‘That’s hard,’ I say, trying not to smile. A little overweight, to him, must mean something in the region of three hundred pounds. His face takes on a blank expression – his colours shift into the spectrum of dull greens and silvery-greys that I associate with the negative emotions.
He blames himself, of course. I know. The stair-carpet was loose, perhaps; he was late from work; he stopped by the boulangerie for a fatal ten minutes too long or sat down on a bench to watch the girls go by—
‘You’re not the only one,’ I said. ‘Everyone feels the same, you know. I blamed myself when my mother died . . .’
I took his hand. Beneath the flab his bones felt small, like a child’s.
‘It happened when I was sixteen. I’ve never stopped thinking it was somehow my fault.’ I gave him my most earnest look, forking my hand behind my back to stop myself from laughing. Of course I believed it – and with good reason.
But Nico’s face lit up at once. ‘That true?’ he said.
I nodded.
I heard him sigh like a hot-air balloon.
I turned away to hide a smile and busied myself with the chocolates that were cooling on the counter at my side. They smelt innocent, like vanilla and childhood. Nico’s type rarely make friends. Always the fat boy, living alone with his fatter ma; lining up his substitutes against the arm of the sofa while she watches him eat with anxious approval.
You’re not fat, Nico. Just big-boned. There you are, Nico. Such a good boy.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t,’ he said at last. ‘My doctor says I oughta cut down.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘What does he know?’
He shrugged. The ripples went all the way down his arms.
‘You feel OK, don’t you?’ I said.
That sheepish smile. ‘I guess I do. The thing is . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well – girls.’ He flushed. ‘I mean, what do they see? This great big fat guy. I thought if I lost a little weight – toned up a bit – then maybe, you know . . .’
‘You’re not so fat, Nico. You don’t need to change. You’ll find someone. Just wait and see.’
Once more he sighed.
‘So. What’s it to be?’
‘I’ll have a box of the macaroons.’
I was tying the bow when Alice came in. I’m not sure why he needs a bow – we both know that box will be open long before he gets it home – but for some reason he likes it that way; tied with a length of yellow ribbon, incongruous between his big hands.
‘Hi, Alice,’ I said. ‘Just take a seat. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
In fact, it was five. Alice needs time. She stares at Nico fearfully. He’s a giant beside her – a hungry giant – but Nico has become unexpectedly mute. He bridles – all three hundred pounds of him – and a flush creeps over his broad face.
‘Nico, meet Alice.’
She whispers hello.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. With the fingernail, to scratch a sign along the satin of the chocolate-box. It might be anything – an accident – but then again it might be the beginning of something: a turn in the road; a path into another life—
All change.
Once more she whispers something. Looks down at her boots – and sees the box of macaroons.
‘I love ’em,’ says Nico. ‘Try one with me?’
Alice begins to shake her head. But he looks nice, she tells herself. There’s something about him, in spite of his bulk; something reassuringly childish, almost vulnerable. And there’s something about his eyes, she thinks; something about him that makes her feel that maybe – just maybe – he understands.
‘Just one,’ he says.
And the symbol scratched on the lid of the box begins to gleam with a pale light – it’s Rabbit Moon, for love and fertility – and instead of her usual plain chocolate square, Alice shyly accepts a cup of frothy mocha, with a macaroon to accompany it, and they leave at the same time (if not quite together), she with her small box, he with his large one, into the November rain.
And as I watch, Nico opens a red umbrella of giant proportions bearing the legend Merde, il pleut! and holds it over little Alice. The sound of her laughter is distant and bright, like something remembered rather than heard. And I watch them down the cobbled road, she skipping in the puddles with her giant boots, he solemnly holding that absurd umbrella over them both, like a cartoon bear and an ugly duckling in some fractured fairytale, on their way to a great adventure.
4
Thursday, 22nd November
THREE MISSED CALLS from Thierry’s phone, and a photograph of the Natural History Museum with a text message reading: Cave Woman! Turn on Ur fone! It made me laugh, but not quite easily; I don’t share Thierry’s passion for all things technical, and after trying unsuccessfully to text him back, I hid the phone in the kitchen drawer.
