The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (19 page)

Dotted on the pews, looking tiny as ants, were people, mostly singly, just sitting, contemplating. I couldn't join them without paying the entrance fee, and I didn't have a God I could talk to, and even if I did I couldn't imagine any kind of God taking time off from massacres and famines to help out an aging, very, very fat man I barely knew. But even so. My heart formed a silent plea—
please
—said over and over again.
Please. Just, please.

I felt better.

- - -

The shop had a sign on it—
fermé cause de maladie
—and some concerned people milling around outside, who'd obviously made the trip specially and everything. I knocked heavily on the roll door. The workshop around the back technically had a fire exit, but I had no idea where it went out, so I kept banging till I heard Frédéric.

“We're shut! Go away!” he shouted.

“It's me!” I yelled.

Immediately the shutters were raised.

“Why didn't you call? Where have you been?” he shouted at me.

“Because my phone is dead,” I explained. “And you can't use the phones in the hospital.”

“Well, that's not very helpful,” he grumbled. “We've been waiting. Any change?”

“No,” I said. “I don't think so. But no change is good at this point.”

Frédéric snorted. “I don't know about that.”

I noticed something. There was no noise in the shop.

“Why are the churns switched off?” I asked.

Frédéric shrugged. “Oh, of course we cannot continue without the chef,
cherie
. It's not possible.”

“What do you mean, it's not possible? Are you going on strike?”

“No. But without him…”

“You're telling me you've worked here all these years and you don't know what he's doing?”

Frédéric's little face grew cross.

“Of course we see what he is doing. But what he is doing and what an artisan would do…for the conch, it is not precisely the same, madame. It is the difference between daubs on a wall and an artist's canvas. It could not be.”

I was used to working in a factory, where our industrial processes basically meant that a monkey could turn out the same chocolate day after day as long as he could remember what sequence of buttons to push. It might mean a lot of banana flavor though.

“Of course you can,” I prodded. “Benoît has been here man and boy. Surely we can honor Thierry and continue making chocolate.”

“It is impossible,” he said, looking at me as if he was explaining something very simple to a particularly stupid child. “It cannot be the same.”

“Well, I hope it can,” I said. “Because I think Alice wants us all to stay open. If you want to say no to her, though, go ahead, be my guest.”

Frédéric visibly paled.

“She cannot say that,” he said.

“She did,” I said. “I heard her at the hospital.”

He shook his head. “She does not understand.”

I was kind of on Alice's side over this. Wages had to be paid, I assumed, hopefully including mine. People would still come. Thierry was mostly all about the sizzle and the salesmanship at the front of the shop, I was sure of it; Frédéric and Benoît could carry out all the workshop duties. And I could help, I thought to myself. I'd watched them all over the weeks, hadn't I? I had a good nose for this kind of thing.

Frédéric called on Benoît, and in a low, deep-seated, 100 mile per hour growl that reminded me once again how much people were modifying the way they spoke when they spoke to me so I could understand it, started to explain how crazy everyone was being. Benoît as usual did little more than grunt in response, but in a way that seemed to indicate more displeasure than usual.

“
Les
anglais,
” was the only remark he made eventually, which made me indignant, as he'd obviously lumped me in with Alice's side of everything.

“It's nothing to do with me,” I said eventually, backing away. “Speak to Alice, okay? Do we need cleaning up?”

Benoît shook his head.

“It's done,” he said ominously. And then in English: “It's over.”

I
could hardly climb the stairs. All I wanted was to get back in, to be home, to get some sleep. Oh God, and I would have to phone Claire, of course I would. I hadn't even thought about that. Well, I would need to charge the phone first, then I could think about it. Maybe after a bath.

Of course, Sami was there. Today he was wearing a peacock-blue fringed shawl over his tanned torso, and bright blue eyeliner. He was obviously waiting for me.

“
Darling!
” he exclaimed. “I heard the horrible, horrible news. Look, I have cognac. It's good for shock.”

