The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (11 page)

“Well, hello,” I said, taken aback.

He was still talking, crossly, to Sami.

“She'll never find a taxi,” he was saying.

“Of course she will,” said Sami. “Or a bus, or a friend.”

Laurent rolled his eyes.

“I'll be fine,” I said. I was tired and a bit drunk and cross from the martinis and I suddenly wanted very much to be in my bed. I didn't like these strangers discussing me like a piece of furniture. The subways were probably still running anyway. I stood up and smiled shortly.

“Good night.”

- - -

As it turned out, the rather grumpy young man had turned out to be right. It was far later than I had thought, and the streets were completely deserted. So much, I thought, for this being a big all-night party town. I'd been to London twice, and as far as I could tell, Soho and Trafalgar Square kept going all night every night. Here, though, it was practically silent.

All the taxis cruising the streets seemed to have lights on but didn't stop. My heart started to jump a bit. Maybe the system was different here. Maybe if you had a light on that meant you weren't free. So I tried hailing a few cars without lights, but that didn't do me any good either, until one car with one man in it started slowing down a bit close to me and I turned tail and scampered up some steps. Then I turned around, worrying a bit about the sound of my shoes on the steps and wondering exactly how safe Paris was, after all. About ten people had warned me already about pickpockets. What about muggers?

I heard a footfall somewhere behind me. The streetlights, utterly charming though they were, wrought iron in the old-fashioned style, gave out picturesque circles of light. At the moment, though, I would have liked full-beam motorway service station blindingness. I could barely see my way ahead and hadn't a clue where I was going. I started walking up the church steps a little faster. The footsteps behind me sped up.

Oh crap, I thought to myself. Oh god. I was stupid, after all, coming out by myself. I was stupid coming out at all, full stop, with a new flatmate I barely knew. I should have stayed inside and eaten packet noodles and, I don't know, had a good cry or something. I moved faster, trying to see a street that led somewhere more wide open with more chance of company, but all the roads ahead seemed equally tiny and mysterious. Oh bugger.

Straight ahead was the outline of the huge church, the Sacré-Coeur. I decided to head for that, from some old-fashioned idea about sanctuary, but truly from the expectation that it would have some kind of big courtyard, somewhere with lights—you could see the floodlighting right across the city. I ran up more steps, and behind me, the feet were faster too, closing and closing, my heart pounding in my mouth, my hand searching in my bag for something I could use as a weapon. I closed on the great big old-fashioned iron key that opened the building door and told myself to aim for his eye.

“
HÉ
!”

The voice was deep and throaty, and I could tell by the tread that it was someone heavy. Shit. Right. This was it. The steps were closing in. I was in a small cobbled courtyard nowhere near the church, surrounded by boarded-up shops and tightly shuttered flats. Would they open up their shutters for me? I doubted it. Never mind, there were plenty of quiet-looking alleyways nearby.

“AAARRRRGH!!!!!”

I screamed with all my might and leapt on the dark shadowy figure, the keys outstretched in my hand, trying to stab them into his face. I caught him off guard, and he toppled over hard on the cobblestones, me coming down on top of him, still trying to get at him with the keys and screaming the worst obscenities I could think of.

I didn't realize at first that there was an equally terrified screaming coming from underneath me. A pair of extremely strong arms was trying to keep me away from his face. I had reverted to English—extremely Anglo-Saxon—and was trying to whack him; he suddenly spoke in English too.

“Pleeze, pleeze stop…pleeze…I don't mean harm. Any harm. Pleeze.”

The meaning didn't filter through straightaway, and I was so crazy with adrenalin, I'm not sure when exactly I would have stopped, if a shutter at the top of the apartment block we were underneath hadn't suddenly opened, and, without warning, a bucket of water poured down on our heads.

That stopped us. Panting, I realized I was sitting on top of the grumpy man from the bar. He was holding my hand in a vice grip at arm's length, but I had already managed, I saw, to make a good bloody cut in his forehead. Seeing the blood, now being washed by the water, suddenly made me wobble.

“Oh,” I said, shock and faintness washing over me. I wobbled and nearly collapsed on top of him. He quickly moved his hands to my waist, holding me up.

“What the…what the HELL did you think you were doing?” I finally managed to gasp as I clambered up. I was soaking.

“I was shouting at you. Didn't you hear me? I didn't catch your name the first time.”

“You don't follow a woman like that!”

“Well, you don't march out into a foreign city if you don't know your way home. Sami is fun, but he's always going to choose the party over you.”

I brushed down my hair as he lumbered to his feet. His English was extremely good, only the merest hint of a French accent.

“So you were…”

“I'd come to find you. I was only meant to meet you anyway, and I'm heading back your way. Actually, I'm knackered. Sami is never where he says he's going to be…”

“I can imagine,” I said, which was as close as I could get right then to an apology, with my heart still racing at a million miles an hour. “Oh God, I've hurt you.”

As if he hadn't realized before, he put a large hand to his face, only to feel the blood trickling down. He pulled his hand away and looked at it.

“Gross,” I said, appalled. I felt in my bag in case I had a tissue, but I didn't have one on me.

“That is awful,” he said, suddenly looking very wobbly himself. “Have you stabbed me?”

“Of course I haven't stabbed you,” I said defiantly. “I've keyed you.”

He didn't understand the word till I showed him the keys, then recognition dawned. My already anxious body suddenly pounded with fear that he was going to be furious. Instead, to my enormous, shattering relief, he shook his head, opened his mouth, revealing a white-toothed smile, and started to laugh.

