The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (5 page)

Two Months Later

I
f one more person told me how lucky I was, I was going to scream. I didn't feel lucky at all. At the huge, mobbed railway station in Paris where the Eurostar stopped, everyone had charged off in every direction as if holding a “look how well I know Paris” competition and left me standing there feeling totally exposed, so then of course I figured I would look like someone totally exposed and then become a massive target for pickpockets. This is why my mum and my dad have been to Scarborough every single year for a hundred and seventy years, I swear to God. At least in Scarborough, you know which end of the pier to avoid and you can tell if someone's wearing a real police uniform or a novelty hat for fun, and here I couldn't read the signs or know what to think and I didn't dare take a cab. I limped down an escalator pulling my wheelie bag and thinking of all the people who'd swooned and said I was so lucky to be in Paris and how amazing it was going to be and all I could think was, well, yes, I'll probably sit by myself in a room for six weeks watching it all go on around me and not notice a thing. That was entirely within the realm of possibility. And I wouldn't like the food.

I looked up at the Metro map. It made totally no sense to me, none of it. I gazed at it, hand clutching tightly to my wallet and passport. It could have been on upside down as far as I could tell. None of the lines had names, just numbers, but the notice boards had names.

I finally figured out that they were giving the names of the stations at the end of the lines. Or so I thought. I boldly strode forward and got a ticket from the man behind the counter, who I then asked in my best French for the way to my stop. He gave me a gigantically long stream of hugely complicated directions. I didn't understand any of them, but said thank you and went to walk away. He shouted at me loudly and I turned around, panicked, as he indicated that I had already started heading off in the wrong direction. I thanked him, tears pricking my eyes with embarrassment.

The tunnel platform was mobbed with every conceivable type of person, most of them speaking French loudly at a billion miles an hour as if showing off and a few of them looking like horribly lost tourists, just like me. We avoided each other like plague victims, too scared to reveal our vulnerability and ignorance. If I could have turned around and gotten back on the nice cozy Eurostar, I would have in a heartbeat. I glanced at my watch. I'd changed the time, so it was four o'clock here, which meant three o'clock in Kidinsborough. Tea break time. At Braders I'd have been sitting down with a cuppa and a packet of salt 'n' vinegar chips. Even thinking of that stupid factory, which I hated and detested and where I slagged off almost continuously, was making me homesick now. Around about now in the hospital, they served custard creams.

I stared nervously through the dirty graffitied window of the loud silver train. It rattled past stops including, I thought, the one I should have gotten off at. Within another few minutes, we were practically out in open fields. Wherever it was I was meant to be going, it wasn't out in open fields. My heart racing, I jumped out at the first station when the train, after a hundred years, finally started to slow down. Several people in the carriage watched me with amused eyes, which made me hot and cross and anxious. I took the first train going the other way, which thank goodness, did turn out to be a slow stopping train with two levels, halfway up and halfway down. I took a tiny orange plastic seat near the door and strained my eyes at the passing signs, trying to stop the train by willpower alone.

When I finally reached Châtelet-Les Halles, I got my suitcase shut in the revolving door but was helpfully freed by a very well-dressed man who was rushing past. I turned to thank him, but instead he shot me a look that gave me a very strict telling off for getting in his well-shod way. I stood up above ground again finally, dirty, hot, and grumpy, and tried to orient myself with my tiny map. Thank God she'd said island; a bridge, a bridge I could see. Stupid bloody Paris and its stupid bloody hard-to-get-about Metro and its grumpy people and its shouting railway staff and stupid well-dressed men…I was very close to tears. My toes were killing me.

Next to the Metro station was a little café with tables and chairs pushed out onto the pavement, despite cars running close by and exhaust fumes in the air and a florist whose blooms spilled over onto and under the chairs. I felt for my wallet for the 198th time that afternoon, then collapsed into a chair. A little man in trousers and a white shirt came running out importantly.

“Madame?” he said fussily. I didn't know what I wanted, really. Just to sit down. And given the perilous state of my finances, I really would have liked just a glass of water, but that wasn't going to go well, I could tell already. I glanced at the next table. An old man with an equally old dog dozing under his chair raised an eyebrow at me. In front of him was a tall, large glass filled with brimming, icy cold-looking lager. The waiter followed my eyes.

“
Comme
ça
?”—like that one?—he barked. I nodded my head gratefully. Yes. Fine. Bit naughty at four o'clock in the afternoon, but then I'd been up since five because Mum was utterly convinced I was going to miss all my connections. And I was hot and tired and cross and it was nice, for two seconds, to stop panicking about everything I had to do and whether I was going to lose my ticket on the train or drop my passport or leave my bag unattended and have it blown up.

