The Lollipop Shoes (11 page)

He was back on form again, the small moment of uncertainty gone. He stood up, cramming his macaroon into his mouth (I noticed he’d left the chocolate). He grinned at Rosette, still playing on the floor.

‘Well,
jeune fille
, what do you think? We could go to the Luxembourg, play with the toy boats on the lake—’

Rosette looked up, her eyes bright. She loves those boats, and the man who rents them; would stay there all summer if she could . . .

See boat
, she signed, emphatically.

‘What did she say?’ said Thierry, frowning.

I smiled at him. ‘She says that sounds like a pretty good plan.’

I was struck by a sudden affection for Thierry, for his enthusiasm, his goodwill. I know he finds Rosette difficult to cope with – her eerie silence, her refusal to smile – and I appreciated the effort he was making.

Upstairs, I discarded my chocolate-smeared apron and put on my red flannel dress. It’s a colour I haven’t worn in
years; but I needed something to combat that cold November wind, and besides, I thought, I’d be wearing a coat. I wrestled Rosette into anorak and gloves (a garment which, for some reason, she despises), and then we all took the Métro to the Luxembourg.

So curious to be a tourist still, here in the city of my birth. But Thierry thinks I’m a stranger here, and he takes such joy in showing me his world that I cannot disappoint him. The gardens are crisp and bright today, pebbled with sunlight beneath a kaleidoscope of autumn leaves. Rosette loves the fallen leaves, kicking through them in great exuberant arcs of colour. And she loves the little lake, and watches the toy boats with solemn enjoyment.

‘Say
boat
, Rosette.’

‘Bam,’ she says, fixing him with her catlike gaze.

‘No, Rosette, it’s
boat
,’ he says. ‘Come on now, you can say
boat
.’

‘Bam,’ says Rosette, and makes the sign for
monkey
with her hand.

‘That’s enough.’ I smile at her, but inside, my heart is beating too fast. She has been so good today; running about in her lime-green anorak and red hat like some wildly animated Christmas ornament, occasionally calling –
Bam-bam-bam!
– as if shooting down invisible enemies, still not laughing (she rarely does) but concentrating with fierce intent, her lip pushed out, her brows drawn together, as if even running could be a challenge not to be taken frivolously.

But now there’s danger in the air. The wind has changed; there’s a gleam of gold from the corner of my eye, and I’m beginning to think it’s time—

‘Just one ice cream,’ Thierry says.

The boat does a clever little flip in the water, turning ninety degrees to starboard and heading out for the middle of the lake. Rosette looks at me mischievously.

‘Rosette, no.’

The boat flips again, now pointing at the ice cream stand.

‘All right, just one.’

We kissed as Rosette ate her ice cream by the side of the lake, and he was warm and vaguely tobacco-scented, like somebody’s father, his cashmere-coated arms folded bear-like over my too-thin red dress and my autumn coat.

It was a good kiss, beginning with my cold fingers and finding its clever, earnest way towards my throat and finally my mouth, unfreezing what the wind had frozen, little by little, like a warm fire, repeating
I love you, I love you
(he says that a lot), but under his breath, like Hail Marys delivered in haste by an eager child too keen for redemption.

He must have seen something in my face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, serious again.

How to tell him? How to explain? He watched me with sudden earnestness, his blue eyes watery with the cold. He looked so guileless, so
ordinary
– unable, for all his business acumen, to understand our kind of deceit.

What does he see in Yanne Charbonneau? I’ve tried so hard to understand. And what might he see in Vianne Rocher? Would he mistrust her unconventional ways? Would he sneer at her beliefs? Judge her choices? Feel horror, perhaps, at the way she lied?

Slowly, he kissed my fingertips, putting them one by one in his mouth. He grinned. ‘You taste of chocolate.’

But the wind was still blowing in my ears, and the
sound of the trees all around us made it immense, like an ocean, like a monsoon, sweeping the sky with dead-leaf confetti and the scent of that river, that winter, that wind.

An odd little thought came to me then—

What if I told Thierry the truth? What if I told him everything?

To be known; to be loved; to be understood. My breath caught—

Oh, if only I dared—

The wind does curious things to people: it turns them around, it makes them dance. In that moment it made Thierry a boy again, tousle-haired, bright-eyed and hopeful. The wind can be seductive that way; bringing wild thoughts and wilder dreams. But all the time I could hear that warning – and even then I think I knew that for all his warmth and all his love, Thierry le Tresset would be no match for the wind.

‘I don’t want to lose the chocolate shop,’ I told him (or maybe the wind). ‘I need to keep it. I need it to be mine.’

Thierry laughed. ‘Is that all?’ he said. ‘Then marry me, Yanne.’ He grinned at me. ‘You can have all the chocolate shops you want, and all the chocolates. And you’ll taste of chocolate all the time. And you’ll even
smell
of it – and so will I—’

I couldn’t help laughing at that. And then Thierry took my hands and spun me around on the dry gravel, making Rosette hiccup with laughter.

Perhaps that’s why I said what I did; a moment of fearful impulsiveness, with the wind in my ears and my hair in my face and Thierry holding on for all he was worth, whispering
I love you, Yanne
, against my hair in a voice that sounded almost afraid.

He’s afraid to lose me
, I suddenly thought, and that was when I said it, knowing that there could be no turning back after this, and with tears in my eyes and my nose pink and running from the wintry cold.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘But quietly . . .’

His eyes widened a little at the suddenness of it.

‘You’re sure?’ he said, a little breathlessly. ‘I thought you’d want – you know.’ He grinned. ‘The dress. The church. The choir singing. Bridesmaids, bells – the whole shebang.’

I shook my head. ‘No fuss,’ I said.

He kissed me again. ‘As long as it’s yes.’

