The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (2 page)

- - -

I dozed off again and heard a noise. Something familiar, I was sure of it, but I couldn't tell from when. I was at school. School figured a lot in my fever dreams. I had hated it. Mum had always said she wasn't academic so I wouldn't be either, and that had pretty much sealed the deal, which in retrospect seems absolutely stupid. So for ages when I hallucinated my old teachers' faces in front of me, I didn't take it too seriously. Then one day I woke up very early, when the hospital was still cool and as quiet as it ever got, which wasn't very, and I turned my head carefully to the side, and there, just in the next bed, not a dream or a hallucination, was Mrs. Shawcourt, my old French teacher, gazing at me calmly.

I blinked in case she would go away. She didn't.

It was a small four-bed side ward I'd been put on, a few days or a couple of weeks earlier—it was hard to tell precisely—which seemed a bit strange; either I was infectious or I wasn't, surely. The other two beds were empty and over the days to come had a fairly speedy turnover of extremely old ladies who didn't seem to do much but cry.

“Hello,” she said. “I know you, don't I?”

I suddenly felt a flush, like I hadn't done my homework.

I had never done my homework. Me and Cath used to bunk off—French, it was totally useless, who could possibly need that?—and go sit around the back field where the teachers couldn't see you and speak with fake Mancunian accents about how crap Kidinsborough was and how we were going to leave the first chance we got.

“Anna Trent.”

I nodded.

“I had you for two years.”

I peered at her more closely. She'd always stood out in the school; she was by far the best dressed teacher, since most of them were a right bunch of slobs. She used to wear these really nicely fitted dresses that made her look a bit different. You could tell she hadn't gotten them down at Matalan. She'd had blond hair then…

I realized with a bit of a shock that now she didn't have any hair at all. She was very thin, but then she always had been thin, but now she was really, really thin.

I said the stupidest thing I could think of—in my defense, I really wasn't well.

“Are you sick then?”

“No,” said Mrs. Shawcourt. “I'm on holiday.”

There was a pause, then I grinned. I remembered that, actually, she was a really good teacher.

“I'm sorry to hear about your toes,” she said briskly.

I glanced down at the bandage covering my right foot.

“Ah, they'll be all right, just had a bit of a fall,” I said. Then I saw her face. And I realized that all the time people had been talking about my fever and my illness and my accident, nobody had actually thought to tell me the whole truth.

- - -

It couldn't be though. I could feel them.

I stared at her, and she unblinkingly held my gaze.

“I can feel them,” I said.

“I can't believe nobody told you,” she said. “Bloody hospitals. My darling, I heard them discuss it.”

I stared at the bandage again. I wanted to be sick. Then I was sick, in a big cardboard bedpan they left a supply of by the side of my bed, for every time I wanted to be sick.

- - -

Dr. Ed came by later and sat on my bed. I scowled at him.

“Now”—he checked his notes—“Anna, I'm sorry you weren't aware of the full gravity of the situation.”

“Because you kept talking about ‘accidents' and ‘regrettable incidents,'” I said crossly. “I didn't realize they'd gone altogether. AND I can feel them. They really hurt.”

He nodded.

“That's quite common, I'm afraid.”

“Why didn't anyone tell me? Everyone kept banging on about fever and bugs and things.”

“Well, that's what we were worried about. Losing a couple of toes was a lot less likely to kill you.”

“Well, that's good to know. And it's not ‘a couple of toes.' It's MY TOES.”

As we spoke, a nurse was gently unwrapping the bandages from my foot. I gulped, worried I was going to throw up again.

Did you ever play that game at school where you lie on your front with your eyes closed and someone pulls your arms taut above your head, then very slowly lowers them so it feels like your arms are going down a hole?

That was what this was like. My brain couldn't compute what it was seeing, what it could feel and knew to be true. My toes were there. They were there. But in front of my eyes was a curious diagonal slicing; two tiny stumps taken off in a descending line, very sharp, like it had been done on purpose with a razor.

“Now,” Dr. Ed was saying, “you know you are actually very lucky, because if you'd lost your big toe or your little one, you'd have had real problems with balance…”

I looked at him like he had horns growing out of his head.

“I absolutely and definitely do not feel lucky,” I said.

“Try being me,” came a voice from behind the next curtain, where Mrs. Shawcourt was awaiting her next round of chemotherapy.

Suddenly, without warning, we both started to laugh.

