My Chocolate Redeemer (25 page)

Halfway up the aisle André steps from the crowd and puts his hand on my arm. ‘Bella, I'm very worried about Clovis. Have you seen him? He left his room and somehow got hold of his motorbike. The old one. The one they gave him at the post office. Then he tried to persuade the Dutch girl to come with him but she laughed. When he insisted and tried to carry her away, the young accountant hit him.'

‘The young accountant?'

‘You know him. Over there. Dark hair, standing very close to the Dutch girl. Name's Dupont.'

I look. There must be some mistake because the boy André points out to me is the escapee from the Foreign Legion, randy Raoul of the easy erection and the greasy bathing trunks.

‘What did you call him?'

‘Dupont,' says André. ‘He's an accountant from Grenoble. Bella, we must do something. Clovis has gone away and I fear for him. The boy is shattered.'

I also worry about Clovis, of course, but this is not the time or the place to begin to discover again that many universes run parallel to the one in which I am most at home, because I invented it, and because I do not wish to live in worlds where accountants from Grenoble masquerade as escapees from the Foreign Legion. I spot other guests from the Priory Hotel in the crowd, all of them, no doubt, as unreliable as the accountant. There is the German family, Gudrun and Wolf, and the two lizards from Monte Carlo, Alphonse and Edith, and the very last thing I want right now, thank you very much, is for André to wave his wand and to turn all my princes into frogs.

‘I can't stay.'

‘You mean you won't. You hate me! Your friend! Well, you'll see today what lies in store for your friend. Don't worry, I'm not staying for this meeting, I don't need to hear it with my own ears. They plan to pillory me, Bella. From the platform today they'll set this mob on me. Watch! The Angel will weave his spell and move with all the cunning of a beautiful snake to sting and poison the minds of these people. He wants it, you know. My hotel. I think I could take their hatred, and I think I could even take their fear, I could pray for the strength to stand up to their attacks on my beautiful things, my boys and my Priory. But what I can't stand is to be hated by you for something I didn't do. I'm not blaming you. It's the penalty. I prayed for mortification and for suffering. Remember we talked about it? And look now what's happened: my prayer's answered!' He gives a ghastly smile. ‘And you'll see what you want. You'll see the Beast of the Bourse destroyed. There's only a little more time to wait. It's funny, Bella, I haven't it in me to pray that this cup be taken from me. Yet I'm frightened.'

‘You're hurting my arm, please let me go.'

‘I see you're carrying a photograph of your grandfather.' He takes his hand from my arm, defeated. And then he says, angrily, bitterly: ‘Well, things are difficult, things are complex. There are many views of everything. And never less than two. Here – this is another view.'

And from his pocket he takes out an old, faded black-and-white photograph and pushes it violently into my hand, crushing it. I have to smooth it out on the glass front of my grandfather's picture before I can make out what it is. It's a picture of a young man, in fact there are several young men, but this young man is right in the foreground. He's tied to a stake, in a village square. The heads of all these young men are shaven and in the distance I can see a row of soldiers who stand with rifles. The riflemen are wearing tin hats and they seem to be waiting for something.

‘This was taken minutes before he was shot. You see the firing squad is making ready. It happened in a village not far from here, after a trial before a court drawn from the Resistance. Several hundred were shot. Executions began at dawn and went on until after eleven. Many were young men. All were guilty of murdering their own countrymen and collaborating with the Germans.'

Though he is here without his cap, the prisoner at the stake is the same soldier who watched over my grandmother's sleep from the heart of her holy trinity on the bedside table. My grandfather is very young. The light strikes his face from the right, illuminating the clean, handsome profile. He looks up, over the heads of the firing party, up to the wall on his right; it is the corner of a house and on the wall of the house is the advertisement for the chocolate my grandmother always spoke of when she recalled his last moments on earth.
Chocolat Cémoi … Un Régal Chocolat Cémoi
.

