The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Page 18
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.
For a second the following morning, I awoke without thinking anything, except that I felt refreshed from a good night’s sleep. A bright morning light was streaming in through the French window and throwing panes of bright buttercup yellow across my plain white sheets that had come with an old-fashioned blue comforter rather than a duvet.
Then I remembered, and my heart dropped. Oh God. I jumped out of bed and paced about in a rush, not sure what to do first. Well, I had to talk to Laurent—but, I realized stupidly, I didn’t have his telephone number. Sami might, but Sami never answered his phone—he thought it was bourgeois—so probably not. Okay, first things first. Get dressed. Coffee. I pulled on my dressing gown and stumbled in, nearly tripping over the most beautiful guest, asleep on the sofa, who appeared to be wearing angel wings. I recovered just in time and fixed myself a tiny cup of espresso, loaded with sugar, and took it to drink on the balcony. I was definitely getting used to it.
I looked out onto the early Paris morning. Far away across the river I saw a group of police horses being led out to exercise. A small group of schoolchildren were already huddled at the stop for the bateau mouche. Across the road, a woman was taking in washing that had been hanging outside her window on a pulley. We smiled at each other. It seemed so strange to me that somewhere out there was Thierry, being held together by beeping machines, kept alive by plastic tubes coming in and out of his heart. I wondered if Laurent were still there, holding his hand, his heavy head drooping from exhaustion. I was sure he would be. Alice, on the other hand…I had a feeling I might be seeing Alice today. I groaned and set about the daily lottery of seeing if there was hot water. Then I remembered. I still hadn’t called Claire. I could have kicked myself. I glanced at my watch. It was 5:00 a.m. in the UK. She’d still be asleep, hopefully. I couldn’t disturb her now. I’d call her from the shop.
I had a lukewarm shower, glanced once again at Cupid asleep—Sami often provided random sofas to various young artists—and let myself out quietly. My toes—no, not my toes. I always forgot. The hospital psychologist had said I had to say “the place my toes had been.” Otherwise, I would psychologically not manage to get rid of them—well. That place was aching a little, but it was better than yesterday, which was just as well. I had a feeling I was going to require all my energy today. Nothing could let me down.
- - -
Claire sat by the window, staring out, then down at the telephone, then out again. She didn’t want to do anything else. She had tried to sleep, but it hadn’t come. She had wanted to call Anna, but got too nervous when she picked up the phone. If it was bad news…could it be? What was it? But the tone of Anna’s voice had been so panicky. Maybe she’d just been lost, that must have been it. Lost and worried…but why hadn’t she called back to say she was all right? Why not? Where was she? Claire truly felt she couldn’t bear it if sending Anna to Paris turned out to be the second great mistake of her life. She breathed heavily and looked around for her oxygen cylinder. She could hear Patsy, her daughter-in-law, marching smartly up the path with the wheelie bin. She was a trouper, Patsy, a real life-saver. She couldn’t bear being a drain on her children and their families—or at least, had hoped she wouldn’t be for a good many years yet—but what else could she do? Most of all she couldn’t bear the look on the faces of her grandchildren—Patsy and Ricky had two daughters, Cadence and Codie, and she felt, at fifty-eight, she should be down on her knees playing with them, cutting out paper dollies and dressing up, passing on funny stories and songs, and telling them about their daddy when he was a little boy.
Instead they gazed at her horribly old, gray face and the oxygen machine in utter horror. She didn’t blame them. Then Patsy would crossly nudge them and they would come bearing the drawings they had done for her and a new scarf for her head, but truly they were too young ever to remember her as anything other than old and sick and witchlike, and it broke Claire’s heart.
“Hello, Claire!” said Patsy, opening the door with her own key. “I’ll just put the kettle on. Montserrat’s coming around to give you a bath, isn’t she? Great. Can I do anything for you?”
Claire stared at the phone in her lap. Was there anything to be done now, she wondered.
- - -
Frédéric and Benoît were looking positively mutinous and not even smoking. I raised my eyebrows, then I understood, as I saw the long thin figure of Alice opening the shutters. The boys raised their hands to me and I waved b
ack, shyly. I wasn’t sure if they saw me as the enemy or not.
