The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (22 page)

“Uhm, can we not go quite that far,” I said. “It's not that bad.”

“Not that bad is as good as terrible,” he said. “In this shop.”

Alice bit her lip and thought about it for a moment.

“The shop must go on,” she said. “It must. We have bills and commitments. It is impossible that we close now; it is our busiest season…Can you sell the rest of this morning's stock?” she asked Frédéric.

He drew himself up to his full height—about five foot six—and said, “I can, but I will not, madame.”

Alice rolled her eyes.

“All right,” she said to me. “Go. And when you come back, do it right or you'll find French laws protecting jobs don't cover yours.”

T
he Pritzer, I found out, was a very, very posh hotel, on the Place de la Concorde, near the Crillon. It was a beautiful yellow stone and looked like a castle, with small balconies and canopies over every window. Outside were two porters dressed in livery with top hats on, each standing next to a large topiary cock. A spotless red carpet descended the steps onto the pavement. Outside, a large man wearing sunglasses and a very tiny woman who looked like she was made out of icing sugar were descending from a huge black car. They were completely ignoring each other. The woman was holding a tiny dog like a baby. The porters leaped to help them.

“Excuse me,” I said when they'd finished. “Where's the kitchen entrance?”

Around the back of the hotel, all was very different. The back entrance was off an alleyway filled with dustbins. The other side of the hotel was old white brick, not sandstone, and a grubby fire door was propped open at the bottom with several staff in white aprons and tall hats crowded around it, smoking furiously. I felt nervous but walked up. Just inside the entrance was an old man wearing a peaked hat and a green blazer, sitting at a desk next to a huge row of time stamp cards. That made me feel a bit more at home; it reminded me of the factory. I told him who I was looking for and he made a call.

A long hall stretched out in front of me, on one side lined with huge carts of linen and women in black dresses with white pinafores. On the other were great swinging doors with round panes of glass set in them, obviously leading to the kitchens, and it was from here that Laurent emerged. In his whites, he looked commanding and rather impressive, firing a list of instructions behind me as he came, looking none too pleased to see me, for which I couldn't really blame him. I'd caused him nothing but trouble since I'd arrived.

“Hello,” I said in a small voice.

“Yes, follow me,” he said. “Can't you tie your hair back?”

I retightened the loop of my ponytail, hoping that would be enough. He grunted, thanked the commissionaire, and pointed me in the direction of the hand sanitizer mounted on the wall outside the large swinging doors.

I'd never been in such a huge kitchen before. I stopped to goggle for a second; I couldn't help it. It was an utter hive of activity, men (and they were nearly all men) marching everywhere to and fro; not running, but marching very, very quickly. Everyone was wearing white with blue checked trousers and clogs, except some of the men wore white trousers and had their names embroidered on their jackets, including Laurent. I assumed this meant something important.

The noise levels were unbelievable; people were shouting in a variety of different languages; pots and pans were clanked and hurled across the room. In the corner, four younger men in T-shirts were frantically packing and unpacking industrial-sized dishwashers and two had their hands deep inside pots. On my right, a boy who looked to be around sixteen was furiously chopping vegetables. I had never seen anyone chop anything so quickly; his hand was a blur.

To my right was a long line of perfect salads laid out, onto which a man was slicing pieces of perfectly cooked pink duck, all exactly the same, at absolutely precise thicknesses. Another, older man came up to him at one point and told him off furiously for not making them all thin enough and the man, instead of arguing back, stood with his head down until the rant was over and then recommenced, apologizing.

Laurent caught me staring and gave me a half-smile. “Have you never seen a working kitchen before?” but I shook my head; I hadn't. My Saturday job in the Honey Pot didn't even compare; I'd never seen anything remotely like this. It was like a huge airfield, but once you got used to the size and the noise and the number of people bustling about and occasional bouts of steam, it seemed to make a lot of sense; it was organized, like ants, not the chaos it first appeared.