- - -

I was in the hospital for another three weeks. Loads of my mates came by and said I'd been in the paper and could they have a look (no, even when I got my dressing changed, I couldn't bear to look at them), and keeping me up to date on social events that, suddenly, I really found I'd lost interest in. In fact, the only person I could talk to was Mrs. Shawcourt, except of course she told me to call her Claire, which took a bit of getting used to and made me feel a bit too grown-up. She had two sons who came to visit, who always looked a bit pushed for time, and her daughters-in-law, who were dead nice and used to give me their gossip mags because Claire couldn't be bothered with them. Once they brought some little girls in, both of whom got completely freaked out by the wires and the smell and the beeping. It was the only time I saw Claire really, truly sad.

The rest of the time, we talked. Well, I talked. Mostly about how bored I was and how was I ever going to learn to walk properly again. (Physio was rubbish. For two things I had NEVER, ever thought about, except when I was getting a pedicure and not really even then, my toes were annoyingly useful when it came to getting about. Even more embarrassing, I had to use the same physio lab as people who had really horrible traumatic injuries and were in wheelchairs and stuff, and I felt the most horrendous fraud marching up and down parallel bars with an injury most people thought was quite amusing, if anything. So I could hardly complain. I did though.)

Claire understood. She was such easy company, and sometimes, when she was very ill, I'd read to her. Most of her books, though, were in French.

“I can't read this,” I said.

“You ought to be able to,” she said. “You had me.”

“Yeah, kind of,” I muttered.

“You were a good student,” said Claire. “You showed a real aptitude, I remember.”

Suddenly I flashed back on my first-year report card. In amid the “doesn't apply herselfs” and “could do betters,” I suddenly remembered my French mark had been good. Why hadn't I applied myself?

“I don't know,” I said. “I thought school was stupid.”

Claire shook her head. “But I've met your parents; they're lovely. You're from such a nice family.”

“You don't have to live with them,” I said, then felt guilty that I'd been mean about them. They'd been in every single day even if, as Dad complained almost constantly, the parking charges were appalling.

“You still live at home?” she asked, surprised, and I felt a bit defensive.

“Neh. I lived with my boyfriend for a bit, but he turned out to be a pillock, so I moved back in, that's all.”

“I see,” said Claire. She looked at her watch. It was only 9:30 in the morning. We'd already been up for three hours and lunch wasn't till 12:00.

“If you like,” she said, “I'm bored too. If I taught you some French, you could read to me. And I would feel less like a big, sick, bored bald plum who does nothing but dwell on the past and feel old and stupid and useless. Would you like that?”

I looked down at the magazine I was holding, which had an enormous picture of Kim Kardashian's arse on it. And she had ten toes.

“Yeah, all right,” I said.

- - -

1972

“It's nothing,” the man was saying, speaking to be heard over the stiff sea breeze and the honking of the ferries and the rattle of the trains. “It is a tiny…look,
la manche
. You can swim it. We won't.”

This
did
nothing
to
stem
the
tide
of
tears
rolling
down
the
girl's cheeks.

“I would,” she said. “I will swim it for you.”

“You,” he said, “will go back and finish school and do wonderful things and be happy.”

“I don't want to,” she groaned. “I want to stay here with you.”

The
man
grimaced
and
attempted
to
stop
her
tears
with
kisses. They were dripping on his new, oddly shiny uniform.

“Well, they will make me march up and down like an ape, you see. And I will be an idiot with nothing else to do and nothing else to think about except for you. Shhh, boutchou. Shhh. We will be together again, you see.”

“I love you,” said the girl. “I will never love anyone so much my entire life.”

“I love you too,” said the man. “I care for you and I love you and I shall see you again and I shall write you letters and you shall finish school and you shall see, all will be well.”

The
girl's sobs started to quiet.

“I can't…I can't bear it,” she said.

“Ah, love,” said the man, his accent strong. “That is what it is, the need to bear things.”

He
buried
his
face
in
her
hair.

“
Alors
. My love. Come back. Soon.”

“I will,” said the girl. “Of course I will come back soon.”

M
y two brothers stopped coming to visit me the instant it was clear I wasn't actually going to snuff it—I loved them, but at twenty-two and twenty, you have a lot of other things to do that aren't talking to your weird big sister about her weird accident in the hospital. Cath, bless her, of course, she was brilliant—I couldn't do without her, but she worked really long hours at the hair salon. It was a forty-five-minute bus ride from the hospital, so she couldn't come that often, though I so appreciated it when she did. She liked to tell me who won hideous hairstyle of the week and all the times she tried to convince them to make it less hideous but they fought on regardless, desperate to emulate a Kardashian, even though they had short, greasy brown wisps that wouldn't take an extension. They'd be back in a week shouting and screaming and threatening to sue because what was left of their hair was falling out.

“I tell 'em,” said Cath. “They don't listen. Nobody listens to me.”

