The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Read online

  The sun fell heavy and huge, rippling through the great old oak trees as she sought out some shade. The light felt thick and golden, almost like syrup, as Claire sat, waiting, unable to concentrate, fiddling with her hair, her new dress, the food, the delicate china she had carefully removed from the tall armoire in the dining room, the small jar of fresh flowers she’d picked from the beds, behind other plants so hopefully nobody would notice. She had showered as late as possible and sat, anxiously. He made his way around to the door which led onto the little back alleyway between their grand imposing street and the next, knocked quickly, then entered, taking off his hat and wondering where his handkerchief was.

  Then she stood up. The sun lit up her pale hair, made it shine as if it were gold. The gentle green silk of her dress ran off her like a river; she looked like something conjured from the water, or a dryad from the trees.

  “Claire. You look…you look beautiful,” he breathed quietly, for once moved to silence. She moved toward him, and he pulled her close, then sat her on his lap in the shade of the great green tree. Nothing was eaten. Words were no longer necessary. Some little time later, the birds started into the bright blue sky.

  - - -

  Thierry led me down to the corner of the street, where there was a tiny, packed boulangerie with a few tables and chairs very close. You could no longer see the river, nor the Île de la Cité, which sat in the middle like a great ship. Thierry barked a quick order to the waiter, who came charging back right through the middle of everyone with two tiny coffees, each with four sugar lumps placed on the side, and two enormous religieuse buns—two profiteroles, one smaller than the other, covered in chocolate and held together by cream, so they look like little nuns or priests. He ate his without thinking about it, then held up his hand for another, like a cowboy downing whisky shots at a bar.

  Then he paused while I waited for him. The bun was totally delicious.

  “It was difficult,” he said. “Her father…well. We were very young. It was the summer. She had to return, then I got called up…”

  He looked up at me, and suddenly through his jolly, tubby demeanor, I saw a lot of sadness in his eyes.

  “When you are young,” he said, “you think you will get lots of chances at love. You are careless, you spend your youth and your freedom and your love because you think you will be rich with all these things forever. But they do not last. You spend it all, then you see if you have spent wisely.”

  He took a more reflective bite of his second cake.

  “I thought…I thought we would have time, always. That the summer would never end, that things would never have to change…I am an old fool, Anna. Don’t be like me.”

  “Things aren’t so bad for you,” I said instantly.

  He smiled. “Ha. Thank you. You are kind.” He leaned forward. “Do you think…do you think I could talk to Claire?”

  I tutted. “Have you never heard of the telephone? You can talk to her whenever you like.”

  “I feel uncomfortable on the telephone,” said Thierry. “And also I did not know; what if she didn’t want to talk to me?”

  “You two are worse than teenagers,” I said, meaning it. When my brother Joe had a crush on Selma Torrington, he sat in his bedroom for a week. James found a poem he’d written and we were so taken with the horrible seriousness of it all, we didn’t even tease him about it.

  “You’re grown-ups,” I said. “Just phone her. Or write back to her.”

  His face looked unhappy again.

  “I don’t…I am not so good with the letters.”

  “Well, you have to do something.”

  “Then I shall do that,” he said. “You think she would be pleased to hear from me?” he asked again, beckoning over the bill.

  “Of course!” I said, exasperated, and he smiled.

  He positively bounced back along the riverbank with me, sweating slightly and seemingly full of newly inspired energy, pointing out various landmarks and asking did I think Claire would be able to travel and would she like to come and see them again, and pondering how much they might have changed in forty years and how she had been in the interim without him, and asking questions I couldn’t answer, like what her husband was like.

  “Oh,” I said. I had been wondering when would be a good time to bring this up, but hadn’t seen an opening in the conversation so far. “I met your son.”

  He stopped short and looked at me.

  “Why?” he said. “How did you meet my son?”

  I didn’t say I had thought he was going to try to attack me and steal my mobile phone.

  “Uhm, just about town,” I said. Thierry narrowed his eyes at this.

  “I thought this was your first time in Paris,” he said.

  “It is,” I stammered. “I just have a very sociable flatmate.”

  Thierry looked displeased. “Well. He is a do-nothing.”

  “Doesn’t he have a job?” I said, a bit shocked. I’d just assumed he did. Maybe that was why he had such a tiny scooter.

  “Well, if you call making ridiculous confections for a great big company that is not your father’s company and is in fact in direct competition…”

  His face went brick red.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I really am. I didn’t realize things were quite as bad as that.”

  He shook his head. “He says I was not a good father. He makes Alice smoke too much.”

  I wondered if Thierry’s self-obsession and gadfly enthusiasms, while fun, might not be ideally suited to fatherhood.

  “Maybe you are very alike,” I ventured.

  “We are not at all alike,” he said, and as soon as he said it, I got the family resemblance in the brown eyes with their thick fringe of lashes. “He doesn’t listen.”

  “Shall we get back?” I said. I didn’t particularly want Benoît to take against me any more than he had already, and they’d be shutting for lunch soon and I still had pots to clean.