‘Well, you have it now. I'm sorry, Bella, but I wasn't going to my grave letting you think the most terrible of all thoughts: the thought of one who believes she knows the truth about another – who believes that the truth she knows is pure. I couldn't bear it that my friend, perhaps my only friend, should remember me with horror. I'm a soul in torment, Bella. You wouldn't deny me water?'

‘I thought he died for his country? For the Resistance?'

‘Your grandfather was among the fascist Militia. Do you understand what that means? He worked for the Germans, he was a volunteer, a follower of Pétain and of the Vichy clique. They were terribly fierce, the Militia, and they were often used by the Germans for tracking down dissidents in the mountains. It is said that this lot died bravely shouting before they were shot, “Long live Christ the King!” and “Long live the Marshal! Long live France!” '

‘I thought he died fighting the enemy.'

‘For a good many in these parts the Resistance was the enemy.'

His face is chalk-white. He puts his fist in his mouth and when he takes it out I see blood on his knuckles – he has bitten down to the bone. I can think of nothing to say. It is sometimes kinder to shoot people. Because I must do something I lean forward and kiss him on his broad pink forehead. That's all. There isn't time for more.

Behind me I hear unmistakable hints of the Angel's approach. The crowds are noisy with the socialists, who see him first, shrieking, ‘Down with the new fascists! Down with the Angel of Hate!' I must hurry if I'm to make it to the platform before he catches up with me. Now his supporters see him and set up a counter-clamour, ‘
Patron! Patron! Patron!
' They stamp their feet until the square trembles.

I reach the platform unnoticed by anyone but Uncle Claude who frowns gloomily at me and motions at me to pull my dress down over my knees when I sit. That's always the trouble with these skimpy mixtures, they will ride up, but with my hands full, adjustments for the sake of modesty are awkward to make.

And now here he is, the Angel, in a blue suit and – oh my! – but he's been on a diet, he's so much leaner, craggier and his eyes show like bluebells on a river bank, rich and strong and – and what the hell is this? – I don't believe it! He has with him none other than Domitian, the lead singer, or should I say the big yeller, with a group called Record Damages, which is, I have to say, a piss-poor little sewing circle masquerading as a rock group and imagining it has some weight, whereas in fact it wouldn't even register on the post office scale. But it's Domitian all right, in mufti, in deep disguise. Gone are the butcher's hooks through the earlobes that used to swing with a low jingle, vanished are the jodhpurs with the swastika spurs, gone too is the shrunken-head necklace with all the little noses buried in his chest hair. He is in a suit even bluer than the Angel's and a pink tie with dolphins leaping from a salmon sea. And this, can you believe, is the mighty presence from Paris whom Uncle boasted about.
Of course!
Now I know what he's up to on the platform. Domitian has one platinum disc, the kind of thing that stinks of the studio and was done so nakedly for the cash that you can almost smell the producer's cigar wafting across the lyrics. Oh, I know, it's got a pretty enough little circular riff arrangement, that's if you like being reminded of the lesser-known rhythms of, say, ‘Maid Of The Mountains'. But it's the lyrics that made Domitian rich and made the
Parti National Populaire
embrace him as their troubadour, a style which
Les Temps
, with the wry understatement affected by those who are intelligent enough to know that they're powerless, without being brave enough to do anything about it, described as ‘… not a form of versification likely to appeal to the cous-cous voter …'

No indeed.

‘They say that Africa's the mother of man/So I say this to the Africa lover/We're gonna pack your bags real soon/And boot you home to mother …'

Isn't it a reflection on our times that a group of the heavily unwashed, who once set out to be the end of civilisation as we know it, spaced-out rockheads, who believe that talent amounts to showing the audience your dental fillings, are now turning up on platforms like this, disguised as friends of the dolphins and displaying a degree of grace you would normally associate with an electric cattle prod?

