by Jenny Colgan
“Claire?”
“Oh, thank goodness.”
Her voice was frail, but the relief was unmistakable, and I could have kicked myself for not calling her earlier.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “My battery died, and then it was late.”
“But you’re all right?”
“Ye-es,” I said reluctantly.
“What is it?”
“It’s Thierry.”
- - -
Claire knew it then. She knew against all the certainties that life should grow over old wounds, that people grew up and moved on with their lives, all the truisms she’d been told and learned from other people and taken to heart and pretended to herself for years and years and years that they were true, even as she had raised another man’s children and been another man’s wife, and another man’s divorcee whose body showed up its own pain…even through all of that, the way the electricity shot through her heart meant it could have been yesterday; the years just fell off her. Nothing had changed, not a tiny thing.
“What about him?” she asked, grasping anxiously at the oxygen cylinder.
“Is everything all right, Mum?” Patsy called cheerfully from the kitchen. Claire didn’t like her daughters-in-law calling her Mum; it made her feel about a million years old, but she wouldn’t dream of mentioning it.
“Fine, thank you.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
Claire shook her head in vexation.
“So,” she said, “what? What is it?”
A painful lump formed in her throat. He couldn’t be…he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be. Mind you, she nearly was, she thought to herself bitterly. But not Thierry, with so much life bursting from him.
- - -
“He had a heart attack,” I said, as plainly as I could. “He’s in the hospital.”
“A heart attack? A serious one?”
“Yes.”
Claire found herself giggling with nerves and hysteria. “Oh, all that chocolate, all that butter,” she said. “Is he…is he…oh Lord.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s in the hospital. He’s had an operation to put in a stent. They don’t know if he’s going to be all right.”
“But if he’s had the operation?”
“Yes, but it’s difficult…” I wasn’t quite sure how to say it. “He is terribly fat.”
“Oh!” Claire looked down at her pin-thin wrists and shook her head. Her voice quavered; she was still giggling in confusion. The difference between them would be greater than ever. “Oh,” she said again. “But he’s still alive?”
I didn’t understand why she was laughing. This wasn’t good news.
“Well, yes, but he’s very seriously ill.”
“Ha, well, that’s…well, that’s…”
Claire was nearly breathless now with her giggling fit. Patsy came rushing through from the kitchen.
“Mum! What’s the matter?”
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” said Claire, wheezing and waving her away.
“Claire? Mrs. Shawcourt?” I said on my end of the phone. Gradually she managed to control herself.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you for letting me know.”
“That’s all right,” I said, still amazed about her reaction. There was a pause.
“He’s alive?”
“Yes, he’s alive.”
“But he’s not very well?”
“I think that’s about it.”
Her voice quieted.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I would like to see him so.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. How could she get on a plane to Paris? She couldn’t walk three steps without running out of breath. She couldn’t even change trains. It was impossible. I felt so sorry.
“Maybe when he’s better, he can come and see you?” I said. “I’ll make him.”
Claire looked again at the old, collapsing purple veins in her left hand. Her right hand was getting sore just from holding up the phone. She could see her reflection in the window. He wouldn’t know it was her. He wouldn’t recognize her.
“No, don’t,” she said. “Don’t. But let me know, won’t you? Let me know how he’s getting on.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
“And what about you?” she said suddenly. “How are you? How are you enjoying Paris?”
I half-smiled to myself as I wiped away a black glob of mascara from underneath my eye. I wasn’t going to be the bearer of any more bad news.
“It’s…it’s eventful,” I said.
“Tout va bien à part ça?”
“Oui, à part ça.”
- - -
I realized as I hung up that I had been hoping that Claire could have been my savior, that I could have poured my woes out to her—she would understand, surely. She had been a young girl in Paris once. I wasn’t much of a young girl, but she’d sent me here.
I hadn’t expected her to be quite so enervated by the news. She was so tired, mostly, so weary; everything took her so long. But when she had giggled, nervously, jumpily, I’d caught a glimpse of another Claire, a younger one. I had thought she would be concerned—but from a difference. When I was recuperating, other people’s bad news slightly washed over me; I was too selfish and wrapped up in myself to pay it that much attention. But Claire had responded completely differently, as if Thierry was someone she still knew terribly well, intimately, that this news about someone she hadn’t clapped eyes on for forty years was somehow of intense importance to her.
- - -
1973
Claire had seen Richard Shawcourt around. He went to the same school as her, but he was in a higher year. He wore brown horn-rimmed glasses that made him look too serious to be a schoolboy, and sometimes he’d carry a music case. He was carrying it that day as he swung through the woods.
