The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Page 16

  “Oh yes, we’re all so concerned about his welfare now,” spat Alice, two circles of pink appearing high on her cheekbones. “Bit too late, don’t you think?”

  I stepped up. “Uhm, maybe we should all calm down?” I ventured. “I don’t think Thierry would want us to be squabbling…bad karma?”

  They both turned on me, and for a second I thought I was going to get it in the neck. Then Laurent held up his hands in resignation.

  “Yes, yes, you’re right,” he said. He fixed Alice with a hard stare. “I think we should put aside our differences for Thierry, do you agree?”

  Alice gave a shrug so Gallic it was impossible to believe she wasn’t French born and bred, and whipped out her mobile phone.

  Moments later, the atmosphere was lifted somewhat by Benoît and Frédéric arriving, both of their heads down. They were so obviously miserable, it gave me something to do, to comfort them. They had closed the shop for the afternoon for the first time outside of August in forty years. Already, worried customers had come around asking if it were true, and the newspapers had been on the phone. By the sound of her, Alice was dealing with that side of things. Now all five of us stood or sat, Laurent not looking at any of us, Alice walking up and down talking on her mobile, as if making herself busy would in itself make a difference. I focused hard on the linoleum. Every minute that ticked by made me feel less optimistic.

  Suddenly the doctor was standing at the door, removing her mask. Her face was completely unreadable.

  - - -

  Claire clutched the handle of the chair very carefully. She had tried to call Anna back—she knew there was something wrong, there had to be, she could hear it in her voice—but she couldn’t get anyone to pick up the phone. She bit her lip. Monserrat, her caregiver, was fussing about cheerfully in the background, clearing up, lining up her medicine bottles for later when the community nurse would come around. Monserrat was great, but she didn’t want to get into a big conversation about how she felt and what was up.

  It had been her decision, when first diagnosed, not to tell people. She couldn’t have explained why. She didn’t want to draw lots of attention to herself to begin with; she couldn’t bear to see pity in people’s eyes. She never could. Not when her marriage broke up, not when she had flunked her A-levels. It felt more painful than chemo ever could. She knew on some level that it was pride; stupid pride, inherited from her father more likely than not, but it didn’t make it any different.

  Also, what was her ex-husband Richard going to do anyway? Drop everything and rush back and undo their entire lives? And the boys were busy. When it finally got so much and she had to tell them, they had been wonderful, and those nice girls they married, but she had always attempted to minimize any pain or discomfort so they wouldn’t worry so much. She much more enjoyed the stories of what the children were doing and, sometimes, their hand-drawn cards. Anything that took her out of herself, that helped her stop thinking “cancer cancer cancer” was all for the best.

  Project Anna had been the best thing she’d found to date. She had told herself it was purely about extending the girl’s life experience; showing her a different way of doing things, the same way, once, Mme. LeGuarde had shown her, for Anna to enjoy her own youth. She only had the memories of the lovely girl she had been once. (And she could look back now without embarrassment; she had indeed been lovely.) These days her body was all pale folds, swollen by steroids and strong drugs, softened by childbearing and age. She felt herself starting to hang loose from her bones, her teeth softening in her head.

  But then, seventeen and fair-haired and fresh—she could understand now why Thierry had been so attracted to her, even if then it had seemed completely out of the blue. Anyway, she didn’t want to ruin those memories. When she’d first gotten the Internet (quite late; she’d had the prickling sensation that, even though he’d been dead many long years, the Reverend would not have approved of the Internet one bit), she had of course looked him up. And she’d found him too, still often in the pages of the French press, or in many, many cookery books and guides to Paris. His heft had surprised her, although she remembered with pleasure his gargantuan appetites for everything—for food, for chocolate, for sex and wine and cigars, and for her. It wasn’t entirely surprising, she supposed, that it had caught up with him. On the other hand, she had led a blameless life of teaching and cooking healthy meals for her family and keeping her weight down and not smoking and not drinking to excess and look where she had ended up, on a ward with tubes sticking out of her, feeling like she was 190 years old, so did it matter, really, in the end?

  She had idly wondered, many times, what would happen if she wrote him a quick letter—she knew where to find him, after all. But she had always stopped herself. It was ludicrous, a crush from so long ago, a two-month wonder. He must never think of her at all. She couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing than someone turning up in your life you completely forgotten ever existed. She imagined him searching his memory, trying to be polite, the awful dawning realization of how much thought she’d given him throughout her entire life, how much time. It was a ghastly idea. Until Anna had given her the perfect excuse.

  - - -

  1972

  “There, there,” her mother had said, as she lay back in her old bedroom, with its ridiculous posters of Davy Jones and ponies. It was the room of a child, utterly stupid to her eyes now, and seeing it had only seemed to confirm how much she no longer fitted in in this place.

  She had cried all the way back on the train, on the ferry, and on the train again, even as she remembered Thierry’s fervent words—do not forget me, do not leave, come back, come back. And she had promised, she really had, but she had no money and no hope and no idea of what to do, and she was trapped in a pale blue bedroom with ducks on the mantelpiece and a valance on the bed, and a school uniform hanging up in the cupboard.

