The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (28 page)

“
J'arrive
!” I yelled, redoubling my efforts. Although I was out of breath, running, properly running at the very limits of my capacity suddenly felt so freeing. I hadn't realized I missed it, didn't even realize I'd ever done it. I had filed running away with summer sandals and my youth. Now, though, I raised my hands in the air with the sheer exhilaration.

Just as we got to the side of the bridge, I tried to jump a tricky step. As I launched into the air, it flashed through my mind in a heartbeat that I wasn't going to make it. My toes couldn't flex properly and I had no stability on that side. I came down on the stairs heavily, right side first, my legs folding up underneath me, knocking the side of my right foot and the tips of where my toes used to be very hard against the harsh stone.

I crumpled, tears springing to my eyes even though I didn't want them to. It hurt like absolute buggery.

Instantly Laurent turned around, his face full of concern. He leaped to my aid, even as another passerby stopped to see if I was all right.

I blinked, trying to breathe properly and not burst into sobs like a baby.

“
Merde
,” I said, “That really, really hurts.”

He crouched down by my foot, and just at that precise moment, I realized that of course the force of the impact had knocked off my beautiful shoe, which was lying about a foot away, spattered with blood.

“
Mon
Dieu
!” he shouted. My hand shot to my mouth as I realized what he'd done; he thought my fall had somehow knocked off my toes. I glanced down; they were not a pretty sight, all grazed from the cobbles.

“No, no, it's okay,” I muttered, feeling like the world's biggest freak. I had to get up on my own; he was struck slightly dumb. Then he remembered his manners and darted forward, but he felt tentative as he proffered me his arm.

“It's…it's just…I had an accident,” I muttered, my face bright red. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Everything I had ever feared, everything I had worried about me being a big weirdo, impossible to fancy, seemed to be coming true.

“Of course,” he said, and before he could help himself, his eyes flickered up and down my body, as if calculating which other parts of me might be missing. It felt like a slap in the face.

“I…I lost my toes,” I added.

The color came back into his cheeks a little bit. “Sorry, I just got a bit of a shock.”

“Yes, I know. It's weird,” I muttered. This was every bit as bad as I had thought it would be.

“No, no, it's…it's fine.”

But it wasn't. Suddenly I felt very strongly that it wasn't fine. That I wasn't comfortable, that I couldn't be the kind of carefree European girl I always wanted to be. Traffic honked and signed on the bridge and I had come down to earth with a literal bump.

He smiled at me finally, nervous. “Uh, do you want to come over and tell me all about it?”

But the extraordinary, breathtaking kiss of just a few minutes ago had evaporated; now we looked awkward, and I was covered in blood and needed cleaning up. I was a bit wobbly and he noticed.

“Are you all right? Can I help you?” He put his arm around me.

I shook my head. “Can you just help me home?” I said, leaning into his reassuringly broad chest. “I'll be fine, I just…Another time maybe,” I said. “It's getting late. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Come on then,” he said, propping me up. “You can't hop the entire way.”

Part of me was absolutely terrified he was going to offer to carry me, but we leaned together like two old drunks and made silly small talk of the kind you do when you've just kissed someone and then kissing has, for whatever reason (like blood), suddenly fallen off the agenda. He didn't ask me where I'd gotten the injury, for which I was grateful.

At my door, I tried to get away as quickly as I could. He noticed it and seemed slightly hurt. I covered it up by being as brisk and breezy as I could.

“Lovely to see you,” I said, suddenly sounding like I came from
Downton
Abbey
.

He blinked. Then he looked as if he'd just made up his mind about something, leaned forward, and kissed me very, very gently on the lips.

“Perhaps one time you can tell me about it,” he said. Then without another word, he raised his arms and walked away, disappearing into the night. I listened until I heard the scooter fire up with its usual roar, then turned into the house, finally letting the tears flow.

I didn't even bother putting the lights on as I marched up to the sixth floor, sobbing loudly, uncaring of who heard me. At one point I thought I heard a door open again, but I didn't even bother turning around.

Sami was in the middle of looking at himself in the mirror and putting on a gigantic earring made of peacock feathers. I suspected he'd done nothing else since I'd left.

“
Cherie
!” he cried out, jumping up. “
Cherie
…”

He saw my stricken face, the tears messing up the beautifully applied makeup he'd done just hours before.

“What happened?”

“He saw my foot and completely freaked out,” I said. “Can't say I blame him.”

“Didn't you warn him?”

“What, that I'm hideously deformed?”

“Yes!”

“No, I didn't get the chance. I fell over and my shoe came off.”

Sami hit his forehead with the flat of his palm. “My love.”

He jumped up and disappeared into the tiny kitchenette, reappearing shortly with a tub of warmish water, a soft cloth to bathe my foot, and a cocktail glass full of clear liquid with three olives in it.

“Dirty martini,” he said. “It's the only way.”

He then gently lowered my foot into the bath.

I looked at the glass, took a gulp, then nearly choked. It took about five seconds to hit my bloodstream.

