Free My Chocolate Redeemer by Christopher Hope

a few days later he would disappear back into Africa.
    Since my Papa no longer spoke to his family I became the go-between. Each summer I went to stay by the lake with my French family. My Uncle Claude would come to Paris to fetch me and before we left to drive back to my grandmother’s house he would look gloomily around our apartment at the new display of my father’s trophies, the exotic accumulation of another year in Africa. And he would shake his head and click his tongue disapprovingly as if he were a teacher who had discovered one of his dimmer pupils has been writing on the walls.
    In my father’s bedroom, which was a kind of African shrine, there were photographs of men just like him who had spent their lives in Africa. These pictures were taken in the last century and showed traders and their houses. Some of them lived on houseboats moored on brown, broad rivers, clearly settled there for good because the boats had been roofed over and become permanent trading posts. There were pictures of the surprisingly comfortable and immensely cluttered interiors. The fashion was for many rugs and coloured glass in the windows, tables with twirly legs, a variety of lamps hanging from the ceiling, vases galore, leopard skins on the floor. Everyone in these pictures wore hats, it didn’t matter whether you were a master or a servant, the head went covered if it was to be decent: hats of straw, hats with ruffles, cockades, plumes, bowlers, toppers, hats made of hair, or rope, or rags. But hats. Every head was roofed. Without doubt the head was then regarded as the seat of wisdom and if you went out with it not properly protected and respected, who knew what might fall on it.
    These pictures offended Uncle Claude particularly. He would pause in front of one of them and demand loudly, ‘But what is the use of it all? We went to these places and interfered. We stirred up the mud and now the mud is coming home to stick. The fair body of France is obliged to suffer the rubbish slung by those who delight in her humiliation. This is what radical politics have reduced us to. France beyond the seas is diminished, France at home is humiliated. Is this what we want, Bella?’
    Being perhaps seven or eight at the time, I had no answers to these bitter questions. My mother was always careful to be out when my uncle came to collect me for my summer holiday. She was at that time photographing the female models of famous painters, in their old age. Could anything of their original beauty be found beneath the accumulated grime and varnish of the years?
    When my father died somewhere in Africa, and nobody knew anything, we lost our apartment in the rue Vandal, our clothes, our car, our jewels. I continued these summers beside the lake in my grandmother’s house, although my role changed and I was no longer the go-between and became instead, in the houses of both Mama and Grand-mère, a hostage. I was never sure until the last moment whether each would release me at the end of my time. My mother hinted darkly at some terrible war-time secret which was the real cause of the rift between Papa and his family, while Grand-mère declared furiously that when my father had died, Mama had stolen away with me to England.
    â€˜Would you run away with a child to Devil’s Island, or some grim police state?’
    â€˜But Grand-mère,’ I protested, ‘England is not either of those things. Why don’t you come and see for yourself? We would love to have you visit us.’
    â€˜Too much coal,’ she sniffed. Her beautiful nostrils flexed.
    â€˜She gives the same reason as I believe Renoir’s mother used,’ my Uncle Claude explained.
    I enjoyed being in both places. I liked being with my mother, except during her feminist phase. I enjoyed the freedom of having the little flat in England all to myself, while she was away on her shooting assignments. I studied the life in the little square beneath