The Confectioner's Tale (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

May 1988

It is early morning when the train slides into the Gare du Nord, but the station is already crowded. Travellers haul suitcases, businesspeople watch for their trains, suited and stiff, even on a Saturday. I crane my neck; the huge glass roof slopes above me, a sky held together by bolts. It too is alive, grey girders furred with a skin of pigeons.

For a second, I can only stand, my sleep-starved brain disorientated by the language of the city. Then there is a nudge at my back, poking me forwards into the fray. I mumble an apology and try to think straight as I search for signs towards the exit. Instead I find a coffee stall, where the smell of fresh pastry and dark roasted beans is drawing tired travellers like moths. Some of my dwindling money is spent on coffee and a warm croissant.

I haven’t been to Paris for years. I can’t afford a taxi, so I grab a free tourist map and set off for the Rue de Richelieu, hefting my rucksack a little higher. The walk takes me through the grand boulevards, but I am too tired to notice much, too focused on the task at hand. The library is still closed when I arrive, so I sit on the steps to wait in the warm morning sun.

‘Mademoiselle? Excuse me?’

A woman in wire-rimmed glasses is bending over me, concerned.

Blearily, I pull myself upright, mortified to have fallen asleep while waiting.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I stammer, collecting my bag. ‘I’ve had a long night. I telephoned about seeing some records, yesterday.’

The librarian smiles. ‘The young lady from Cambridge,’ she says in perfect, accented English. ‘You
have
had a long night. We are just opening, but if you wait, I will find the one you want.’

It doesn’t take her long to locate the reel of microfilm I’m after. Thanking her again, I follow through the wooden swing barrier that leads deeper into the library.

The main hall is enormous. Desks march down the centre, row upon row of green glass lamps casting their light. I gawp at the ceiling, punctured by star-shaped light wells. Six feet ahead, the librarian raises her eyebrow. I hurry to catch up.

She shows me to a bank of microfilm scanners at the far end, hidden in the shadow of a balcony.

‘You load it, so,’ she demonstrates.

I assure her that the scanners are similar to those at my own university library. She makes a dubious noise in her throat but wishes me good day, instructing me to return the reel to the main desk when I am finished.

I crank the film to its starting place. It contains copies of
Le Petit Parisien
, the newspaper in which society weddings were announced, every issue that was published in 1910. If she married well, this is where I will find Mademoiselle Jeanne Clermont.

The library is quiet, a beautiful spring morning outside the windows. I bring out the photograph of the group outside Pâtisserie Clermont. The girl stares back at me, eyes unreadable.

Newsprint slides into focus. I crank the handle until I reach May, scrolling slowly. Wedding announcements were popular at the time. There are whole pages filled with descriptions, portraits of brides inset between the columns.

Then, a few issues in, a face catches my eye.

There she is, alongside three others, Jeanne, née Clermont. She has been photographed wearing a wreath of flowers; they bloom around her dark hair, her pale face, yet she looks sad, somehow blank, on what should have been a joyful wedding day. I see the name linked to hers and realize why.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

May 1910

How he came to be on the Left Bank he had no idea. The day was bright and breezy, yet it mocked him, the sunlight like needles in his pounding head. He should have jumped off the omnibus when it began to trundle south, but he remained, clinging weakly to the rail as the roads swept by beneath his gaze, blurring into a mess of grey.

How could everything have fallen apart so quickly? He thought of Jeanne. Was she crying even now, cursing him for condemning her to a life of poverty as she packed her bags? Gui rested his head against the rattling vehicle and tried to pull his thoughts together.

No, she had asked him to meet her. They would leave, just as they had planned, and soon all of this would be a memory.

By the time he came to his senses, the omnibus was halfway through Saint-Germain. He leaped off the vehicle as it slowed. He would have a long walk home. Unintentionally, he found himself turning onto the Boulevard Raspail. Once he had walked these streets with Jeanne, with Jim, on that night when his world had changed for ever.

They had been sheltered by the dark, then, by the voices and the music of strangers. He caught his reflection in a glass window: white and bloodied. He looked up in a daze. The electric sign of La Rotonde was unlit, paintwork faded and shabby in the daylight. A familiar silhouette was seated at a table within.