Laurent led me down to the far end of the room. Next to him, two men were kneading bread. They had huge muscular forearms and looked like miners or sailors, not bakers. An almost comically large man was opposite them, icing tiny pastries. The size of the man was completely at odds with the task he was undertaking.

Laurent's station was by the window, which looked out onto the Seine. He had a huge copper pot bubbling on the stove on a very low flame, the chocolate melting very much like his father's. But instead of oranges and mint, there was every manner of flavoring around his work bench. Tiny chilies were lined up in bright green and red; yellow marjoram and little pumpkin flowers jostled next to pine needles and sea salt.

“This looks like a mad person's laboratory,” I said.

“I'm going to take that as a compliment,” he said gruffly. “Is there any more news? You seem to be the first to know about anything.”

“That's not true,” I said quietly. “But I do need to ask you this favor.”

He checked on one of the smaller pots he was stirring. “Try this,” he said. I opened my mouth eagerly, and he smiled. “You are a proper chocolate girl. Okay, hang on.”

He blew on it to cool it down.

“What is it?”

He shook his head, then popped it in my mouth.

My first instinct was to spit it out. It was horrible, not sweet at all. It was sharp, bitter, and with an odd warm flavor that I couldn't identify. Laurent was holding up his finger strongly, warning me not to spit it out.

“It's new,” he said. “You have to give it some time.”

“It tastes like cat food,” I said, but then stopped talking as the warmth of the melting sweet gradually hit my tongue. It spread all around my mouth as the chocolate melted and was the most extraordinary, rich sensation on my tongue and around my mouth. It tasted like nothing I'd ever had before. It was also slightly horrible, but as soon as I'd finished it, I immediately wanted another one.

“Wow, what
was
that?” I said eventually, looking hopefully at his pot.

“Slow-roasted tomato chili chocolate,” Laurent announced proudly. “If you don't use the very bitterest of beans, it makes you throw up. It's a hard one to get right.”

“It's not really a sweet at all,” I said.

“It's not,” agreed Laurent. “Wait till you see what I do with it and the duck.”

I boggled to think.

“And your dad didn't think this was cool?”

“He just wanted to do things his way.”

“And you don't?”

He shrugged.

“Well, maybe it's better for fathers and sons not to work with each other.”

A small man, quite young, had appeared before him and was now removing trays of quickly hardening chocolate to the enormous fridges. Laurent grimaced at him quickly and checked his watch.

“
Alors
, I need to get to the hospital. What do you need from me, exactly?”

I gave him a piece of the chocolate I'd made. He maneuvered it around his mouth exactly how his father did it. His face fell.

“Oh,” he said.

“The shop needs you to help me,” I said. “I can't do it.”

“I have been thinking about this,” he said. “I don't think it's possible. I've changed my mind. No offense, but you worked in a mass-market factory. You don't have the right genes, the right experience.”

“That's nonsense,” I said crossly. “It's just that I've only been here five minutes.”

“It's pointless,” he said.

He started washing his hands, handing over the stove to another man—didn't they have any women working here at all?—who carried on stirring.

“Yes. Yes, we need you,” I said. “I can't. I can't do it, not yet. I didn't get to watch him do it often enough. But I'm a quick learner, I promise.”

He looked at me, then waved his hand around the room. “Do you know how long it's taken me to work up to this?” he said. “How many kitchens I've worked in, how many people have shouted at me, how much crap I've taken off everyone, how much bullying I've gotten for who my father is? How much I've looked and concentrated and learned and observed? And you want me to, what, just give it all up and come back and put mint in milk chocolate? Is that what you want me to do?”

“It's not what I want you to do,” I said. “It's for the shop. It's for your dad.”

Laurent blew his thick fringe out of his eyes. “Well, that's interesting, because the last time we discussed it, he said he didn't want me to cross the threshold anymore and that I was a total failure who'd never learned a thing.”

I put my arm out, but didn't touch him. “That was before.”

“But if I come up, will you let me do my own styles, my own designs? No, of course not. Alice will insist on doing things the old way and I'll be completely trapped again, acting as a slave to my dad, just like he's always wanted his entire life. I will not cook there!”