“Come, come with me,” he said, then directed me up a tiny alleyway that looked forbiddingly dark. I had one more second of panic, at which he said, “Please. I certainly wouldn't attack you again.”

“I have my keys,” I said, nervously giggling as the adrenalin finally started to leave my body.

To my total surprise, the narrow alleyway opened out onto a wide, brightly lit thoroughfare that still had cars thundering down it and, here and there, a café still open. The man led me through to a tiny coffee shop, tucked away, inhabited by several Turkish men using a hookah and a dark-eyed proprietress with bags under her eyes who raised an eyebrow but nodded brusquely as the man asked her for two coffees and a bathroom.

I sat there quietly until he came back, his wound cleaned up somewhat, holding tissue paper to his head.

“I'm sorry,” I said again quietly. The coffee arrived. It was hot, black, and about 50 percent sugar. It was just what I wanted.

He shook his head, then glanced at his watch.

“Argh,” he said.

“Don't show me,” I said. “I have to be up in a few hours.”

“I know,” he said.

I looked at him. “Who are you?”

He grinned and I caught something then…saw something in his face.

“I'm Laurent,” he said. “You're Anna, I remember now. You work for my dad.”

- - -

1972

Thierry
worked
from
first
thing
in
the
morning, but at noon he made a stated decision to close the shop for three hours rather than the traditional two. When Benoît Sr. suggested this was commercial suicide, he pointed out that Italian shops closed for four hours and would he rather that, and that people would wait.

They
would.

Then
Claire
would
put
the
children
down
for
their
naps, under the cheerful guidance of Inez, the housemaid, and slip out, Mme. LeGuarde and Inez swapping meaningful looks.

They
would
wander
across
Paris's bridges, each more beautiful than the last—on one foggy day, which turned the city into black and white, like a Doisneau photograph, they strolled the Pont Neuf, every cobble, it felt to Claire, smoothed away by lovers meandering across it for hundreds of years.

Thierry
would
talk
and
talk—of flavors and schemes and what he had learned, in Innsbruck and Geneva and Bruges, and occasionally would remember to ask Claire what she thought of things too, but it didn't really matter to Claire; she was happy to listen to him, to rejoice in her understanding, which improved day by day, to revel in the warmth of his full attention, because when he got back to the shop, or went out, he would instantly be surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him—some business, or a word, or an idea, or to congratulate him on his taste or ask him about something in the newspaper. When they were in public, he was everybody's. Tracing out their own, circuitous routes of Paris, he was all hers, and she found herself unable to ask any more.

Usually
by
the
time
he
thought
to
ask
her
what
she
thought, it was nearing time for him to get back—never again in Claire's life would time speed away from her as quickly as it did during those walks, those lunches. Three hours felt like the blinking of an eye, and she would float through the afternoon, so light-humored and good-natured that Arnaud and Claudette would cling to her, happily repeating the English songs she taught them, lisping along to “hun-eee oh! Sugar, sugar.”

Mme. LeGuarde kept a close eye on her and, when she judged the time to be right, casually came in to Claire's room one night and sat down on the bed.

“Now,
cherie
,” she said kindly, “please tell me you know about contraception.”

Of
all
the
shocking
and
strange
things
that
had
happened
to
Claire
on
her
trip, none was as strange and bizarre as this elegant lady of the world referring to…well…matters. Of course she had a rough idea, picked up from her time at Chelsea Girl; she knew what a rubber was, kind of, and the girls spoke casually about being on the pill, although the thought of going to nice old Doctor Black, who'd known her since she was a baby, and asking him for pills to have sex, even if she had met anyone she'd have liked to have sex with apart from Davy Jones, was completely beyond her comprehension levels. The idea of these matters being discussed under the Reverend's roof was simply impossible.

It
being
in
another
language
helped, of course. But Mme. LeGuarde's cool, confident manner in discussing sexual hygiene, as if it were nothing more nor less important than regular hygiene (which, indeed, in Mme. LeGuarde's eyes, it wasn't), was an eye-opener to Claire in more ways than one. Firstly, she declined the offer of prophylactics but promised to ensure they were used. Secondly, she took Mme. LeGuarde's matter-of-fact tone and unflustered manner and stored it away somewhere. Years later, she was to end up taking all the sexual education classes in the school, as most of the other teachers couldn't bear it. Statisticians in later years always marked down the lower rate of STDs and teen pregnancies in the Standish ward of Kidinsborough, an otherwise very deprived area, as a blip. It was nothing of the sort.

- - -

Of course, as soon as he said it, I realized immediately. Of course he was. The build, the dark brown eyes; he was far more handsome than Thierry could ever have been, but fundamentally they were very similar, down to the long black eyelashes and the spark of mischief in the eyes, now the panicking was over.

“You look…”

“Please don't say I am like a thin version of my father.” Laurent looked down and patted his small stomach with a weary look. “Aha, not so thin.”

Actually he wasn't fat at all—just big, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders.

“Well, you can't look that much like him,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn't have stabbed you with those keys.”

“Well, unless he's really difficult to work for,” said Laurent, downing his coffee. “Ah. That's better. Am I dry?”

His curly hair stuck up in all directions and he had a lot of dark stubble on his chin.

“Do you have any big meetings tomorrow?” I said.

“That bad, huh?” he said. “Hmm.”

“So why did Sami want to introduce us?” I said.

“Oh, Sami likes to think he knows everyone.” Laurent thought about this and qualified the statement. “Okay, he does know everyone. He thought it was funny, you turning up.”

“Why?”

“Well…because.”

“What?”

“Because he knows my dad and I…we don't get on that well.”

It was hard to imagine anyone not getting on with the avuncular Thierry.