The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (27 page)

I shook my head.

“Then do you fancy a walk? I've been hunched over a stove all day.”

- - -

I needn't have worried about the ballerina shoes. They were light, but they fitted me beautifully, even on the toe end of my right foot, and were like walking on air. We crossed the Pont Neuf and headed down to the Louvre. As we did, old, wrought iron lampposts came on, pop pop pop over our heads, and the long chains of fairy lights that lined the Seine sprang into life, glowing in the dusk.

“I love this time of night,” said Laurent. “All the commuters have gone, all the day-trippers have vanished back toward…well, wherever day-trippers go, I have no idea.”

It was true. Above the scent of exhaust pipes and hanging baskets and garlic sizzling in the pans of a thousand restaurant kitchens was the sense of excitement, of the night beginning. Chatting about food, and restaurants, and bits and pieces, we turned into the grand place, and I nearly stumbled. Laurent proffered me his elbow without even thinking about it, and I took it. We walked under a huge stone arch, and I couldn't help but gasp; even though I knew about it and had seen it in films of course, I'd never seen it before: we were in Place du Louvre. The huge glass pyramid—with another, slightly farther away—was lit up in glittering white and silver, as if it had drifted into the eighteenth century from outer space.

“Isn't it beautiful?” said Laurent. At this time of the evening, the museum was long shut, and there were only a few people dotted here and there, taking pictures of the fountains and the amazing building of the Louvre itself. The rest of the huge space felt like ours. Above us, the stars were popping out.

“It makes me so proud, all of this.”

“You're a proud kind of person though, aren't you?” I said, teasing him.

He shrugged. “No.”

“Well, what kind of a person are you?”

“Well, I am dedicated, you know. I care about my work very much. Yes, I am proud of it. I want it to be the best, the best it can possibly be. Otherwise, what's the point, you understand?”

I nodded.

“You feel this too?”

I thought about it. I did see—or felt—since I'd arrived here that I did understand the desire for excellence, for living in a way that didn't settle for good enough. But I'd also seen what it cost—father and son not talking, Thierry ill, Alice.

“I only ever wanted to be happy,” I said quietly. It sounded like a low aspiration sometimes. Laurent shot me a sideways glance.

“Are you?”

I looked at him, wondering. Then I turned around and looked at the glorious vista spread out in front of us. I advanced toward the pyramid, my arms outstretched.

“I think you can be happy in Paris,” I said.

“Be careful!” shouted Laurent suddenly. “You'll set off the alarms! They'll think you're here to steal the Mona Lisa.”

“Really?” I said, jumping back, slightly panicked.

“Uhm, no,” he said. “But I like seeing you startled.”

I turned toward him.

“Your mouth goes open like this—‘o'—and your eyes pop open,” he said. “I like it. I…”

Then, as if losing his drift, he covered the few steps toward me, grabbed me in his arms, and kissed me fiercely under the floodlights. I felt the torch of a passing security guard quickly pass over us before I gave myself up entirely to his hard, hungry mouth, his hand on the back of my neck forcing me to him, and I stopped thinking about anything at all.

- - -

Claire wondered about packing. It was summertime, of course, but she felt cold these days, always so cold. Like a child who needed her blanket wherever she went. Ricky and Ian wouldn't help her to pack—they were sulking with her—and Montserrat was none too keen on the plan either. Anna had sent her some times of trains but hadn't indicated when she'd come back to pick her up—she was working too, of course. It was a lot to ask.

It was a lot to ask, yes. And she was a stubborn selfish old woman. But even so.

She carefully got herself up the stairs and opened her cupboard door. It was late, and she couldn't sleep. She could never seem to sleep at the right times. During the day, she would doze all over the place, but the nights were very long. She'd taken her painkillers, which normally knocked her out, but tonight she felt slightly excited, more mobile than she'd felt in quite a while. Privately she thought it might be the excitement of the journey that was giving her extra energy, extra strength. This feeling motivated her onward. There was no one sleeping in tonight as people did closer to the chemo. Tonight it was just her. She was supposed to be recuperating, getting ready for a new surgery. Instead, she was packing for a holiday. The thought made her heart tremble in anticipation.

Illness made you so old. She knew Patsy's mother, who was a bouncy sixty-two, older than her, who had Botox and teeth whitening and went to aqua-aerobics and looked after the children two days a week when Patsy went to work as an HR manager for the prison service. She was, in fact, exactly the kind of granny Claire would have liked to have been, except instead of the soft play and cinema and sweets kind of granny, she'd have been an art galleries and culture and stories and libraries and restaurants kind of grandmother, she liked to think. She would have talked to them about politics and their place in the world and never ever let them think that Kidinsborough was the limit of their horizons. Patsy's mother thought she was the most terrific snob. Claire supposed she was.

There they were, lined up. The green dress and the yellow floral, both of them faded and zipped into plastic bags. Claire wondered, if she'd had a daughter, would she have enjoyed these clothes? So exquisitely made—and vintage was so in again these days. Although, it suddenly occurred to her, she'd lost so much weight with her illness she could probably fit them again. The very idea made her want to laugh with the blackness of it. Her, bent over, bowed down, in the clothes of a young girl…she blinked, less sure now she did want to pack.

And next to them, her wedding dress. She'd never been able to throw it away.

It made her feel dreadfully guilty now to look at it, remembering how impatient she had gotten with the little Kidinsborough seamstress, who had fussed around her and stuck her with pins and was nothing like the efficient ladies of the rue du Faubourg.

- - -

Claire
had
let
her
mother
choose
the
dress. It was ludicrously fussy, with a nylon train and long sleeves and a high ruffled neck, so as not to offend some of the Reverend's older parishioners.