The place was near empty, smelled of damp cloth and stale tobacco. Jim was scribbling furiously on a loose sheet of paper, a glass upended near his elbow. Gui swayed, head spinning from the change in light.

‘Stevenson,’ he croaked, squinting.

Jim looked up in annoyance only to blanch, his mouth drooping open an inch as he gazed.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ he managed eventually. Gui couldn’t help but notice the frostiness in the young man’s voice. He grimaced in pain.

‘Clermont,’ he told the writer with as much emotion as he could muster. ‘He found out …’

His vision swayed violently, and he found himself clutching at the table. He shook his head to clear it.

‘For God’s sake, sit down,’ the other man insisted, pressing him into a chair. ‘You’ve had the sense knocked out of you.’

He called for a waiter, and a minute later Gui felt a cool glass being nudged against his hand.

‘Drink this,’ Jim said.

Gui took a sip. Cheap brandy. It reminded him of Pigalle. He drank the rest, only to find another at his fingertips.

‘Sip that one,’ the writer advised, and for the first time, Gui was able to look at the young man properly.

Jim was leaning back in his chair, face twisted somewhere between confusion and resentment.

‘You look a state. I’m guessing your fortune-fishing at Pâtisserie Clermont did not end well?’

Gui made to push his chair away in anger, but missed his grip and reeled.

‘You know nothing of it,’ he said, ‘Jeanne and I are in love, we—’ Abruptly, his nose began to bleed again. He swiped at it. ‘We are eloping.’

‘Du Frère,’ Jim sighed, ‘I shook hands with her
fiancé
.’

Gui stared miserably at the table before he sat again.

‘I have to explain,’ he said.

‘Then explain.’

Gui lowered his forehead to his hands. ‘Jeanne is engaged to marry Leonard Burnett,’ he told Jim heavily. ‘Her dowry is part of a business arrangement at the pâtisserie.’

‘And you’ve muscled into the middle of that,’ finished Jim. ‘Was that your plan? Throw a spanner in the works by seducing Mademoiselle, then promise to disappear and let the marriage continue as planned – for a price.’

‘No!’ Gui insisted, but his head pounded so much that he was forced to close his eyes. ‘No,’ he said again, trying to breathe calmly. ‘I love her. I told you, we’re getting out of here, tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ asked Jim, turning a box of matches in his fingers. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know.’ Gui sniffed, dabbing at his nose with his sleeve. ‘The train, perhaps. We’re to meet at the Place de la République at midnight. At least that’s what Patrice said. But I can’t see how she will get away. She was locked in her room when they threw me out, and they were calling for a doctor.’

Jim’s fingers faltered. The matchbox lay still in his hand.

‘A doctor?’

The heat flared to Gui’s face. ‘We consider ourselves married. It is no one’s business but ours.’

Jim laughed bitterly, shaking his head.

‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You truly don’t realize you have ruined that girl’s life with your grubby plan.’

‘Jim, please,’ Gui begged, ‘there is no plan—’

‘Enough, du Frère.’ Jim lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer one to Gui. ‘I helped you before and you lied to me. Why should I believe you a second time?’ He sat back in his chair, face hard.

Resentment stirred in Gui’s gut, an ugly feeling, laced with hurt.

‘To hell with you,’ he spat. He knew it was his pride speaking, but he was too angry, too worn down, to care. ‘You’re just like them.’

Jim’s voice followed him out into the fading afternoon.

‘I told you, Gui. Never lie to a reporter.’

Chapter Forty

May 1988

I stare at the photograph of Mademoiselle Clermont for a long time, as though that would allow me to speak to her, to reach through time and ask her what had happened that May, over seventy years ago.

Finally, I find a pen and make a note of the announcement and its contents, wondering why I feel so saddened. I can’t shake the feeling that there is something I don’t know, but, as I feared, I have reached another dead end. Perhaps this was why Grandpa Jim never spoke of what had passed: he knew that he would not find the resolution he wanted, no matter how desperately he searched. Slowly, I gather my things.

The woman at the information desk smiles as she makes me a copy of the article, asks after my research, but I can only nod. Shrugging, she goes back to her conversation with a co-worker. They are talking about an argument with her brother, who lives in Bordeaux.

