by Karen Swan
‘Excusez-moi, monsieur . . . do you know where I can find this address?’
The man looked at the piece of paper she was holding out – it was the dry-cleaning receipt she had scrawled the address on the other night. He pulled out a pair of spectacles and struggled to read her writing.
‘Oh, la-la. C’est la bas,’ he said finally, pointing to a tiny alley opposite, next to where she’d just been. Cassie hadn’t noticed the alley because it was so narrow that a scooter chained to the downpipe on the adjacent building had obscured the entrance to it.
‘Thank you, thank you, sir,’ she smiled, running back over. She started down the alley. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet long, and there was nothing down it except for a black fire door, which only opened from the inside, and a fire escape above. She turned round, searching for a name or number, anything at all, but there was nothing. She looked back at the fire door. That had to be it.
She was just raising her hand to knock when she heard voices from the other side – lots of them. She stepped back just as the door was flung open and a couple of Japanese girls came out, talking quickly, cameras around their necks. They were followed by a tall, narrow woman with ebony skin and a wicked afro, a middle-aged man with a grey moustache, and finally a dark-haired, black-eyed man the size of a bear.
‘Wait there!’ he barked to the group as he punched in an alarm code inside the door. They all stopped obediently, though the Japanese girls didn’t break stride in their conversation.
‘Oh, excuse me, but I’m going in!’ Cassie said, lurching forward, not quite able to bring a smile to her eyes.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded, clearly as grizzly by nature as by looks. He looked her up and down. She was wearing blue jeans and the Moncler jacket Luke had given her for Christmas. She hadn’t been able to face wearing it since leaving New York, but winter was showing no signs of upping sticks and the wind was especially bitter on the bike.
Cassie prickled at his abrupt manner. ‘I’m here to see Claude,’ she said, deliberately not answering his question.
‘I am Claude,’ he said, with such pomposity that he could have been saying, ‘I Claudius.’
‘Oh.’ Cassie’s eyes widened. That was bad luck. ‘Well – hi!’ she said, giving a wan smile and holding out a hand. ‘I’m Cassie.’
He ignored it. ‘You’re late.’
‘Yes.’ She dropped her hand, insulted by the snub and suddenly determined not to apologize. She planted her hands on her hips and turned the tables on him. ‘I couldn’t find the door.’
He scowled at her.
‘So, what – you’re . . . going out now?’
‘Well, we weren’t going to wait for you any longer,’ he said, marching off.
Cassie stared after him. ‘We?’
Again he ignored her, disappearing out of the alley and making off down the street. Cassie threw her hands in the air in bafflement. Oh, great! Now what was she supposed to do? Leave him to go out with his friends? Chase after him?
She stared down the empty alley, catching snatched flashes of people walking past on the bright pavement beyond. She looked at her watch. She supposed she was forty-five minutes late now. And he was Henry’s friend. Clearly if Henry rated him, he must have something going for him. He wouldn’t have hooked her up with a bad-tempered Frenchman just for the hell of it.
She ran after him. He was a good two hundred yards ahead, but in spite of her splitting headache, she caught him up easily.
‘So, are they joining us for lunch too, then?’ she asked, jerking her chin towards the group in front, absorbed in their casual bonhomie.
He flicked his eyes towards her irritably, as though surprised to find her still bothering him. ‘Is that a problem for you?’ he asked.
‘No. The more the merrier, frankly,’ she said with forced brightness. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You would know if you’d turned up on time.’ He accelerated his pace.
Cassie narrowed her eyes as he pulled away. Quite how someone as easy-going as Henry could be friends with someone like this, she didn’t know, but she made a mental note to give Henry a Chinese burn next time she saw him. She wondered how quickly she could get out of this.
They marched along the streets in silence, past the cafés which had been filled since breakfast and were now segueing at full capacity into lunch, past the shops selling rustic lace tablecloths and olive-printed oilcloths, past the lovers leaning on scooters and below the children playing marbles on the balconies, past the tourist shops selling replica football kits and Tricolor flags, until they rounded a corner and walked straight into a riot.