“God, that is helpful,” I said, feeling its warmth spreading about my body. “It's like medicine.”

“It is,” said Sami. “I'm a doctor.”

I managed a grin then burst into tears again. “No one will ever want me again,” I said.

“Don't be stupid,” said Sami. “You almost scored a really hot bloke. All the girls love Laurent. He has an air of mystery.”

I snorted. “There's nothing mysterious about him. He's just a bit grumpy. Well, sometimes. Then he lightens up and, well, he's really interesting.”

Sami sighed. “Yes. Maybe you being unimpressed is why he likes you?”

“No. It's because he's unimpressed by me,” I said sorrowfully. “Why can't everyone just fancy me and then I could choose the ones I wanted?”

“Ah yes,” said Sami. “The great beauties, they have such happy lives. Anyway, you are dressed. Come with me.”

“Where are you going?”

“You will like it. It is a rehearsal.”

“That's what I needed. A rehearsal. No, hang on,” I said, the cocktail getting to me. “Laurent was meant to be my rehearsal, so I could go off and find the real thing. And I stuffed it up.”

“No matter,” said Sami, glancing at himself once more in the mirror to his satisfaction, then putting on a silver waistcoat, a pink scarf, and some incredibly tight trousers.

“Oh Lord,” I said.

“Darling,” he retorted, “as if anyone's going to think you were with me.”

- - -

I followed Sami down to the street and he disappeared. Did anyone in Paris actually walk down the roads? It was as if there were streets for the tourists and shortcuts for everyone else. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to hear about him climbing over the rooftops. He had gone around the back of our house, which I saw to my surprise contained an old, overgrown garden into which someone had placed some sheds of gardening tools and assorted odds and ends, then cut over a major thoroughfare to the Pont Saint-Michel. We went into a huge building that appeared from the top to be some kind of radio station, but down some steps by a side door, with a commissionaire lazily peering over his copy of
Paris
Soir
to nod us through, was what was clearly a recording and theater space. It had red velvet seating, thick walls, plush carpets, and a huge stage that was dimly lit. There were about six or seven other people there down the front, two of them smoking. One raised his arm to Sami, who waved back madly as I followed him.

“Anna is unlucky in love,” he announced to the throng, who all made sympathetic noises and budged up to let us sit in the middle.

At the front of the stage, an anxious-looking man with long gray hair and a walking stick was talking quickly into a walkie-talkie. Then he hit the stick on the ground quickly, twice, twisted around, and shouted to someone in a dimly lit box over our heads. Instantly, lush waltz music started up from a huge sound system. Startled, I jumped. The lights changed on stage, and suddenly it was as if it were lit by millions of flickering candles from behind the screens. Figures started to emerge from the wings; men from the left, women from the right. The men were wearing buttoned jackets, and the women were in wide crinolines, their faces pale. They looked like they had come from a different age. To my eyes, the two groups came together absolutely seamlessly, the women slid into the men's arms, and they began to dance. It was sublimely beautiful to be so close to them, as they spun and floated across the dance floor with the music, the skirts rustling as the men picked up the tiny women and spun them as if they were feathers. The music changed and slowed down, but the dancers, instead, sped up, now beating double-time and pirouetting faster and faster. It seemed incredible that none of the couples would hit each other moving across the floor, and I was riveted.

“
Non
non
non
non
non
!”

The gray-haired man was beating his stick on the floor again.

“That is insupportable! Do it again but correct.”

The dancers stood in a row, the music stopped, but they still looked ethereal to me, like something from a dream.

“It's disgusting, do you hear? Like sixteen cows stamping in a meadow.”

“They're amazing,” I whispered to Sami, who shook his head.

“They're from the Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, so they've been rehearsing for something else all day. Now they're tired. But, you know. They must eat. This will be our ball scene in
La
Bohème
.”

“Don't ballet dancers get paid well?” I said, truly surprised. As the music started again and they glided back onto the stage, I couldn't help appreciate every perfect arm extension, every perfectly turned-out leg. I had seen dancers at the pantomime, but never anything like this, so exquisite. The girls were unutterably tiny, like little fragile birds, their delicate bones visible through the skin until I almost felt worried for them. I wondered, as they leaped up on their toes, if having flat toes might not give me some kind of an advantage.

As I watched them dance again and again, totally hypnotized, I gradually started to see the tiny incremental difference in rhythm that might make them less than perfect and made the choreographer burst into apoplectic shouting, but like cowed army recruits they never talked back or did anything other than meekly follow orders. Until finally the music swelled one last time, getting on for midnight, and even the porter, who had let us in and was now sweeping up the back of the room, paused to watch them twist, float, and fly in circles in the air in a movement that was glorious together, as if they weren't sixteen separate people, but one spinning circle, with component parts. It struck me that it would also look perfect if seen from above.

Everyone felt it; there was harmony and joy in the room as, finally, they stepped and twirled faster and faster as the music got slower and slower, until the great wide skirts were almost a blur and the men were lifting the women in the air, then swapping them one after another until you couldn't see who was who. It was ravishing. The gray-haired man let them play all the way through to the end, whereupon they finished, perfectly, almost silently, and in the next second, disappeared off the stage so quickly, it looked like a trick.

