The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (10 page)

“How is…” He went quiet, his natural exuberance suddenly seeming a little stifled. “How is Claire?”

I carried on polishing so he didn't have to see my face. I knew it would betray the worst. When I had been at home, the recipient of the best physio and rehab the National Health Service had to offer, Claire had had an argument with her oncologist. She had told him she wanted an end point for chemo, after which she didn't want to do it anymore. He had gotten very cross with her and reminded her she wasn't that old. She had been very sharp with him, then so crotchety when I saw her that I had suggested immediately I shouldn't go to Paris, and it's the only time I saw her get even a little cross with me. She had said what was the point of anything if I couldn't even do that, and she was going to be absolutely fine, if only to spite her bloody oncologist.

I shrugged.

“She's…she's been better,” I said.

“And she is, what…your aunt?”

“No, no. She was my teacher.”

“Your teacher?” He beamed suddenly, surprise on his face. “What did she teach?”

“Well, French, of course,” I said.

He snorted. “Ha. Well, you can tell her from me you have the accent. Terrible, terrible accent.”

He laughed at my expression. “I'm teasing you. It's a joke. Your French is very good.”

I sniffed. I'd thought I had done very well actually, considering I'd never visited the bloody country before.

“Very well,” he said again, obviously sorry he'd hurt my feelings. “Tell me more about Claire. All I got was her letter.”

“Well, we were in the hospital together,” I said. “So we kind of became friends. She's the one who told me to get away. Well, forced me actually,” I said, remembering. “She made me do it.”

“Good for her,” said Thierry. “And is she…she has a husband, a family?”

I shook my head. “No. She's divorced.”

Instantly I saw in his eyes a sadness—and something else too, perhaps.

“Truly? Oh, but she was a beautiful girl. A beautiful, beautiful girl.”

I agreed; in our little town, before she got ill, she had shined like a star.

Thierry shook his head. “But she will recover,
non
? She is not old. Oh, well, we are all old,” he grumbled to himself. “But she…she was so beautiful.”

“Who was so beautiful?” came Alice's perfect vowels, her accent retaining a tiny hint of the aristocratic English it must have been once.

“No one, no one, darling,” said Thierry, turning around and pasting his beaming jolly grin back on his face. “Let us leave. Do we have a quiet evening?”

Alice looked at me with her eyes narrowed. Then said, “Yes, darling. We must drop in to the François's cocktail party; they are expecting you. And the ambassador's. It is all business.”

“It is all ridiculously tedious,” said Thierry, grumbling. “People are no fun anymore. In the old days, it was all wonderful and we could dance and smoke, and now it is just everyone standing and looking worried and muttering about money, money, money.”

“Well, if you didn't eat and drink so much, you might enjoy it more.”

“
Non
, I have to eat and drink to enjoy it at all.”

They headed off into the evening twilight. Frédéric had zoomed off on his scooter; Benoît was waiting for me to finish, tapping his heavy keys in his hand but not saying a word. I smiled at him in a jolly fashion as I left, but he did not return it.

“Bye then!” I said cheerily in English, but he didn't turn around.

I was still weary—and a bit shell-shocked. Practicing with Claire was one thing; doing nothing but speak French all day long was a bit horrific and exhausting and had done nothing but prove to me how terrible my French was. I clambered up the stairs. My missing toes were tugging painfully at me. This drove me crazy. Honestly, when I had all my toes, I swear I couldn't tell them apart. Now I'd lost a couple, it was all I could think about. My missing toes acted as a bellwether, telling me when I was a bit tired or run down or doing too much—all of which I could have predicted would happen today—then suddenly I would feel them there. Darr said, the first time I displayed my hideous foot,
Oh, you hardly notice
, but I did. All the time.

No more sandals in the summer; no more lovely pedicures for when you go on holiday and get your feet all lovely and brown and the pink reflects off the tan, and you feel lovely and summery for long after the end of the trip. Now I was stuck in great, big, clumpy, ugly shoes all the time—high heels were kind of difficult too, because anything pointed at the toe twisted my other toes very painfully, and my podiatrist had told me to steer well clear. She'd also told me not to worry about it, hardly anybody walked up and down a beach counting other people's toes, and plenty of people had six to a foot and no one ever noticed and other things like that, and I had smiled and pretended to agree with her and nod, all the while vowing never to show off my foot ever again.