It was only the general noise and clanging of the kitchen that stopped people turning to look at Laurent shouting. I was still pink anyway; I couldn't bear it. I stared at the ground so he couldn't see how furious I was. But he noticed anyway and didn't give a toss.

“I have to go to the hospital,” he said. “And I can't lose this job. Not at the moment. There are…there are no jobs like this. I've worked so long for this, and I'm already taking more time off than anyone else does, just out of kitchen respect for my father…”

I nodded. “I understand,” I said in a flat voice. He was walking me out now, grabbing his scooter helmet from the wall.

“He doesn't want what I have to offer,” said Laurent. “He's made that totally clear…I'll be back for evening service,” he told the man at the door, clocking out.

He saw my unhappy face as we entered back into the bright hazy afternoon.

“Look,” he said, “just…try a few more times. It's not difficult what my father does, believe me. It just takes a bit of practice.”

“Except I don't have the genes.”

“You don't have the genes to invent it,” he said. “But a monkey can copy a recipe eventually.”

I gave him a look.

“I think that just came out ruder than I meant it to,” he said, a look of apology in his features.

“Well, wouldn't be the first time,” I said.

“Do you need a lift?”

“No, thank you,” I said stiffly.

We stood looking at each other, both cross.

“Send my love to your dad,” I said. “Let us know how he is. Frédéric is climbing the walls.”

Laurent half-smiled. “Yes, he would be. But Benoît's the one you have to watch for.”

I nodded. “Yeah, well, thanks for all the advice,” I said sarcastically.

And he got on his scooter and sped away.

T
he next few nights, as the shop closed over what happily turned out to be a bank holiday weekend, I stopped going home at all. I stayed. And I cooked and I stirred and I experimented and I added and took away and did the bloody conching, over and over and over again. I tried the pistachio—a disaster—-and the violet, and the hazelnut. In fact, anything including nuts was a consummate failure.

Eventually, after working until I fell asleep in the workroom, on the fourth night I finally got it figured out. If I stuck to just a couple of things—no nougatine, no caramel, no sculpture, no drinking chocolate, or experimenting with dark chocolate, which I simply didn't have the palate for—I realized that if I stayed simple—very, very simple—and with the right ingredients, which Benoît had already sorted out, I could do it. Well, I couldn't do it; that wasn't the case at all. But I could produce the two simplest chocolates we did—an orange and a dark mint—that tasted almost, but not quite, as good as the real thing. Good enough, at any rate, to pass most of the tourist palates who were looking for a souvenir rather than a gourmet item.

I melted and mixed and poured, over and over again, leaving the radio on and downing endless amounts of espresso to keep me awake. By Monday night, I was as exhausted as I had ever been in my life. My phone rang, unexpectedly, at three o'clock in the morning.

“Allo?”

“You live! You are alive! I can call off the fire brigade and Interpol.”

“Sami?” I said, realizing I hadn't spoken to anyone all weekend. “Is that you? You haven't really called Interpol, have you?”

He chuckled on the phone.

“No. I assumed you were off discovering Paris and your first taste of erotic adventure.”

“Ahem,” I said. “You're very rude.” Then I looked around at the workroom. “What are you doing?”

“We're at the Cirque du Soleil after-party. The gymnasts tend to get a little wild.”

“Oh,” I said. “You could stop by here if you're hungry. I have a lot of taster chocolate left over.”

“
Vraiment
?”

And that is how, half an hour later, I found myself drinking something entirely suspicious out of a bottle that Sami told me was pastis. It reminded me of Laurent's chocolate in that at first it was horrible, then almost immediately delicious. It also, given my exhausted and underfed state, got me incredibly drunk very quickly, as I watched beautiful young people whose genders I couldn't exactly ascertain descend on the chocolate with the enthusiasm only people who hang upside down from a roof for four hours a night can gather. It was nearly all gone and the room clean and tidy as the sun started to come up from outside and I realized there was no point trying to get any sleep today either.

