pendant Papa gave me and hand it to him.
‘Why are you giving me this?’
‘Because I think it belongs to you.’
‘It doesn’t. It’s yours.’
‘Yes, Papa gave it to me. But you gave it to him, didn’t you? All the jewels he gave to me and my mother came from you. The stones of the Wouff.’
‘Gifts. It’s a custom among my people, the people of the stone.’
‘Gifts for favours. Bribes.’
‘There’s no such word in our language. Besides, these stones for us are not what you regard them as: treasures, valuables. They’re the sacred signs of our gods and they represent marks of friendship and affection that we felt, your father and me. Freely passed, freely accepted. Given like promises. Why do you want to return it to me now?’
‘After my father died the men from the government in Paris came to see us and they took all the diamonds and jewels away from my mother. All except this one. So I want you to take it because I feel it’s yours. It doesn’t belong to me. Please, we have enough trouble here. My grandmama is very ill.’
‘You believe that this is why I came? You give me the diamond because you hope I’ll take it and leave?’ Very gently, he takes the pendant and replaces it around my neck.
‘Ah, no, my dear. I will go – but not yet. Keep it. One day you might be glad. It’s a special stone. Only certain people may wear it.’
‘I don’t think you understand. My uncle and the Angel and Father Duval – they’re powerful men. My uncle’s the mayor and Monsieur Cherubini runs him like clockwork. They have a new party, the PNP, which many people in the village belong to, and the police chief too. And they’re keen to begin to stir things up.’
‘My compliments. You have important tribal relations.’
‘There’s a big rally on Saturday.’
‘And you wish to invite me? Very well, I will come.’
‘There will be trouble. You must get out.’
‘You worry for me! You are a good girl.’
‘Please.’
‘My dear young miss, it is you who don’t understand. This is not something I can decide myself. Those men out there in the parking lot – why do you think they watch me day and night?’
‘For your protection. Because you have enemies.’
‘Yes. But also so that I should not slip away and never be seen again. So that I shouldn’t run home to my own country where my people cry for me. I hear their voices on the wind –’ He cocks an ear to the silent, velvet night beyond the windows. ‘Come home, Redeemer! – they cry – Save us from the tyrant … I hear their cry but I cannot reply. Believe me, if the door stood open I would fly tomorrow. Tonight. This second! But the watchers are ready. I do not move without their knowledge. You see how I am in this place. They chose it, took it over for me because of its position. A fine place to imprison a man, an easy place to guard, no access except by the little lake road, the water before, the mountains behind …’
‘There might be a way.’
‘Can you see such a way? They have patrols on the autoroutes outside the village, people standing by to catch me at the airports. Yet if I could get out then they would have trouble stopping me, this I know, because people don’t recognise people they are not expecting to see. I would glide by them like a ghost. If, and I say if, I could get away … If I had help, a friend, a guide …’
‘By water,’ I hear myself say, ‘that’s the only route. Late at night, tomorrow night, Friday. That would be the time.’
‘But how do I get clear of the village? The lake, yes, possibly, to escape from the Priory. But how to get from the village thereafter?’
‘You don’t, not immediately. You wait, hide, until Saturday morning when the rally begins and when everyone is fully occupied. The entire village is expected to turn out. No one’s allowed to park in the square, so there will be motor cars all over the village, unattended, available. You understand?’
‘Such consternation when they find me gone! The scandal!’
‘Monsieur Brown, if we do this properly there will be no consternation. No one will know you’ve left the hotel. You will spend Friday night quietly in some hiding place and then when the rally gets underway, you disappear.’
‘Where will you hide a person of my prominence?’
‘Leave that to me. Come down to the private beach tomorrow night, at two in the morning exactly. Don’t bring much – just what you’re standing up in.’
‘And a song on my lips, hope in my heart and my people’s voices ringing in my ears!’
He takes up a position in front of his picture, the one with the wand and all the medals, and he beams like crazy. I think in his own mind he’s already back in Zanj, back in his uniform. Back getting ready to chew up some opponents? Well, I don’t ask that question. You appreciate my diffidence, it’s not easy suddenly to turn round and ask someone if he eats people. You need to nudge the conversation along. And anyway, what do I say if he says ‘yes’? Between the two of us, I think I’d be even more worried if he said ‘no’.
‘May I paint you?’
‘What?’ For a moment I don’t understand because he has a camera in his hands, one of those cameras which gives you prints immediately and he’s examining me through the viewfinder as I sit on his little green settee.
‘Something to remember you by. Something to take away with me. The daughter of my friend whom I have travelled so far to see. My rescuer!’
‘We haven’t done it yet.’
‘I have faith. Please, just one picture. Let me arrange you. Excuse me but you seem to have newspaper in your hair. May I remove it? What lovely pins! There!’