Bordeaux
. I stop in my tracks, thoughts tumbling.

There is a payphone near the doors. Hurriedly I scrabble through my notes, and there it is, the number for the G. du Frère I got from Directory Inquiries. I stare at it. The thought of calling the number again terrifies me, but I have exhausted all other possible leads. I try to be rational, to swallow the fear and guilt that arises when I think of the young man on the other end of the phone. It is my grandfather’s guilt, I realize. I have resurrected it, from where it lay hidden. I have pursued it, and now, I have one last chance to lay it to rest. I owe it to him to try.

It takes me three attempts to punch in the numbers correctly. The plastic receiver grows warm under my sweating palm as the phone rings, again and again.

After a minute of waiting and praying, a breathless voice answers.

‘
Oui?
’

It is a woman. She sounds young. My carefully prepared words stick in my throat, and I begin the conversation by coughing.

‘Hello,’ I get out at last. ‘I … I’m looking for Monsieur du Frère.’

‘You mean Gui du Frère?’

I swallow drily.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s away on business at the moment,’ she says. ‘Can I take a message for you?’

‘Oh. When will he be back?’

‘Not sure, next week probably.’

All my tension, my excitement, plummets to the floor. The woman on the other end must hear it.

‘Who’s calling?’ she asks with more interest. ‘Is it urgent?’

‘I … know his family, sort of. I did really hope to speak with him today, that’s all.’

‘Wait a minute …’ There is a rustling of papers from the other end of the phone. ‘As long as you’re not trying to sell something, I can give you the number of his hotel,’ she tells me. ‘Have you got a pen? It’s Paris, 48 34 506.’

My pen blotches to a halt.

‘Paris?’

Chapter Forty-One

May 1910

‘Gui, don’t squirm so,’ Isabelle commanded.

He jerked away from the cloth she was using to clean the wound to his head. He was exhausted, from the fight and the confrontation with Jim and the long walk back to Belleville, but even so, he couldn’t settle.

‘It stings,’ he mumbled, although in truth he didn’t care about the pain.

‘You are lucky it only stings.’ Isabelle went to the stove for more hot water. ‘What did you imagine would happen? That girl is from a wealthy family, their marriages are determined by stocks and shares, not love.’

‘Don’t lecture me, please.’ He squeezed his eyes closed.

‘I am not lecturing, Gui. Those kinds of matches keep Madame and me in business. It is the order of things. You are a fool to try to defy it.’

He ignored her, twisting his head to see the clock on the mantel.

‘For goodness’ sake!’ She threw down the cloth. ‘It has not changed in the last minute. Here, you had better see to yourself. I must get ready for work.’

She sat at a small table and began to remove the rags from her hair. Gui was too uneasy to wait in his own room. He fixed his gaze on the sky. It was resolutely blue. He swiped half-heartedly at the cut above his eyebrow and drank a tumbler of gin to numb the pain. Eventually, he fell into a doze.

Isabelle woke him to say goodbye when she left for work downstairs. She was worried, made him promise to write as soon as he could, to tell her that he and Jeanne were safe. She had sent for Puce to come and escort him to the meeting point at the Place de la République.

‘If I cannot convince you to use some caution,’ she said resignedly, ‘then at least you will have a pair of eyes to watch your back.’

When she had gone, Gui returned to his contemplation of the evening sky. His case stood packed at the foot of the bed. He picked at a crust of bread, stared at the clock. The sky outside welled into a deep indigo.

He should send word to his mother, he realized. Using the cheap paper and pencil on Isabelle’s desk, he scrawled a note.

Coming home. Have news. Am bringing a guest. Do not tell anyone of my arrival. Do not worry.

Love Gui

It would have to do. He was loath to write anything of Jeanne in case the letter was intercepted, and he would not know where to start, anyway. The sky retreated another shade. He opened his case, counting out a few centimes. There, lying on top was his treasured book. Its words had bewitched him in the grimy dormitory, spun sketches of wonder in his mind. To be a
pâtissier
– an architect, like Monsieur Carême – had seemed the purest, grandest vocation. Now Gui knew better. The creations were hollow, confections of money and power. He took up the book and fed it to the stove a page at a time.