- - -

The scent of Frédéric's cigarette coming up the rue Chanoinesse scattered the beautiful golden circus creatures like some kind of dream, and he sniffed suspiciously as he entered.

“How long have you been here?” he asked suspiciously.

I shrugged. “I wanted to practice over the weekend,” I said. He glanced around.

“I'll clean it all up,” I said defensively and he raised an eyebrow. Then he advanced on the latest tray in the cooling rack. I stared at him anxiously. Of course the dancers had loved it, but they would love any chocolate at that time of day. Frédéric was the one who really knew.

He took a long pull of water from an Evian bottle to clear his palate, then took a small piece from the baking sheet on the tray. He held it up to the light, then crumbled a little between his fingers to check the consistency. Finally, he popped the whole piece inside his mouth. I held my breath. I had tried everything I could and this was…well, if I was totally honest, this was as good as I could do. I waited as he waited, for the chocolate to melt and the full richness of the underlying taste to come through. As he did so, Benoît startled me by turning up silently beside him and watching the process.

Gradually Frédéric turned to me. He wasn't over the moon. I wasn't a hitherto undiscovered genius. But he gave me a tight, trim little nod.

“We can…we can manage that,” he said in a quiet voice.

Exhausted as I was, a huge smile spread across my face.

“
Merci
,” I said, delighted. And, completely out of the blue, Benoît grabbed a piece, swallowed it quickly, then came up and, without saying a word, kissed me on both cheeks.

- - -

“This is all you have?” said Frédéric.

“Yes,” I said. “I figured I'd just try to get one or two right.”

“Good idea,” he said. He checked his phone.

“Alice hasn't called you?”

I shook my head.

“Or Laurent?”

“I don't think Laurent wants anything to do with me,” I said ruefully.

“Well, we're only keeping their businesses alive,” said Frédéric. “Why would they want to tell us anything?”

I thought, though, if Thierry had deteriorated, we would definitely know about it. Which was something, I suppose. I went through to the front of the shop to get some fresh morning air and wash my face in the bathroom and to check if Alice was coming. There was no sign of her.

“Well,” said Frédéric. “We shall worry about that as it happens. All that matters is that today we have a shop we can open.”

And when I came back from the bathroom, Benoît had made me a cup of coffee.

- - -

Claire looked up at Patsy.

“Patsy, I've decided, I want to take a trip.”

Patsy's face immediately got panicky, as if she'd suddenly gone mad. Claire wondered if she thought she meant trip like a long journey into the night, or suicide or something. Or just a trip, she also considered. Something very different.

“I would.”

Ian had gotten her a film out called
The
Bucket
List
. It looked absolutely terrible—old men on a cancer ward having a hilarious time—but the concept stuck with her.

“There is something I want to do. Before…before it's too late.”

“Don't talk like that,” Patsy had said hastily.

- - -

Of
course, she had met Richard Shawcourt before. But their school lives were very different. He lived in a bought house, for starters, not something tied to the church; just a bought house, but a nice house, a detached. Although now that didn't intimidate her anymore. She knew a little bit about nice houses. Before, she'd barely have given him a second glance, she was so sure of their differences. She'd have laughed at him, in fact. Very few kids like him even went to Kidinsborough Academy, never mind wielding a clarinet. He'd started off very small, she remembered now, just punchbag material even from her year group, but now, she saw, he'd grown into himself, in the upper sixth, ready to leave for somewhere better, and behind the brown horn-rimmed spectacles, he was actually rather handsome, with his wavy dark hair and strong eyebrows. Not that she was interested, of course. He walked her home from the forest that day, asking her about herself, to which she replied in the most vague of terms, and after that he'd seemed to pop up everywhere. She barely noticed until Christmas came and went, and a card arrived from Mme. LeGuarde, full of family news about the children that didn't even touch on Thierry, but added a fulsome footnote as to how much they missed Claire and hoped she was (Claire thought, correctly, that this was deliberately pointed) concentrating very hard on her education.

