by Jenny Colgan
“Can’t we do that in the mixer?” I asked tentatively, my wrist getting tired.
“We can buy them from the supermarket,” he barked back. “Would you like that? Would that suit you?”
Next, he started to melt some of the day’s fresh plain in a huge double boiler style device over boiling water, very carefully, stirring all the time. He added milk powder and cocoa powder, even though I raised my eyebrows at him. “You make it stick together if you want,” he said. “Don’t question my methods.”
But he was smiling though, so I knew it was all right. He made the whole lot into a kind of paste, then he studied the line at the back of the greenhouse for a long time, humming and hawing. After changing his mind several times and picking up and putting down a large bag of almonds, eventually he settled on half ginger and half lime, sprinkling them and tasting liberally in the two different vats. Then, once again with that dainty step of his, indicating to me to do the other ones, he poured one of the double boilers into two dozen little ramekin pots. Not taking any chances, I put mine in with a big soup ladle. Then we lined them up on trays.
Thierry flung open the doors of the fridge, saying, “Ta dah!!! Now I shall make use of you, you money-guzzling goddess!” But of course the fridge was actually full. Benoît dashed to clear some shelf space for us to put in les petits pots.
Thierry took himself off for a midmorning digestif, and by the time he returned, the little pots had set and darkened to a glossy sheen. He frowned, then announced to the fridge that this was all they were good for, this and eating his money. He took out a tiny silver spoon and let me taste a side of the lime one. It was extraordinary. Lighter than air, whisked into a melting nothingness that left a dark rich sensation on the tongue and an extraordinary desire to eat more of it; it was hardly like eating at all, more like a dream of flavor.
He priced them at something extortionate. We sold out in fifteen minutes. I made him promise to stand over me one more time while I made them, and he said he didn’t have the necessary forty years to teach me where I was going wrong, but I was pleased nonetheless.
When I got back that evening, Sami was cross. He was making costumes for a production called La Bohème. (He said it in a way that assumed I had heard of it. I had never heard of it, but nodded my head importantly. I guess to him it was like someone saying they’d never heard of Michael Jackson.) Anyway, he said his bohemians had all gone too far bohemian and he couldn’t get them to come to any fittings, so he was going to have to track them down at their house, except they were living on a barge and setting it loose.
It was a gorgeous evening; the light in Paris felt like dripping gold.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to come,” said Sami with some sarcasm, because he kept asking me to come out in the evenings and I hardly ever said yes, partly because I was shy, and a lot because I was constantly knackered, embarrassed about my French, and smelled of greenhouse.
But I was buoyed by Thierry’s careful lesson of the day and how accepted it was making me feel, and for once not too exhausted, so I said yes, to his total surprise.
The singers were living on a houseboat on the Seine. It was full of people enjoying the evening, drinking and juggling and hanging out. I pasted on my best grin as Sami got swallowed up by a hundred of his closest acquaintances and got myself a glass of champagne (I was quite impressed that they didn’t have enough money to rent an apartment but wouldn’t dream of stinting on the fizz), and by the time I came back up deck from the tiny galley, someone had started up the engines and we were putting out into the Seine itself. I wasn’t entirely sure this was legal and looked around dubiously as the barge narrowly avoided the pleasure boats—the bateaux mouches—that patrolled the waters. The boat went upstream under the bridges and passed the crowded stone banks. The towers of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower bobbed in and out of sight as we moved. The party grew wilder as we moored just off the Île de la Cité, and suddenly two men, to huge roars of encouragement, took out huge brands that were their fire-eating torches. At first I was horrified—they were going to set the boat on fire and kill us all. But then I sort of thought, well, I am away, in a foreign country, having an extremely foreign experience, and anyway I can’t get off the boat, so I may as well just go with it. But I made sure I was as far back as possible.
The boys, stripped to the waist, lit the torches and then, to my excited horror, started juggling with them. The boat was bobbing up and down but they kept their balance perfectly, and it was both funny and frightening at once. People on the banks of the river were hailing each other to watch. Sami was ring-mastering, shouting and gesticulating with his arms.
