Sylviane Caillou. Vanished as so many do; stolen from her car seat aged eighteen months, in front of a chemist’s near La Villette. Stolen away with her changing-bag and toys, last seen wearing a cheap silver baby bangle with a lucky charm – a little cat – dangling from the clasp.
That wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been. And even if it was, after all this time . . .
You choose your family, Mother said. As I chose you and you chose me. That girl – she wouldn’t have cherished you. She wouldn’t have known how to care for you: how to slice the apple widthways to show the star inside, how to tie a medicine bag, how to banish demons by banging on a tin pan, how to sing the wind to sleep. She wouldn’t have taught you any of that—
And didn’t we do OK, Vianne? Didn’t I promise we’d be OK?
I have it still, that little cat charm. I don’t remember the baby bangle – probably she sold it or gave it away – but I half-remember the toys, a red plush elephant and a small brown bear, much-loved and missing an eye. And the charm is still there in my mother’s box, a cheap thing, such as a child might buy, tied with a piece of red ribbon. It’s there with her cards, and a few other things: a photograph of us taken when I was six, a stash of sandalwood, some newspaper clippings, a ring. A drawing I did at my first school – my only school – in the days when we were still going to settle down someday.
Of course I never wear it. I don’t even like to touch it now; there are too many secrets locked in there, like scent that needs only human warmth to release it. As a rule I don’t touch anything in that box – and yet I don’t quite dare to throw it away. Too much ballast slows you down – but too little and I could blow away like a dandelion seed, losing myself for ever on the wind.
Zozie has been with me for four days now, and already her personality has begun to affect everything she touches. I don’t know how it happened – a temporary moment of weakness, perhaps. I certainly hadn’t intended to offer her a job. For a start, I can’t afford to pay her much, though she’s happy to wait until I can – and it seems so natural for her to be here, as if she has been with me all my life.
It began on the day of the Accident – the day she made the chocolate, and drank it with me in the kitchen, hot and sweet with fresh chillies and chocolate curls. Rosette drank some in her little mug, then played on the floor as I sat in silence – Zozie watching me with that smile, and her eyes all narrowed like a cat’s.
The circumstances were exceptional. On any other day, at any other time, I would have been better prepared. But on that day – with Thierry’s ring still in my pocket, and Rosette at her worst, and Anouk so quiet since she heard, and the long empty day stretching ahead—
At any other time, I would have held fast. But on that day—
It’s all right. I know what you need.
What, exactly? What does she know? That a dish that was broken came back whole? It’s too absurd; no one would believe it, still less that a four-year-old child had performed the trick, a four-year-old child who can’t even talk.
‘You look tired, Yanne,’ Zozie said. ‘Must be hard, looking after all this.’
Silently I nodded.
The memory of Rosette’s Accident sat between us like the last piece of cake at a party.
Don’t say it, I told her silently, just as I’d tried to tell Thierry. Don’t say it, please; don’t put it in words.
I thought I felt her brief response. A sigh; a smile; a glimpse of something half-seen in shadow. A soft shuffle of cards, scented with sandalwood.
A silence.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.
Zozie shrugged. ‘So drink your chocolate.’
‘You saw it, though.’
‘I see all sorts of things.’
‘Such as?’
‘I can see you’re tired.’
‘I don’t sleep well.’
She looked at me in silence for a time. Her eyes were all summer, freckled with gold. I ought to know your favourites, I thought, almost dreamily. Perhaps I’ve simply lost the knack . . .
‘Tell you what,’ she said at last. ‘Let me look after the shop for you. I was born in a shop – I know what to do. You take Rosette and have a lie-down. If I need you, I’ll shout. Go on. I’ll enjoy it.’
That was just four days ago. Neither of us has referred to that day since then. Rosette, of course, does not yet understand that in the real world, a broken dish must stay broken, however much we may wish it otherwise. And Zozie has made no effort to broach the subject again, and for that I am grateful. She knows that something happened, of course; but seems content to let it go.
‘What kind of a shop were you born in, Zozie?’
‘A bookshop. You know, the New Age kind.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘My mother was into that kind of thing. Shop-bought magic. Tarot cards. Selling incense and candles to blissed-out hippies with no money and bad hair.’
I smiled, though it made me a little uneasy.
‘But that was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember much of it now.’
‘But do you still – believe?’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I believe we can make a difference.’
Silence.
‘And you?’
‘I used to,’ I said. ‘But not any more.’
‘May I ask why?’
I shook my head. ‘Later, perhaps.’
‘OK,’ she said.
I know, I know. It’s dangerous. Every action – even the smallest – has consequences. Magic comes at a high price. It took me a long time to understand that – after Lansquenet, after Les Laveuses – but now it seems so very clear, as the consequences of our journeying widen around us like ripples on a lake.
Take my mother, so generous with her gifts, handing out good luck and goodwill as, inside her, the cancer grew like the interest from a deposit account she never even knew she had. The universe balances its books. Even such a small thing as a charm, a cantrip, a circle drawn in sand – all must be paid for. In full. In blood.