How I would manage if I ever met someone, I put to the back of my mind. I was too busy focusing on convalescence and trying to figure out how to survive for the rest of my life with the only half-decent employer in the district no longer in need of my services and my settlement money running down. Anyway. No one would get to see my deformity, and that was the end of it. Which meant I couldn't mention it, at risk of turning into a freak show right away. My brothers had been fascinated with what exactly had happened to them—had they been thrown into a bin? Could I keep them in a jar? Had they been set on fire? (They had been set on fire, thrown in the incinerator when I was too poorly for them to risk reattachment. I had lied and told them they were keeping them to clone another one of me.)

I limped up the stairs, then perked up as Sami stood there, waving a green bottle at me. He was wearing a multicolored silk bathrobe that was far too short for him. I tried not to look upward as I ascended the stairs.

“
Alors
!” he shouted. “The evening is beginning.”

“Not for me,” I said quickly. “I'm exhausted.”

Sami looked hurt.

“You don't want to meet my friends?”

I really, really didn't. For one, my French had finished. The end.
Finis
. The idea of going out with Sami's doubtless colorful friends to somewhere noisy and coming over as a total dud was depressing. Really, what I wanted to do was slump in front of the television, but I saw the TV was already on and remembered—which was stupid, of course, why wouldn't it be—that the telly was in French and seemed to consist of four blokes around a table shouting at one another. I sighed. I'd give anything for a dog doing cartwheels on
Britain's Got Talent
, possibly accompanied by pizza. I'd thought at lunchtime I'd eaten enough for the entire day, but my stomach seemed to think otherwise. I should have gotten some shopping, but I wasn't sure where to go. And there wasn't a thing in the apartment, I could tell. It smelled of exotic shower gel and cigarette smoke and a large sandalwood candle.

Also, apart from meeting Claire, I had changed. The accident had changed me, it really had. I'd kind of felt up for anything before that, and the realization that I wasn't, in fact, invulnerable was actually really hurtful. I'd called it getting better, but actually, it was more like hiding.

T
here was, as I was to discover over the course of many, many evenings, no point whatsoever in trying to avoid a night out with Sami. And also, a night out with Sami wasn't like a night out for many people. When me and Cath went out, for example, we'd tell some other people where we were going, then there'd be lots of texts and messages from people about which bar we'd be in, then we'd always end up at Faces because it had a dance floor and we'd do some dancing, then we'd end the night with a kebab at Pontin Ali's. That's what everybody did. All the nights were roughly the same, some more fun than others. Normally we saw a fight, and occasionally Cath got into one.

Sami, however, had the skill, just as he did with his costumes at the opera house—he could take the everyday, the bland, the tawdry, and with hardly any money but a bit of imagination, he could turn it into magic.

He could always find out where an art exhibit or a flash mob was going to happen. One evening, he led us all to the great Monaco circus, which had just arrived in town, and we sat on the tiny roof terrace of a cheap restaurant that served the best bouillabaisse in Paris, at mismatched tables festooned with tiny fairy lights, and watched the elephant and the tigers march out of their smart transporters. One night, he insisted everyone wear the color blue, then talked us into a private showing of a hot young artist as the entertainment, where we drank their wine and talked loudly and pretentiously about the sculptures until asked to leave. He had an ever-shifting coterie of nighttime friends: bar workers, box office staff, butchers, bakers, actresses, and guitar players, anyone who worked antisocial hours, who finished when the restaurants and bars were closing up and needed to know someone who knew how to have a good time in the twilight world. He was the
demimonde
to me.

I didn't know any of that that first evening though. All I knew was that, although I was tired, I was eager too; for company, to watch people who didn't know all about me, who wouldn't make tired old jokes week after week about Long John Silver (I had only just stopped using the cane; I kept leaving it everywhere anyway). My long sleep at lunchtime and the adrenalin of all the new experiences had left me energized and overexcited; it was the first time I had worked in so long. I felt I needed to do something; there was, I realized, no way I was going to sleep if I just went to bed. None at all.

“Go on then.”

I dressed in a very plain black dress that Claire had seen on an online shop and sent me over to suggest I buy it. To me it looked like absolutely nothing; I preferred things a bit more stand out-y, but she'd said this was more how to dress in Paris, so I had huffed, then agreed when it went on sale. It was weighted down in the hem, so it actually did lie very nicely—and the only, the ONLY benefit of being so stupidly ill was that I currently weighed less than I had done my entire adult life, so it fitted me smoothly without any of my normal lumps and bumps (usually I had two handfuls of stuff around the bottom of my back I could just kind of lift). Well, I supposed a couple of months of working in a chocolatier's would sort that out for me.

