Christmas at Tiffany's (37 page)

‘Yes?’

‘Meeting you, for example,’ she said, trying not to feel shy about it, just presenting it as the truth it was. ‘And when I met his friend Robin in New York . . . Do you know Robin?’ She wondered whether this network of men were all interconnected.

Claude shook his head.

‘Oh. Well, Robin let me read from a first-edition copy of
A Christmas Carol
that had belonged to Charles Dickens!’

Claude gave what Cassie took to be an impressed nod.

‘And he arranged a gift just for me under the Tiffany Christmas tree on Fifth Avenue. It’s been things like that, you know – moments of rarity in the middle of the mundane.’ She sighed happily. Then stopped. ‘Although I wouldn’t want you to think it’s all been sweet consideration.’

‘
Non?
’

She shook her head. ‘He made me run round Central Park on half a case of Château Margaux.’

‘
Non!
’

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘I mean, the Château Margaux bit might have been my fault, but still . . .’

Claude laughed – the first time she’d ever heard it – and she stared at him as his face crinkled stiffly with amusement. He looked so young, like a little boy being tickled by his mother.

‘I think you are probably as bad as each other,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Probably,’ she said, picking up the last violet cream macaroon.

‘Do you have to call any other strangers in Paris?’

‘No, thank God! It’s now completely apparent to me why my parents always told me not to speak to strangers. You’ve put me off that for life.’ She laughed. ‘But I do have to somehow get myself invited on to some secret picnic society. I don’t suppose you’ve any contacts on that front?’

Claude shrugged and looked at her blankly.

‘And I’ve got to go to the catacombs.’

‘Oh,
mon Dieu
,’ he said, giving a shiver.

‘What?’

‘Four hundred miles of tunnels that go down over seven levels below the city. Most are unmapped.’ He looked at her. ‘They are very dangerous to explore alone.’

Cassie stopped eating. ‘And my night vision is appalling.’

‘Well, there is a short section open to the public. It is well-lit and clean there. You will be fine.’ He looked at her. ‘So long as you’re okay about bones.’

‘Bones!’

‘Yes. The walls down there are built from human bones and skulls.’

Cassie paused. ‘Why?’

‘Because by the end of the eighteenth century the cemeteries in the city were completely full and there was nowhere left to put the bodies, so they exhumed the human remains and relocated them to the limestone quarries which Haussmann had mined. They say there are over six million bones down there.’

Cassie grimaced. ‘Oh, great. It’ll be a party,’ she muttered.

‘For sure,’ Claude smiled, motioning for the bill and bringing the waitress racing over.

They settled up – Claude insisted on paying – grabbed their coats and walked back out into the chilly evening air with their cheeks pinked.

He pulled the hood of his parka up and turned to her, and for a second she thought how very frightened she’d be to pass him on a quiet street. He looked so menacing and dark, and yet for all his growling and sneers, there was something of the child about him, something vulnerable. Anouk was by far the more scary to encounter, especially at the moment. ‘I have been thinking – if you would like, we could meet more often. On Tuesday evenings, per’aps? And Thursdays too?’

‘If I would
like
? I would love!’ she squealed, hugging him hard, determined to make their goodbye on fonder terms than their hello. Claude stood like a plank in her embrace, but she didn’t care. If they were meeting three times a week then some barriers had to start coming down between them. He was rapidly becoming one of the most important people in her life, and she’d be damned if she couldn’t call him a friend too.

Claude nodded, embarrassed. ‘Okay. I see you tomorrow night then.’ And he turned away without further ceremony.

Cassie shrugged happily and watched him shuffle off. She put on her beret and belted her coat tightly before turning and walking in the opposite direction towards the river. She didn’t feel like cycling tonight – she didn’t trust herself to keep her hands on the handlebars, for one thing – and she was close to home here anyway. But there was something else, something else Claude had said which was knocking about in her head and giving her a plan.

Cassie glanced around anxiously, wondering if this still counted as Paris at all, or whether she was in the suburbs now. She was only in the quinzième arrondissement, but whereas the buildings in the first, fourth and fifth were carved from limestone and decorated with pretty lead roof tiles, here they were square, concrete tower blocks. The balconies had bikes and washing on them, and there wasn’t a gargoyle or tourist in sight.

The park was easy to find, though, and she jogged through the gates, aware that the heavens were about to open, past two giant bull statues, beyond the old vineyards where the Pinot Noir grapes still grew and towards the pavilions she’d been told to head for. In their previous life they’d been the sheds of the old horse market, but now they housed the antique book market, and that was the reason she’d come.

She stepped under the roof just as it began to spit and she looked back up at the sky crossly. It was menacing and heavy, with billowing black clouds – the last thing she needed when she had a long bike ride home, freshly done hair and ten people for dinner tonight. It was Anouk’s birthday, and she was jangling with nerves, not only because this was her second attempt at making friends with Anouk’s circle, but also because somehow she had persuaded Claude to help her cook for it.

It had been Bas’s idea for her to check out the book fair. He’d overheard a famous designer saying the market was one of his secret stops for design inspiration, but she didn’t have much time to browse – Claude was coming over at three.

She dived straight in, weaving in and around the trestle tables laid out with ancient tablecloths and laden with boxes filled with musty old books. Pure heaven! There were occasional modern books in the mix, but almost everything she picked up was at least fifty years old and quite a few three hundred or more. They were generally arranged with their spines up, the titles picked out in gilt lettering against the fraying leather covers.

Every time she picked up a book she couldn’t stop herself from smelling the pages. What was it Robin had called them? Volatile organic compounds? Well if this was decay, they could bottle it up and sell it to her. She smiled lightly as she recalled that new-born memory, sitting in the dark underneath Manhattan, reading from Dickens’ very own book. She wondered what the stallholders here would think of
that
story.