She
liked
Richard, she really did. He was kind and he drove down on a Friday night from university in his car and impressed her mother and was polite to her father and called him sir, and they would go out to dinner and he'd tell her about his plans for setting up a business and push her to work harder, and she had. She was going to just about scrape through teacher training college, and he was so touchingly pleased and interested in her. After three years, he asked her, nervously, if she would like to get married, and she was so busy making everything normal around her and forgetting about Paris that she woke up one day and found that it had worked, that the great crevasse had finally healed over and that marrying Richard and having a nice house and a life and maybe moving out of Kidinsborough would actually be rather fun.

And
the
weird
thing
was, to begin with, it was. It was fun. When the boys were small, they would load them up into their Austin Mini Metro and drive down to Cornwall and Devon and spend holidays sheltering from the rain and eating chips on the sea front. They'd moved into a nice detached house—Richard had set up his business in town, so her leaving Kidinsborough dream had not come true—and the boys had had music lessons and football clubs and school friends and birthday parties, and everything was as nice as it could be. If Claire ever felt a sense of “Is this it? Is this really it?” well, a lot of people felt that way, especially women with children in the late '70s and teachers in the early '80s, and she put it down to normal ennui.

And
then
the
boys
had
gone
to
college
and
Richard
had
had
an
affair
with
a
girl
in
his
office
that
wracked
him
so
solidly
with
guilt
she
couldn't even believe for a second that he'd gotten enough enjoyment out of it to be worth the bother. She would probably have quite happily let him over that too, until her unruffled reaction to his tortured revelation quite suddenly derailed them both.

He
had
been
shaking and drenched with sweat the night he'd come home. She was making corned beef salad with salad cream. She hated corned beef, it had occurred to her. The boys liked it so she'd served it every third Thursday for about twenty years. Her overwhelming memory of the evening, during which Richard sobbed and begged forgiveness, was a curious sense of relief that she'd never have to eat corned beef again.

It
was
when
he
had
looked
up
at
her, desperate for her to forgive him, to make it all right, or even to start tearing at his clothes in a fit of deadly jealousy, attacking him with the shearing scissors, that he'd realized. That it gradually dawned on his face that his affair didn't really, at the end of the day, matter to her that much because she wasn't in love with him, not really, hadn't ever been. And that's when he'd gotten really angry.

- - -

Claire fingered the dress. She had loved him, in her way, as much as she could. Which just wasn't enough, not in a marriage. And she'd felt so lucky too; he had been scrupulously fair in her settlement, always kept the love and attention of his boys. A lot of her friends had not been that lucky. A lot of her friends who had married in the full heat of desperate, undying love, pure soul mates, who had then come to hate their partners and turned bitter, living in much worse unhappiness than she and Richard ever had. There was nothing to say that she and Thierry too, with all their class and cultural differences, wouldn't also have ended up tearing each other apart in despair, ruining their children in the process, whereas Ricky and Ian were as well-adjusted as it was possible to be. The way the world was now, who was to say that level-headed, compatible companionship wasn't the way to run marriage anyway?

Still, she fingered the dress sadly. Oh, there was never any accounting for the human heart. And no one looking at her now, she thought, would ever see anything other than the wispy bald head, the lack of eyebrows, the weight loss. No one would ever see the tentative bride, or the joyously happy teenage lover, or the unfulfilled housewife, or the middle-aged woman who had rather enjoyed living on her own again with no boxer shorts to wash and no huge dinners to make.

It was a terrible dress. A daughter would never have wished to wear it. She sighed. She should probably go to her scarf drawers. Her friends had presented her with a succession of jaunty scarves to wear over her head. She hated them all. She hated having to pretend to be jaunty when all she wanted to do was throw up. But it was so kind of them. It showed that they were thinking of her. And people liked sick people to be jaunty; it made them feel less scared and awkward. So she had better pack a few.

She felt, for the last time, the hem of the floral yellow dress with its tiny picked-out daisies.
Alors
, she thought. Whenever she thought about Thierry, she always thought about him in French, as if she was adding a layer of code to her most innermost secrets. It was absurd to think on some level she was trying to hide her thoughts—from who? From God? If God still sounded like the Reverend, he didn't speak any other languages.

Alors
. Thierry would get a shock when he saw her. Mind you, from the sound of things, he'd changed a bit too. And did it matter, in the end?

- - -

We pulled ourselves away. He smiled at me, completely unselfconsciously. I couldn't help it, there was something very attractive about the fact that he absolutely didn't give a damn about what we were doing or whether anybody saw us. It also made him look a bit wolfish.

“Come with me,” he said.

I smiled. It felt a little late to play the coquette now, given that I had the pink bra on and everything. But my heart was beating painfully, partly from the excitement, partly from the nerves.

“I shouldn't,” I said. “It's turning me into a double agent.”

He laughed. “I need a double agent,” he said. “No. Forget that. I need you.”

He took my hand in his great big one. It was hard to believe that his thick fingers could make such delicacies out of sugar and cocoa and butter.

“Race you back to the bike,” he said.

It had gotten later, and the streets around the Île de la Cité were nearly deserted as the crowds went to eat in the Marais or further north.

“I can't run,” I said. Truthfully, I hadn't tried.

“Of course you can,” he said, looking at me severely. “You might jiggle a bit, but I like that.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“On your mark…get set…”

“No!”

“Go!”

We burst off across the great Place du Louvre, my thin soles crunching against the gravel. It had been so long. The soft evening wind blew in my face, my hair out behind me. Laurent was very fast and looked very young, funneling along, occasionally turning his head to laugh at me, the wind whipping his curls in his eyes.