Later, he rang. It seems he’s not going to be able to get back this weekend, although he promises he will next week. In a way, I’m a little relieved. It gives me time to get things in order; to prepare my stock; to become accustomed to this new shop of mine, its habits and its customers.
Nico and Alice were back today. Alice bought a small box of chocolate fudge squares – a very small box, but she ate them herself – and Nico, a kilo of macaroons.
‘Can’t get enough of these bad boys,’ he said. ‘Just keep ’em coming, Yanne – OK?’
I couldn’t help smiling at his exuberance. They sat at a table in the front of the shop. She had mocha, and he had hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows, while Zozie and I remained discreetly aloof in the back kitchen – unless a customer came in – and Rosette pulled out her drawing pad and began to draw pictures of monkeys, long-tailed and grinning, in every colour in the box.
‘Hey, that’s good,’ said Nico, as Rosette handed him a picture of a fat purple monkey eating a coconut. ‘I guess you must like monkeys, eh?’
He did a monkey face for Rosette, who gave a crow of laughter and signed – Again! She’s laughing more often. I’ve noticed that. At Nico, at me, at Anouk, at Zozie – perhaps, next time Thierry calls, she will start to connect with him a little more.
Alice laughed too. Rosette likes her best, perhaps because she is so small, almost a child herself in her short print dress and pale-blue coat. Perhaps because she so rarely speaks; even with Nico, who talks enough for the both of them.
‘That monkey looks like Nico,’ she said. With adults her voice is wispy and reluctant. With Rosette, she has a different tone. Her voice is rich and comical, and Rosette responds with a brilliant smile.
So Rosette drew monkeys for all of us. Zozie’s is wearing bright-red mittens on all four hands. Alice’s monkey is electric blue, with a tiny body and a ridiculously long and curly tail. Mine is embarrassed, hiding its furry face in its hands. She has a knack, no doubt about it: her drawings are crude, but oddly alive; and she manages to convey facial expressions with only a couple of strokes of the pen.
We were still laughing when Madame Luzeron came in with her little fluffy peach-coloured dog. Madame Luzeron dresses well, in grey twinsets that hide her expanding waist, and well-cut coats in shades of charcoal and black. She lives in one of the big stucco-fronted houses behind the park; goes to Mass every day, to the hairdresser’s every other day – except on Thursdays, when she goes to the cemetery by way of our shop. She might be as young as sixty, but her hands are wrung with arthritis and her thin face is chalky with concealer.
‘Three rum truffles, in a box.’
Madame Luzeron never says ‘please’. That would be too bourgeois, perhaps. Instead she peered at Fat Nico, Alice, the empty cups and the monkeys. An over-plucked eyebrow went up.
‘I see you’ve – redecorated.’ The slightest of pauses before that last word throws doubt on the wisdom of such a move.
‘Fabulous, isn’t it?’ That was Zozie. She isn’t used to Madame’s ways, and Madame gave her a piercing look, taking in the overlong skirt, the hair
pinned up with a plastic rose, the jangling bracelets on her arms and the cherry-print wedges on her feet – worn today with a pair of striped stockings in pink and black.
‘We fixed up the chairs ourselves,’ she said, reaching into the display box to select the chocolates. ‘We thought it would be nice to cheer the place up a bit.’
Madame gave the kind of smile you see on the face of a ballet dancer whose shoes are hurting them.
Zozie kept talking, oblivious. ‘Right now. Rum truffles. There you are. What colour ribbon? Pink looks nice. Or maybe red. What do you think?’
Madame said nothing, although Zozie seemed not to require an answer. She wrapped the chocolates in their little box, added a ribbon and a paper flower, and placed the confection on the counter between them.
‘These truffles look different,’ said Madame, looking at them suspiciously through the cellophane.
‘They are,’ said Zozie. ‘Yanne makes them herself.’