I sat back in the chair and turned my face to the sun. Having left England in a cold fog, I hadn't expected spring sunshine, but out of the wind, it was warm and gentle on my face. Blinking and wondering where I'd packed my sunglasses, I took a deep breath as my beer arrived fast as lightning, took a sip—it was freezing and delicious—and glanced around me.

I couldn't help but smile. Forget the dirty Metro or the rattling suburbs or the hard-to-maneuver ticket barriers. Instead, here, I found myself on a corner of a crossroads of cobbled streets, leading toward, on my right, a great hump-backed bridge over the Seine from which I could just make out the back of a huge church. My heart leaped. It was Notre Dame; it had to be. On my other side were long rows of huge white buildings, seven or eight stories high, one leading down the embankment of the river, one backward filled with shops, the road several lanes wide, shops and restaurants with striped awnings poking out onto the pavements as far as the eye could see.

Slowly, my shoulders began to lower themselves, and my heart rose a little as I took another sip of beer, despite my tiredness and worry and anxiety. (I know, I know, there are people who travel without ever worrying about it, who turn up and bounce on trains and planes and enjoy it and wake up in a new city without even batting an eyelid—I wonder what their lives are like, I really do, because I am not like that; I worry all the time.) Next door, at the flower shop, a handsome young man with slicked-back hair came out looking slightly furtive and carrying a large bunch of white lilies. I wondered who they were for. As I wondered, he caught my eye, boldly staring at me, and winked as he walked off. Heh. I grinned at that too.

The people started to leave work—early by my standards for rush hour, but they were leaving nonetheless. The women all looked like they'd just been in the hairdressers. Their makeup was subtle; their hair was dark and lovely and didn't even look dyed—I thought regretfully of the highlights Cath put in, which cost me a fortune once every six weeks and was basically like being on a payment plan even at mate's rates—and they mostly wore really subtle clothes of black or navy or gray; not many trousers, I noticed. The female managers at Braders wore trouser suits mostly, too tight trousers over fat bottoms with little short jackets perched on the top. It was not a look, I felt, that suited them. Here, if the women did wear trousers, they were over tiny, nonexistent bottoms and were flowingly cut and looked rather chic and boyish, not a containment exercise. Of course, I thought. This was how Mrs. Shawcourt—Claire—dressed. This was obviously where she had learned. I wondered how she had done it.

The old man at the next table leaned over.

“
Anglaise
?” he asked. Well, yes. Although I wished it wasn't QUITE so obvious. I nodded, smiling.

“You 'ave been to Paris before?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Oh,” he said, his face completely creased with wrinkles. “Oh, you will adore it. To be young, and in Paris for the first time…
Mademoiselle
, I envy you.”

I tried to smile back as if I wasn't desperate for a bath and feeling positively ancient compared to the beautiful young French girls rushing back and forth. I tried for a second to let myself believe that he was right, that a whole new world of adventure and excitement could open up for me, Anna Trent, from Kidinsborough, here in Paris. The idea was ridiculous and absurd. The most exciting thing that happened to me was finding those boots I loved 70 percent off in the Debenhams sale. But as I drained the rest of my golden beer and looked around at the warm-tinged early Parisian evening, I let myself, just for a moment, wonder if it might be true.

I
knocked on the door carefully. The Île de la Cité was an island—there were two—right in the middle of Paris, connected by a series of bridges. It was mostly large buildings—a huge hospital and the law courts and police stations in proud, imposing stone, with Notre Dame Cathedral marking the west side—but around the back of the smart edifices were little streets too, cobbled and twisted, marking out an older city, and it was down one of these I finally found myself, on a road called the rue des Ursins, which was down some steps from the pavement, near a bridge, and across from some cobbles surrounding a tiny triangle of garden.

The street numbers didn't seem to make any sense; they jumped hither and thither, and areas called arrondissements just seemed to pop out of nowhere. There's something about the first time you go to a place—it takes far, far too long and you notice little details that you then notice forever, like the wrought iron lamps that lit the way as night started to fall. But finally I tracked it down. It was on the sixth floor of an old building made of golden stone that had wrought iron balconies with flowerpots full of pansies and large, floor-length windows.

When I first saw it, my heart leapt. As I drew closer, I noticed that the stone was a little shabby, that the pansies were dead or plastic, that the beautiful windows had old rattling frames and were single-glazed. It was not a set of smart apartments, but rather a subdivided old house, rather neglected. I sighed. Our house was small and smelled of boy and lynx aftershave and fish fingers and sometimes our farty old dog, but my little room was warm and cozy. Mum liked to whack the heating up, and Dad would chide her for it getting too expensive, and it was double-glazed and nice and modern. I'd never lived in an old building before. It was almost impossible to work out what the color of the huge old door had once been; a sort of sandy red seemed to cover it, just about. There was a jumble of old bells with writing all over them, and the steps were worn smooth. I couldn't see the name—Sami—that I was meant to push, so I tentatively pushed at the door. It creaked ominously straight in front of me, and I stepped in.