  Mme. LeGuarde had held her hands on the last evening, genuinely sad to see her go; Arnaud and Claudette had held on to her legs.

  “I hope you have gotten a lot out of your stay,” she said, and Claire had gotten tears in her eyes and sworn that she had, that she could never be grateful enough.

  “I don’t want to be patronizing,” said Mme. LeGuarde, “but it is nice to have love affairs when you are young. But there will be many, you understand? One swallow does not make a summer is the English phrase, I know. You are confident now and you have learned many things on your way toward being a grown-up woman, so take these memories. But do not cling on to Paris, no? You have your own life, your own way to make. You are far too clever to hang around, waiting for crumbs, relying on other people, you understand me?”

  And Claire, struck dumb with misery, had nodded and remembered the words and she knew deep down it was wise advice. But oh, how much she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted Mme. LeGuarde to say, “We cannot do without you. Forget school, come stay with us until you marry Thierry.” Even thinking something so ridiculous brought a blush to Claire.

  Back home, her mother had been so pleased to see her, but Claire felt like a stranger in her mother’s arms; how could it only have been two and a half months? She was a new person. A woman of independence, who worked, then spent her evenings as she chose. How could she be expected to concentrate on algebra and verb declensions?

  Her father had looked her up and down. He had never particularly enjoyed Claire growing up, even though she had been as respectful and obedient an adolescent as one could find. It was evident even to his unpracticed eye that she was growing further away from him than ever. He grunted.

  “I hope you haven’t picked up any fancy ways in Paree,” he said. “They’re loose over there.”

  “She’s a good girl,” assured her mother, stroking her all over. “You look wonderful, dear. So kind of Marie-Noelle to take such good care of you. She wrote to me.”

  “Did she?” said Claire, looking startled.<
br />
  Her mother smiled a secret smile. It had obviously been everything she’d hoped for her gorgeous but too staid daughter.

  “Don’t worry, nothing bad. Apparently she was a credit to the family, Marcus.”

  “Well, I would hope so,” said the Reverend, looking slightly mollified. “You would hate to be neither use nor ornament, hmm, Claire?”

  Claire nodded. It had rained all the way on the train home. After the golden heavy light of Paris unfolding onto ancient cobblestones, of verdant parks and iron railings and great churches, the bland red brick and corrugated iron of Kidinsborough, the already dripping cement of the new NCP car park and the shopping center, with its overturned trolleys outside, felt worse than ever. She couldn’t believe what she was doing back there. She wished she had a best friend to confide in, for once.

  Her mother had made mince and potatoes for her homecoming, once her favorite. “I’m really not hungry,” she said to her mother apologetically. “I might just go to bed. I’m so tired.”

  “Your mother has made good food,” said the Reverend. “It would be a sin to waste it.”

  So she had had to sit, in the old dowdy traveling clothes she had last worn at the beginning of the summer—now too short in the leg and too tight in the bust, and try to choke down the overboiled carrots and mushy potato, try not to think about melting camembert that came in its own little wooden basket, baked in the oven with herbs and served on a crisp green salad (the only salad that had hit Kidinsborough in the early seventies was a couple of leaves of damp iceberg lettuce served with tasteless quartered tomatoes and salad dressing). Or the golden roasted chickens they bought from a man who sold them on a spit that tasted so hot and salty that they had let the grease run down their chins, and Thierry had licked it off, and she had laughed and laughed, and they had mopped up the rest of the juices with the most incredible fresh bread, still warm from the oven. Thierry had shown her how to know when bread was at its freshest by the crackling noise it made when you broke into it, adding smugly, “But Pierre would never give me second bread.”

  She could barely remember that girl. And as the days grew shorter, and school started again, she felt like she was trapped, trapped in the body of a child who needed to do what she was told.

  Every day, she woke up early, terrified she might miss the postman. Her father wouldn’t understand Thierry’s letters but her mother could, and her father would get the gist, surely, or just disapprove in general. She watched him like a hawk; she couldn’t trust the Reverend not to block any incoming post, but he seemed his normal irascible self, grumbling over his newspaper about the terrible state of everything and how Britain was going to the dogs and how the union men were “wicked, wicked.”

  He started preaching this, too, from his pulpit, which did not go down at all well with the local population of Kidinsborough, who were hanging on to their steelworks by the skin of their teeth. His congregation dwindled, and men came from the bishopric in the evening, talking to him in low voices.

  Every day, Claire got up early to make sure her father didn’t make it to the post before her, but he never did. So as the days went by, it became stranger and stranger that she had received no letters. She had returned to school, gazing at the stranger she had become in the mirror—not the carefree girl striding happily down the Bois de Boulogne, but a sullen teenager in a short gray skirt and a too-tight tie, looking just like anyone else.

  In class she barely paid attention, except in French, instead writing endless letters to Thierry, circular in tone, about how much she missed him and how much she hated Kidinsborough and how next summer she would find another position and come back to Paris and this time they couldn’t make her go back, nobody could, sending it to the shop, although who knew where he was now, where he was posted.

  There was no response.

  In November, they moved.