Claire was skipping school. Some days she felt sad, some days dreamy. Today, she felt mutinous. She’d snapped repeatedly at her mother over the breakfast table (there was no point in cheeking the Reverend if she ever wanted to leave the house again) and stormed out nastily, barely even bothering to check the post. She’d started out in the direction of school—she had French oral practice that morning, which she was good at—but had gotten halfway there and seen a huge gaggle of girls, including Rainie Callendar, all giggling and screaming at each other and laughing at Looby Mary, a big lummox of a girl in their year who always walked alone and never spoke. They were obviously being viciously mean about her, even though Mary was clearly educationally subnormal and barely clean, asking her questions about whether she had a lad and which discotheque she would take him to, and it turned Claire’s stomach all of a sudden, the stupid, pointless cruelties of school life. She wondered what Thierry would do. He wouldn’t stand for it, she was sure; his benevolent attitude toward the world wouldn’t allow it.
She marched up to them.
“What are you guys, eleven?” she said, her voice not even wavering. “For God’s sake, you’re practically school leavers and you’re running around being bullies.”
“Get over yourself,” said Rainie Callendar, who dyed her hair already.
“Oh, it’s the French madame’s pet, oh je t’aime,” said Minnie Hutchison, who was her evil sidekick. Everyone started laughing, but Claire just turned around to Looby Mary and said, “Are you all right?” and Looby Mary just looked really confused, like she hadn’t properly understood what was happening in the first place, and scuttled off. The group of girls had reconfigured and were now talking loudly in shocked tones along the lines of, “Well, I don’t know who she thinks she is,” and “I suppose she thinks she’s better than everyone,” and Claire sighed, rolled her eyes, and marched off to the woods.
“Aw, too scared to come to sc
hool?” shouted Rainie, and Claire ignored her.
- - -
She sat in the bough of her favorite tree in the copse behind the school, lighting one of her precious Gauloises—barely inhaling, just letting the smell of the smoke calm her down to stop her kicking a tree.
The sound of someone coming made her scuttle down and put it out, trying not to be seen.
“Sorry,” said Richard Shawcourt, looking awkward and a bit embarrassed, his trousers already getting too short even this early in the school year. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to say well done and make sure you were all right. I never dare stand up to bullies; they break my glasses.”
She stared at him up and down.
“What’s in that music case then?” she said.
- - -
It was worse than I had thought. When I got back, Frédéric and Alice were having a full-blown stand-up row in front of the shutters. They were screaming at each other too quickly for me to properly follow them, but it seemed reasonably obvious from the way they looked at me with furious eyes that it had a lot to do with me and my perceived weaknesses. Frédéric was obviously continuing to insist on the closure of the shop. This solution didn’t appear to be cutting any ice with Alice at all. They both gazed at me expectantly.
The good thing about our corner of the Île de la Cité is it contains lots of tiny alleyways that are good for ducking down. I ducked down one now. Then I took out the telephone number that I had purloined from Alice’s phone.
The voice answering spoke low and quickly.
“Allo?”
“Laurent?” I said. “It’s me, it’s Anna.”
He exhaled slowly. “Anna, I’m at the hospital. I can’t really talk. This isn’t a good time.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry…how is he doing?”
Laurent sighed. “Still no change. These bloody machines are making my ears hurt. And I have to get back to work. I mean, I really have to. They can’t run service without me.”
This was the worst news I could hear. I needed him, really badly.
I told him so.
“Please,” I said. “I need you. To help me out with the shop. I can’t do it by myself.”
“But I thought you worked in chocolate?”
“Well, I do, but I’m hardly going to be as good as your father, am I?”
“No,” he said, a little quickly for my liking.
“I need help. It’s all going wrong. Frédéric and Alice are fighting.”
“Alice would fight with a dead dog in a town hall,” said Laurent. I presumed this was some unusual French saying I wasn’t familiar with. He sighed and sat quietly for a long time. I could hear the beep beep and the swishy-swashy sound of the respirator behind him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’m going to leave and do my shift, then come back to the hospital. Can you meet me at work? A few pointers, that’s all, okay?”
I nodded. “Where do you work?”
“The Pritzer,” he said. I’d never heard of it, but he said it like I ought to.
“Come in the back entrance. I’ll see you at three.”
“What will I tell Alice?”
“Tell Alice you’re going to save the shop, and also that she can go pee on scissors.”
My French had a long way to go.
- - -
Alice looked down her long nose at me.
“Well, Thierry won’t hear of it. He would never let Laurent’s concoctions”—she pronounced the word concoctions as if it were poisonous—“near his customers.”
“I realize that,” I said. “But I think it might be better…”
“What we are making here is chalk,” burst out Frédéric provocatively. He’d stopped shouting, briefly, when I made my way over to them, but his ears were bright red. Benoît was nowhere to be found. “It is a travesty! It is a sin!”
“Uhm, can we not go quite that far,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad is as good as terrible,” he said. “In this shop.”
Alice bit her lip and thought about it for a moment.
“The shop must go on,” she said. “It must. We have bills and commitments. It is impossible that we close now; it is our busiest season…Can you sell the rest of this morning’s stock?” she asked Frédéric.