Although there were only six of us there, we clapped our hands off. The dancers appeared back onstage, pink, pleased, and clapped for each other too. Sami had been right; it was exactly what I needed to take my mind off it.

“Okay! Dinner!” shouted Sami, starting to round everyone up. “We shall go to the Criterion. They won't mind.”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midnight, and I had a busy day ahead.

“I shan't join you,” I said, suddenly distracted by the sight of one of the dancers taking off her shoes and revealing blood on her toes. She was so exceptionally beautiful, but her foot was disgusting; covered in weird lumps and bumps and bunions. The toes were in fact all misshapen and bunched together. I couldn't take my eyes off them, till I realized she was aware of me staring at her and wrenched my face away.

“I know,” she said, smiling. “They are disgusting,
non
?”

“Mine too,” I said, suddenly feeling slightly excited to be in any way included in this otherworldly gang. “Look.”

I showed her. There was still blood on my ballet slippers.

“My God,” said the girl. “Ah well. Who wants to wear heels anyway, right?”

I smiled at her and she smiled back. She must have been about five foot one.

“Right,” I said.

I went up to Sami and kissed him.

“Good night,” I said. “Thank you.”

Sami kissed me back on the cheek. “Don't worry,
cherie
. It will be all right.”

“Thank you,” I said.

T
he next few weeks, the queues for the shop definitely fell off a bit. I panicked. It was full August now, and Frédéric did try to persuade me that this was normal, that most of Paris emptied out and most of the businesses shut down—in fact, we would be closing ourselves for a fortnight at the end of the month. I had no idea what to do with myself. I supposed I should go home, see Mum and Dad. Or maybe invite them over, although they'd have to get a hotel, and the whole process would worry my mother to bits. If I could get to Thierry, who was being kept in the hospital for what seemed to me a very long time—the French, it seemed, did things very differently—then I could nail down the exact date for Claire to come over. It seemed to me, the sooner the better, although I know her periods of feeling better and worse ebbed and flowed. It was difficult to time them, exactly.

I called her late one night. “Hello?”

“Anna!”

I tried to gauge the tone of her voice. It sounded a little breathier, but not much.

“Have you been running?”

“Ha, yes, very amusing. How's your accent coming along?”

I smiled secretly to myself. In fact, people had almost stopped addressing me in English, as they usually did—Parisians all seemed to speak wonderful English and take great delight in showing it off to you, thereby thoroughly dissing your French in the process. But the last couple of weeks, as I'd spent more and more time out the front of the shop, that had really started to calm down. I would never be an Alice, almost pass for French. Everything from my hair to my shoes screamed “
rosbif.
” But no longer did everyone scramble into English at the first sight of me; people now even forgot to slow down when they were talking to me. I took it as the greatest of compliments (even though it meant I had to ask people to repeat themselves all the time).

“Super
bien
,
merci
, madame,” I said cheekily. I could almost hear her smile down the telephone.

“I have written to Thierry,” she announced out of the blue. “He never gets my letters, but I have told him I am coming. With you of course. On the twentieth of August.”

“Perfect,” I said. He must be up and about by then.

“Can he…Well, I would like him to meet me at Calais.”

I thought privately that Alice would rather let him climb Mount Everest without oxygen, but I didn't say it.

“Okay,” I said guardedly. “I mean, he's had a major operation. Uhm…I'm just a bit worried about you and the bags and everything…I mean, I'm confident I can help you, but I'm not sure he could get to Calais.”

Claire bit her lip. “Ha! No one wants me to go. Not one other person. Everyone thinks you're trying to kill me.”

“I do want you to go! I'm coming to fetch you! I booked the tickets! But I'm not sure I can perform miracles.”

I wondered briefly if they were right, then put the thought out of my mind. If I got really, really ill—well, I suppose we all do one day, there's no way around that. But if I got really, really sick, and there was something I really, really wanted to do, I'd have liked very much for someone to help me, even if everybody did think it was a stupid idea. If you asked me, the stupid idea was cancer. It was a bloody stupid idea, but hardly my fault.

Claire calmed down instantly.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm just getting agitated. Don't worry. I've left…well, if anything happens. You'll be totally exonerated.”

“Uhm, okay,” I said, not entirely sure how I felt about that.

Laurent hadn't been in touch at all, which made me slightly annoyed, then slightly pleased that I hadn't slept with him, as presumably that would have come to the same end, and regardless of Sami's libertarian spirit, that would have made me slightly unhappy.

Given, though, that Alice had also told me to back out, it made it very hard to find out how Thierry was doing and how much he knew about Claire's plan. Alice popped down to the shop every couple of days and hummed crossly when she looked at the cashing up, but was frustratingly tight-lipped on Thierry's progress. All I knew was that he had to still be at the hospital because, as Frédéric said, if they'd let him out even for a second, he would have been back in the shop before they'd taken out the drip.