  “He never listens to me, his father,” said Thierry, not listening to me. He stepped out into the road suddenly. A car screeched and swerved to avoid him, and we both jumped back, frightened.

  “Idiot!” shouted Thierry, his face purple, shaking his fist in a rage at the disappearing little gray Peugeot. “Bloody monster! You cannot drive! You should not be allowed to drive!”

  The lights had changed, and I ushered him across the cobbled road, as he continued to shout threats and gesticulate behind him.

  “You bloody son of a pig! You do not look where you are going!”

  We were one step onto the Pont Neuf when it happened. The pavement was busy, thronged with people going to work in the huge Ministry of Justice building, and ready to visit the cathedral, and several people found their way blocked as the huge man suddenly stopped short in the middle of the pavement, clutching his chest and left arm.

  1972

  There we are,” thought Mme. LeGuarde, as they returned from Provence, the children tanned and happy to do little more each day than paddle in the stream at the end of the garden, try to catch snakes in pillowcases, and fall asleep in restaurants in the evening, little Claudette often under the table, as they met up with friends—the same friends, Mme. LeGuarde noticed with more amusement every passing year, that they saw all the time in Paris, dressed a little more casually and discussing the local dishes with some passion. Ah, well, that was the life of the bon chic, bon genre. More than once, her thoughts strayed to Claire and whether she had done the right thing leaving her alone with that bear of a man. She had, she decided. The girl was nearly eighteen years old and had never been allowed an inch of freedom her entire life. She was a sensible child, and he was a kind man. This would be good for her.

  Nonetheless, her eyes swept the house on her return, everything so anxiously placed perfectly and Claire standing there with wide, nervous eyes—she’d obviously
been up all night making sure everything was just right. There was a (watery, poor) shepherd’s pie in the fridge she’d made for them, and to Mme. LeGuarde’s practiced eye, Claire looked rosy, happy, anxious, overtired, and well and truly in love.

  Claire herself felt delirious. She was happy, excited, transported. She was terribly nervous and had no idea how she was going to look after the children. Somehow she’d thought that when she and Thierry got together—if they ever did; she hadn’t quite been able to believe it would ever happen till the very second it actually did—it would somehow calm her down, quell the craziness in her breast, the fact that she spent every moment of the day thinking about him. In fact, if anything it had gotten worse. The softness of his curly hair; the fire and tenderness in his eyes, the bulk of him…they spent every moment together they could: eating, talking, making love, all of them done with Thierry’s huge appetite for life. She felt as if he had brought her to life, that she had been leading a black-and-white existence, and with the arrival of this affable Frenchman, everything had burst into color. The Reverend’s house was Kansas, and Paris, to her, was Oz.

  Mme. LeGuarde caught up with her after they’d been home a couple of days. Claire had been beyond conscientious with the children, listening patiently to all their stories of sticklebacks and wading and hammocks and bees, playing and painting with them, and taking them to the new exhibitions. But her soul lived only till five, when she would run to the shop, and he would be there, dragging her into the back room, hiding behind the huge copper vats, kissing her passionately as if he hadn’t seen her for months, insisting she try this or that, a new taste, a new flavor, then a restaurant where he would inveigle her into snails, or foie gras, or linguine with tiny clams she had to pry from their shells, or lobster Thermidor to a backdrop of wildly kicking girls. Then he would take her back to his little set of rooms at the top of Place des Arts, the noises of the street and the streetlamps still bright beneath them, the chatter of French at high speed and cars occasionally whooshing past, and they would make love, over and over again, then he would dress and courteously take her home, dropping her before midnight with a kiss and the certain knowledge that they could do it all again tomorrow.

  “My dear,” Mme. LeGuarde said quietly as Claire was preparing to go out, this time in the pale cream stripe. Claire’s back stiffened, as it always did. There was something inside her, deep down, that didn’t feel as if she deserved this, that she was doing something wrong. In her father’s eyes of course, she was. Her polite, stiff weekly letters to her parents, full of the doings of the children and the sights of Paris, gave so little away her mother worried that she was actually terribly miserable and lonely, but surely if she’d been so unhappy she’d have found out a way to make an international phone call. Her mother made sure she answered the phone all the time, just in case it was the operator asking them to accept a reverse charge call and the Reverend said no, he didn’t believe in them.

  “It’s all right,” said Mme. LeGuarde to Claire’s back. She was fastening in some tiny emerald earrings Thierry had bought her. She had laughed and said he didn’t have to buy her anything at all and he had said he knew that, really he would like to buy her diamonds like Elizabeth Taylor, but he was just starting out and this was all he could do. They were very small, like tiny green chips, but they matched her eyes and were beautifully set in an antique twist of silver. She would have loved them anyway, because he had chosen them for her. The fact that they were tasteful too made her hug herself gleefully inside. They had made love wearing nothing else but the earrings, and she had giggled and called herself a kept woman.

