The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Read online

  “So I see.”

  “You’re Anna,” he said eventually. “You’re working in the shop.”

  I felt a huge sense of relief that he was making sense. I’d suddenly gotten very worried he’d had a stroke or something.

  “Yes!” I said. “Yes! That’s me.”

  He frowned. “How is the shop?”

  “Don’t worry about that just now,” I said politically. “Listen. I spoke to Claire.”

  His big dark eyes—now he was a little thinner, I could see the resemblance between him and Laurent much more. His long lashes gave him the look of a slightly helpless, very large puppy.

  “Oh yes?” he said.

  “She wants…she wants to come to Paris.”

  His lips suddenly stretched into a wide smile. They were cracked and I passed him some more water.

  “She is coming?”

  “What on earth happened between you two?” I burst out suddenly, thinking of Laurent’s anger, and Alice’s insistence on being French, and Claire’s funny turn. “How can two pen pals that met like a hundred years ago…I mean, I had to write to a guy in Poland, but I couldn’t tell you his name. It started with a zed though, that was cool. But anyway, I mean. What was it?”

  With no small difficulty, Thierry shunted himself up a little on the plump white pillows.

  “Careful,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “But I think I am going to get better. Do you know what my doctor said? She said she wants me walking up and down today. Walking up and down!”

  “You like walking up and down.”

  “I like walking to a café and walking toward an aperitif,” said Thierry. “I like walking and disputing and setting the world to rights. I like walking over bridges and through parks and along the Champs-Élysées on a Saturday morning to see the pretty ladies and the small dogs. I do not want to walk up and down the corridors of a hospital in a dress where everyone can see my pee pee.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “I know. I’ve been there.”

  “You have?” He looked at me.

  I nodded. Then, even though the situation was distinctly peculiar, I slipped off my sandal. That was another thing I missed—flip-flops and open-toed pretty sandals and high-heeled shoes and nice pedicures. Thierry squinted at first. Then he did a double take. “You only have…un, deux, trois…”

  “Yup,” I said. “Then it finishes. They made me walk a lot as well.”

  “What happened?” said Thierry.

  “Same as what happened to you,” I said. “Just a thing.”

  He liked this and nodded his head. “Just a thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you got over it.”

  I considered it. “Mostly,” I said. “You’re not quite the same afterward. But mostly.”

  He nodded at this. “If I do the walking.”

  “Yes. If you do the walking.”

  He sighed. “But, you know,” he said, “I have already lost fifteen pounds.”

  “Good,” I said.

  He nodded. “Well,” he said, smiling, “I want to look good when I see Claire.”

  “Tell me about Claire,” I said. But at that moment, the door burst open and Alice marched in, holding a very small coffee and a copy of Paris Match. She was wearing an immaculate navy jacket, teamed with a red printed scarf and very skinny white trousers. She looked like she was entering a “Who’s the Frenchiest” competition.

  When she saw me sitting on the bed, she pulled up short. Oh, for Christ’s sake, I wanted to say (in English). No, I am not trying to get off with your morbidly obese sixty-year-old husband who’s in the hospital after suffering a severe heart attack, okay?

  “Oh, Anna,” she said in a way in which one might (and indeed, in Paris, often did) say “Oh, dog poo on the streets.”

  “Hi Alice,” I said. “I just came up to see how Thierry was doing.”

  “Why?” she said.

  I didn’t know the answer to that without betraying Claire.

  “Frédéric and Benoît want to know,” I said. “Frédéric’s scared of hospitals.”

  She sneered at this. “Well, tell them he’s on the mend. How are sales? I hope you’re not hanging back.”

  “Let me try what you’re doing,” said Thierry.

  “Best not,” I said. “Plus, you’re on a no-chocolate diet.”

  I still wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t throw back the blankets and march down to the shop in horror once he tasted what was up.

  They both looked at me.

  “I’d better get back,” I said, feeling awkward.

  “Yes, do,” said Alice, fussing around Thierry’s bed. Thierry looked at me with a comical look of mute understanding, and I realized that saying the Claire word in front of Alice was as much of a non-non as I’d expected it to be.

  I picked up my bag and headed for the door. Just as I did so, I heard Thierry say, “No news from Laurent?”

  “Oh, no,” said Alice.

  I stopped short. Did Thierry not know that Laurent had been by his bedside night after night? That he hadn’t slept in days? That he’d left his job to come down to the shop to help me out? He must do.

  “Of course he’s been here,” I said before I left the room. Alice turned on me, her eyes blazing as Thierry sat bolt upright.

  “Oui?”

  “Anna, a word,” said Alice in English. She followed me outside.

  “Have you no compassion?” she said. “How dare you interfere in my family? Laurent hasn’t been back since Thierry regained consciousness, and God knows when we’ll see him. Don’t be so cruel as to tell a sick man that he can’t see his son. Much better if it’s just done and dusted and they’re kept apart.”

  This seemed to me that it was becoming a bit of a thing, Thierry not seeing the people that he loved.

  “I’ll tell Laurent to come back,” I said boldly.

