My Chocolate Redeemer (10 page)

He was very excited. Sweat stood out on his forehead and he dabbed at it with his apron. ‘And if I didn't have enough on my mind, there is the new guest. Arrived last night and he's taken the entire upper floor.'

‘All of it? Who is he?'

André looked vague. ‘He's simply someone who wishes to avail himself of my hotel, for a short period, and desires utter privacy.'

‘He must be very rich.'

‘I really couldn't say.'

‘But he must be! The whole of the second floor? What's that – twenty bedrooms?'

‘Thirty. Twenty-four single bedrooms, where the monks had their cells, and six doubles in the adjacent wing, overlooking the lake.'

‘Six suites! – he takes six suites as well?'

‘He doesn't use the suites. Just one single room.'

‘What's his name? Is he a sheikh or a shah or something – with a harem? Or a huge staff? Or twenty-four cousins?'

André smiled thinly. I could tell he did not like my questions. But there was something else, a kind of irritation, touched with alarm.

‘He's here alone. There is no entourage.'

‘Why did he come?'

André began to look embarrassed. He shrugged. ‘We were given no details.'

‘How long is he staying, this rich guest who has fallen out of the sky?'

‘I am assured the visit will be brief.'

‘You mean you don't know?'

He flushed, not bothering to conceal his anger now. ‘How should I know the length of his stay. I am not psychic, Bella, and since I have not been favoured with the dates for the duration of his visit, I can't answer your question. The reservation was not one I could refuse. Don't ask me what I think about this. My views weren't considered by those arranging for this gentleman to descend upon me.' A look of real pain crossed his eggshaped face, fine cracks began spreading outwards from the corners of his eyes and rippling across the tightly stretched skin of his pink cheeks, seismic disturbances within the flesh.

‘What people like us need, if we're not to fly apart, is discipline.' He took my hand. ‘I sometimes feel all the familiar elements of life are flying apart at prodigious speed.' He began to pat my hand, rhythmically and rather hard. It hurt. ‘Since no one else will do it, we must discipline ourselves, each in his own way. Tell me, besides weeping, do you find yourself praying?'

My hand was stinging so much I pulled it away and licked it to cool it. ‘Yes.'

‘Aloud?'

‘Yes. And I want to go down on my knees in the street!'

André shook his head. ‘You see – it's impossible to live like that, in the modern world. In the monastery of St Bruno monks have their own discipline. I'm not referring only to the procedures where they confess their sins to the Prior, or are accused by their fellows of faults for which they must make reparation. I mean the little whip they hide under their pillows. It has five tails and they call it the
scourage
. And I tell you, Bella, every Friday after Lauds they whip themselves. True! Except at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes I believe that the boys who work for me would benefit by it, but I don't hold out much hope. Look, I'll show you.'

He took from the pocket of his apron a little stick with leather cords dangling from it. It looked not unlike the ceremonial flywhisks Papa brought home from Africa. Lifting it to his ear and without taking his eyes off me, André lashed himself on each shoulder in turn.

‘Normally one would do this without a shirt. But I simply cannot spare the time. I must get on. Twenty-six for dinner tonight and chef has deserted me.'

He replaced the whip in his apron pocket and sighed. ‘It's out of place. I know that. I keep it for sentimental reasons. A penance, punishment, discipline – call it what you like – must be appropriate. I think I have perhaps found my real
scourage
: to work myself to death.'

‘Where are your boys?'

He shrugged. ‘Tertius is playing
boules
, he's in the village team. Hyppolyte is unwell and Armand is in Lyons, again … But now I must get back to the kitchens.'

He walked me slowly along the cloisters, past the statues of hunched, dwarfish little bishops with croziers and books who sat in stony silence on the window sills and leered as we went by.

‘You mean they've left you to prepare dinner for all the guests on your own?'

He gave me a smile of an inexpressible sweetness. ‘For my sins, yes. Tonight we're having cream of lettuce soup, followed by
filets de sole marguéry
.' He waved a hand. ‘Goodbye, Bella. I'm glad you've stopped crying.'