“
Bonjour
?” I cried out. There was no response. “
Bonjour
?”

Nothing. There was a glassed door at the end of the broken parquet hallway that let in just enough light to let me see the dusty piles of old mail over the floor and a tired looking pot plant by the stairwell. The stairs led up into the dark. I fumbled a bit and found a light switch, turned it on, and moved upward—there was nothing on this floor—but before I was halfway up, the light went out. I cursed crossly under my breath and trailed my hand till I found another switch. This wasn't, it turned out, a light switch, but instead a loud doorbell that went off like a gun.

“ALLO?” shouted an old lady's voice. I knew I was meant to be on the top floor, so I cried out a quick “
Pardon
, Madame” and continued on my way.

What was with these accursed lights that couldn't stay on? One had to dart between them. The staircase was incredibly twisted and narrow, so it was difficult to get up without scrabbling a bit on my toes, and I was beginning to feel terribly nervous when I finally made it to the top. Down below, the lady whose bell I had rung by accident was shouting her head off now, saying things I couldn't make out, but I think one of them was police. I cursed again under my breath, some proper Anglo-Saxon words, hauling my now incredibly heavy bag up the steps.

Finally I emerged onto a tiny little landing with—thank goodness—its own light coming through a dirty skylight above me. It was a tiny space, like being inside a turret. Someone had put a little white bookshelf crammed full of books at the top of the steps, so I couldn't get my bag past it. On the other levels, there had been two apartments, but here there was only one, as if the building had run out. I stepped forward. Beside the low white door was a little brass plaque that had “Sami” written in very tiny letters. I blew out a breath of relief. I didn't fancy reliving the stairway of death. It then occurred to me that, if I was going to live here, I was going to have to negotiate the stairway of death on eight toes every day, but I put that thought out of my mind for once.

I knocked sharply on the door. “Hello?”

Inside, I heard the sound of someone moving about. Thank goodness; I didn't know what I would do if I had to turn around again.
Probably
just
get
back
on
the
train
, I thought to myself. No. No, I wouldn't do that. Definitely not.

“
J'arrive
!” a voice called, sounding slightly panicked. There was a clattering noise inside. I wondered what was going on.

Finally, the door was flung open. A gigantically tall man stood there. His skin was a dark olive color, his eyebrows black and bushy, his jaw bristly and jutting. He was wearing a patterned robe which didn't appear to have much underneath it. He glanced at me without the slightest flicker of recognition or awareness whatsoever.

“
Bonjour
?” I said. “Anna Trent? From England?”

I worried suddenly that Claire hadn't done it right, hadn't managed to set it up, or there'd been some misunderstanding, or he'd changed his mind, or…

He squinted. “
Attends
,” he commanded. “Wait.”

He returned two seconds later with a huge pair of black-rimmed glasses. I sniffed. He smelled of sandalwood.

With the glasses on, he squinted once more.

“
La
petite
anglaise
!” he said, a sudden smile splitting his face. He switched to English. “Welcome! Welcome! Come in! Come in! I will say, I did forget. You will say, 'ow could you forget, and I will say…I will say…welcome à Paris!”

The second I stepped into the room, I could see there was absolutely no doubt that he had indeed forgotten. There was almost no hallway, just room for a hat stand with a collection of esoteric hats on it—I counted a fez, a trilby, and the head of a gorilla costume—then it opened out into a room. It wasn't a large room, but it was incredibly stuffed. There were capes and material, feathers, scissors, fur stoles, pillowcases, ashtrays, empty champagne bottles, and an enormous red sofa with huge cushions strewn about it and over the floor. In the corner was a kitchenette that had blatantly never been used. The peculiar man straightened up, even though the ceilings were much lower than I'd expected and he could hardly stand up; he must have been six foot five.

“
Non
,” he said sadly, looking around at the mess. “I did forget.”

He turned to face me happily.

“But what if I said, yes, welcome, Anna Trent…”

He pronounced it “a-NA Tron.”

“…thees is always my house prepared at its best for visitor? You would not like that.”

I shook my head to indicate that I wouldn't.

“You are cross with me,” he said. “You are sad.”

I shook my head. I was neither of those things; I was just a bit overwhelmed and tearful and exhausted with traveling and as far away from home as I'd been in my whole life really, and I kind of just wanted a table and a chair and a cup of tea, not some crazy bohemian workshop super mess, if that was all right with everyone. I had no idea who this guy was, except I knew I had to share with someone who didn't work in the shop.

“What is all this stuff?” I said, gesticulating.

“Oh, I bring my work home,” he said. “I work too hard, this is my problem.”