And for a moment it was so good; the small, sweet dream right there in my hands. Thierry’s a good man, I thought. A man with roots; with principles.

And money, Vianne, don’t forget that
, said the spiteful voice inside my head, but the voice was faint, and getting fainter as I gave myself to the small, sweet dream. Damn her, I thought, and damn the wind. This time it would not blow us away.

7

Friday, 9th November

TODAY I QUARRELLED
with Suze again. I don’t know why it happens so much; I want to be friends, but the more I try, the harder it gets. This time it was about my hair. Oh, boy. Suze thinks I should get it straightened.

I asked why.

Suzanne shrugged. We were alone in the library during Break – the others had gone to buy sweets at the shop, and I was trying to copy up some geography notes, but Suze wanted to talk, and there’s no stopping her when that happens.

‘Looks weird,’ she said. ‘Like Afro hair.’

I didn’t care, and told her so.

Suze made the fish-mouth face she always makes when someone contradicts her. ‘So – your dad wasn’t black, was he?’ she said.

I shook my head, feeling like a liar. Suzanne thinks my father’s dead. But he
might
have been black for all I know.
For all I know he might have been a pirate, or a serial killer, or a king.

‘Because, you know, people might think—’

‘If by
people
, you mean Chantal—’

‘No,’ said Suzanne crossly, but her pink face went a shade pinker, and she didn’t quite meet my eyes as she said it. ‘Listen,’ she went on, putting her arm around my shoulders. ‘You’re new to this school. You’re new to
us.
The rest of us went to the primary school. We learnt to fit in.’

Learn to fit in.
I had a teacher called Madame Drou, back in the days at Lansquenet, who used to say the exact same thing.

‘But you’re different,’ said Suze. ‘I’ve been trying to help—’

‘Help me how?’ I snapped, thinking of my geography notes and how I never,
never
get to do what I want when she’s around. It’s always
her
games,
her
problems and her
Annie please stop following me around
when somebody better comes along. She knew I didn’t mean to snap, but she looked hurt anyway, pushing back her (straightened) hair in what she thinks is a very adult fashion and saying, ‘Well, if you won’t even
listen
. . .’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

She looked at me for a moment or two. Then the lesson bell rang, and she gave me a sudden, brilliant smile and handed me a folded piece of paper.

‘I made a list.’

I read the list in geography class. Monsieur Gestin was talking to us about Budapest, where we’d lived once, for a while, though I don’t remember much about it now. Only
the river, and the snow, and the old quarter that looks so like Montmartre to me somehow, with its winding streets and its steep stairways and the old castle on the little hill. The list was written on half a sheet of exercise-book paper in Suze’s neat, pudgy hand. There were tips on grooming (hair straight, nails filed, legs shaved, always carry deodorant); dress (no socks with skirts, wear pink, but not orange); culture (chick-lit good, boy-books bad); films and music (recent hits only); what to watch on television, websites (as if I had a computer anyway), how to spend my free time and what type of mobile phone to carry.

I thought at first it was another joke; but after school, when I met her queuing for the bus, I realized she was serious. ‘You have to make an effort,’ she said. ‘Otherwise people will say you’re weird.’

‘I’m not weird,’ I said. ‘I’m just—’

‘Different.’

‘What’s so bad about being different?’

‘Well, Annie, if you want to have friends . . .’

‘Real friends shouldn’t care about that kind of thing.’

Suze went red. She often does when she’s annoyed, and it makes her face clash with her hair. ‘Well, I
do
,’ she hissed, and her eyes went to the front of the queue.

There’s a code in queuing for the bus, you know, just as there’s a code when you’re going into class, or picking teams in games. Suze and I stand about halfway. In front of us there’s the A-list: the girls who play basketball for the school; the older ones who wear lipstick, who roll their skirts up at the waistband and smoke Gitanes outside the school gates. And then there are the boys: the best-looking ones; the team members; the ones who wear their collars turned up and their hair gelled.

And there’s the new boy: Jean-Loup Rimbault. Suzanne has a crush on him. Chantal really likes him too – though he never seems to notice either of them much, and never joins in any of their games. I began to see what was going on in Suze’s mind.

Freaks and losers stand at the back. First, the black kids from the other side of the Butte, who keep to their group and don’t talk to the rest of us. Then Claude Meunier, who stutters; Mathilde Chagrin, the fat girl; and the Muslim girls, a dozen or so of them, all in a bunch, who caused such a fuss about wearing their headscarves at the beginning of term. They were wearing them now, I noticed as my eyes went to the back of the queue; they put them on the minute they leave the school gates, even though they’re not allowed them at school. Suze thinks they’re stupid to wear headscarves, and that they should be like us if they’re going to live in our country – but she’s just repeating what Chantal says. I don’t see why a headscarf should make a difference any more than a T-shirt, or a pair of jeans. Surely, what they wear is their business.

Suze was still watching Jean-Loup. He’s quite tall, good-looking, I suppose, with black hair and a fringe that covers most of his face. He’s twelve, a year older than the rest of us. He should be in a higher form. Suze says he was kept back last year, but he’s really bright, always top of the class. A lot of the girls like him; but today he was just trying to be cool, leaning against the bus stop, looking through the viewfinder of the little digital camera he never seems to be without.

‘Oh, my
God
,’ whispered Suze.

‘Well, why don’t you talk to him for once?’

Suze shushed me furiously. Jean-Loup looked up briefly
at the noise, then went back to his camera. Suze went even redder than before. ‘He
looked
at me!’ she squeaked, then, hiding behind the hood of her anorak, turned to me and rolled her eyes. ‘I’m going to get highlights. There’s a place that Chantal goes to for hers.’ She grasped my arm so hard it hurt. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We could go together! I’ll get highlights, and you can get yours straightened.’