The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (13 page)

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The next few weeks, I started to settle in. The work was extremely hard and unrelenting, but I liked it and was even starting to get the hang of the husking and the conch. Frédéric was funny and flirtatious. (A different girl every week would turn up for him at the shop, all of them pouty and disdainful, which was exactly how he liked them—he liked, he explained, to prostrate himself fully in front of a strong woman who would control everything. It was no surprise our flirtation hadn't exactly progressed.) He was voluble and fiercely purist about every stage of the chocolate-making process. Benoît continued to treat his job like a monastic calling. Alice never quite got over the look of distaste she put on every day to see me turn up, but Thierry was taken with me and liked to chat—and I liked to listen, thankfully—as he pontificated on life, and chocolate, with chocolate being by far the most important, obviously. He would often take me for lunch while Alice toiled away, showing me the best
croque-madame
or how to eat shellfish properly. I would set my alarm for naps, then often go out with Sami too, after work, who turned out to be the most fun omnisexual Algerian flatmate I'd ever had, when he wasn't complaining about opera singers who got too fat and budgets that got too small. I didn't see Laurent about much after he'd dropped me off. Sami said he was quite the
boulevardier
, always with a different model on his arm. I imagined Thierry had been similar when he'd been younger. Poor Claire.

After two months of this, I found I loved getting up at the crack of dawn, patting Nelson Eddy the dog, who fetched the newspaper for his mistress who lived on our street every morning, pit-patting past our door as we opened up; seeing the freshly cleaned cobbles come to life, water dribbling down the drains; the tiny funny-looking vans delivering drinks and fresh food; the smells of bread baking everywhere; the running hither and thither of kitchen staff. The sheer number of restaurants in Paris was dizzying, and Thierry seemed intent on visiting all of them; then the glancing up through the roofs and pigeons to the tiny floating clouds miles above to see if it was going to be another glorious day. That summer, it seemed, every day was a good day. I liked most of all getting dressed and going out on my little terrace first thing. The whole of Paris, laid out in front of me like a huge tray of macaroons, glowed rose pink, and I would think of the boarded-up high street of Kidinsborough with the pound shop and Kash4Gold, and how when it rained, the canal would spit old bikes out on the tow path, and feel as far away from home as if I'd landed on the moon. I did no food shopping (during my lunch hour, everything else was shut too, which drove me absolutely crazy), and mixed and scrubbed with all my might. I thought—I thought—one morning that I might even have actually had a dream in French. Sami and I often crossed paths at 4:00 a.m., he coming in, me arising for work, and we would often stop and take a coffee (with brandy for him, nothing for me, as every time I ran out of milk, I had to go down seven dark flights to find some, and it never seemed worth it, so I just learned to drink it black). Sometimes he was with chaps, sometimes with girls, sometimes alone, sometimes with an entire party. It was very fortunate I didn't work normal hours; it could have been a disaster. The eyrie remained absolutely tiny, with no working kitchen beyond coffee, no shower, and a bath you had to sit in with your knees pulled up to your chin.

I loved it.

I tried to keep in contact with home, but it seemed so far away sometimes.

I knew I was getting into it when Cath and I swapped email. I think I was just a bit overexcited and needed to tell someone. In retrospect, Cath probably wasn't the right person.

Hi C! I just got back from the most amazing party on a boat in the middle of the Seine. There were fire jugglers (my flatmate took me, everyone he knows does something stupid like that) and they kept setting drinks on fire and people kept trying to leap over them. Then these two chefs came on. One of them is my boss's son, but they've fallen out with each other. Anyway, they were trying to hurl crepes over the flames in little pans, but they kept falling out and it was hysterical and brilliant. Hope you're good, Anna.

Dear Anna,

On Tuesday I put four hours' worth of extensions in “Ermine” (she used to be called Sal, do you remember? daft bint) McGuire's head for her
X-Factor
audition. She smoked through the entire thing. I think I've gone blind. She wanted red, white, and blue and kept on talking about how she was going to pull Simon Cowell. It took all afternoon and I had to have the door blowing open on account of her wanting to smoke. I think I've got bronchitis. And I lost one of my new snakeskin nails in it. I said what was she doing, being the new Michelle McManus? And she told me to shut it, but I'd been standing all bloody day. Then she came in yesterday, her eyes red with crying, and said nobody had even seen her and she'd waited nine hours in the hosing rain and the colors had all run and it was my fault and she wanted her money back. I said she could go whistle and she said she could go punch me in the head. I got out the big scissors.

The police have said they won't press charges, but I have to give her the hair back in a box. I said I wouldn't be touching it, it probably had crabs already. PC Johnson smiled and said he got off at 9. So I'm off.

Come back soon,

Cath.

I hadn't meant to gush to Cath, but it was really a proper fun night. Well, it had started in the morning. Thierry had marched in huffing something about refrigeration. He was furious about it; even if we were running horribly late, you could never, ever put his work in the fridge, because it took away the highly polished shine. Anyway, we'd had an electricity bill and Alice was spitting feathers about it and basically implying why couldn't we work in the dark or something, and Frédéric had mentioned the fridges and Thierry had started huffing and puffing and getting red in the face, until eventually he'd signaled something to Benoît, who had immediately run up the street and returned with two dozen eggs.

“Anna! Come with me!” Thierry hollered. He had kind of taken me under his wing a bit. I was happy about this, obviously, in that I wasn't going to get sent home to annoy Claire, but I could always feel Alice's gimlet eyes boring into me.

“Chocolate pots,” said Thierry. “Seeing as we are paying for all this electricity…” He glared balefully at the large fridges, which were full of milk and butter actually. He grabbed the eggs and started separating them into a bowl, so quickly and deftly it was fascinating to watch. Then he took the whites, passed me over a bowl, and started to whisk them up at the speed of light.

“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 boiler
s
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.