“How is he?” I said quickly in English to Alice.
She favored me with a sideways glance.
“The same,” she said. “Stable.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Well, it’s not worse,” I added lamely.
Stable was, hmm. I didn’t really like the sound of it. I’d learned that in the hospital. Critical was the worst. Critical was not good criticism. It was very bad indeed. Recovering was the ideal state of affairs, really. Stable just meant the same as yesterday. Which, in Thierry’s case, meant life hanging in the balance. I didn’t like it at all.
“Hmm,” was all Alice said. Then she handed me her phone. “Take this,” she said. “It’s ringing off the hook and I don’t want to deal with it right now.”
I had no idea what she expected me to do with it. I was tempted to throw it in the Seine, but instead I set it to vibrate and put it in my apron pocket, where it started vibrating absolutely nonstop. I ignored it.
Alice pulled up the last shutter and turned to face us.
“Now. The shop will continue as before.”
Frédéric raised up his hands.
“Madame, it is just not possible. An orchestra cannot play without its conductor. A kitchen cannot function without its chef. We will be selling substandard goods.”
Alice went pale.
“It is his wish,” she said. Frédéric and Benoît exchanged a disbelieving look so obvious she couldn’t possibly have missed it. She bit her lip furiously.
“Anna, can you conch chocolate?”
Frédéric and Benoît glared at me, but I was too scared of Alice not to answer her. It was a mistake that was to prove fatal.
“Uhm, well, yes, I can have a shot, but…”
“Fine. You shall do it.”
Benoît made a sharp intake of breath. “But I think we should wait until…”
“Rubbish. Anyone who doesn’t want to work here can go home right away. If you think this isn’t want Thierry would want, you can take it up with him, but there may not be a job waiting for you at the end of it. I am the co-owner of this establishment. Don’t think I am soft like Thierry.”
None of us thought that.
“I would get rid of the lot of you at a moment’s notice if I thought it would keep the shop open and our business alive. In a second. So don’t push me.”
We all stared at the ground.
“In you go. Open up. Behave as normal. Anna will flavor. Don’t mess it up. I am now going to be extraordinarily busy, and I do not want to have to worry about you on top of everything else.”
And with that, she tossed the keys to Benoît, turned on her heels, and clipped off down the alleyway before I had the chance to remind her that I still had her mobile phone.
- - -
Not a word was spoken as we entered the dimly lit shop and passed through to the back. The dim lighting flickered then came on. Benoît set the coffee machine, but only made two cups, one for him and one for Frédéric. I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
Frédéric looked at me. “If we don’t stand together, we are nothing,” he said crossly.
“I know, I know,” I said. “But I think…I think she might be right. I think Thierry would want the shop to continue rather than us all just going off on holiday or something.”
Benoît muttered something totally unfathomable.
“I mean, we can have a shot,” I added.
“And lose our reputation forever? This is what you British do not understand about the French. You think you must work, work, work, work, and open on Sundays and make mothers and fathers with families work in supermarkets at three o’clock in the morning and make people leave their homes and their churches and their families and go shop on Sundays.”
“Their shops are open on Sundays?” said Benoît in surprise.
“Yes! They make people work on Sundays! And through lunchtimes! But for what? For rubbish from China? For cheap clothes sewed by poor women in Malaysia? For why? So you can go more often to KFC and get full of fried chicken? You would rather have six bars of bad, bad chocolate than one bar of good chocolate. Why? Why are six bad things better than one good thing? I don’t understand. We are not the same, you and I.”
“I know that,” I said, feeling suddenly near to tears. “I know all that. But I still think we should at least try. Try to make something good, with as much love and care as Thierry would do.”
Frédéric and Benoît stared at me.
“Plus,” I said. “I don’t think we have much choice.”
- - -
In the end I decided on mint, surely the simplest of flavors. Frédéric and Benoît drank their coffee and watched me blankly as I scrubbed and cleaned all the vats, got my hammer, swept the floor, then started gathering ingredients.
