My Chocolate Redeemer Read Online Free Page A

to the great pain and chagrin of my dear Grand-mère, who regarded the removal of a twelve-year-old ‘daughter of France’ to England to be nothing short of kidnapping. She referred thereafter to my mother as the ‘child stealer’. No doubt, she said, this was how Joan of Arc had been stolen by the Goddams. The Goddams was her way of referring to the English.
    â€˜There are mothers walking across Europe who have seen their children stolen by their Algerian husbands. They walk to draw attention to the theft. I will join them to protest at the taking of Bella to England.’
    â€˜But Maman,’ Claude protested, ‘your arthritis!’
    â€˜Very well, I shall go by wheelchair, and you may push me. No, on second thoughts, you are too busy. You are Mayor now – and mayors cannot go walking whenever they please.’
    I remember asking Mama if there was to be a funeral and she explained that without a body this was not possible. However, she promised me that on her return from New York she would arrange a memorial service for friends and family. Sadly, she was delayed in the States where her project, brilliantly transformed into a photographic essay on the oldest female film stars in America, ‘The Eye of Aquinas’, was a great success and when she returned to London some months later she confessed that she had forgotten all about the memorial service.
    â€˜Your Papa would have understood, my little Bella.’
    We took a flat on the northern heights of London overlooking a square. It went by the name of Pond Square though it was neither watery nor square but was in fact an ovoid of solid earth covered with tarmac and surrounded by elderly plane trees. Boys played football against the wall of the public convenience which stood rather proudly at one corner having about it the air of an old auberge, rather comfortable and welcoming, or perhaps the sort of modest bar you’d find in some small, out-of-the-way French village.
    Appearances deceive. That is their function, particularly in England. I have gathered together a number of useful proverbs which attest to this truth during the course of my English classes at the Academy where I have made reasonable progress over the past three years since we moved to London. I know for instance that beauty is only skin deep, that it is in the eye of the beholder; that handsome is as handsome does. I make my annual visit to my grandmother in the thin house at the top of the village of La Frisette, every July. ‘French leave’ Mama calls it. Like many English expressions it disturbs my grandmother. And when I translate these for her she treats them with disbelief and loathing. Her lips tighten and compress into a hard, thin line, a crack so narrow it would not admit even a coin, and when she sniffs, short and hard, her nostrils pinch together. Her skin is very fine and she looks like a delicate creature flinching when she does that. Anemones, or butterflies’ wings, are not more delicate than the little indentations of distaste registered on my grandmother’s nostrils when I come out with such expressions.
    Now I’m back in La Frisette for the duration. Ever since Mama disappeared into America. I suppose she must have found herself – and lost me. She communicates regularly; I get dollar bills, sometimes pretty large denominations, from Tampa and Dallas. She used to scrawl a few lines across the notes: ‘ Beauty is always so appropriate – but so fast. Must rush!’ Or: ‘We will have the funeral, one day. Promise.’ But soon the messages stopped and just the bills arrived. I keep the money in the silver trunk under my bed, with my chocolate supplies. I’m saving up, for something.

Chapter 2
    Each glittering summer in the house high above the lake, between the church and the Bellevue Hotel, overlooking the village square; ever since I was a tiny girl I have come to the house in July, on my own, and