And
that
was
it. Nothing more. Nothing from Thierry or Paris; nothing except the faint tinge of lavender that seemed to scent Madame's Christmas card, although that may have just been her imagination.

So
when
Richard
brought
her
a
large
bunch
of
blood-red roses and a small brooch in the shape of a frog at the Christmas dance, she let him kiss her up against the back wall of the gym, in amid all the other snogging, writhing couples, to show the world, and Thierry, and Mme. LeGuarde, and Rainie Callendar how very much she didn't care.

- - -

It
was
Richard
who, when she failed all her A-levels except for French, comforted her and assured her she could still go into teacher training, and it was Richard—nice, steady Richard, who was going to study engineering science in Leicester—who brought the Reverend around to agreeing to let her leave home. It was Richard with whom she slept in the small modern bedroom in the halls of residence that smelled of pot noodle and incense and hash, shocking and exciting him with her prowess, confirming for her that Thierry was a one-off, not like other men. And gone. And after dating a few of the long-haired young men on campus, self-conscious in their new flares, talking endlessly about Herman Hesse and Nixon in overponderous tones, she gradually realized that Richard was as nice as any man she'd ever met; kind, and sensible, and steady and well-off, and there was no more point in loving your first love than in thinking you were still going to marry Davy Jones.

Much, much later, when they were divorcing—they'd kept it as civilized as possible, waiting for both of the boys to have left home and be nicely settled, very little rancor on either side—Richard, in a rare moment of not being businesslike and distant and organized, had said, “You never really loved me, did you? It was never really me. I thought you were amazing and different and mysterious, but now it seems to me you were just thinking about someone else the entire time.”

He'd shaken his head in wonderment. “The thing is, for me, Claire, I got to spend twenty-five years with someone I loved. With someone I really and truly loved. But you…I don't know what on earth you've wasted your life doing.”

And
Claire
had
smiled
stiffly
and
signed
the
papers
his
lawyer
had
sent
over
and
waited
until
she
heard
the
familiar
sound
of
his
Rover
turn
the
corner
before
she'd sunk to her knees and simply disintegrated, becoming unbodied; she degenerated into a wavering mass of tears and snot and pouring emotion, dribbling beyond the bounds of the self, soaking the good John Lewis carpet they'd invested in together.

Although
she
didn't believe, as some did, that cancer was some kind of malignant force or punishment that snuck into you if you were unhappy or upset, she couldn't help believe that if it was a dark spirit, it would have seen that day—and the nights, the many nights that followed it—as an ideal opportunity to infect a soul that saw nothing but deepest black.

- - -

“What do you mean, a trip?” Patsy repeated when she saw the tight set of Claire's mouth and realized she wasn't in the mood to be dissuaded and that she wasn't joking either.

Claire stared down at her Hickman line and sighed. This was going to be really complicated and annoying and hard work and dangerous. It was going to upset her children, and quite possibly Anna, who, she now realized, she'd sent on this mission in a selfish way to work out what had happened anyway. It would cause expense and trouble and would perhaps be all for nothing, and she was nothing but what she had always been, according to the Reverend and Richard and everyone, it somehow seemed, who'd known her well: a selfish, hard person, with unseemly desires.

She set her mouth. There was more of the Reverend in her, she thought sometimes, than anyone would ever have suspected.

“I want to see Paris one last time,” she said.

Patsy frowned.

“Are you sure?” she said.

Patsy didn't know anything about Claire's past, because not even Richard knew more than a hint or two. She'd been very careful that they never went to France, even on holiday. She actually made her French accent worse than it was and never joined in a conversation about Paris, even though she was asked about it often. She knew he would guess something in an instant; in fact, the very reason he was first so attracted to her was the air of difference she had given off after that summer. So Patsy treated her patronizingly, like it was some kind of whim.

“I am sure,” said Claire. “I will sort everything out. And I can pay for it.”

She could. Richard had been utterly fair, and her teacher's pension was good, and she had an annuity she'd had absolutely no ability to spend which, she realized dryly, was a great thing for the insurance company and the country as a whole.