Sami came and watched me getting ready.

“Aren't you going to wear any makeup?” he said. I shrugged, then glanced over at him. He was wearing peacock-blue eye shadow that kind of glittered. Oddly, it didn't make him look less masculine; it simply highlighted his luscious dark eyes and gave him a very dangerous look.

“Are you a transvestite?” I asked. One thing about having to get by in another language: I never was able to make space for niceties or anything other than being very up front.

Sami laughed. “No,” he said, “I just like to be beautiful.” He gazed in the mirror, obviously reassuring himself that he was. He certainly was, but I'd never heard a man speak like that before. He was wearing a tight-fitting black suit that looked incredibly expensive, with a new white shirt, a turquoise tie, and a bright turquoise handkerchief in the top pocket that exactly matched his eye shadow.

“You are,” I said approvingly. To me he was like some exotic bird of paradise. He turned me by the shoulders and put me in front of the mirror.

“You look half-gypsy,” he said approvingly of my pale curly hair that never would settle down. “
Arrête
!”

He vanished and came back with an enormous professional makeup case laden with potions and ointments.

“Stand still.”

I submitted myself to his bidding and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was amazed at what I saw.

Sami had drawn a thick line of kohl right across the top of my lashes, fanning it out way past my eyes. It gave them huge, smoky definition, and he'd smudged powder on top of that and added mascara. LOTS of mascara. Suddenly my eyes looked enormous in my face.

“No lipstick,” he said. “Better like this. You may look mysterious and like you are wearing black on purpose and not because you are lazy about your clothes.”

“I'm not lazy about my clothes!” I protested, but I knew it was true. There wasn't much point in buying nice things when (a) I couldn't afford them, and (b) I had to wear a uniform at the chocolate factory, so I just tended to sling on jeans and a top underneath. It was quicker and easier and I didn't really have to think about it. Then Cath and I liked to dress up for going out at the weekends, but that meant I always needed new outfits, so I had to buy the cheapest I could find, really, so I didn't wear the same things all the time.

Anyway, so it wasn't a case of being lazy. It was a case of being practical.

In the slim-fitting black dress though (I always chose clothes to disguise the bits I didn't like, especially at the back), with the huge eyes…suddenly I looked like someone completely different. Not the young, who cares, back of the class Anna. And not the more recent Anna, with the slightly shell-shocked expression, the definite lines of weariness and wariness around the eyes. No, I looked like someone totally strange and new. I attempted a smile, but it didn't go with my new look, which was more mysterious, less friendly.

Sami laughed at me.

“Are you pouting?”

“No!” I said, jumping up and blushing.

“You are! You are loving looking at yourself!”

“NO!”

“That is good!” he said. “That is exactly right. Now. Come. Martini.”

I followed him out into the darkening city night. The tourists with their colorful backpacks and upside-down maps had retreated now to their hotels and the large restaurants with pictures on the menus that thronged the Place de la Concorde. Instead, the night felt like ours. We jumped on a bus that took us over the bridges and up the steady hill to the north, to Montmartre again.

Claire had often spoken about Montmartre; it was her favorite place in the city. She said on hot days it was often the only place you could get a breath of wind, climbing up the steps and sitting at the top. She said they used to park their little car up there—good luck, I thought, seeing the parking restrictions there now—and picnic at the top of the steps.

Sami hopped off the bus and led me down a side alley and through another. I had not the faintest idea where I was. Occasionally I would hear snatches of clinking glasses and happy conversation, or smell the scent of garlic and onions and oil simmering in a kitchen, or the bakeries that ran all night, releasing their bright warm scent of bread. Finally he came to a stop and indicated a large building that was completely silent. There was a tiny side passage and it was up here he led me; in the side was a tiny door, behind which shone a bright yellow light.

Sami knocked brightly three times, and the door was opened by a young girl dressed like a '50s cigarette girl. As she opened it, a huge blast of heat and light and noise blew out at us, and I stepped backward. She accepted some cash from Sami and ushered us inside.

Down a long flight of stairs, we found ourselves underneath the street in a huge crypt. It must have been a cellar of some sort, or some kind of storage.