‘Pity,’ said Madame. ‘I liked the others.’
‘You’ll like these better,’ said Zozie. ‘Try one. It’s on the house.’
I could have told her she was wasting her time. City people are often suspicious of a free gift. Some refuse automatically, as if unwilling to be beholden to anyone, even to the tune of a single chocolate. Madame gave a little sniff – a well-bred version of Laurent’s mweh. She put down the coins on the counter-top—
And it was then that I thought I saw it. An almost invisible flick of the fingers as her hand brushed against Zozie’s. A brief gleam of something in the grey November air. It might have been the flicker of a neon sign across the square – except that Le P’tit Pinson is shut, and it would be another four hours at least before the street-lights went on. Besides, I ought to know that gleam. That spark, like electricity, that leaps from one person to the next—
‘Go on,’ said Zozie. ‘It’s been so long since you indulged.’
Madame had felt it just as I had. In a moment I saw her expression change. Beneath the refinement of powder and paste, a confusion; a longing; a loneliness; loss – feelings that shifted like clouds across her pinched pale features—
Hastily, I averted my eyes. I don’t want to know your secrets, I thought. I don’t want to know your thoughts. Take your silly little dog and your chocolates and go home before it’s—
Too late. I’d seen.
The cemetery; a broad gravestone of pale grey marble, shaped like the curve of an ocean wave. I saw the picture set into the stone: a boy of thirteen or so, grinning brashly and toothily at the camera. A school photograph, perhaps, the last one taken before his death, shot in black-and-white but tinted in pastel shades for the occasion. And underneath it there are the chocolates; rows of little boxes, wasted by the rain. One for every Thursday, lying untouched; beribboned in yellow and pink and green . . .
I look up. She is staring – but not at me. Her frightened, exhausted pale-blue eyes are wide and strangely hopeful.
‘I’ll be late,’ she says in a small voice.
‘You’ve got time,’ says Zozie gently. ‘Sit down awhile. Rest your feet. Nico and Alice were just leaving. Come on,’ she insists, as Madame seems about to protest. ‘Sit down and have some chocolate. It’s raining, and your boy can wait.’
And to my amazement, Madame obeys.
‘Thank you,’ she says, and sits down in her chair, looking ludicrously out of place against the bright-pink leopard print, and eats her chocolate, eyes closed, head resting against the fluffy fake fur.
And she looks so peaceful – and yes, so happy.
And outside, the wind rattles the newly painted sign, and the rain sizzles down on the cobbled streets, and December is only a heartbeat away, and it feels so safe and so solid that I can almost forget that our walls are made of paper; our lives of glass; that a gust of wind could shatter us; that a winter storm could blow us away.
5
Friday, 23rd November
I SHOULD HAVE known she’d helped them along. It’s what I might have done myself, once, in the days of Lansquenet. First, Alice and Nico, so oddly alike; and I happen to know that he’s noticed her before, calls in at the florist’s once a week to buy daffodils (his favourite), but has never yet found the courage to speak to her or to ask her out.
Now suddenly, over chocolate—
Coincidence, I tell myself.
And now Madame Luzeron, once so brittle and self-contained; releasing her secrets like scent from a bottle that everyone thought had dried up long ago.
And that sunny glow around the door – even when it’s raining – leads me to fear that someone may have been easing things along; that the stream of customers we’ve had over the past few days is not due entirely to our confectionery.
I know what my mother would say.
Where’s the harm? No one gets hurt. Don’t they deserve it, Vianne?
Don’t we?
I tried to warn Zozie yesterday. To explain why she mustn’t interfere. But I couldn’t. The box of secrets, once opened, may never again be closed. And she finds me unreasonable, I sense that. As mean as she is generous, like the miserly baker in the old tale who charged for the smell of the baking bread.
What harm is there? I know she’d say. What do we lose from helping them?
Oh, I came so close to telling her. But every time, I stopped myself. Besides, it might be coincidence.