So he arranges me. I have a little pillow behind my head and I sit on the edge of the settee with my left knee raised. Very gently he takes the right shoulder of my dress and pulls it down, baring my arm and showing the pendant around my neck. Then he goes over to the fire and lights it. He gives me a mirror to hold and I look at myself, glad to see I am still there, still in one piece. Once the fire is blazing he sets the camera on automatic and crouches in front of the flames with his back to me. He takes several pictures before he’s satisfied. He constantly feeds the fire. The room becomes terribly hot, I can feel the flames playing along my legs, I have beads of sweat on my lip and forehead. His red shirt is the colour of the flames crackling in the grate.
Afterwards he shows me the original. A picture torn from a magazine.
‘Les Beaux Jours’. I like the title,’ says Monsieur Brown. ‘And I recognise you in the picture.’
‘But her hair is redder than mine and I think she’s quite a bit shorter. She’s wearing a pearl necklace, not a pendant. It isn’t me.’
‘It is now,’ he says.
I am walking through the darkened cloisters of the Priory towards the front door, after leaving him, and the whole place is deathly quiet, the guests asleep, André absent. Then, in the dark of the Prior’s garden, through the glass walls, I see him lying by the well, beneath the virgin who examines the foot of the Christ child. Clovis. Out for the count, stoked to the eyeballs. Has he been taking Chinese heroin or durophet or LSD or the whole damn caboodle? I can’t say, but he is out cold. He’s become again the old shooting, popping, sniffing Clovis, stoned out of his unstable little mind. Where is the new Clovis of the salmon-pink overall and the perspex boot, full of life and high hopes? My first thought is to wonder how on earth he got past the watchers at the gate who would let no one in. But then I guess Clovis was so high he was flying and simply soared over their heads, Mercury, the messenger of the gods, only he wasn’t wearing a funny hat like a golf cap, which Monsieur Brown wore when he played Mercury in the painting. Clovis just wears his hair as green as Ireland and is lying now on the ground as if he’s dead, or has given up all hopes of life and happiness.
I go upstairs to André’s room and knock on the door. It takes him some time to answer and when he does he is wearing a lavender silk dressing-gown and his eyes are red. It looks to me as though he has been weeping. He opens the door just a little but when I tell him about Clovis he comes out immediately, though not before I see behind him the big wide bed, and I mean really wide, and there tucked up like the three bears without Goldilocks are Armand, Tertius and Hyppolyte, sleeping like three little mummified babies stuck in the womb, sleeping soundly and smiling broadly, tucked up in the mammoth bed under a white blanket pulled up to their chins. All this I take in and he sees that I do and he doesn’t care. He helps me to carry Clovis inside to the empty television room on the ground floor and we call the doctor.
Twice tonight Dr Valléry has stepped from the tepid depths that are his mistress and he is not best pleased. I think that he’s beginning to imagine that I’m a bird of ill-omen.
‘Heroin,’ says Valléry after a while.
‘Come, we will carry him to one of the rooms and put him to bed,’ says André. ‘I will nurse him.’
‘Will he die?’ I ask.
‘If he’s lucky,’ says Valléry.
At home I find no sign of my uncle or the Angel. Father Duval sits downstairs reading an old copy of the Life of Charles Maurras. When I speak to him his eyes fill with tears.
‘A terrible thing, Bella. A sacrilege has been committed! He was wailing like an animal so I went upstairs. I feared he would wake your grandmother. I opened the door of your uncle’s study and he ran out into the night. A mad creature. Go and see for yourself.’
My grandmother is fast asleep. The door to my uncle’s den is open. His telescope is not pointing at the sky, the moon is out, the light good and the magnification beautiful. What I see through the telescope is the deck of a yacht, on the lake. I know immediately that it’s the Minnie III because I recognise the couple who move together like oil and shadows on her deck, I swear the image of them is so clear you can see her mouth open and I tell myself I hear her groan of pleasure. Now I know what Clovis saw and why he went back to the needle. My uncle’s passion for astronomy has given Clovis a glimpse of uncharted universes.
‘Your uncle is searching the village. It is terrible! What did the cannibal want – did you find out?’
‘I think I know.’
‘Well?’
‘He wants me.’
‘But Bella, what could such a person want you for?’
Before I can begin to answer, Uncle Claude bursts in, his face mottled with rage, and stands grinding his teeth. ‘Please find him!’ he cries to Duval. ‘Where is he? I must kill him! Nothing else will do.’ He sees me and rushes over and drops to his knees. ‘Bella, you’re his friend. Tell me where he is! I will give you chocolate, money, clothes, anything – find him so I can strangle him soon.’
‘Who do you want?’
‘The post boy, the cretin, the motorised idiot with the hoof!’
Everyone is mad.
‘Clovis?’
‘The assassin! The virus! The defective!’
‘What did he do?’
‘My flasks!’ Uncle Claude’s voice rises to a howl. ‘My formulas. Years and years and years of work. My solutions, my primordial soup! Gone, all gone, forever!’
‘He damaged it? Knocked it over?’
He shakes his head. ‘He drank it!’