She'd made me look in the bathroom mirror and told me I'd be all right. I looked absolutely hellish. My blue eyes were bloodshot all the time from the antibiotics and looked a bit yellow; my curly pale hair—normally blond with the help of Cath, now all growing out—was frizzy and all over the place, like a crazy person; and my pale skin was the same color and texture as hospital porridge. Cath tried to say encouraging things, mostly because she's like that and also because she has to say encouraging things in the salon to sixty-year-old women who are two hundred pounds overweight and come in asking to look like Jennifer Lawrence, but we both knew it was a vain effort.

A lot of the time, though, it was just me and Claire. It was a weird situation, in that we got to know each other a lot faster than I supposed we would have otherwise. But I also realized, with a bit of a shock, that I was kind of glad, really, that I wasn't with Darr anymore. He was a nice bloke and everything, but not one for conversation. If he'd had to come and see me every day, it would have been a disaster—we'd have been talking about nothing but fries and his favorite football team by day three. I don't know how we'd have carried on exactly, without the possibility of a snog. (I still had a tube in my arm and a tube up my pee hole—sorry—and even if I didn't, there was something about the idea of only having eight toes that made the idea of ever feeling sexy again rather unlikely.) Being sick gave me a lot of perspective; I'd been gutted when we broke up—he kept trying to be unfaithful, and in a town the size of Kidinsborough, that didn't stay secret for long. His defense—that he'd been serially unsuccessful—didn't help him, although I had liked the little flat we'd rented together. That was my one regret, even now. I missed that flat.

But he gave my brother Joe a box of chocolates to pass on to me (which Joe promptly ate, being twenty) and texted me to see if I was okay. I think he might even have taken me back, toes or no toes. I had heard his dating had been about as successful single as it had been with me, though that might just have been Cath trying to make me feel better.

But, oh, I was glad to have Claire. I'd bought a cheap smartphone six months before and now cursed my luck for not having something to play with that had anything better than, basically, Snake on it. I grumbled aloud at hospitals not having Wi-Fi connections, even when they told me they would interfere with the machines. (I'm not a scientist, right, but I bet that is totally, like, not even true.) I read lots of books, but there's a difference between reading a book when you're tired after working all day (desperate to get into the bath and enjoy a few pages with a cup of tea, even when Joe is banging on the door shouting about hair gel) and having nothing else to do.

Plus, I was on lots of medication and it was a bit tricky to concentrate. There was a telly in the far corner blaring away, but it was set to the same channel all day and I got really tired of watching loud, fat people shouting at each other, so I kept my headphones on. It was kind of great to see people, except I had nothing to say to them except how much fluid my wound was draining and other fricking disgusting things, so I didn't really like chatting.

The nurses were a great laugh, but they were always in a rush, and the doctors were always knackered-looking and not really interested—they were all interested in my foot, but it might as well have been connected to a cat for all the interest they showed in me above the ankle. And everyone else on the ward was old. Really, really old. Really “Where am I? Is this the war?” old. I felt sorry for them and their anxious, exhausted-looking families coming in every day to hear “no change,” but I couldn't really communicate with them. I didn't realize young people—youngish—don't often get that sick. Or if they did, they were over in surgery, having glamorous bits chopped off, or in accident and emergency recovering from a fabulous night out that got a bit out of hand, not over here in medicine, which was aging patients with a million things wrong with them and nowhere else to go.

So it was an absolute relief to sit calmly with Claire and repeat, steadily, rote memorizing
avoir
and
être
and the difference between the recent past and the ongoing past and learning how to roll my
r
's properly. (“You must,” she said, over and over again, “work so hard on your accent. Be French. Be the Frenchiest French accent of anyone. Do a massive Inspector Clouseau and wave your arms about.” “I feel like an idiot,” I said. “You will,” agreed Claire, “until you speak some French and a French person understands you.”)

We puzzled our way through children's books and flashcards and test extracts. It was good for me to realize that Claire was enjoying it too, much more than her short, slightly awkward conversations with her sons—she had been divorced for a long time, I found out.

Finally, eventually, like a musician tentatively picking up an instrument, we started to speak a little—haltingly, painfully—in French. I found it easier to listen than to speak, but Claire was endlessly patient—we had so little else to do—and so gentle when she corrected me that I couldn't believe what an idiot I had been not to have paid closer attention to this wonderful teacher when I'd had the chance.

“Did you live in France—
est-ce que tu habitas en France?
” I asked slowly one dank spring morning, when the green buds on the trees outside seemed to be enjoying the rain, but nobody else did. It was always the same temperature inside the hospital anyway, a hermetically sealed ship disconnected from the outside world.

“A long time ago,” she replied, not quite meeting my eyes. “And not for very long.”