  “You can tell him what you like, it won’t work,” said Alice. “I think, personally, if you want to hang on to this job, that you keep your nose out of our business. I mean that in a friendly way.”

  Alice didn’t mean anything in a friendly way.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll tell Thierry you made a mistake. Thank you for coming to the hospital; I doubt it will be necessary again.”

  She turned and closed the door on me. I looked down the endless corridor and wondered, not for the first time, if perhaps, at thirty, I just hadn’t actually grown up yet, that there was a whole adult world out there I just couldn’t make heads nor tails of and that was that. Damn confusing to me though.

  - - -

  Wednesday was early closing and I got a chance to go home. For once, amazingly, the flat was empty. Sami had a big opening night of La Bohème coming up, and I’d promised to go, although I wasn’t sure I’d get on with opera. It was a bit highfalutin for me. I liked Coldplay.

  I made my way up the stairwell, humming. Perhaps a little nap, then I would log on and see if I could trace a route for Claire. She had asked me outright in the last conversation and I’d agreed. I would go home, see everyone, and fetch her back. This bit about her wanting to come by ferry didn’t help; going from London by train would be about a million times more convenient than getting her to Dover, but we’d work something out.

  - - -

  “Mum, you have to see it just isn’t fair. It’s just not right.”

  Claire looked out of her window again. The nurse had just changed her dressing and given her a mild sedative while she did it, so everything kind of gently washed over her head. Ricky Jr. was talking to her—he was so handsome, she thought. It was amazing she and Richard had turned out such nice children after all.

  “We can’t take the time off—Ian either, but it’s not even that. We wou
ldn’t. It’s not right. A journey like this—next year, maybe. Eighteen months. When you’re strong enough and well enough. Sitting on a cross-channel ferry in your condition, it’s just ridiculous. We couldn’t insure you to go, for starters.”

  Ricky worked in insurance, which Richard had thought was a brilliant thing, and even though he’d gotten wonderful exam results and gone to a good university and married a lovely girl and been, his entire life, nothing but a credit to them, Claire had privately occasionally found a bit of a shame. She adored her sons completely, but they were so very like their father. She would have perhaps enjoyed a mercurial, ambitious, annoying daughter to fight and spar and bond with, or an odd, intense, clever son who ended up at CERN or designing bizarre things for the Internet or joined a band and disappeared for months at a time. Ian was a solicitor, and a good one. They were such good men, pillars of their community. In a way, it was a shame when they were born that the Reverend had taken relatively little interest in them; he would have been proud of them. They were both very, very sensible.

  She looked at him, feeling a little hazy.

  “And you’re right in the middle of treatment…it’s not fair on any of us. You’re just not strong enough. You have to realize that.”

  “I’m not strong enough for any of it,” she said.

  “Mum, don’t talk like that. You’re only fifty-eight.”

  “I’m fifty-eight with cancer in three different bits of me. That’s not like those hill-climbing, marathon-running fifty-eight-year-olds you see on television, all right?”

  She hadn’t meant to be snappy—detested it, in fact—but she had spent a year now—no, when she thought about it, most of a lifetime—allowing herself to do what other people wanted her to do, gently following their paths, being a good girl, doing what she was told. And where had that gotten her? Stuck in a chair by a window, with her children annoyed at her, even after she’d broken the heart of a perfectly decent man.

  “This is what I want to do,” she said again carefully, so she didn’t sound drugged. She was aware that she sounded like someone trying to pretend they weren’t drugged. “My friend Anna is going to help you.”

  “The one with the chopped-off toes? She was in the paper,” said Ricky. “She didn’t get anything like the payout she should have done; she was crazy. She should have gone for them.”

  “I think she just wanted to forget all about it,” said Claire. “Anyway, that’s not important. I shan’t disturb you, you don’t need to do anything; we’ll arrange it all.”

  “It’s not about the arranging,” said Ricky, his face suddenly white. “It’s not about that, Mum. It’s about whether it makes you sicker.”

  They didn’t know, thought Claire. They couldn’t, with their young fit bodies and young families and all their lives spent thinking about the new car and the mortgage and where they’d go on holiday next year and the year after that. Even though every single person on Earth was living under a death sentence, to actually have one written down on paper…However much they tried to pretend there’d be new treatments, new ways of fixing her, more chemo, always more chemo. But she knew. That there wasn’t a lot of sand left in the hourglass, that the time was coming. That if there was anything she wanted to do, she had to do it quickly. They were scared they might lose her—well, they were losing her. They just hadn’t faced up to it yet. She had.

  And there was only one thing she wanted to do. And this was it.

  Ricky looked at her mutinous face. “I’m telling Dad,” he said, as if he was talking to Ian and they were nine and seven again.

  Claire shrugged. “There’s not much he can do now, I would say.”