Suddenly I saw a familiar face, bent low in conversation with a girl, but, it seemed, not really paying attention to what she was saying. His eyes searched the boat. Then they saw me and smiled, briefly, in recognition, and he raised his hand. Before I realized what I’d done, I’d smiled too and waved back. It was Laurent, Thierry’s son. Instantly I felt rather guilty, as if I were double-crossing the lovely day I’d had at work with his dad. I bit my lip, and he grinned and got back into conversation with the girl, but not before Sami grabbed his arm and started yelling at him. At first he shook his head no, no, definitely not, but before I knew it, someone had stuck a frying pan in his hand and a white chef’s hat on his head, and the music had been turned up and everyone was clapping. He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender and, in the oddest coincidence, started cracking eggs into a bowl. His deft strong fingers behaved exactly like his father’s. I was hypnotized. Someone brought up flour too, and milk, and he whisked it up—again in the same way—and the fire-eaters brought their torches down and started throwing them more gently, as, to my utter astonishment, Laurent melted some butter in the little pan, then started to cook pancakes over the flames of the fire-jugglers’ torches. This must have been a party trick; each new one was flung in the air in near-perfect timing with the torches themselves and greeted with rounds of applause, particularly the one that flew right off the boat, to be immediately snapped up by an enormous seagull.
It was true; everyone Sami knows is basically in show business. I am completely the most normal person Sami has ever met. He thinks I’m really exotic as a consequence. He keeps asking me if it’s true that we eat things out of paper and what toast is.
It was stunning to watch. At one point, Laurent had to reach for a pancake he’d flipped right up out of the pan and stretched a long arm over me, lost his footing, and landed nearly in my lap.
“Oof,” he said. “Bonsoir, mam’zelle.”
“Hello, Laurent,” I said. He’d straightened up really quickly.
“The spy!” he said, but his eyes were twinkling in a way I’d seen before.
“I’m not a spy! How could I be a spy? What, I’m going to steal a pancake recipe?”
“You shall tell my father I am a partying good-for-nothing,” he said, his big black eyes sparkling at me.
“That very much depends,” I said, “on whether or not I get the next pancake.”
He looked at it, all perfectly cooked, then grabbed a bottle from the side of the boat and poured Grand Marnier, the orange liqueur, all over the top. It sizzled, and as the alcohol burned off, a delicious smell filled the air. Then he picked up a napkin and, in a move that seemed almost like magic, flicked the pancake onto it, and in a trice, folded it up into an envelope so I could eat it.
“I shall tell him you’re a very good boy,” I said. The crepe was painfully hot, but totally delicious.
Something crossed his face at that moment, something that wasn’t just about him being a party boy. Some remembered pain.
“No,” he said quietly. “No. Don’t tell him anything at all.”
I looked straight at him, wondering what these two larger-than-life personalities could possibly have fallen out about that was this bad.
“Come in and see me,” I said, a
bit tipsy, not quite realizing what I was saying. Then I stopped horrified.
“I don’t mean like that,” I said. “I mean, come by to see me and you can see your dad. But not like that.”
He smiled, put out a calloused hand, and suddenly, out of the blue, touched my cheek. I flushed a fiery red.
“Ah, not like that, huh?”
I reminded myself about Frédéric and that this was what French men were like. Incorrigible flirts. Ridiculously flirtatious. Cor, they were good at it though. I resisted a sudden strong temptation to reach out and touch his stubbled chin, his thick curly hair.
“Laurent! Laurent! More crepes! Encore!”
The girls were calling for him from the other side of the boat, the torches still burning high. I checked my watch. It was late; I was up early. Someone moored the boat to give me time to get off, and a party of people dressed as Harlequins to get on.