But it's the time of platform kisses: Father Duval kisses the Angel, the Angel kisses Grandmama, who closes her eyes and smiles seraphically from her satin pillows and the crowd erupts again into whistles and applause and cries of ‘
Vive Monsieur Cherubini!
' and since they do not know who the aged lady is, perhaps some suppose that they are going to witness a miracle cure, for nothing is beyond the power of the Angel. Uncle Claude does not know who Domitian is and so does not try to kiss him. Domitian kisses me because I am under forty-five and female and therefore must be a fan
and
he calls me dear child, and the nasty little virus is himself not more than twenty! But fame ages people, I notice … Domitian does not kiss Grandmama because even he can see she is very ill and illness is the closest you come in Domitian's world to bad taste.

Uncle Claude steps to the mike and announces that Father Duval will open the meeting with prayers. More cheers from the Party faithful and far away, at the back of the square, cries of anger from the hecklers but they are faint and distant like mewing gulls helpless against a booming surf. Father Duval bounds to the mike. He has spent some time warming up the crowd and they love him. The little Father of the microphone:

‘Friends, patriots, Frenchmen and women, I won't detain you long because you wouldn't forgive me, nor I myself were I to do so. I'm not here on my own behalf, but on behalf of another whose very laces I am not fit to tie,' and he waves his hand at the Angel who responds genially by lifting the leg of one trouser a little to reveal that he is wearing black moccasins without laces. The crowd love it. They always appreciate this side of him, the down-to-earth country humour.

‘But I'm here to pledge myself to our Party, the
Parti National Populaire
. With it we will march into the future, free, proud, purposeful. Free because it is French, proud because it is free, purposeful because at its head there marches one who leads, like the Maid of Orleans once led the fighting men of France against the enemy, our dear, no our
beloved, patron
! And another thing, remember that the PNP is growing, it is strong and it grows stronger across the country. We grow like the rejuvenation of cells in a person recuperating from some illness who is in the hands of a great expert. The miracle of our cure comes from our faith, faith in national identity, or in other words, in ourselves. A last word: we are free because we revere that most precious institution, the family. Ours, yours and the greater family of France. For us the family is holy. It might be said that our mother is France and our father is our beloved
patron
. As a result our demands are natural and modest. All we ask is to be allowed to remain French. Therein lies our freedom. I will remind you of what the Africans said during their struggle for independence – they said: “Africa for the Africans”. We say the same. France for the French! But to achieve this, firm leadership is essential. Let me quote that considerable patriot of the 1920s, Pierre Taittinger: “France wants a fist!”

‘And this brings me to my prayer – if I have a prayer – it is this: let us press forward with the terrible modesty of our proposals, let us allow nothing to stand in our way. I, for my sins, am the parish priest of the little village of La Frisette to which we welcome you today. Some of you know that. That is to say that I am “a father”. Well, that may be so. But let me tell you that in the presence of our
patron
, I feel like not a father but a child. This is what I meant by my earlier, perhaps clumsy allusion. If it was clumsy, forgive me! And I want to tell you further that my congregation has been collecting money together for our little church. For the roof, you see. For cleaning the gravestones. For stopping the draughts that howl down the aisles. Yet we have decided by popular decision to present our savings to the PNP. And why? you ask. Because we see the Party is the guarantor of our future. We give to it and we know our gift will be redoubled in the giving. Remember this when you leave here today. Facilities have been made available to receive your gifts. Forgive me for having trespassed on your time. Here is the man you have really come to meet, our
patron
, Monsieur Cherubini! May God bless him!'

I see that not only has the money from the church gone to the PNP but Father Duval has lined up various collectors with church plates.

But it's still not time for the Angel to approach the mike because now my grandmother interrupts. That is to say, she lifts her hand as a child might in a classroom. She wants attention and I get up but she won't let me come near her, shaking her head and struggling to lift herself off the pillows. She is far too weak and falls back. By this time the crowds are pointing and whispering. The Angel calls to Father Duval to carry the microphone across to Grandmama. Something rather odd is happening. I can see her struggling with the ring on her finger. Father Duval bends closer to her with the mike. Now, suddenly, we can all hear her voice, echoing around the square. It's very, very ragged: