The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris

by Jenny Colgan

  “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.

  “Well, it’s all decided,” she said, as the Reverend looked up from his grapefruit half.

  “What?” he growled.

  “For the summer. Claire has been invited to go and au pair.”

  Claire had never even heard the expression.

  “You’re going to nanny. For my pen pal.”

  “That French woman?” said the Reverend, folding his Daily Telegraph. “I thought you’d never met.”

  “We haven’t,” said Claire’s mother proudly.

  Claire looked from one to the other. She didn’t know anything about this. “Who is it?”

  “Well, I have a pen pal,” said her mother, and Claire suddenly remembered the Christmas cards that arrived with Meilleurs Voeux written on them. “From school. When I was eleven, we all got pen pals. Like you, remember?”

  Claire remembered, guiltily, that she had stopped writing to Jerome in Rouen before she had turned fifteen.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Well, Marie-Noelle and I have kept it up…here and there of course, not very often. But I know she has two children now, and I wrote to her and asked if she would like to take you for the summer. And she said yes! You will look after the children; she has a cleaner she says here…goodness.”

  Her mother’s face went a little strained.

  “I hope they’re not terribly posh,” she said, looking around at the very nice but plainly furnished vicarage. A churchman’s stipend didn’t go terribly far, and Claire had always known better than to expect new things. It wasn’t until much later in her life that Claire reflected as to whether her bright, spirited mother had ever regretted falling in love with the committed, passionate young reverend, and the life that followed it. But Claire lost her beloved mum far too young, a victim of the cancer that had already set itself ticking in her own DNA.

  “I don’t care if they’re posh. Are they decent people?” asked the Reverend.

  “Oh yes,” said her mother cheerfully. “There’s a little boy and a little girl, Arnaud and Claudette. Aren’t those the loveliest names?”

  Claire’s heart was starting to race.

  “Where…whereabouts in France?”

  “Oh, sorry, where’s my head?” said her mother. “Paris, of course.”

  The settlement from the chocolate factory was not at all life-changing. It was barely anything-changing once I’d paid off my credit card. I wondered if maybe we should have gotten more, seeing as I now walked with a pronounced limp and had nearly died and everything, but they said that bit was the hospital’s fault. The hospital said I was getting better now and getting me better was technically all they had to do really, and I did mention to Dr. Ed that actually if the hospital hadn’t let me get so sick, they would have been able to reattach my toes. He had smiled and patted my hand in the manner of doctors he’d seen on television and told me if I ever had any questions, just to go right ahead, which completely bamboozled me as I thought I’d just asked one, and then he gave me a s
mile and a wink—I have no idea what the wink was, maybe it was his “style”—and floated on to sit on Claire’s bed.

  It was time to go home. After dreaming of being set free for so long, I suddenly realized I didn’t actually want to go. Or rather, that it would be weird to lose the institutionalized days of drugs and meals and physio and not having to focus on anything else but getting better.

  Now I had to face the world again and find a new job. It was a feature of the settlement that I didn’t go back to Braders, presumably in case I had another one-in-a-million freak accident. If anything, I would have thought I’d have been a safer bet than other people, statistically speaking.

  And I was going to miss Claire. We’d chatted more and more in French, to the annoyance of almost everyone, and it was truly the one good thing in my life, demonstrating that I could learn something, that I had a new skill. Everything else was just dread. There weren’t any jobs, I knew that much. Cath said I could come and sweep up in the hairdressing salon, but that paid about absolutely nothing, and I wasn’t that good at bending down without falling over yet. On the upside, I’d lost about fifteen pounds. That was the only upside. But I wouldn’t recommend my method of losing the weight.

  I told Claire about my worries, and she looked pensive.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Well,” she said, “I knew…I knew someone in Paris who worked in chocolate. It was a long time ago though. I don’t know what he’s doing now.”

  “Ooh,” I said. “A young flirtation?”

  Her thin face took on a little color.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Where you madly in loooove?”

  We’d gotten to know each other well enough that I could tease her, but she could still get a teacherly glint in her eye. She did so now.

  “He is not very good at writing letters,” she mused, glancing out the window. “But I will try. I shall ask Ricky to use that email thingy when he comes. You can find anyone these days, can’t you?”

  “You can,” I said. “But if he’s a friend of yours, why haven’t you gone back to Paris for so long?”

  Claire’s lips pursed.

  “Well, I was busy raising a family. I had a job. I couldn’t just jump on a plane whenever I felt like it.”

  “Hmm,” I said, suspicious. She was very touchy all of a sudden.

  “You could though,” said Claire. “You can do whatever you like.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so. Hopalong Cassidy, that’s me.”

  - - -

  I realized later that the impact—the emotional impact—of the accident didn’t really hit until I went back home to Mum and Dad’s. In the hospital I’d been, well, special, I suppose. I’d gotten flowers and gifts and was the center of everyone’s attention, and people brought me drugs and asked after me, and even though it was kind of horrible, I was being taken care of.

  Home, though—it was just home. The boys clattering in late at night, grumbling because they had to share a room again; Mum fussing around, steadily predicting doom for my chances of finding another job and how they would cut disability living allowance, to which I said, “Don’t be stupid, I’m not disabled,” and we both looked at my crutches, and then she would sigh again. My face in the mirror: my pale blue eyes looked so tired, and my fairish hair, without its usual highlights by Cath, just looked colorless. I had lost weight, but because I hadn’t moved around at all, I just looked slack and saggy sometimes. I used to love putting makeup on to get ready for a night out, but it had been so long I’d kind of forgotten how, and the drugs had made my skin so dry.