At that point in time, cognac didn't seem like a bad idea, even though I had only the haziest idea what it actually was. Sami just liked to be in on the good gossip.

“It is the talk of Paris! Where will we get our hot chocolate now? You know, the tenor, Istoban Emerenovitz, will only sing here if he has a constant supply! Now we shall lose him to the New York Met and the world will mourn.”

I wasn't exactly sure that the world would mourn something like that, but I gave a half-smile and said not to worry, everything was going to be all right. It was odd how, in the space of a few hours, suddenly I had become the center of information.

“And you were there?” said Sami, kindness fighting with his curiosity for gossip. “Poor little bird. Was it awful?”

For the first time since the nightmarish dash to the hospital and all its memories, I just let myself go and burst into floods of tears.

“Oh, my little bird,” said Sami, giving me a rather oddly scented hug. “Would you like your uncle Sami to take you to a party? Yes? We shall go to a party and you can tell everyone all about it and feel much better.”

At that precise moment, there was nothing I would rather do less. I explained this to Sami, who got exactly the same confused dog look about my not wanting to go to a party as Frédéric had gotten at the idea of imitating Thierry's recipes, but he eventually left me in peace.

I had little doubt that Alice would get her way—she was just that kind of person—so I was going to spend the next few weeks very busy indeed. I just hoped I was going to be up to it.

- - -

1972

Although
completely
wrapped
up
in
herself
when
she
got
back
to
school, it finally penetrated Claire's haze that something was up with another girl. At first she couldn't put her finger on what was different about Lorraine Hennessy. Then everyone started gossiping and whispering, and poor Lorraine could no longer do her skirt up and that was that; she had gotten herself pregnant, some people said by a boy who'd come around that summer on the carny and whizzed her too hard on the Tilt-a-Whirl.

It
wasn't quite still the days of sending women off to special homes for fallen ladies then in Kidinsborough, but they weren't that far away. And for Lorraine to have made it all the way to senior year…as the wives gossiped in the covered market, you think you get that far, then everything is plain sailing after that. Poor Lorraine had fallen at the last hurdle, for a twinkling-eyed boy with a missing tooth, dirty fingernails, and wild, long, curly hair. She left school at the autumn half-term and most people carried on regardless.

Claire, though, was obsessed. Even when the Reverend brought it up at supper, with much tutting and judgment and disapproval, she couldn't help thinking about it. She was simply too careful. She imagined herself carrying Thierry's baby, a round, chubby, pink-cheeked laughing little cherub. She looked carefully every day at her stomach, just in case. Yes, they used precautions, but as the Reverend had said in one of his more risqué sermons, contraception was next to useless; the only true protection was chastity and the love of Jesus Christ.

She
wished
they'd been less careful. When she ran into Lorraine in the high street—her mother, conscious that her father's spies might be around, wanted to hurry her back—Claire stopped and said hello. She couldn't help it; she drank in every feature of Lorraine's full vase-shape; her newly rounded, pale breasts; the tight, high bump, so unfathomable that inside was another being; the trembling, defiant look in her eye.

“Good luck,” she said to Lorraine. In the two minutes they'd been standing there, they'd both already ignored whispers from passersby.

“Aye,” said Lorraine, whose mother, next to her, seemed to have aged ten years. Lorraine didn't look proud, but her glowing, fruitful body did. Claire was the only girl at Kidinsborough Modern who envied her, who didn't join in the nasty chatter disguised as concern. She would have taken her bump in her arms and gone straight to the ferry and taken the train and turned up late at night in Thierry's garret, and he would have been delighted to see her. She ignored, once more, the lack of letters, the possibility that in fact his face would fall as she arrived, confused, that there might even be some other girl in his bed; she was under no illusion that he was short of offers. No, she would be there and he would jump up, that wonderful broad smile on his face, his mustache tickling her belly as he kissed it and kissed it again and they sat up all night making plans for their little one and how he would be the bonniest, best fed baby in all of Paris, until the dawning sun hit the rooftops of the rue de Rivoli and bright pink morning turned Paris's white streets into a sea of roses with the promise of a fresh golden day beyond…