Cassie moved slowly from one table to the next, not entirely sure what she was even looking for. A small emerald-green leather notebook caught her eye, and she picked it up. It was filled with black-and-white photographs of a woman, and from the way her hair was done and the clothes she was wearing, it looked like they were taken in the 1920s. The first photographs showed her fully-clothed, hatted and demure, but as she turned each page an item of clothing was removed until, at the back of the book, she was naked, her modesty gone with her clothes. There were a good few pages left at the back after all her clothes were shed which testified to that. It was early porn, but no less shocking. She put it back quickly, aware the vendor was watching her.

Some stalls specialized – in philosophy, or poetry, or military history, or history of art – and the haggling was done in low, intense voices, far more so than at the food market, where everyone used their hands, eyebrows and smiles to try to drive down the price of sweet onions. Most of the browsers were solitary, like her, wrapped up against the mid-winter chill, and were it not for the sound of children playing in the nearby playground, it would have been just like being in a library, the sound of pages flicking and turning, coughs muffled behind scarves, eyes down.

She made a purchase for herself – an early edition of
Larousse Gastronomique
– but nothing suitable to give to Anouk, and she was scanning the last row, about to give up, when a title caught her eye.
Bijoux des Anciennes
. She picked it up and began looking through it – it was all about the jewellery of the Egyptian and Roman empires, and showed jade necklaces, pearl-drop earrings, hammered gold cuffs, lapis lazuli and onyx rings, emerald and peridot collars . . . The illustrations were full-colour and beautifully rendered, showing how they would have been worn.

It was perfect! Anouk would love it. The materials they’d used were precious yet rough still, not whittled to cultivated perfection like modern jewellery but retaining that guileless rusticity that Anouk managed to make so luxurious.

She bought it quickly, eager to get back, even though it was still raining. Pulling her beret out of her pocket, she tucked as much of her hair as she could into it, and trotted quickly towards the park gates. It was raining too hard to cycle now. She would have to catch the metro.

Everyone was jogging, dodging puddles, trying to get to cover. She saw a man ahead of her. He was walking briskly, the collar of his coat turned up and obscuring his face, but still she recognized him.

‘Jacques!’ she called, flagging up her arm to get his attention. ‘Hey, Jacques!’

But he was already out of the park and on to the streets. By the time she passed the bull statues and got to the pavement herself, he was gone.

She had just finished chopping the tarragon when she heard the curt rap at the door and felt her heart give a startled leap in her chest – even his door knock managed to sound stroppy. She wiped her hands on a tea towel and went to let him in, casting anxious eyes over the apartment as she passed through. Everything was immaculate – the table was set for ten, the crystal gleaming, the wine chilling and all the guests’ flowers – sent in advance, as was polite in Paris – decanted into vases of every shape. She’d even managed to save her hair from the worst of the rain. Now all she needed was the Michelin-starred chef.

Anouk was still detoxifying at the hammam – the worst of the crisis appeared to have blown over with Pierre but she was still on edge – and wouldn’t be back till after five. Cassie was hoping all the food prep would be done by then and they could enjoy a quiet glass before everyone else arrived. It was usual for gifts to be opened in front of the giver, and although Cassie was pleased with her purchase, the book, at over one hundred and fifty years old, was in poor condition with its flapping spine and yellowed pages. It was a thoughtful gift, but probably not a
Parisian
gift. She’d prefer to present it to her privately.

‘Claude,’ she smiled, letting him in and leading him through to the kitchen. She hoped he would pass comment on her outfit, or the way she’d laid out the kitchen utensils like his. But he walked straight through, his nose in the air, nostrils flaring like a bull about to charge.

‘That’s the reduction,’ she said, watching him sniff the air like a tracker dog.

‘I know,’ he said tightly, walking over to the pan on the hob and immediately inspecting the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon beside it. He tilted his head to the side for a second, inhaling deeply, then sliced off a tiny cube of the chilled butter, whisking it quickly into the red wine sauce. He tested it with the taster spoon. ‘Better. It needed more butter.’

She nodded, picking up on his tension as he inspected the kitchen with a professional eye, seeing where the oven was in relation to the bin and fridge, assessing the weight of the pans, the sharpness of the knives . . . She could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was tightly coiled, and she wondered again whether it had been a mistake inviting him tonight, a mistake to try to move their relationship from purely culinary interest to wider friendship. They enjoyed a graceless, intense camaraderie in the kitchen, where neither thought about anything other than teaching and being taught, but step into another next room and his composure collapsed quicker than a soufflé. She really wasn’t sure how he was going to ‘transfer’ from the kitchen to the table, and Anouk’s circle was a sophisticated one.

She went back to peeling the egg for the gribiche sauce as he began to fillet the fish, her mind marvelling at how he’d been able to tell by smell alone – ‘
au pif!
’ – that the reduction needed more butter.

The pastry mix was boiling away in the oven when they heard Anouk’s key in the door an hour later. She drifted in, wearing layers of pebble-coloured yoga kit and not a trace of make-up or tension upon her for once.

‘How are the workers doing?’ she asked, peering into the pans as though she knew what to look for, and Cassie noticed Claude stiffen at the gesture; his arm froze in mid-stir.

Cassie quickly poured her a glass of the wine and placed it in her hand. ‘Be gone,’ she said, shooing her out. ‘Get ready. Your guests will be here in a little over two hours and you look a state.’

‘I do not,’ Anouk protested vehemently.

‘No. Of
course
you don’t,’ Cassie smiled. ‘But I do need you out of this kitchen.’

Anouk made a faint attempt at resistance but quite happily let Cassie push her towards the bathroom. The door clicked behind her and Cassie breathed a sigh of relief, happy to see that Claude had started stirring again and dinner was still on track.