This, I was to discover, was nothing like Sami's worst problem, but I took him at his word.

It turned out Sami worked at the Paris Opera in their costume department, earning next to nothing at all, with dozens of tiny seamstresses, making clothes for the opera productions. He'd really come to work in one of the big couture houses but had had no luck and was practicing his trade letting out stays for singers and complaining about fat tenors and sullen sopranos who insisted they needed space in their costumes to sing but were, he confided, just too greedy.

But that all came later. Now it just all seemed a big mess.

“I have a room for you!” he said. “It is nothing like this.”

His face looked briefly panicked.

“Wait here,” he said and vanished through a door at the back. From a quick count of the doors, I ascertained, with some relief, that there must be another bedroom and a bathroom. For a hideous second, I'd thought that might be it and that I would be stuck in one hideously messy room with a distracted giant.

Within a few moments, and looking rather as if he were concealing something about his person, Sami returned rather sheepishly.

“It is
prêt
, ready for you,” he said, bowing from the waist. Sami would have, quite frankly, gotten killed at our school. Probably literally. It would have been on the news.

I followed with my clumpy bag, feeling very nondescript and plain, where he was pointing.

My old bedroom in Kidinsborough was very small, so it wasn't like I wasn't expecting it. But there's something about being thirty and walking into something tinier than a prison cell…it was absolutely minuscule. Tiny. The size of the single bed they'd squeezed in there—who knows how—and a tiny chest of drawers crammed up against it and nothing else at all; there just wasn't the space. I blinked once, twice. I wasn't going to start crying. For starters, there was nowhere private to do it. I must admit, I'd fantasized, maybe a tiny bit. About a little bitty en suite, maybe, or some grand space; I'd seen them in magazines. Paris had all those grand apartments with the posh rooms and marble fireplaces and high ceilings and…this was basically a coffin. Probably where the maids used to sleep or something. It was painted totally white, with dark brown scuffed parquet on the floor.

“What do you think?” said Sami. “Isn't it AMAZING?”

I put my head back out of the doorway.

Amazing? I wondered. What on earth must his be like?

“AMAZING!” he said. I blinked at him.

“Oh, AnNA Tron, she is very sad and cross with me,” he said, making his face go sad. “Can I get you something?”

“Tea?” I ventured.

“I 'ave no tea.”

“Coffee?”

“
Mais
bien
sûr
!”

He clattered happily over to the tiny kitchenette, while I advanced inside my little monk cell with my large purple bag. I put it on the bed—there was literally nowhere else it could possibly go—and clambered past the chest of drawers over to the window. And that's when I saw it. I gasped.

The window opened sideways and was full-length. I thought briefly of how many children must have fallen out of it. But I didn't think it for long before seeing past the net curtain and opening the catch, to find outside two extraordinary things: the tiniest balcony, only just big enough to fit a tiny wrought iron table and two wrought iron chairs, but directly in the path of the sun and, from six floors up on the Île de la Cité—Paris. Paris all around. The rooftops of the other buildings across the water, with tables out on their south-facing side. The road down, and the bridges all the way down the Seine. To my left, to the northwest, I could just make out the ominous looking black tip of La Défense, the great center of the financial district, which looks like a sinister black bridge. And everywhere, the teeming, pulsating life of the city, the noise insulated from six stories up—the little fruit van chugging its way furiously down the street; a collection of stunningly attractive people emerging from a sleek black car to a chic bar; two little lines of schoolchildren walking politely down the next street hand in hand. And if I craned my neck really, really far to the left, to the west, I could see it. The one and only unmistakable fretted iron of the Eiffel Tower.

I gazed and gazed and gazed at the pinkening skyline, as if I were thirsty and this was water. I could no longer feel the pain in my foot, or my longing for a shower, or my general exhaustion.

“Your café,” said Sami, coming in my room without bothering to knock. “You really not like?”

I smiled.

“I didn't see the balcony. It's amazing. Amazing.”

He had given me a tiny cup of black stuff with a sugar lump sitting next to it. I normally just like lattes or Nescafé. I looked at him.

“Have you got any milk for the coffee?” I asked apologetically.

“Milk? No. Milk is a feelthy thing. You suck the teets of a cow. No. Milk. No.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Brandy? I have a leetle brandy.”

And as it was such a gorgeous evening, I said yes, why not, and we sat out on my little
balcon
(he had one too, on the opposite side of the sitting room; we could wave to each other in the morning) and drank coffee with brandy in it and looked out over Paris. I don't think if anyone could have looked up and seen me (which they couldn't, because we were up in the eaves, where pigeons flew by and the sky turned pink and yellow and lavender, and there was no one else there but the birds) that they would have thought for a second that I was anything other than as much a part of Paris as anybody else, and I looked out on the strange and extraordinary foreign landscape and I wondered. I wondered.