The private beach was deserted. The empty deckchairs were orange and blue. The departed guests would now be in their rooms changing, getting ready for a cocktail and looking forward to the dinner André was preparing. The chairs opened their mouths and yawned, showing their brightly striped throats. The lake was soft and lovely as the shadows began mixing inkily with the water. It was curious the way the water seemed thicker and more solid as night began to come on and it grew to be an altogether more substantial body; darker, crueller and more private, absorbed with itself. I heard its low mutter. The many hotels and restaurants that loaded the lower slopes of the village took the force of the slanting afternoon sun which gave them a blind, somehow indecisive look; it was that curious moment of the day, that point where people had packed up and left the lake and the official evening was still an hour away from its formal beginning, when the lights would go on in the restaurants and on the terraces and the guests would talk and laugh at such establishments as the Beau Rivage and the Hotel Bellevue and at the Palace and even the famous restaurant
Les Dents Sacrés
where the rich gourmets ate and the local yokels pressed their noses to the menu boards outside and whistled at the prices of the hors-d'oeuvres. And in this non-time it was as if all had temporarily lost their identities and were waiting to reclaim them – as if for this brief period the lake alone knew what it was.

I bowed my head and called on the Lord: ‘Give me the power to thwart the heathen.' I don't know why I used the word ‘heathen' and the use of the term ‘thwart' was even more unusual. It wasn't at all like me. Perhaps this was what they meant by ‘speaking in tongues'. Or maybe it was just a matter of the comfort of words. If I say that something that brings out the reddish tints in my hair is called Copper Blush, and my foundation powder is called Warm Burgundy, my lash mascara Smokey Ebony and my lipstick Strawberry Surprise, you'd be a fool if you took away anything from this description except a very vague impression because the words are used as a kind of paint and it doesn't in the least matter whether the words used relate to, or match, or have no connection whatsoever with strawberries and blushes.

Behind me I heard shouts and wolf whistles. And there out on the lake, clambering onto the wooden pontoon that lay moored about thirty metres from the private beach, and which was used as a swimming platform by the guests, I saw Tertius, Hyppolyte and Armand, who were all supposed to be somewhere else, according to André. I'm pleased to say that my recent religious conversation did not stop me from lifting a rigid forefinger in their direction in an unmistakable gesture. They all laughed and applauded and dived off the pontoon and I saw their smooth heads breaking the water like seals playing. The stupid boys had thought it clever to lie to André, who was even then slaving over his lettuce soup and scouring mussels under cold running water and scraping off the black rope-like tufts from the shells with a small sharp knife for the
filets de sole marguéry
, which his guests were to enjoy that evening; a meal which was no doubt to be served by André as well, for the boys, whose loud catcalls and childish innuendoes, seeming in the main to refer to the way I moved, now reached me faintly across the water, showed no sign of preparing to put on their white coats and take up their dubious roles as waiters.

I walked away from the swimmers, the hotel and the private beach, along the little road that runs around the shore of the lake, dividing the Priory from the
plage privée
, skirting the waterside where the yachts are moored. The little road passed between the private wooden jetties and the big houses standing at the far ends of their gardens, their beautiful lawns, sweeping down the waterside. Most of the houses were closed up, shutters tightly secured against the wind off the water. Black and graceful streetlamps leaned over me, their pretty heads shaped like musical clefs. Everything in that corner of the lake, where the road hit the mountain and stopped dead, had been made to seem natural, a human settlement painted on the mountainside. Now I entered the picture – a daub of pink against the evening grey, visible to whatever hawk's eye swept the canvas while I kept moving, invisible the moment I stopped dead at the mountain – then I disappeared into the painting.

Many of the houses have chains around their gates, the links show rustily through ugly, yellow, transparent sleeves. These houses look like they've been shut since the nineteenth century. When the streetlamps come on they turn a warm amber. An old painted notice on a fence reads:
‘Respect the purity of the Lake'
. I took a good deal of comfort from that sign. Then I turned around and walked back. All the lights on the second floor of the hotel were shining. An entire floor to himself. The guest must be made of money! Thirty rooms for one man, André had said, and no entourage!

