The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Read online

  Claire suddenly felt exhausted. She loved Patsy, but couldn’t possibly explain to her why getting a cab in Paris could only ever defeat the point. Or maybe it did. Maybe they’d completely built over it, like the new shopping center in Kidinsborough that had turned into a kind of derelict drug run within five years. Or the pedestrian plaza, which was mostly used now as somewhere for people to be sick on a weekend. It was where the ambulances parked up.

  Under the Eiffel Tower, there was an old-fashioned carousel. It didn’t move very fast, it creaked a lot, and it made its own music. The children had adored it—they had their favorite horses and animals and loved the second story, reachable through a child-sized curved wrought iron staircase, even though it rotated even more slowly than the one underneath it. She wondered if that were still there.

  “Well, nonetheless, I want to go.”

  “Well, let me talk to the Eurostar people. They must have some way of taking sick people.”

  “I don’t want to take the train,” said Claire, in a moment of sudden realization. “I have to take the ferry.”

  “But that will take much longer and be much more dangerous,” said Patsy. “I mean, if you can afford it, you should go first class.”

  Claire saw her favorite nurse, Montserrat, come up the path and attempted a wave. Somehow just having made the plan was already making her feel better about things.

  “No,” she said. “I shall take the boat. I have friends in Paris. I think they can help.”

  So fortunately, Alice was incredibly grateful for everything. Ha, was she a bugger. Honestly, getting a smile out of her would be like getting her to eat something; her entire mouth was a no-fly zone.

  “Is it better?” she asked carelessly.

  “Is he better?” demanded Frédéric, as if he was going to hold all of the chocolate hostage until he knew.

  Under Alice’s enormous sunglasses, she looked very drawn.

  “He is…he is a little better,” she admitted. “Well, he is no worse. And the stents appear to have taken and, well…” Her lip curled slightly. “Every day he loses a little weight. But I wish…” She looked away. “I wish he would wake up and say something, dammit.”

  This sounded not ideal. I knew a little bit myself about waking up in the hospital, and I knew, courtesy of Dr. Ed, that the quicker you managed to do so, the better it was all around. I was suddenly tempted to ring Dr. Ed, find out if that friendly manner was all it was supposed to be. But I didn’t, of course; he wouldn’t have remembered my name.

  “What does his doctor say?” I said.

  “Why, are you a professional?” snapped Alice. Every time I gave her a bit of credit for being under stress, she managed to use up every bit of it and eat into my meager reserves of respect even more.

  “No,” I said. “But I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked bluntly. Everyone was staring at me.

  “Nothing, it doesn’t matter,” I said quickly. I didn’t like people bringing up my hilarious comedy injury. It hadn’t been the least bit funny to me.

  Alice sighed. “She says, ‘Wait and see, Madame, wait and see,’ as if I have the least option to do anything else. Then she goes off to lunch.” She glanced around. “Anyway. As long as you are managing not to make a complete disaster going on here, I suppose this is a relief.”

  She stalked off.

  Frédéric, whose jolly manner was nearly restored and who was almost making up in flirting with female clients what Thierry used to do in charming them, said, “That was the nicest she’s ever been to us.”

  - - -

  I, on the other hand, was utterly at the end of my tether, exhausted by the end of the day. News of Thierry’s illness had made the papers, which just made us busier than ever, which struck me as counterintuitive, but nonetheless, there were a lot of happy-looking tourist children standing outside, and even when Frédéric abruptly told people that today they had a choice of orange or orange, everyone seemed to take that as an acceptably French thing to say.

  I scrubbed and cleaned and cooked and mixed—although Benoît too helped me immeasurably and silently in the back of the greenhouse—and by 7:00 p.m. felt ready to collapse into bed. If Sami was holding an impromptu masked ball or something, I was going to kill him.

  I was last to leave, locking up with the heavy metal key in the large bolt grille—it looked rather like the front cover of a huge old-fashioned lift—when I heard the scooter roar up right behind me. I didn’t pay it any attention at first—they were ten a penny around here—but it came to a stop right behind me.