At least that’s what the market felt like to her poor beleaguered head. Everything was suddenly louder, brighter, more vivid, as shouts, haggles, cries and laughter jostled for the ear, and colours vied for the eye. She felt the inevitable headache coming on.
The group came to an abrupt stop and Claude turned to face them all, his face as bleak as before. ‘So we are here,’ he said vaguely. They were standing outside a tabac. Cassie looked around for the restaurant.
Claude reached into a cross-the-body bag he was carrying and handed everyone a small, pale green laminated card. Cassie’s eyebrows shot up as he handed one to each of them.
‘It’s a shopping list,’ she exclaimed, looking up at him.
‘Congratulations on cracking my code,’ Claude muttered sarcastically, and the Japanese girls tittered with laughter.
Cassie blushed, furious. Who the hell laminated their shopping list? And who the hell got their lunch companions to do their shopping for them?
‘Okay, so you have one hour to buy everything. I do not mind which stalls you buy from, but resist the temptation to buy from the first stall you go to. Quality and cost can vary greatly. Your eye for fine ingredients will tell me what you are capable of before we even get into the kitchen.’
Cassie stared at him, and then at the group, clearly all strangers to one another, and then at the list. It was beginning to dawn on her that she wasn’t on a lunch date here. It was a cookery course! The thought immediately excited her.
‘What are we cooking?’ she asked, feeling her hangover recede.
‘Again, you would know if you’d arrived on time,’ Claude said flatly, quashing her spirits again. He checked his watch. ‘We shall meet back here at 12.15 p.m.’
He might as well have fired a starter’s gun. Everyone dispersed instantly and Cassie sighed as they disappeared into the crowds. The road was closed to traffic and shoppers milled about everywhere, handling, weighing, sampling the produce casually. Part of her wanted to storm off and leave this rude Frenchman to it, but a bigger part of her was intrigued.
It wouldn’t hurt to browse. She stepped off the pavement and into the thick of the flow, wandering at a snail’s pace that suited her battered body. The stalls were all covered in the same white sail-canvas, and as she passed, she noticed the artful way they’d been set up, almost like Dutch still-lifes: glossy aubergines were clustered like grapes on a vine, chillies were threaded and hanging down like coral necklaces, roasted chickens were set out in military rows, aged and mouldy cheeses were wrapped in wax paper and twine like little gifts, live lobsters sat black and angry in straw boxes with their pincers taped shut, yellow courgette blossoms lay in trays like trugs of narcissi, roma tomatoes were heaped high, scallions piled up shiny and smooth . . .
She stopped at a stall where four trestle tables covered in navy cloth were laid out with deep bowls piled high with olives – black, green, pitted, stuffed. She tried counting how many varieties there were, but there had to be well over thirty – forty, even. She heard the stall owner – a short man with a doughy face that looked as if it had been dusted in flour – speaking Italian to another younger man who was standing next to him.
The man noticed her staring. ‘Oui, madame?’ he smiled, his arms held out, all ready for a sale.
‘I just wondered what these were seasoned with?’ she aske
d, pointing to a bowl of olives in the centre row.
‘Toscana – sun-dried tomatoes, rosemary, garlic,’ he said, pressing his index finger and thumb together like a verbal drum roll.
‘Really?’ She clapped her hand over her tummy appreciatively. Her hangover had meant she could only face coffee for breakfast, but she was rapidly feeling hungry. She reached for her purse. ‘I’ll take fifty grams, please.’
The man spooned them into a plastic lidded tub and she handed over the money. ‘You are Italian?’ she asked as she waited for her change.
‘Si. We come from a small village – Diano d’Alba, near Turin. Twice a week.’
‘You mean you travel to here from there?’ Cassie asked, astonished.
‘For this market, yes. It is the very best in Paris. We are not the only ones. People come from hundreds of miles around to sell and buy here. My father came before me, and now my son.’ He patted his son hard on the shoulder. The son gave a polite nod. They must have been up since dawn.