  “You’re not in trouble,” said Mme. LeGuarde. Claire felt relieved. It was ridiculous, to keep panicking like this. Thierry thought she was being hilarious. She was a grown woman. Who could begrudge her her happiness? Claire wasn’t so sure. God was always watching. And so much happiness, so much pleasure. It didn’t feel right, somehow. She didn’t feel like she deserved it. Somewhere in the back of her head, a tiny voice kept telling her she was wicked.

  Claire turned around.

  “Good,” she said. “You know, the children really are wonderful, Mme. LeGuarde. You’ve done such a great job with them.”

  Mme. LeGuarde waved her hand. In her opinion, like that of many French women, children flourished the less their parents interfered.

  “I just wanted to say, my dear. We have grown very fond of you during your stay here.”

  Claire felt herself blushing and felt awkward. How could they like her, when she had been…when she had been out every night like an alley cat, her inner voice—that sounded a lot like her father—said. “We will be very sad when you have to leave us…in two weeks.”

  Mme. LeGuarde was doing her best to be gentle.

  “You are going back to school, non? I think that will be right for you. You should continue your studies; you have plenty of brains. University life would suit you.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Claire, shaking her head miserably. Most of her energy went on not thinking about leaving. Two weeks was forever. It was a long time. She could worry about it later.

  “My father thinks it’s a waste of time. He thinks secretarial school. Or teacher training.”

  Mme. LeGuarde frowned. “Well, you are good with children…but don’t you think there are other things you could do? Or other people you might meet?”

  Mme. LeGuarde was nothing if not practical.

  Claire swallowed, all her happiness gone. She stared fixedly at the parquet floor, not trusting herself to speak. Mme. LeGuarde gently lifted up her head and looked her in the eye.

  “I hope you have been happy here,” she said, very clearly and distinctly. “And that when you go home, you will have many happy memories.”

  Claire understood, of course she did. She was only a girl. Thierry was barely twenty-two, at the very beginning of his career. What did she think was going to happen, that she was going to stay in Paris and get married?

  Of course, on one level, deep down, that was exactly what she thought. Not to go back to school, not to go home at all. She had a silly girlish vision of Thierry and her, her in something from the special, lace-heavy corner of Marie-France’s shop, in a beautiful park on the Île de la Cité…not that they could get married in a park of course; that was ridiculous. And not that she could afford a wedding dress. And they had only known each other a few weeks. The whole thing was ridiculous, impossible. She was too much of a Northern girl not to know that, even if Thierry had even mentioned anything beyond August at all. He had not.

  She couldn’t imagine Thierry in Kidinsborough, catching the number 19 bus, walking to the Asian shop on the corner to pick up some supernoodles for supper like the boys liked. She couldn’t see him propping up the corner of the Crown, her dad’s pub, drinking a pint and talking seriously about who was going to score on Saturday. He didn’t even speak English. How would he choke down her mother’s Yorkshires, which shattered like glass or resembled mush? The first time she had eaten glazed carrots at Mortons, she genuinely refused to believe it was the same vegetable they ate at home. He couldn’t come over. The idea was ridiculous.

  But Arnaud and Claudette were starting school; she wasn’t needed around here. She had to go back to school herself. And Thierry could afford to neglect his business in August, when there were no galas, no parties, no social set to cater for. That would change for him too, in September; he would have to work harder than ever just to keep afloat. There would be no room for her in all of this. She knew this.

  She thought of all this in the split second it took to lift her head.

  “I will,” she said, returning Mme. LeGuarde’s steady gaze. “I will have good memories.”

  - - -

  Thierry staggered back and many of the passersby stopped and cleared a space; I grabbed his arm, and thankfully a strong-looking man with a beard helped me lower him to the ground
, as he made horrible sounds. I pulled out my phone and stabbed 999 over and over again, but it didn’t go through, and I felt as if I was in a horrible nightmare. The bearded man took my phone and showed me how to dial 112 instead. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the emergency number might be different, but when the operator answered in French, I suddenly found myself struck completely dumb and unable to talk. Thankfully the man took the phone back from me and barked our location into the mouthpiece.

  Behind me, a woman who introduced herself as a nurse had put a scarf under Thierry’s head; he now appeared to have lost consciousness. I crouched down and held his hand, whispering in English that everything was going to be all right, even though I didn’t know whether it would be at all. Someone came along and shouted “Thierry Girard”—it wasn’t till much later I thought that only in Paris would someone recognize a chocolate maker in the street—and many other people stopped after that and looked concerned and murmured to each other. Somebody took out a phone, and the man with the beard growled and called them a filthy name till they sidled away, head down. The nurse, thank God, climbed onto him and started doing chest compressions. I swore with everything I had in me that I was going to attend a St. John’s Ambulance course, just like they’d suggested every year in the factory. The idea of having to give fake mouth to mouth to Mr. Asten, the first aider, was so repulsive we had just laughed and scoffed every time it had come up. I vowed now that I would take it and make everyone else do it too, just as long as…as long as he was all right. He had to be all right.