He smiled, as if he knew exactly what was going through my mind, gave me a quick kiss on either cheek—perfectly normal here, I knew, absolutely standard French behavior, brothers did it to one another, so there was no reason for it to set my cheeks flaming so, or for me to catch the slightly burned sugar smell that came off his warm skin—and vanished back into the crowd, as I, with a mix of relief and regret, found my own way across the gangplank and back to the safe ground of the Île de la Cité—no long walk home for me, lost in the big city. I knew the way. The lights and the fire and the laughter and music from the barge lit up the river all the way home.
I didn’t mention the previous evening when Thierry marched in the next day. It was barely eight o’clock and I was sweeping up the husks when I heard the ting of the front doorbell. Frédéric and Benoît looked at me, confused. They had been playing the radio loudly. French pop music was, I discovered, very much an acquired taste. Frédéric immediately turned it down and called out, “Bonjour.”
But standing in the doorway, without Alice or any bluster from yesterday or any of the constant motion I’m used to, was Thierry, his large bulk outlined in the still hazy light from the front door, his normal broad grin completely absent.
“Anna,” he said. “Come, walk with me.”
- - -
I did as he said. It was going to be a beautiful day, but there was still a hint of dawn chilliness in the air. There were many fewer tourists about this time in the morning; it was mostly just shop keepers, the rattling of grates, the sluicing of dirty water in the mop buckets going down the drains, everywhere the scent of coffee and fresh baking.
“Let us walk,” he repeated, without saying anything else. I glanced at him quickly, wondering if his knees were up to it. He didn’t look like he took any exercise at all. He saw me glancing and smiled, though less ebulliently than usual.
“I used to love to walk,” he said. “I used to walk everywhere. It was my favorite thing to do. Look!”
He took me down the cobbled lane that led to Île Saint-Louis and then across the beautiful Pont de Sully, which is lined with the padlocks of lovers. People just leave them there, to signify their love, and the authorities let them stay. They’re beautiful. A bateau mouche wended lazily down the river, and a large flock of seagulls took off just in front of us. Ahead was the somber, riveting wall of the old Bastille.
“Paris changes too much,” he said, even though I was thinking absolutely the opposite, pointing out a huge field of banners over on the Left Bank. “Look, they are having a festival,” he said. “Food from all around the world.”
“Why don’t we take a stall,” I said, not thinking about it.
He looked at me. “Because we do not need to! We are far too good,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “It was just an idea.”
“Does Chanel take a stall at a market? Does Christian Dior?”
I didn’t point out that you could find these brands all over the world, but decided to change the subject.
“Why don’t you walk so much anymore?”
“Because I am busy, because Alice does not like to walk; she thinks it is vulgar.”
“How is walking vulgar?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“Well, because you cannot wear beautiful shoes, and you look like you cannot afford a car.”
I thought that was possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, but I’d already insulted him once this morning, so I decided to keep it to myself.
“I like it,” I ventured instead. “It’s a good way to see a place.”
“It is!” agreed Thierry fervently. We’d reached the other side of the bridge; the morning rush-hour traffic was inelegantly struggling for places on the roundabout, but we ignored them all. He turned and gestured back at what I’d already come to think of as my home; the Île de la Cité, the square familiar towers of Notre Dame Cathedral visible through the gaps.
“Look at it! A perfect tiny city-state in miniature. Everything you could possibly want is there.”
Except a supermarket that opens at lunchtime, I thought but didn’t say.
“You could live on that island forever and never leave. People did. It was the first inhabited area of Paris. Right in the heart of the world.”
I smiled at his absolute certainty that where he was was the heart of the world. He moved surprisingly swiftly for such a large man.
He looked at me.
“I got another letter from Claire.”
There wasn’t any point in prevaricating.
“She is very unwell,” he said.
“She is,” I said. I felt immediately guilty. Sami had the oldest laptop in the world and sometimes we could hook on to our neighbor’s Wi-Fi, but I hadn’t kept in touch anything like as much as I should have. She didn’t have a lot to occupy her days; a bit of gossip would have come in very handy. Later she told me she was thrilled I was too busy and happy to write, just as her own mum had been, so convincingly I almost believed her. I called Mum and Dad every Sunday and told them about new things I’d tried and new food and they tried to sound interested, but I don’t think they were really. They told me about the dog (barbed wire in paw) and Joe (new building apprenticeship, fat girlfriend). And Cath texted from time to time. But my new life felt so immersive. I vowed at the very least to be better at talking to Claire.