  She and Richard were always courteous, although she was aware she found it easier to be so than he did. She liked Richard’s new wife, Anne-Marie, too, liked her a lot, and her daughter. Anne-Marie in her turn was so relieved that Claire wasn’t a terrifying nightmare who would still be phoning Richard every five minutes and turning the boys against her, and had been very kind to Claire, sending her magazines during her illness about soap stars that didn’t make a lot of sense to Claire, but in her darker moments she enjoyed looking at the colorful pictures of peacock dresses and losing herself in a world where losing or gaining weight meant love break-ups and romance, not chemo and steroids.

  “Well then, I’ll call that girl.”

  Claire raised her eyebrows. Trying to get Anna to do anything she didn’t want to do was an interesting challenge at the best of times.

  “If you like.”

  - - -

  I figured I’d phone first. They must have someone who could help out. I took the phone onto the balcony. Hearing the blank computer voice explain that my call to DownSouthNet Rail was important, please could I continue waiting—while I explained back that clearly it wasn’t, otherwise they would hire someone to actually answer the telephones, then remembered that I was speaking to a machine and wondered if anyone listened in on these bits, then assumed that they didn’t, then started to get impatient and cross and wonder if I could do this later.

  Then I thought about Claire, how thin and weak she had looked the last time I saw her, and Thierry, his big face suddenly transformed by the huge grin on his face the moment I had said her name. It was so strange to me. I’d never had anyone to feel that way about—I mean, Darr was all right, but, you know. I don’t think seeing Darr would be the last thing on anybody’s list, unless you needed some really average rendering done. So I sighed and held on.

  “Your call is important to us.”

  It was strange, what was important, I thought, looking down on the street where already people were gathering for early aperitifs in the sunshine. Tiny glasses of Pernod were brought to the small rackety tables at the bar opposite, along with a jar of olives and a plate of cooked meat; good customers then. It was a man and a woman, in middle age, engaged in an intense and lively conversation. I wondered what about. How nice, I thought. How nice it would be to get to that age and still be together and still have so much to talk about, so much to think of. Mind you, anyone looking at my mum and dad would think the same thing, except that in actual fact, they would be in the middle of a fight to the death as to whether my father should take his extra raincoat to fishing club. When it was abroad, it just seemed so much more exotic and interesting to me. Presumably if you were in the conversation, it might not seem like that at all.

  “Please continue to hold.”

  The great bells of Notre Dame chimed the hour—three o’clock. I thought of Laurent at work, delicately spraying the chocolate with sealant so it wouldn’t whiten up if it were to last right to the very final cafés of the evening in the Pritzer’s winter garden, each perfect square imprinted with the hotel’s signature. Did people even know, I wondered. Did people even know how much care and attention went into the chocolate on their pillow? Maybe in France they did.

  I felt anxious and antsy, restless. I know what Sami would have said: get laid. But I didn’t want to “get laid.” In this big and lovely and scary city, I wanted to do what Thierry wanted to do and Alice, presumably, and Claire, and everybody else; I wanted to fall in love.

  “Hello, love? Sorry for keeping you waiting.”

  The voice was a woman’s, reassuringly northern and normal; she sounded motherly and actually, genuinely sorry for a system that I supposed, when you got down to it, wasn’t her fault.

  “Hello,” I said. “I wonder if you can help me.”

  I explained the situation and she hummed and hawed on the end.

  “Well,” she said finally. “She’ll have to change at Crewe. Or at London.”

  “Crewe’s probably better, wouldn’t you think?”

  “But I don’t think…I mean, we don’t accept responsibility for sick people on the train.”

  “There’ll be somebody with her,” I said, a little testily. “All I’m asking is can a guard
meet the train and make sure we’re comfortable in the second train? It’s going to be a big stress for her.”

  “Wouldn’t she be better flying?” asked the woman tentatively. “They do lots with wheelchairs and so on.”

  “You’re a train company!” I said, exasperated. “Do you tell everyone to get a plane?”

  “You don’t need to shout,” said the woman. “I’m just saying we don’t normally do this. Health and Safety won’t allow it.”

  I snorted, in a proper French way. “You can’t do anything? Look,” I said, “what’s your name?”

  “Aurelienne.”

  It was an incredibly unlikely name to belong to such a normal, comfy-sounding woman. “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice softening a little. “My father was French.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, then, you will understand.”

  And I told her the whole story, about Claire and Thierry being in love, and how they’d waited their whole lives and now they were both sick and it was their only wish to meet, one more time, in Paris—I laid it on a bit, I will say. At the end, she was silent.

  “Well, that’s nice,” she said.

  “It will be,” I said, “with your help.”

  I was all fired up now, sure I could convince her to see the romantic side of it, sure I could stir her latent French heart.

  “It’ll be in the papers,” I lied.

  “I just don’t…” she said. Then added, “You know, I’ve never even been to Paris.”

  “You haven’t?” I said, shocked. “You’re half-French.”

  “Oh, my name is all I have really. He left my mother,” she said. “She hates the French.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Probably just the same in this case.”

  “No,” I said. “They just got separated.”

  “Hmm,” said Aurelienne.

  “And now they want to get back together.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And you’re going to help make it happen.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You know, I don’t know why she doesn’t just fly.”