  “Merde,” came a gravelly voice.

  I turned around. Laurent was standing there, looking wild-eyed. I turned back again. I was sick of him and his stupid feud with a man lying unconscious in a hospital bed.

  “Has everyone gone?”

  “Yes,” I said, as sarcastically as possible. “Everyone has gone. Everyone important has gone.”

  He blinked a couple of times as I turned back around to finish closing up.

  “Oh,” he said. “Only…only…he’s woken up.”

  I turned around. Even though I was utterly exhausted, and filthy, and cross to see Laurent, I couldn’t help it; a huge grin split my face.

  “Truly!”

  “Truly. He’s not saying much, but he’s swearing and demanding beignets.”

  “Oh! Well. That is brilliant!”

  “We’re not out of the woods,” he said gravely. “Well, that’s what M. le Médecin keeps saying. But he looks…he looks a lot less gray, like a dead elephant.”

  “Does he know you called him a dead elephant?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. I slipped out before he saw me.”

  I threw my hands up in anger. “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” he said. “Alice was giving me the feud eyes, and he was telling her he was hungry and she was telling him he was going to have to start getting a whole lot more hungry, and it seemed to be turning into a massive family fallout within about two minutes of him regaining consciousness, and I realized why I kept out of their way in the first place.”

  He paused. “I’ll see him tomorrow, I promise. Stop looking at me like I’m the big bad wolf.”

  He did look a bit like the big bad wolf when I thought about it, with his dark hair and thick brows and bright white teeth.

  “You promise,” I said gravely.

  He nodded and looked around.

  “Also,” he said. “I wanted to come down here before everyone had left…I felt bad about the other day.”

  “Good,” I said, then, using a word I really enjoyed using in French, “you were unconscionable.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I’m here. I just…everything was just getting on top of me, you know? I’d been spending all my nights there…I was tired.”

  “So you came down to apologize?”

  “God, no. I came down to show you how to make something.”

  “Well, maybe I can already make something,” I said.

  He grimaced. “Alice brought some of that mint stuff you did the other day into the hospital. She thought it was all right, foreigner. It was filthy. None of the staff could believe it.”

  That was my first day’s efforts.

  “You are so rude,” I said.

  “No,” said Laurent. “I just don’t think you realize how bad it was. So, now I am here.”

  “Well, you’re too late,” I said.

  He waggled his eyebrows at me. “I doubt it.”

  I sighed. Even though I was exhausted and had spent the last nineteen hours dreaming of a bath and what I’d do to Sami if he’d used all the hot water again to take his makeup off, I took the keys out of my apron pocket.

  “Come on then,” I said wearily.

  Inside, every
thing was gloomy in the dusk. Laurent looked around with a practiced eye as I fumbled my way through to the greenhouse to switch the lights on there. We couldn’t put the lights on at the front of the shop; everyone would think we were open and start hammering on the shutters like chocolate-starved zombies.

  Laurent wasn’t following me. I turned back to look at him. He was running one of his hands through his thick curly hair.

  “I haven’t…I haven’t been in here for…”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Well. A long time,” he said. “Years. Maybe ten.”

  Even I was shocked at that. “You haven’t spoken to your dad in ten years?”

  Laurent suddenly looked very unhappy. “The smell in here,” he said. “It hasn’t changed a bit.” He ran his hand along the long wooden countertop, worn smooth over the years. “It hasn’t changed a bit,” he repeated wonderingly, shaking his head.

  “You know, sometimes down the street, I pass someone eating some. I can smell it a mile off. It doesn’t smell like the chocolate you get everywhere else. Every time I smell it, or see the bag…it’s like being punched in the gut.”

  I shook my head and put the coffee machine on. “You know,” I said, “I know families fall out for all sorts of reasons. Cath’s mother didn’t speak to her sister for sixteen years over a purloined silver jubilee scarf. But fighting over whether or not you can add spice to chocolate?”