- - -

1972

It
was, Claire knew, the daftest form of rebellion. Hardly rebellion at all, really. Still. She sat, fixed at the breakfast table, staring at her cereal. She was too old, at seventeen, for children's cereal, she knew. She'd rather have coffee, but it wasn't a fight she was prepared to take on. On this other matter, however…

“You're not wearing those things to my chapel.”

Those
things
referred
to
a
new
pair
of
flares
Claire
had
saved
up
for. She'd had a Christmas holiday job in Chelsea Girl. Her father had had a very difficult time reconciling himself to the fact that she was willing to take on the mantle of hard work (which he did believe in, very much) against the fact that it was very clearly taking place in a den of iniquity that sold harlot's clothing. Her mother, as so often, must have had a word behind the scenes; she had never, and would never, dare contradict the Reverend Marcus Forest in public. Few would.

Claire
glanced
down
at
her
denim-clad legs. She had spent her entire life being relentlessly unfashionable. Her father thought fashion was a fast track to eternal torment. Her mother instead had made her pinafores and long school skirts and dirndls for Sundays.

But
working
had
opened
her
eyes, made her feel more grown-up. The other girls in the shop were twenty, older even, worldly wise. They discussed nightclubs and boys and makeup (strictly banned at Claire's house) and found Claire's life (everyone knew the Reverend) hilarious. The older, sophisticated girls took her under their wings, made her dress up in the latest clothes, cooing over her slender figure and undyed pale blond hair that always made her look, as far as she was concerned, washed out (although there weren't many mirrors in the house). The boys hadn't asked her out at school. She had told herself that it was because of her father but feared, inside, that it was something else, that she was so quiet, and uninteresting, and her pale hair and eyebrows meant she sometimes felt she was barely there at all.

As
the
three
weeks
passed, every day she grew a little bolder. It finished nastily one weekend, when her father was trying to write his Christmas sermon and she arrived back in from the shop with her eyes heavily made up, dramatically kohled in a shimmering emerald green with brown shading all the way around the socket and—most shocking of all—her eyebrows, colored in dark brown with a pencil one of the girls had produced. She had stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror of the strange, mysterious creature she had become, no longer pale and colorless. She did not look skinny and gaunt; instead, she looked slender and glamorous. Cassie had pulled her pale hair off her face and pinned back her childish fringe, and it added years to her. All the girls had laughed and insisted she come out with them that Saturday.

Claire
didn't think so.

Her
father
stood
up, furious.

“Get it off,” he said quietly. “Take it off. Not under my roof.”

He
didn't get angry or shout. He never did; that wasn't his way. He just told her exactly how it would be. In Claire's mind, the voice of her father and the voice of God, in whom she believed completely, were very much the same. There was no doubt.

Her
mother
followed
her
to
the
avocado-colored bathroom and gave her a consoling cuddle.

“You do look lovely,” she said, as Claire furiously wiped her face with a brown washcloth. “You know,” she said, “in a year or two, you can go off to secretarial school or teacher training, and you can do whatever you like. It's not long to wait, my darling.”

But
to
Claire, it felt like a million years away. All the other girls got to dress up and go out and have boyfriends with tinny old cars or terrifying motorbikes.

“That job…I thought it was a good idea but…” Her mother shook her head. “You know what he's like. It's driving him crazy. I just thought you needed a bit of independence…”

Then
she
disappeared
and
Claire
heard, late into the night, a conversation, whispered, that she wasn't meant to overhear, but could tell, always, by the tone that it was about her. It was difficult being an only child sometimes. Her father seemed to treat her as someone who wanted nothing more than to get into terrible trouble at five seconds' notice, which drove her mad. Her mother did what she could, but when the Reverend went into one of his glowering sulks, they could last for days, and it made the atmosphere in the house very, very unpleasant. He was used to the two women in his life doing his bidding without question. But Claire yearned, more than anything else, for a bit of freedom.

The
job
was
over, even after the shop offered to keep her on as a Saturday girl. She was desperate to do it, but it wasn't worth the grief. So she remained in her role of working hard at school—they had mentioned university, but the Reverend wasn't a huge fan of education for women and wanted to keep her closer to home than York or Liverpool. Claire didn't really think it could happen. Sometimes, late at night after her parents had gone to bed, she'd stay up late watching the movie on BBC2 and feeling a tiny clutch of panic around her heart that she would stay in Kidinsborough forever, watching her parents get older and older.

Two
months
later, in early March, her mother came to breakfast with a sly expression on her face and an envelope with a stripe of red and blue airmail around the corner of the pale blue paper and looping, exotic-looking handwriting.