“What was wrong with you?” he said.
“I lost two toes,” I said.
Thierry scrunched up his face in pained sympathy. “Ah, look.” He showed me his littlest finger. It was slightly blunted. He’d obviously sliced the top off. “This is how I knew I was bound for sweets, non? No more butchering for me. No more cooking for big hungry soldiers in the desert. Ugh.”
I nodded in sympathy.
“So,” he said. “And she…she has all her toes?”
“She has cancer,” I said.
“Yes.”
We were walking above the embankment by the river, which was running fast today, a kind of dark blue color. There were a lot of boats up and down; goods and coal were coming in.
Thierry stared at the water as if he didn’t see it.
“Ah, the cancer,” he said simply. “It is the sniper at the party. Everyone, we are happy, then…boom.”
We kept staring.
“They can do many, many good things for cancer now,” he said.
I shook my head. “Maybe. She has it in three places. It is hard to have it in three places. And she is stubborn.”
Thierry glanced at me then looked away very quickly. “So it is as bad as that.”
“Maybe,” I shrugged. I didn’t want to think about it.
“And her family is kind.”
“Her sons are very good.”
“She has sons?”
“Two.”
“Ah, sons,” he said, and I supposed he was thinking of Laurent. “They are kind? They look after her?”
&
nbsp; “They’re wonderful,” I said.
He harrumphed.
“Mine would not call the pompiers if I were on fire.”
Thierry bit his lip at this.
“Oh, my little Claire,” he said suddenly, as if I wasn’t there. “My little English bird. My little Claire.”
- - -
1972
“You look…you look beautiful.”
Claire giggled. She had never seen Thierry lost for words; she didn’t think it was possible. He was as greedy for words, for ideas and new information and jokes, as he was for food, for wine, for chocolate, for Paris, for her.
But here, out in the garden of the LeGuarde house, all closed down as the family decamped to Provence, leaving her alone in Paris, it felt like everyone had left, en masse. The entire city had emptied out, leaving the heat for the soft breezes and mimosas of the South. Businesses had closed down, restaurants were no longer serving. The city was like a ghost town. Or a playground.
In a feat of devastating boldness, Claire had left a note. A little note, at the shop, in the morning before he would be in. She had thought about it many times. She had gone to Papeterie Saint-Sabin, the great stationers, and spent an enormous amount of her earned cash on the most exquisite stationery. She had been almost unable to choose from how beautiful it all was. Finally she had gone for a pale green and yellow flower, very similar to her new dress. The heavy cream envelope was lined with pale green and gold stripes. It was absolutely beautiful. Her heart in her mouth, she had slipped into M. LeGuarde’s private office, all leather chairs and heavy furniture, and borrowed one of his fountain pens, trying to make sure not to blot the ink. And she had written, simply, a time and the address, her hand shaking with excitement.
Of course he had come; had found her, as she planned, around the back door. He took off his hat, his face a little pink in the heat, mopping his brow. The garden was built high, with fruit trees bordering the edge to give the area privacy. On the perfectly straight lawn, Claire had put out a picnic: the finest Morbier cheese, which she knew he adored; some pâté and heavy sourdough bread from the tiny southern bakery on the corner; grapes, big, shiny, and pitted with seeds—he liked to chop them with a tiny knife, nipping out the seeds with extraordinary dexterity in his huge bearlike paws; carved Serrano ham from the terrifying butcher that she had had to pluck up a lot of courage to enter; and, chilling in a bucket of ice, a bottle of Laurent Perrier ’68. Mme. LeGuarde had told her to help herself to whatever she wanted. This was clearly pushing it, Claire realized. She would make it up to them, she told herself.