My Chocolate Redeemer by Christopher Hope Page B

his badge without a test, Father Duval became responsible for counselling the fearful: and I am one of those. Thus – I fear, and he counsels. Both of us conform to our definitions. Definitions are stormtroopers of science: they used once to work for theology, when she was queen, but they switched sides after the coup. They arrive unexpectedly and presume obedience; they hint at consequences, if we do not do what they tell us. It’s odd, considering the damage science has done to the old faithful, to realise that scientists are among the hottest of the new believers. Look at Uncle Claude. He’ll believe almost anything – until he’s proved wrong. And then he’ll believe something else. A search for certainty passed off as the spirit of fearless enquiry. It’s bloody pathetic. Certainties have, of course, nothing whatever to do with Father Duval and me. But sometimes all we have left is to pretend that they do.
    And, oh, what a wanker! – as we liked to say at the North London Academy for Girls. He would have made a good manager in a medium-sized cement factory; he could have run his own florist shop; I dare say he would have made a fine local councillor. He might, in other circumstances, in more extreme societies, have been one of those deputed to dispose of the victims of some death-dealing regime. Just to look at him gives me the confidence to say that the methods he would employ would be scientific, modern and, wherever possible, humane. No doubt he would have disapproved of wanton cruelty and brutality. Such excesses would have seemed old-fashioned and therefore inefficient. Whatever he touches becomes a manageable, small-scale, smiling world. The thing Father Duval likes to do is ‘to spread a little cheer’. He would have felt the same whether he’d run a bar, or a mortuary. Make the best of things and get on with it! he preaches from the pulpit and you feel – yes – he’d do just that – whether dressing a corpse or pouring a drink. He implies, though he never says as much, that this is the real meaning of the Gospel and it’s surely just a matter of time before his congregation, his flock in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, grasp this truth. In the meantime all he can do is to root out superstitious phobias to which the mentally delinquent are prone: hopes of love, dreams of death and eternal punishment; medieval legalisms about the profit and loss of grace – in short all the bad old psychological terrors of the past two millennia. And he does his work of destruction, not of course with any unpleasantness, but like a bank manager cordially turning down sadly unrealistic would-be borrowers. With a shake of the head and a firm smile he shows them the door. How many frail and pitiable human phantoms, what dreads and nauseas are disposed of by his cheerful modesty? What a deathdealer!
    The Church of the Immaculate Conception is built of grey stone beneath a red tiled roof and dominates the village, which falls away below it in twisting streets crowded with a bewilderingly rich assortment of houses, hotels, parks and gardens down to the broad lake shore. La Frisette lies like a delicate tendril of vine fallen at the feet of the mountains.
    The church was used as a munitions dump during the Revolution and had been shut throughout most of the war after the German invaders arrested the parish priest for hiding gypsies in the crypt (gypsies were detested almost as much as priests in the village of La Frisette and most villagers approved of the arrests). After that, through the fifties and sixties, the church had been allowed to slip gradually into decay until, that is, the appointment of Father Duval in the seventies and his ambitious programme for modernisation. The broken stained-glass windows were replaced with clear glass, the Stations of the Cross on which doves had roosted were plucked from the walls and replaced with photographs of famine