  Claire cried. She begged. She pleaded. She ran the whole gamut of teenage rebellion, slamming doors, staying out late, sulking, but nothing worked. Complaints against her father were growing; his old-school, fire-and-brimstone sermons had fallen out of fashion. “Hippies,” the Reverend complained. “Nothing but g-damned hippies getting into everything. They’re going to ruin everything.”

  As a result of this, Claire went out and bought incense, which turned him practically apoplectic with rage.

  Claire sent one last letter, not to the garret but to the shop, where she knew for an absolute fact he would receive it.

  Cheri,

  Mes parents horribles insistent que nous déménageons. Je les déteste. Alors, si tu penses de moi du tout, s’il te plaît sauve-moi! Sauve-moi! Je suis à ‘the Pines, 14 Orchard Grove, Tillensley.’

  Si tu ne réponds pas, je comprendrai que tu ne m’aimes pas et je ne te contacterai encore.

  Mon coeur, mon amour, viens avec vitesse,

  Claire.

  Nothing.

  I do think there is something about the French psyche that can be incredibly useful. That solid practicality—it is very unusual for a French person to be over the top with excitement or laid low with misery—is useful. They do not feel it necessary to be cheery or even terribly polite if the occasion doesn’t warrant it. Which means you can get a lot of necessary information in an unemotional way.

  Laurent started up.

  “How is he?”

  Alice whipped around and, without saying a word, shut off her phone. The doctor’s face was still completely impassive, and I could feel my heart beating a mile a minute, pounding my chest. I suddenly found I wished I could take Laurent’s hand, squeeze it. Just to have someone there while we faced the worst. I looked at his large, hairy hand, hanging down by his jacket pocket. It was shaking.

  “It’s far from clear,” said the doctor, her voice impeccable, ringing out in the small dingy room. “We have operated, inserted stents. But his general condition…” The tone of her voice made it very clear that this was a reproach. “His general condition makes it very difficult to see what the outcome will be.”

  “But he’s still alive now,” said Laurent, his face an animated mixture of hope and terror.

  She nodded curtly. “Bah oui,” she said. “He will be unconscious for some time.”

  “I want to see him,” said Laurent. She nodded and turned around. We all followed the clacking of her heels up the shiny linoleum floor, until she turned around.

  “Not too many,” she instructed. Frédéric and Benoît immediately backed off, and I did too. But Laurent, almost without realizing what he was doing, tugged at my sleeve.

  “You come,” he said quietly. I realized later, of course, that he just didn’t want to be alone with her, with Alice, and all the unsaid things that passed between them, and that I was a witness; I’d been there. But at the time, it felt more than that; I felt like I’d been chosen. Although in the same way, I still felt that if he died, it would be my fault.

  “Of course,” I said, trying not to betray the nerves in my voice.

  “Why is she coming?” asked Alice loudly, but Laurent ignored her. I just stayed out of her way.

  - - -

  The recovery room was gloomy, the lights low. Machines bleeped and whirred to themselves; I looked around to make sure I wouldn’t stumble over any essential tubes or wires. In the center, dimly lit by above, Thierry made a huge mound in the bed, like a gigantic Easter egg. They had, to my terrible sadness, shaved his mustache to insert the tubes up his nose. Without it, he looked odd, insulted somehow.

  His skin was gray, absolutely gray. It was a horrible muddy color you couldn’t look at for any length of time at all. Alice coughed and glanced down. Laurent though was just staring at Thierry’s great barrel chest, still moving up and down.

  “Papa,” he cried, stepping over to the bed, his arms open wide. He sounded like a child. The doctor gave a disapproving clicking noise and he stepped back, not wa
nting to disrupt anything, but there were tears in his eyes. Then he turned back to the doctor.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The doctor shrugged. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said.

  She left after warning us for the fiftieth time not to touch anything, and we three, an odd company, were alone in the room, with Thierry, like a great beached walrus, spread out between us. There was a silence broken only by the bleeping and the great hiss of the respirator, which moved up and down like a broken accordion.

  “So,” said Alice at last. Laurent wasn’t listening; he was sitting forward hard in his chair, staring at his father. “This is what it takes to get you to visit your dad.”

  I really wanted to knock her block off then. It was like she’d searched the world for the most unpleasant thing she could possibly say and then gone ahead and said it anyway.

  Laurent must have noticed my horrified face, because he patted me on the arm.

  “It’s all right, she’s always like this,” he said in English, which was clever, because Alice pretended all the time she didn’t know any English or that she’d forgotten it all.

  “Actually it wasn’t my dad I was avoiding, it was you,” he said pleasantly. “Now would you like to smoke in here and make him worse? Or maybe you’d just like to lever him up and wheel him out to one of your soirées.”

  Alice went very white again. “Actually, I’ll have to go and organize the business you want no part of,” she said. “With two half-wits and whatever she is. By myself. Thanks though.”

  I was struck with a hand of fear. It had never occurred to me I was going to have to work for Alice now, but of course she was right. Oh goodness. I hardly knew what I was doing yet, and now I was going to have to do it under the disapproving eye of this person who thought I’d try to kill myself.

  “Of course, you’d ask if you needed help,” said Laurent.

  There was a standoff then, neither of them prepared to move at all.