“I’m going to do everything myself?” I asked at one point, red-faced and sweating from the effort, getting crosser and hotter and more resentful with every minute that passed.
“It’s your choice,” said Frédéric, which made me very cross. Benoît, however, surprised me; he stood up, went outside, and had a cigarette. When he came back, he was carrying all the butter and fresh cream. I nearly burst into tears. After that, Frédéric did bits and pieces too, but very off-handedly, as if he needed to keep reminding us that he was only here under duress. There wouldn’t be as much time to spare because we couldn’t leave the chocolate to set; it would need to be flash-cooled. This was chocolate-making on the hoof. I smashed and crashed things about, sweated and cried a bit at one stage, when I couldn’t get the conch.
It was lumpy and bumpy and messy, but it was in the fridge.
Finally, at about eleven o’clock, half an hour after the shop had been due to open, the first piece of chocolate emerged from its molds.
The three of us regarded it carefully. I cut it gently with a knife. The consistency seemed all right—not perfect, a little fudgy maybe.
“Well, here goes nothing,” I said in English to the men, who were pretending not to be that interested. I closed my eyes and ate it.
- - -
Well. Nobody threw up. I’ve had worse. Once, for example, some off milk powder got into the mix at Kidinsborough and we had to throw away forty thousand pounds. We were all made to taste it as a way of quality control to try to ensure it never happened again. It wasn’t as bad as that.
But here was what it wasn’t: it wasn’t heaven. It wasn’t the lightly whipped, melting, astonishing delight that Thierry’s chocolate was.
What had I done? We’d churned it the right way, conched it, used all the same fresh, fresh ingredients. But watching someone create and actually doing it yourself are two very different things. Something was missing. It was the difference between an Old Master and a painting by numbers kit.
I made a face. The boys jumped up. Those bastards, they were pleased! I think they’d been terrified this entire time that I turned out to have been good at it.
“This is despicable,” said Frédéric.
“It’s not that bad,” I said.
Benoît simply spat his piece out into a large and grimy cloth handkerchief.
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, you guys. It’s my first time!”
“We can’t sell this,” said Frédéric.
“It’s not that bad!” I said again. He shrugged, as if to say there were so many levels on which I couldn’t understand how bad it was that there was no point trying to explain it to me.
The bell tinged in the front and our heads shot up. Oh lord, it was Alice.
She clacked back in. To my total and utter astonishment, she’d been away having her hair done. She held out her hand for the phone, and I felt in my apron pocket. The last number, I saw, was Laurent’s. My heart started to beat faster. Did he
have news? Was he at the hospital? What was it?
Alice nibbled a tiny corner of the chocolate.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“It’s not,” said Frédéric, but she shot him a warning look.
“Go out and sell,” she said warningly. “Or I’m canceling lunch.”
This seemed to strike scandalized horror into both of them.
“Right. I’m ready for the hospital,” said Alice.
“Uhm, I think Laurent rang.”
Alice looked annoyed, scrolling through her calls. “But not the hospital. So it can’t be that serious.”
“Aren’t you going to call him?” I said as she slipped the phone back in her bag. She stared at me blankly.
“Chop chop, open up,” she said in English.
- - -
There was even more of a crowd in the shop than usual when we finally opened the doors; Thierry’s illness had been mentioned in the press and there were lots of people there who knew his reputation for only the freshest of chocolate, anxious to see what was going on and suspicious, I was guessing, about quality control. I sighed, full of nerves. They were about to find out.
- - -
Nobody said anything, of course, except Frédéric who kept giving me meaningful looks across the counter. They would go outside, nibble a bit, try a piece, then look at each other. If it was their first time to the shop, they seemed to be saying to each other, wow, I wonder what all the fuss was about for this stuff that tastes like any mass-produced supermarket brand.
If they were regulars, it was much, much worse. They would taste a little, like policemen on television testing cocaine, then they would nod at each other as if confirming their worst fears, discard the rest, and leave quickly. It was awful. And at the back all the time was Frédéric, smug and making his I told you so face. During my lunch break, I went to seek out a quiet spot—always near impossible on the Île de la Cité—and sobbed my heart out. Then I remembered someone I hadn’t called.