There’s a symmetry, you see. For every piece of luck, a blow; for everyone we helped, a hurt. A red silk sachet over our door – and somewhere else, a shadow falls. A candle burnt to banish ill-luck – and somebody’s house across the road catches fire and burns to the ground. A chocolate festival; the death of a friend.
A piece of malchance.
An Accident.
That’s why I can’t confide in Zozie. I like her too much to lose her trust. The children seem to like her, too. There’s something youthful about her somehow, something more akin to Anouk’s age than mine, that makes her more approachable.
Perhaps it’s her hair – long, loose and dyed pink at the front – or her exuberantly coloured charity-shop clothes, flung together like the contents of a child’s dressing-up box, but oddly right on her, somehow. Today she is wearing a nip-waisted fifties dress in sky-blue, with a pattern of sailing-boats, and yellow ballet shoes, quite wrong for November – not that she cares. Not that she would ever care.
I remember being like that, once. I remember that defiance. But motherhood changes everything. Motherhood makes cowards of us all. Cowards, liars – and sometimes worse.
Les Laveuses. Anouk. And – oh! That wind.
Four days – and I am still surprised to find myself relying on Zozie, not just to keep an eye on Rosette, as Madame Poussin used to do, but for all kinds of little things in the shop. Wrapping, packaging, cleaning, ordering. She says she likes it – tells me she always dreamed of working in a chocolaterie – and yet she never helps herself to the stock as Madame Poussin often did, or exploits her position by asking for samples.
I haven’t yet mentioned her to Thierry. I’m not sure why, except that I feel he will not approve. Perhaps because of the extra cost; perhaps because of Zozie herself, who is as far removed from the staid Madame Poussin as it is possible to be.
With customers she is cheerily – sometimes worryingly – informal
. She talks constantly as she wraps boxes, weighs chocolates, points out novelties. And she has a knack for making people talk about themselves: enquires about Madame Pinot’s back-ache; chats with the postman on his round. She knows Fat Nico’s favourites, flirts outrageously with Jean-Louis and Paupaul, the would-be artists touting for customers around Le P’tit Pinson, and chats with Richard and Mathurin, the two old men she calls ‘The Patriots’, who sometimes arrive at the café at eight in the morning and rarely leave until dinner-time.
She knows Anouk’s school friends by name, asks after her teachers, discusses her clothes. And yet she never makes me feel uncomfortable; never asks the questions anyone else in her place would ask.
I felt the same with Armande Voizin – back in the days of Lansquenet. Unruly, mischievous, naughty Armande, whose scarlet petticoats I still sometimes see out of the corner of my eye, whose voice imagined in a crowd – so eerily like that of my mother – still sometimes makes me turn and stare.
Zozie is nothing like her, of course. Armande was eighty when I knew her: dried-up, cantankerous and old. And yet I can see her in Zozie – her exuberant style, her appetite for everything. And if Armande had a spark of what my mother called magic . . .
But we do not speak of these things now. Our pact is silent, but nonetheless strict. Any indiscretion – even as much as a spark lit – and once again, the little house of cards goes up in flames. It’s happened before in Lansquenet, in Les Laveuses and a hundred places before that. But not any more. No. This time, we stay.
She came in early today, just as Anouk was leaving for school. I left her alone for less than an hour – just time enough to take Rosette for a walk – and when I got back the place looked brighter, somehow; less cluttered, more attractive. She’d changed the display in the shop window, spreading a swatch of dark-blue velvet on to the pyramid of tins that filled it, and on top she had placed a pair of bright-red, shiny, high-heeled shoes, brimming over with foil-wrapped chocolates in red and gold.
The effect is eccentric, but arresting nevertheless. The shoes – the same red shoes she was wearing on that first day – seem to shine in the dark shop window, and the sweets like buried treasure spill across the velvet in cubes and fragments of coloured light.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Zozie, as I came in. ‘I thought it could do with a bit of a lift.’
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Shoes and chocolates . . .’
Zozie grinned. ‘Twin passions of mine.’
‘So – what’s your favourite?’ I asked. Not that I really wanted to know, but professional curiosity made me ask. Four days, and I am no closer to guessing her favourite than I was before.
She shrugged. ‘I like them all. But the bought ones aren’t the same, are they? You used to make your own, you said?’
‘I did. But then I had more time.’
She looked at me. ‘You’ve got plenty of time. Let me look after the front of the shop, and you can work your magic in the back.’
‘Magic?’
But Zozie was already making plans – seemingly unaware of the impact of that casual word – plans for a line of hand-made truffles, the simplest of all chocolates to make; and then, perhaps some mendiants – my own favourites – sprinkled with almonds, sour cherries and fat yellow sultanas.
I could do it with my eyes closed. Even a child can make mendiants, and Anouk had often helped me in the days of Lansquenet, selecting the plumpest raisins, the sweetest cranberries (always keeping a generous portion aside for herself) and arranging them on to the discs of melted chocolate, dark or light, in careful designs.
I haven’t made mendiants since then. They remind me too much of those days, of the little bakery with the wheatsheaf over the door, of Armande, of Joséphine, of Roux—
‘You can ask what you like for hand-made chocolates,’ Zozie was saying, oblivious. ‘And if you put out a couple of chairs, made a bit of space here –’ she showed me the spot – ‘then people could even sit down for a while, have a drink, perhaps, a slice of cake. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Friendly, I mean. A way of getting them inside.’