  That’s when I really got sad. I cried in my little childhood bed, I slept later and later in the morning, and I got less and less interested in doing my exercises and listening to my friends’ stories about new boyfriends and fall-outs and all sorts of things that sounded completely inconsequential to me now. I knew my parents were worried about me, but I just couldn’t find in myself what to do; I just didn’t know. My foot was slowly healing, apparently—but I could feel my toes, feel them all the time. They itched, they twitched, they hurt, and I lay awake at night staring at the ceiling and listening to the boiler make the same noises it had since my childhood and thinking, “What now? What now?”

  - - -

  1972

  Her mother had wanted to accompany her, have a “girls’ day out” in London, but the Reverend had looked very suspicious indeed and hemmed and hawed about it. Seemingly the fleshpots of Paris wouldn’t be quite as fearsome as the den of iniquity that was London—he hadn’t, she thought, quite gotten the hang of 1968—and he had numerous and repeated instructions, both from her mother and from Mme. LeGuarde on the telephone, that the house was extremely traditional and strict and that it would be nothing but childcare and learning another language, a refinement in young ladies the Reverend did approve of. So after several lists and imprecations about how she was expected to behave—Claire was already absolutely terrified of Mme. LeGuarde; her mother made her sound posh, rich, and demanding, and Claire didn’t know how she was going to cope with small children she could barely talk to—he had driven her to the railway station one spring morning, the sky already threatening large amounts of rain.

  Already excited, she opened her Tupperware sandwich box as the train pulled out of Crewe, nervous and jittery and filled with the sense that she was leaving, going on a journey, by herself, and that it was going to be vastly important.

  Rainie Callendar, the school bully, had cornered her before school broke up.

  “Off to get even more stuck up?” she sniffed.

  Claire did what she always did. She kept her head down as all Rainie’s cronies burst out laughing and moved away as quickly as possible to try to escape their gaze. It rarely succeeded. She decided in herself, she couldn’t wait for the holidays. However much she was going to get locked in a cupboard looking after French brats, it was still going to be better than bouncing between here and the Reverend.

  Inside the box was a little note from her mother.

  “Have a wonderful time,” it said. Not “Behave yourself” or “Don’t forget to clean up after yourself” or “Don’t go out alone.” Just “Have a wonderful time.”

  Claire was quite a young seventeen. She’d never really thought about her mother’s life in any terms, apart from the fact that she was just there, providing meals, cleaning their clothes, agreeing with the Reverend whenever he had something new to say about the long-haired youths with hippie values that had reached even Kidinsborough. It didn’t cross her mind that her mother might have been jealous.

  - - -

  Claire was nervous getting on the ferry, terrified she wouldn’t know what to do. It was absolutely huge. The only boat she’d ever been on was a paddle boat at Scarborough. The great white ship seemed to her romantic—the smell of the diesel, the great honk of the horn as it came alongside the huge terminal at Dover, lined with adventurous-looking people with station wagons piled high with tents and pegs and, even more exotically, Citroën 2CVs with real French people opening their picnics (a lot more exotic than Claire’s meat paste sandwiches) with actual bottles of wine and glasses and long sticks of bread. She gazed around at everyone, drinking it in, then went up to the very front of the boat—it was a blowy day, white clouds flicking across the sky. She felt the breeze in her face and looked hungrily back toward England (her very first time leaving it) and forward toward France and thought she had rarely felt more alive.

  - - -

  “Come and have a coffee,” the message from Claire said on my phone. She’d been discharged, temporarily, and she sounded a little breathy, a little tentative, and I called her back—this was one thing I could manage—to arrange for us to meet up in the cozy bookshop coffee shop, where I thought she’d be more comfortable.

 
Her nice daughter-in-law Patsy dropped her off and made her promise not to buy too many books. Claire had rolled her eyes when she left and said she loved Patsy, but everyone seemed to equate being sick with being four, and then she remembered she didn’t have to tell me that, and we cheered ourselves up by doing imitations of Dr. Ed sitting on the bed doing his empathizing.

  Then there was a pause during which, in a normal conversation, someone would have said, “Hey, you look well” or “You’ve cut your hair” or “You look healthy” (code for “Cor, you’ve gotten fat,” as everybody knows), but neither of us could say anything. In the hospital, with its crisp white sheets and Claire’s neat, spotless cream pajamas, she didn’t look well, but she seemed to belong there. Out here in public, she looked terrifying. So thin that she might break, a scarf tied artfully around her head that served only to announce “I’ve had cancer for so long I’ve gotten really good at tying scarves,” a smart dress that would have looked rather nice if it had fitted her but clearly didn’t as she was far too thin, and drawn-in cheekbones. She looked…wow, she looked sick.

  I got up to go fetch us some coffee and some chocolate brownie cake, even though she had said she didn’t want any, and I said she would when she tasted the homemade stuff they did in here. She smiled thinly and said, “Of course, that would be great,” in a way that wouldn’t have fooled a horse. I was conscious of her eyes on me as I limped across the floor. I still wasn’t at all confident with my stick and had basically decided to get rid of it. Cath kept trying to get me to come out, saying that everyone was dying to hear all about it, but that thought filled me with total horror. I did though desperately need to get my hair done. And some new clothes. I was in my daggiest old jeans and a striped top that had been absolutely no effort whatsoever, and it showed.