  I thought about it. “Maybe all family feuds are totally stupid,” I said, thinking of when James and Joe wouldn’t speak to each other while sharing a bedroom for two years, on account of some unauthorized hogging of the top bunk.

  Laurent looked as if he was going to disagree again, but instead followed me through to the back. He made an involuntary “oh” of nostalgia; it was easy to see that the greenhouse hadn’t changed in decades, even to me.

  “I used to come here sometimes when I was a little boy,” he said, breathing in that wonderful warm scent of plants and cocoa, like a deep chocolate rainforest. “Benoît used to chase me around the vats.”

  “He’s still here.”

  “No, not him, his dad. My dad is very loyal to employees who never answer him back.”

  He came over to one of the work benches and easily swung himself up on it.

  “Come on then,” he said in a challenging way and I was so tired, so sleepy and woozy with everything that had gone on that I thought, just for a tiny instant, that it was me he was asking to go over there. He looked so comfortable and at ease now, his long legs splayed as he surveyed the place he’d once called home that, to my surprise, I nearly found myself walking across the room, letting him haul me up onto his lap. And after that…

  Then I realized he was asking me to bring him some of the chocolate I’d made. I flushed bright red immediately, flustered, sure my face immediately betrayed me, but he wasn’t paying attention. I found some squares that had been badly wrapped earlier and put to one side. Laurent looked at me and smiled.

  “Come on, don’t look so nervous. Where’s your new stuff? You tried your best, and then I’ll give you a helping hand, okay?”

  He thought I was nervous about the chocolate. I’d almost forgotten about it.

  I extended some on a plate. He started to chew. I’d gotten past Frédéric but there was no way Laurent was going to be satisfied. Still, I was having a shot.

  Laurent closed his eyes. There was total silence in the room, with only the tick of the wall clock and the faint rumble of the Metro far below the cobbled streets. After what seemed like an age (that I used to study him—his long eyelashes casting a shadow on his cheek, his unruly curls, the five o’clock shadow climbing up his long jaw line, his lips unusually pronounced for a man), he finally opened his eyes again and looked straight at me. There was something different there from his usual mix of annoyance or amusement. It looked perilously close to respect.

  “You did this?”

  I nodded.

  “Alone?”

  I nodded again.

  He looked to the side. “You know it’s not…I mean, it’s not Girard.”

  I nodded.

  “But…I’ve tasted worse.”

  “I’ve tasted worse? That’s not actually a compliment.”

  “Oh, it is. It is. You’ve definitely got…you’ve definitely got something.” He ate another piece. “Okay, well, here you’re missing the black pepper. You need it to bring up the base notes. And a touch less butter, okay? This isn’t for children, or Americans. And stir a little less, you’ve overchurned. It messes up the components.”

  I looked around for a piece of paper to write all this down on. He stopped chewing for a second.

  “But really,” he said, “compared to last week’s…fiasco…I mean, you’ve done really well.”

  I didn’t want to say that I’d been up for three nights, but he must have seen my eyelids drooping.

  “Look, do that, then I’ll come and talk mint with you another time, all right? Do you want to go and get something to eat? I am absolutely super-fatigued, and I think you might be too.”

  I nodded gratefully—another four-hour session in the greenhouse at this point might just have totally wiped me out—and followed him out of the front door, locking up again, then following him down a tiny maze of alleys I still hadn’t worked out. Three turns around though, and we were at yet another one of those dark doors that seemed to appear out of the middle of nowhere. I felt for the tourists at the great huge outdoor restaurants that lined the Seine or the Bois de Boulogne; they had no idea, could never know about these places. The locals were jealous and selfish with them, had no interest in sharing them. Paris could be pretty tough on the newcomer. This one had nothing but a tiny mushroom over its door to let you know it was even there.