Cassie took her change and smiled her goodbyes, ambling through the crowd and glancing at the list properly. She needed some apples, for a start, and she could see an apple stall a hundred yards further on with just as much diversity of choice as the olive man’s. Giant cookers – nobbled and misshapen – sat as proudly as miniature plumped-out pippins; some of the varieties looked highly polished, like deep red garnets trying to pass off as rubies; others were matt and richly pigmented as if they’d been coloured with wax pastels.
‘What are you looking for?’ the old woman behind the table asked. She was sitting down, a headscarf knotted over her hair.
Cassie shrugged. ‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ she smiled.
The woman got up and took the green laminated list from her, nodding to herself. She turned and jerked a brown paper bag off a string.
‘You are with Claude Bouchard,’ she said, walking to the far end of the table and filling the bag with a dark plum-coloured variety.
Cassie watched her. ‘Yes . . . How do you know?’
She flicked her eyes towards the laminated list. ‘He always starts with the Tarte Tatin. Classique et délicieux. It is the reine des reinettes you need.’ She threw one of the apples to Cassie. ‘Try it.’
Cassie hesitated, but the woman was watching her expectantly. She took a small bite.
‘Is crunchy, a little bit tart, non? But high sugar content so it keeps its texture when it is cooked.’ She winked at Cassie. ‘He’ll ask you that, so remember it,’ she said, tapping her temple. ‘Then you will be his favourite student and that is a very good thing to be. Six euros thirty.’
Cassie fished in her purse for the change. ‘Hmm, I’m not sure I can be bothered.’
The old woman frowned. ‘Claude Bouchard is a Michelin-starred chef,’ she scolded, pocketing the money without looking at it and patting her stomach proudly as though she were his own mother. ‘Or he was. Until he stopped.’ She shook her head and pursed her lips in disapproval.
‘Stopped? How do you stop being a Michelin-starred chef?’ Cassie shook her head at the incongruous glory – he looked more like a cage-fighter than a chef.
‘Three years ago, he locked the doors. Fired everybody. Not walked into professional kitchen since. Now he just does a class when he needs the money, but . . .’ The woman flicked her hands dismissively. She leaned forward and whispered to Cassie. ‘He has the melancholy.’ She smiled, so that her wizened face folded in on itself. ‘But you are lucky. He does not take on many people. He must like you.’
Cassie shook her head. ‘No, no, he definitely doesn’t like me. But he likes a friend of mine.’
Another customer, further down the table, began impatiently filling brown bags with apples herself, and the woman rushed off to serve her. Cassie clutched her rustling bag to her chest and stepped back into the street. She’d seen enough episodes of MasterChef to know that the hierarchy in a professional kitchen was as rigidly enforced as a royal household’s – and she’d turned three-quarters of an hour late with an attitude and hangover. It wasn’t what you’d call an auspicious start by anyone’s standards, much less a Michelin-starred chef’s.
She chewed her lip for a moment, wondering whether the situation was salvageable, then took the shopping list out of her pocket and began studying it with intent. She’d better start making up ground.
She was first back at the meeting point, bags bulging and eyes wide. She hoped that Claude would be back before the others – she didn’t want to do this with an audience. She scanned the faces in the crowd, looking for the other students, but noticed Claude coming out of a crêperie opposite. It was his hunched body language that caught her attention. He looked up and saw her. She thought she saw disappointment come into his eyes – and she realized that she wasn’t the only one who’d been hoping that she would disappear and not come back.
He made his way over reluctantly, checking his watch and rearranging his features into a scowl.
She took a deep breath.
‘I just wanted to apologize,’ she said quickly, as he came to stand next to her. ‘There’s been a misunderstanding – on my part. I didn’t realize what we were doing here today. When you said we would do lunch, I didn’t realize you actually meant we would do lunch. I thought you were just a friend of Henry’s who was going to show me Paris.’
Claude stared at her.
She carried on nervously, as she spotted the others in the group advancing quickly towards them. ‘He didn’t even give me your surname, so I didn’t know that you’re . . . you know, who you are.’ She coughed awkwardly. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry. That was all I wanted to say.’