At any rate, now it had been transformed into a club. At one end was a makeshift stage, and on it was a group of musicians playing fast and furiously for all they were worth: a trumpeter, a tall man wearing a fedora playing the double bass, a drummer who reminded me of Animal from the Muppets, and a tall woman in a fuchsia dress scatting into the microphone. Around people were dancing or sitting at cheap foldaway wooden tables. Condensation dripped off the walls. Many of the people were wearing '40s clothes. I noticed to my horror that most people were smoking; I knew there was a smoking ban in France too, but nobody seemed to observe it, and down here in this place with one rickety stairwell and no fire exits as far as I could see, it felt dangerous.

Over in one corner was a hatch serving great pitchers of wine and nothing else; there was also corner seating further away from the band, and Sami immediately saw some people he knew and bounced up to introduce us. A waitress stopped by and asked if we wanted wine, but Sami immediately demanded she go make us a proper martini, and after rolling her eyes, she agreed.

I'd never had a martini before. Not a proper one, at any rate, clearly. It tasted like someone had nicked it out of someone's gas tank. I spluttered and coughed until I attracted attention, then had to pretend that nothing had happened.

The music was very loud, and as soon as we sat down, people started to circle our table and come up to Sami, who obviously knew everyone there. Obviously this wasn't that surprising; of course he did. People who are very friendly, I have found, tend to be friendly to everyone. I felt a little foolish, in fact, thinking that Sami's eagerness to take me out was to do with something intrinsically interesting about me, rather than a typical benevolence toward everyone in the world. In fact, as I sipped my martini, I saw he greeted everyone with the same excitement, launching into high-volume complaints about how shitty his job or his love life was. Sami, I concluded, was simply one of those people who likes everyone, requires an audience, and wasn't terribly fussy who it was.

Well, that was all right, I told myself, as everyone else barely looked at me. I wasn't truly surprised; the girls were all so glamorous, with heavy dark eye shadow that had gone out of fashion in the UK years ago, set against pale skin—no fake tan—and they were all fashionably skinny. The boys were even more so, and they dressed better. They wore heavy rimmed glasses and nobody smiled or laughed except for Sami; they just waved their hands in the air. Eventually one of the skinny boys grabbed one of the skinny girls to take her dancing. She pouted even more than she had been doing previously, which clearly meant yes. I watched them disappear into the sweaty moving crowd, looking sinuous and elegant and somehow strangely out of time.

I took another sip of my cocktail—in fact, a second cocktail; I appeared to have finished the first—and felt strangely dislocated and dreamy. The odd thing is, although I knew on one level that where I was glamorous and interesting and different—everything I was meant to be here to discover—it wasn't me, I could see, looking around. I didn't fit in. I wasn't Parisian and sophisticated and skinny and beautifully dressed. I was too old, too parochial. It was an interesting world to see, to visit, I thought, looking at Sami with his head back, taking part in four conversations at once, downing his martini, and smoking a cigarette through a holder. But these easy bohemians…I didn't think there was much point in me trying to ingratiate myself, even if I did manage to understand a word anyone said. Sami had briefly introduced me to everyone, but no one had given me a second glance. And I looked at my watch. It was late. I stood up.

“I have to go,” I said to Sami.

He looked up at me, surprised. I didn't think it was just tobacco in his cigarette; the pupils of his eyes were huge.

“Go? But we've just arrived! And there's a sky-top party we all simply must go to later…in a bit…”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I have work tomorrow.”

“How will you get home?”

“I'll find a cab,” I said boldly. I had no idea how I'd get home.

Sami waved a lazy hand. “All right, my
petite
anglaise
who works so hard. Everyone say good night to Anna.”

A man was standing there who had just arrived, to whom I hadn't been introduced. He turned to Sami and said something in a low voice.

“Of course she will,” said Sami crossly. “Darling. More martinis please.”

Then he blinked.

“Of course. You two have to meet.” He grabbed the man, who was tall and slightly thicker-set than most of the good-looking young
beau monde
around, by the arm. The man had been draped around one of the very skinny model-looking types and looked rather annoyed at being disturbed.

“Laurent! It's Anna.”

Laurent, whoever he was, looked completely nonplussed by this information. Rather than kiss me on both cheeks or say “
enchanté
” like most of the other people I'd met, he thrust out a hand rather brusquely without looking me in the eye.