‘Hm.’
I wasn’t altogether sure. It sounded too much like Lansquenet. A chocolaterie should remain a place of business; its patrons should be customers and not friends. Otherwise one day the inevitable happens; and the box, once opened, cannot be shut. Besides, I knew what Thierry would say . . .
‘I don’t think so,’ I said at last.
Zozie said nothing, but gave me a look. I feel I have disappointed her, somehow. An absurd feeling – and yet—
When did I become so fearful, I ask? When did I begin to care so much? My voice sounds dry and fussy, like that of some prude. I wonder, does Anouk hear it too?
‘OK. It was just an idea.’
And where’s the possible harm? I thought. It’s only chocolate, after all; a dozen or so batches of truffles, just to keep myself in practice. Thierry will think I am wasting my time; but why should that stop me? What do I care?
‘Well – I suppose I could make a few boxes for Christmas.’
I still have my pans, the copper ones and the enamel, all carefully wrapped and boxed in the cellar. I have even kept the granite slab on which I temper the melted chocolate; the sugar thermometers; the plastic and the ceramic moulds; the dippers and scrapers and slotted spoons. Everything is there, clean and stored and ready to go. Rosette might enjoy it, I thought – and Anouk.
‘Great!’ said Zozie. ‘You can teach me, too.’
Well, why not? What harm could there be?
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it a try.’
So that was that. Back in business at last, without any fuss. And if any qualms remain in my mind—
There can be no harm in a batch of truffles. Or a tray of mendiants, or a cake or two. The Kindly Ones do not concern themselves with such trivial things as chocolates.
Or so I hope – as with every day Vianne Rocher, Sylviane Caillou and even Yanne Charbonneau recede more safely into the past, becoming smoke, becoming history, a footnote, names upon a faded list.
The ring upon my right hand feels strange against fingers long accustomed to being bare. That name – Le Tresset – feels even stranger. I try it on, as if for size, halfway between a smile and not.
Yanne le Tresset.
It’s just a name.
Bullshit, says Roux, that veteran name-changer, shapeshifter, gypsy and pinpointer of home truths. It’s not just a name. It’s a sentence.
2
Thursday, 15th November
SO THERE IT is. She’s wearing his ring. Thierry, of all people – Thierry, who doesn’t like her hot chocolate, or know anything about her, not even her real name. She says she hasn’t made any plans. She says she’s still getting used to it. Wearing it like a pair of shoes that need breaking in before they feel right.
A simple wedding, Maman says. A registry office, no priest, no church. But we know better. He’ll get his way. The whole hog, with Rosette and me in matching frocks. It’s going to be terrible.
I said so to Zozie, and she pulled a face and said each to his own, which was a laugh, really, because no one in their right mind could imagine that those two could ever be really in love.
Well, maybe he does. What does he know? He came round again last night and took us out – not to P’tit Pinson, this time, but to an expensive place on the river, where we could see the boats go by. I wore a dress, and he said I looked very nice, but I ought to have brushed my hair, and Zozie looked after Rosette at the shop, because Thierry said it wasn’t a suitable place for a small child (though we all knew that wasn’t the real reason).
Maman was wearing the ring he’d given her. A great, fat, hateful diamond, perched on her hand like a shiny bug. She doesn’t wear it in the shop (it gets in the way of everything), and last night she kept playing with it, twisting it round and round on her finger, as if it felt uncomfortable.
Getting used to it yet? he says. As if we could e
ver get used to that, or to him, or to the way he treats us, like spoilt children, to be bought and bribed. And he gave Maman a mobile phone, just to keep in touch, he said – I can’t believe you’ve never had one before – and afterwards we had champagne (which I hate) and oysters (which I also hate), and a chocolate soufflé ice cream, which was quite nice, but not as nice as the ones Maman used to make, as well as being very, very small.
And Thierry laughed a lot (at least, at first), and called me jeune fille, and talked about the chocolaterie. Turns out he’s going to London again, and this time he wanted Maman to go with him, but she was too busy, she said, and maybe after the Christmas rush.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘I thought you said business was slow.’
‘I’m trying something new,’ said Maman, and told him about the new line of truffles she was planning, and how Zozie was helping out for a while, and how she was bringing her old things out of storage. She talked about it for a long time, and her face was pink, the way it gets when she’s really into something, and the more she talked, the quieter Thierry got, and the less he laughed, so that finally she stopped talking and looked a bit embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to hear all this.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ said Thierry. ‘And this was Zozie’s idea, was it?’ He didn’t sound too pleased about it.
Maman smiled. ‘We like her a lot. Don’t we, Annie?’
I said we did.
‘But do you think she’s management material? I mean, she may be all right, but let’s face it, in the long run you’re going to need a bit more than some waitress you poached off Laurent Pinson.’
‘Management material?’ said Maman.
‘Well, I was thinking, when we’re married, you might actually want someone to run the place.’
When we’re married. Oh, boy.
Maman looked up. She was frowning a little.
The Lollipop Shoes Page 10