“You seem distracted.” It was Mrs. Carr, the French teacher. She had been unflatteringly surprised at the improvement of Claire's French during the holidays and was pushing her hard to take it to a higher level—Claire was smart, she could go to university, be a translator, travel the world…Claire's distraction and lack of interest drove her crazy. Years later, Claire tried harder with the dreamy children than almost anything else. Naughty children needed boundaries and direction; that was easy. Motivated children of course easier still. But it was the ones with their heads in the air, miles away, who were the hardest to get through to. You never knew what was going on with them.

Claire had been the best French speaker they'd ever had in the school. But Claire didn't bother doing her homework, skipped class sometimes, and was hardly present even when she did turn up. Mrs. Carr tried to impress on her the importance of the year, but it didn't seem to be doing the least bit of good whatsoever. She might have suspected a boy—so many promising young girls could fall completely apart at this age, look at Lorraine Hennessy—but Claire had always been such a sensible girl, raised in a religious home…oh, who was she kidding, they were always the worst.

Claire
had
sixty-two pounds in her post office account, which was enough to get her to France. The problem was how to get it out; she wasn't allowed to withdraw the money on her own until her eighteenth birthday, which was five months away. It might have been five years as far as Claire was concerned; she couldn't imagine it.

But
the
days
went
by
and
the
weather
turned
absolutely
vicious, gray and windy and wet, the children wearing hooded parkas that came right up over their faces and completely obscured their vision, so they looked like tiny monsters looming out of the gloom.

Claire
knew
she
was
failing
at
school
and
couldn't bring herself to care. The Reverend shouted at her, and she stood there, meekly taking it and not really listening. This only annoyed him even more, but she'd been listening to the Reverend rant and rave from the pulpit long enough to take it to heart. When the form came for university, her mother quietly filed it away on the sideboard. Claire didn't even look at it.

The
weight
she'd gained in Paris fell off her, and the tan faded. The very experience started to feel like a dream she'd had once, or a story she'd read, or a film. She wasn't that girl who'd skipped down the Bois de Boulogne, who'd scooped fresh avocado and salsa together, its slippery tartness making her eyes pop open, Thierry's generous laugh at her surprise.

That
Claire
had
gone, and the one who remained looked even younger than before; pale and fragile, trying to keep warm against the darkening evenings, trudging through Kidinsborough like a ghost.

Her
friends
and
contemporaries
were
living
it
up: sneaking into bars, drinking cider at parties around each other's houses, snogging and more down by the canal. Claire sat in her room and wrote in her diary. She slipped out one morning and found, right at the back of the tiny tobacconists, the same brand of Gauloises in the bright blue packet that Thierry smoked. Nauseous and faintly horrified, she went into the wood and lit one. The very smell made her burst into tears again, but she found herself coming back again and again to smoke them, in the cold and the wind.

Later
Claire
thought
that, had it not been the seventies, she would probably have been picked up by the school guidance counselor, or indeed at home. It wasn't exactly unusual she learned, after many years as a teacher, to meet a depressed teen. Normally it was just a phase, home problems and the inability to realize that everyone else felt as nervous and awkward in their adolescent skin and sexuality as they did. She was always patient and kind with these kids, their sleeves too long for their hands, clutching at the ends, their infuriatingly mumbled responses. She knew what they were going through and how important it felt to them. She also knew the importance of not letting them pull it down. The biggest failures of her academic career were never kids failing academically, but emotionally.

As
it
was, everyone just left her to get on with it, and the gray wet world and her sense of being separated from it and every one in it by a piece of gauze began to feel normal. Until she met Richard.