But something else happened today. Something that confirmed my doubts. The unlikely catalyst – Laurent Pinson. I’ve noticed him in Le Rocher de Montmartre several times already this week. That’s hardly news; and unless I’m much mistaken, it is not our chocolate that brings him here.
But he was here again this morning; peering at the chocolates in their glass cases; sniffing at the price tags; taking in every detail of our improvements with a sour face and an occasional grunt of barely concealed disapproval.
‘Mweh.’
It was one of those sunny November days, all the more precious for being so few. Still as midsummer, with that high clear sky, and the vapour-trails like scratches against the blue.
‘Nice day,’ I said.
‘Mweh,’ said Laurent.
‘Just browsing, or shall I get you a drink?’
‘At those prices?’
‘On the house.’
Some people are incapable of turning down a free drink. Grudgingly Laurent sat down, accepted a cup of coffee and a praline, and began his usual litany.
‘To close me down, at this time of year – it’s bloody victimization, that’s what it is. Someone’s out to ruin me.’
‘What happened?’ I said.
He poured out his woes. Someone had complained about him microwaving leftovers; some idiot had fallen ill; they had sent him an environmental health inspector who could barely speak proper French and although Laurent had been perfectly civil to the fellow, he’d taken offence at something he’d said and—
‘Bang! Closed! Just like that! I mean, what is the country coming to, when a perfectly decent café – a café that’s been here decades – can be shut down by some bloody pied-noir . . .’
I pretended to listen, whilst itemizing in my mind the chocolates that had sold best, and the ones where stock was running low. I pretended, too, not to notice when Laurent helped himself to another of my pralines without being asked. I could afford it. And he needed to talk.
After a while, Zozie came out of the kitchen, where she’d been helping me with the chocolate logs. Abruptly Laurent ceased his tirade and flushed to the creases in his earlobes.
‘Zozie, good day,’ he said, with exaggerated dignity.
She grinned. It’s no secret that he admires her – who wouldn’t? – and today she was looking beautiful, in a velvet dress down to the floor and ankle-boots in the same shade of cornflower blue.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Zozie’s an attractive woman, and Laurent is at that age when a man’s head is most easily turned. But it struck me that now we’d have him underfoot
every day between now and Christmas, cadging free drinks, annoying the customers, stealing the sugar and complaining about the neighbourhood going to the dogs and—
I almost missed it as I turned away and she forked the sign behind her back. My mother’s sign, to banish malchance.
Tsk-tsk, begone!
I saw Laurent slap at his neck, as if an insect had bitten him there. I drew a breath – too late. It was done. So naturally – as I myself would have done in Lansquenet, if the past four years had never happened.
‘Laurent?’ I said.
‘Must go,’ said Laurent. ‘Things to do, you know – no time to waste.’ And, still rubbing the back of his neck, he hauled himself out of the armchair he had been occupying for the best part of half an hour and almost scuttled out of the shop.
Zozie grinned. ‘At last,’ she said.
I sat down heavily on the chair.
‘Are you all right?’
I looked at her. This is the way it always begins: with the little things; the things that don’t count. But one little thing leads to another, and another, and before you know it, it has started again, and the wind is turning, and the Kindly Ones have picked up the scent and—
And for a second, I blamed Zozie. After all, it was she who had transformed my ordinary chocolaterie into this pirates’ cave. Before she came, I was quite content to be Yanne Charbonneau – to run a shop like other shops, to wear Thierry’s ring, to allow the world to run its course without the slightest interference.
But things have changed. With nothing much more than a flick of the fingers, four whole years are overturned, and a woman who should long since have been dead opens her eyes and seems to breathe . . .
‘Vianne,’ she said softly.
‘That’s not my name.’
‘But it was, wasn’t it? Vianne Rocher.’
I nodded. ‘In a past life.’
‘It doesn’t have to be the past.’
Doesn’t it? It’s a dangerously attractive thought. To be Vianne again; to trade in marvels; to show people the magic within themselves . . .
The Lollipop Shoes Page 15