  Laurent knocked and was answered by a stooped man with a napkin thrown over his shoulder. For a second, he paused and stared. Then he took a step back.

  “S…Laurent?” he said incredulously.

  “Salvatore, yes, it’s me,” said Laurent.

  The old man looked nearly tearful, then threw his arms around Laurent’s neck, kissing him three times on each cheek.

  “I thought…God help me, I thought it was your father’s ghost standing there. You look so like him.”

  “So they say.”

  I looked at Laurent again. I couldn’t see the connection at all between huge, wheezing Thierry with his skin like uncooked dough and this tall, olive-skinned, flashing-eyed man, his black curls bouncing, so full of vigor and life, even if his passion sometimes overtook him. Surely he wouldn’t end up like his father.

  “We haven’t seen you in…” The man shook his head. “It has been so long. So long.”

  “I know,” said Laurent.

  “And now. Finally. You are here to run the shop. Your father?”

  “He’s recovering,” said Laurent firmly. “I’m just helping out.”

  The old man looked closely at me.

  “And this is your wife? Your girlfriend?”

  Laurent waved his hand. “Oh, no, nothing like that. She works for my father. Hey, Señor, can you get us something to eat?”

  “Of course, of course,” said Salvatore, throwing open the old wooden door into a passageway from which emerged the most amazing smells of mushrooms sizzling in garlic and butter, with white pepper and all sorts of other things I couldn’t identify.

  But I barely noticed the stunning aromas; I was so tired and shaky that suddenly I was furious that Laurent had referred to me in such a dismissive way. I mean, I know that’s all we’d been doing and all we were, technically, to one another, but…after everything we’d bloody been through. Couldn’t he at least have said we were friends?

  I realized as he ushered me through into a tiny restaurant not much larger than somebody’s front room—decorated like someone’s front room to
o, with family photographs and knickknacks, nearly every table filled with people concentrating furiously on the process of eating as a tiny little old woman ducked and bobbed between the tables carrying piled-high plates as if she was dancing—that actually, if I was being completely honest with myself, I had perhaps seen us as something more than friends. That if I was being completely honest with myself, I did actually fancy him a bit. I suppose it was the high emotional pitch with which we’d been thrown together, I suppose because I’d been alone for so long—I started to feel very foolish—that I’d just fixated on the first available male. Maybe I was ovulating?

  But also something about Paris had reawoken me. After the accident, after my illness, everything in Kidinsborough had seemed so very cold and gray and lifeless. I’d seen Claire and myself as the same, even though she was twice my age. She had noticed it and realized it, and sent me here to bring me back to life. The problem with life was that it had sent a bit of human blood shooting around my veins for once. But I’d forgotten how to do it. I’d forgotten how people fancy each other and how people get together. It’s very rarely because one person thinks the other person sent his father to hospital and is a really terrible cook. I bit my lip thinking of how earlier tonight, I’d even thought about going over to him…oh god. I was such an idiot. I felt so stupid.

  “Anna?”

  He was asking, not what I wanted to drink, but whether I wanted the red wine Salvatore had already brought over. I shrugged and let him pour me a tiny glass.

  “We shall have the risotto of course,” he said. “Marina, has it changed at all?”

  The tiny old woman had much the same reaction as Salvatore, except her kisses were even more effusive. She spoke in a rat-tat-tat Italian-influenced French accent that I could barely follow, but I did catch her saying,

  “No, of course it is exactly the same. We wouldn’t change a single tiny thing. If you change a single tiny thing when you have something perfect, it is all wrong! Wrong, wrong and terrible and a disaster.”

  Laurent cocked an eyebrow at me, but I was too unhappy to flirt back with him. I just nodded, suddenly feeling so terribly, terribly weary. He attempted to make conversation, but I felt so unsure of myself that I could barely mutter responses. Eventually he too lapsed into silence until the food arrived. Then he closed his eyes and inhaled the steam. It smelled almost impossibly rich and flavorsome, full of onions and cream and stock and good things.