He drew himself up to his full height—about five foot six—and said, “I can, but I will not, madame.”
Alice rolled her eyes.
“All right,” she said to me. “Go. And when you come back, do it right or you’ll find French laws protecting jobs don’t cover yours.”
The Pritzer, I found out, was a very, very posh hotel, on the Place de la Concorde, near the Crillon. It was a beautiful yellow stone and looked like a castle, with small balconies and canopies over every window. Outside were two porters dressed in livery with top hats on, each standing next to a large topiary cock. A spotless red carpet descended the steps onto the pavement. Outside, a large man wearing sunglasses and a very tiny woman who looked like she was made out of icing sugar were descending from a huge black car. They were completely ignoring each other. The woman was holding a tiny dog like a baby. The porters leaped to help them.
“Excuse me,” I said when they’d finished. “Where’s the kitchen entrance?”
Around the back of the hotel, all was very different. The back entrance was off an alleyway filled with dustbins. The other side of the hotel was old white brick, not sandstone, and a grubby fire door was propped open at the bottom with several staff in white aprons and tall hats crowded around it, smoking furiously. I felt nervous but walked up. Just inside the entrance was an old man wearing a peaked hat and a green blazer, sitting at a desk next to a huge row of time stamp cards. That made me feel a bit more at home; it reminded me of the factory. I told him who I was looking for and he made a call.
A long hall stretched out in front of me, on one side lined with huge carts of linen and women in black dresses with white pinafores. On the other were great swinging doors with round panes of glass set in them, obviously leading to the kitchens, and it was from here that Laurent emerged. In his whites, he looked commanding and rather impressive, firing a list of instructions behind me as he came, looking none too pleased to see me, for which I couldn’t really blame him. I’d caused him nothing but trouble since I’d arrived.
“Hello,” I said in a small voice.
“Yes, follow me,” he said. “Can’t you tie your hair back?”
I retightened the loop of my ponytail, hoping that would be enough. He grunted, thanked the commissionaire, and pointed me in the direction of the hand sanitizer mounted on the wall outside the large swinging doors.
I’d never been in such a huge kitchen before. I stopped to goggle for a second; I couldn’t help it. It was an utter hive of activity, men (and they were nearly all men) marching everywhere to and fro; not running, but marching very, very quickly. Everyone was wearing white with blue checked trousers and clogs, except some of the men wore white trousers and had their names embroidered on their jackets, including Laurent. I assumed this meant something important.
The noise levels were unbelievable; people were shouting in a variety of different languages; pots and pans were clanked and hurled across the room. In the corner, four younger men in T-shirts were frantically packing and unpacking industrial-sized dishwashers and two had their hands deep inside pots. On my right, a boy who looked to be around sixteen was furiously chopping vegetables. I had never seen anyone chop anything so quickly; his hand was a blur.
To my right was a long line of perfect salads laid out, onto which a man was slicing pieces of perfectly cooked pink duck, all exactly the same, at absolutely precise thicknesses. Another, older man came up to him at one point and told him off furiously for not making them all thin enough and the man, instead of arguing back, stood wi
th his head down until the rant was over and then recommenced, apologizing.
Laurent caught me staring and gave me a half-smile. “Have you never seen a working kitchen before?” but I shook my head; I hadn’t. My Saturday job in the Honey Pot didn’t even compare; I’d never seen anything remotely like this. It was like a huge airfield, but once you got used to the size and the noise and the number of people bustling about and occasional bouts of steam, it seemed to make a lot of sense; it was organized, like ants, not the chaos it first appeared.
Laurent led me down to the far end of the room. Next to him, two men were kneading bread. They had huge muscular forearms and looked like miners or sailors, not bakers. An almost comically large man was opposite them, icing tiny pastries. The size of the man was completely at odds with the task he was undertaking.
Laurent’s station was by the window, which looked out onto the Seine. He had a huge copper pot bubbling on the stove on a very low flame, the chocolate melting very much like his father’s. But instead of oranges and mint, there was every manner of flavoring around his work bench. Tiny chilies were lined up in bright green and red; yellow marjoram and little pumpkin flowers jostled next to pine needles and sea salt.
“This looks like a mad person’s laboratory,” I said.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he said gruffly. “Is there any more news? You seem to be the first to know about anything.”
“That’s not true,” I said quietly. “But I do need to ask you this favor.”
He checked on one of the smaller pots he was stirring. “Try this,” he said. I opened my mouth eagerly, and he smiled. “You are a proper chocolate girl. Okay, hang on.”
He blew on it to cool it down.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, then popped it in my mouth.
My first instinct was to spit it out. It was horrible, not sweet at all. It was sharp, bitter, and with an odd warm flavor that I couldn’t identify. Laurent was holding up his finger strongly, warning me not to spit it out.