Behind me the private beach was dark and the boys were gone from the floating island. Beyond the gates to the hotel is an open space which is used as a parking lot by day. I saw several cars still parked. It was odd to see trippers after dark, too late for bathers, too early for lovers. There were, to be precise, a Citroën, a Renault and a Deux-Chevaux. In each of the cars sat two or three men, tough-looking guys who stared at the dark water as if they were waiting for someone to arrive, a ship or something. But I knew it was too late for the ferries from
La Compagnie des Bateaux sur Le Lac
which collect passengers from the jetty near the restaurant
Les Dents Sacrés
. One came by after dark, playing music, all lit up, a floating restaurant – but it did not stop for passengers. Whatever the watchers in the parking lot were waiting for it wasn't a boat.

From that time when I first got frightened in the TV room, I have had what I think of as my ‘prayer problem'. I'm God-haunted, heaven-possessed, an excess of divine grace fell on me from clear skies. The spirit took me and shook me like a fierce wind, or a fever, and my mind fluttered like a leaf or a feather. I felt increasingly called upon to oppose the likes of Uncle Claude. I heard voices calling me to become an advocate for disorder. ‘Speak for the dead, Bella!' my voices told me. And I knew what they meant. For my uncle the dead were just that: dead. You might regard them as objects for study, if you were an anthropologist. But you did not weep for them. Or venerate them. Or pray for them. In my case the urge to fall on my knees overcame me in public and private places. My lips moved even when I slept. As a result I slept less, ate more chocolate, waited for something.

And this
thing
, whatever it was, was no respecter of occasions. I might be togged out in fur flying hat and distressed leather jacket and a pink soda T-shirt so skimpy it ends at the armpits; I could be swimming, dancing, sleeping, eating, when, without warning, the floods broke. The only thing worse than involuntary weeping was uncontrollable prayer. Not knowing where to turn, I wrote for advice to a magazine I liked called
N-Ova!
They printed my letter, in between one from a twelve-year-old contemplating a second abortion, and advice to someone whose boyfriend had genital warts.

Dear ‘Weepie' of La Frisette
, they wrote,
your condition is unusual and more suited to medieval times than to our 20th century. Perhaps it is associated with psychological problems? Or it may be an allergy. The need you also have ‘to speak for the dead', as you put it, is probably linked to the praying problem. This aspect of it is not particularly advisable and is best left to the professionals. It's possible that energetic physical exercises might dampen down the urge to pray, swimming say, or riding. Avoid places like churches, shrines and religious gatherings. Tears are less of a problem and even excessive weeping will do no harm – though it plays hell with your make-up! Never mind, if you want to cry, go ahead and bawl your head off! Though we know how embarrassing that can be at a club or disco or on that heavy date, or when you're in close quarters with your lover. He/she might think (wrongly) that it reflects your opinion on their performance. Would it help to discuss this with a doctor, relative or family friend? In the circumstances, a minister of religion would not be such a hot idea …

I began to learn to take steps to hide what was happening. I would bury my face in a handkerchief when the tears started, pretending I had a bad cold or hayfever, or a sneezing fit, and run from the room. If I was down by the lake, I would dive in; if I was in bed I would bury my head under the pillows; if I was having a meal I would pretend to be choking. These were unpleasant deceptions but they kept away the questions I dreaded. Only with Clovis did I once allow myself to cry unashamedly and he patted my head soothingly and seemed rather pleased by it all, though I must say he did try to remove my blouse at the same time and I had to restrain him. I jabbed him in the stomach with my elbow and winded him quite badly. He fell over and had trouble getting up again. Through tears in my eyes I saw tears in his eyes. I don't believe in hitting cripples, as a rule, but I had to defend myself. It's not easy to be firm when you're rubbery with inexplicable sorrow. However, the floods never lasted long and when they passed I always felt rather lighter, as well as a bit older and somehow wiser, if rather curiously rusty. Far from complaining about my treatment of him, Clovis always looked back on the shared occasion with delight, calling it ‘the day the rains came'. He seemed to have forgotten that I'd hit him and was hoping that it would happen again.