Claude didn’t bother to respond. In fact, from his still-hostile body language, she wasn’t even convinced he’d heard. They stood in silence as, one by one, the rest of the group joined them, all holding bags stuffed with identical ingredients. Once the Japanese girls arrived, beaming expectantly and carrying twice as many bags as everyone else (the sight of a striped jumper hanging out of one of them suggested they’d been shopping off-plan), Claude clapped his hands briskly and they all filed back towards the apartment in apprehensive silence.
Despite the building’s innocuous exterior, his kitchen was bright and elegant inside, with high ceilings, a tiled floor and a long iroko worktop that ran down the centre of the room. Chopping boards and a selection of sharpened Global knives were arranged at set intervals, and Cassie felt her hangover begin to recede as she caught sight of the dark red Lacanche cooker. This was no mere tourists’ cookery club. Everything she looked at – from the copper-bottomed pans to the diamond-sharpened knives – was of the highest possible quality. It was like being in a professional kitchen with customers in the next room, and it put to shame her once-mooted, never-tried amateurish ambition of setting up her own cookery school, catering to the wives of the guns on the shooting drives.
Claude buttoned up his chef’s whites as everyone emptied their shopping bags at their work stations. He walked around, tutting as he inspected their purchases: crèpes, chanterelles, tarragon, garlic, sugar, butter, flour, pistachios, apples. ‘Too acidic . . . not ripe enough . . . too small . . .’
He got to Cassie and peered over her shoulder. She found she was holding her breath. She’d found a fantastic stall set slightly behind the others for the chanterelles and cep mushrooms, and she was confident of the stallholder’s choice of apples for her. After a minute, which felt like a month, she felt him nod. ‘Maybe not so bad as I thought,’ he muttered with the darkness of a death threat.
Cassie broke out into a huge, delighted grin and tried not to squeal. It was the best thing anyone had said to her since she’d arrived in Paris.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘I don’t know what you see in him.’
‘You mean, apart from culinary brilliance?’
‘He has all the charm of a table leg.’
Cassie smiled as Anouk exhaled delicate puffs of smoke between two perfectly plumped lips. It was f
air to say that Claude had been underwhelmed when Anouk – her interest piqued by Cassie’s fast-growing obsession – had accompanied her to the kitchen that morning. Claude had not given her so much as a nod, and Anouk, four hours later, was still sulking.
Cassie took another sip of her espresso – she hadn’t found anything to replace Tea & Sympathy here, and in the absence of her PG Tips she was becoming a hardcore coffee aficionado – and watched the traffic squeal and jerk around the square. She had just done her third day on the course. It was supposed to have been daily classes for a week, but her day job meant that was impossible, so Claude had completed the course with the rest of the group, and was now instructing her one-on-one every Saturday. Henry’s favours seemed to stretch very far with people.
Today, they’d done a fig and almond tart sprinkled with pistachios, and Claude had revealed to her his secret of bringing the butter mixture for the pastry to the boil in the oven. She sighed contentedly at the fresh memory, driving Anouk even deeper into her black mood.
Cassie watched her as she took a deep, jittery drag on her cigarette. Her friend seemed nervy and on edge. She had been working late in the studio recently and going straight to bed when she came in, and Cassie noticed for the first time that she had black circles under her eyes – a previously unthinkable sign of self-neglect for someone who took longer to wash her face than change a wheel. And now she was interpreting Claude’s customary indifference, which he seemed to direct at any living being, as a snub to her desirability. She wasn’t usually fragile.
‘Have you and Pierre had a fight?’ she asked quietly.
‘Non,’ she replied defensively. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘You seem unhappy.’
‘Not unhappy. Just busy.’ She shook her head and her hair came to a caressing sweep under her cheekbones. She rubbed her temple lightly with her free hand. ‘I am having a problem with my diamond supplier, and Katrina . . . She’s not used to waiting for anything.’
‘I can imagine,’ Cassie replied sympathetically.
