by Karen Swan
A bus stopped a hundred yards away, the Bebe Washington campaign slapped to its side. She’d seen it a few times now and the shock was beginning to wear off. She studied the glowing image that stared back at her – heady and enigmatic; watched as people in the queue stared at it. Kelly had told her the red top had already sold out (and that some late orders had come in for the collection as a result of the campaign) as other women tried to be her. But even she couldn’t do that now. That girl was gone already, replaced by another. She was just a golden phantom.
‘Did Henry tell you about me?’ she asked quietly. ‘Did he tell you what happened?’ She stared at the bus as the passengers climbed on, her voice little more than a murmur. ‘I think he did. I think he told you.’
The bus closed its doors and pulled away. ‘Because I keep wondering – why did he put us together? Why did he get me to ring you? He couldn’t have known how I feel about cooking. I didn’t know how I felt about cooking till I met you.’
Silence.
She shot him a sideways look and gathered up her courage as if she was making a snowball. ‘I think he’s put us together for another reason,’ she said bravely. ‘I think it’s the thing that made you stop cooking.’
Nothing. Not a muscle-twitch or blink.
She sighed and they sat awhile in the cold, their breath hanging like baby dragon puffs in the air before them. Her bottom started to go numb from being still for so long, and her nose tingled with the cold, but she sat on.
Eight, ten minutes passed and he didn’t once move, stir, twitch or even register that she was sitting there.
Finally she got up, feeling sad not to have made any progress. He had, quite literally, frozen her out. Clearly, whatever they shared in the kitchen stayed in the kitchen.
‘Well, I’ll see you on Saturday then, Claude,’ she said, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘Usual time. I won’t be late.’
She walked away and had just reached the rue Saint-Dominique when she heard heavy footsteps behind her. She turned.
‘It’s cold out here,’ he said, as though he’d only just noticed.
‘Yes.’ She was too surprised to comment further.
He looked at her for a moment then gave a nod, as though agreeing with something. ‘Let’s go and warm up.’
She had been intending to go back to the office and admit her failure to Florence, but she didn’t dare disagree with him. He took her by the elbow and led her towards the rank of scooters all parked askew further along the road. His – a dusty grey model with bald tyres – looked far too small to transport such a big bear of a man, but he handed her a helmet and she climbed on behind him, not quite able to get her arms around his chest.
He drove slowly, although without much care, totally disregarding one-way signs and dawdling pedestrians, until they stopped ten minutes later outside a green panelled shop on the corner of rue Bonaparte. Its windows were stacked with boxes that looked like they would house scented soaps, and they came in every pastel colour – baby pink, mint, sky blue – with chicks and bunnies alongside, motifs to bring the promise of spring to grey days. But she peered closer and saw it wasn’t soaps they were selling.
Claude led her in and the bell above the door jangled merrily. Cassie marvelled at the pâtissiers’ treasures stacked in colour-coded rows beneath the glass-covered cabinets that looked like they’d been sourced from an old apothecary. On the far wall, streams of ribbons in pink and mint hung down from their reels, fluttering gently in the breeze created by clamouring customers.
He led her towards the far end, past conical towers of pistachio and chocolate macaroons that defied gravity as well as belief, and into a small café. A baroque chandelier glinted roundly in the encroaching dusk, and they sat on a napoleon-blue velvet sofa. Claude ordered for them without looking at the menu. From the speed and deference with which they served him, they seemed to know exactly who he was.
‘What is this place?’ she asked, shrugging off her coat and shaking her hair out from under her beret. ‘It’s amazing.’
‘This is Ladurée.’ He said it with the same authority he’d said ‘I am Claude’ at their first meeting.
‘Ladurée? I’ve heard of that.’
‘I should hope so. This is the home of the most exquisite macaroons in the whole of France.’ He pinched his fingers to his lips. ‘You cannot claim to be a lover of French food – of Paris – if you have not been here.’
A waitress quickly brought their orders – jasmine tea and a tiered cake stand piled with macaroons in pistachio, raspberry, petal, violet cream, orange blossom and crème anglaise.
Cassie’s eyes widened with delight.
‘Try one,’ Claude said, bringing the stand closer to her.
She picked one up and took a small bite. The outer pastry was so light it was like biting into a cloud puff, and the cream filling was so rich, so intense, she had to close her eyes. ‘I feel like I’m Marie Antoinette,’ she sighed.
Claude smiled with his eyes, watching her intently. ‘We shall make these next,’ he said, holding one between his fingers and looking at it like a jewel. He dropped his voice. ‘There are two secrets to making them. One is to cook them on double trays, the other to let the dough form a shell before you put it in the oven.’
She smacked her lips together. ‘Very, very good,’ she smiled, wiping her fingers with a napkin. God knows she could never let Suzy in here. She’d seen what that woman could do to a cupcake.
‘Well, at least now Henry’s list is making more sense. He told me not just to come to Ladurée . . .’ she took a sip of tea . . . ‘but to make a habit of coming here.’ She picked up an orange blossom macaroon and sighed happily just looking at it. ‘And that I shall do gladly.’
She took another heavenly bite.
Claude watched her.
‘He is a good friend to you.’
‘Who?’ Cassie had to put her hand over her mouth. She swallowed quickly. ‘Henry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, technically speaking, he’s my friend’s brother. We’re not that close. I hadn’t seen him for ten years before this summer.’
‘And yet he has done this list for you.’
‘Yes, well, he’s a man of the world, isn’t he? He goes to places where no one’s ever been before. I think it was just unthinkable to him that I didn’t have any ambitions about getting to know the cities I was living in.’
‘And why didn’t you?’
Cassie looked at him. It sounded like Henry hadn’t told him her back-story after all. ‘Because I didn’t leave my home out of choice. I had made a life for myself. I had roots. I wasn’t looking to suddenly rip myself away from them and start exploring the great cities.’
Claude looked out of the window, nodding to himself again as though reading between the lines.
‘Well, he has never suffered loss, Henry,’ he said. ‘The world is still straightforward to him. Still a present to be unwrapped. I suppose he is trying to make you a gift, to see the world through his eyes – something to be enjoyed and discovered.’
‘I guess I’d have to say it’s working, then. All the greatest moments I’ve had since . . . leaving have come to me through his lists.’
‘Yes?’
‘Meeting you, for example,’ she said, trying not to feel shy about it, just presenting it as the truth it was. ‘And when I met his friend Robin in New York . . . Do you know Robin?’ She wondered whether this network of men were all interconnected.
Claude shook his head.
‘Oh. Well, Robin let me read from a first-edition copy of A Christmas Carol that had belonged to Charles Dickens!’
Claude gave what Cassie took to be an impressed nod.
‘And he arranged a gift just for me under the Tiffany Christmas tree on Fifth Avenue. It’s been things like that, you know – moments of rarity in the middle of the mundane.’ She sighed happily. Then stopped. ‘Although I wouldn’t want you to think it’s all been sweet consideration.’<
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‘Non?’
She shook her head. ‘He made me run round Central Park on half a case of Château Margaux.’
‘Non!’
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘I mean, the Château Margaux bit might have been my fault, but still . . .’
Claude laughed – the first time she’d ever heard it – and she stared at him as his face crinkled stiffly with amusement. He looked so young, like a little boy being tickled by his mother.
‘I think you are probably as bad as each other,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Probably,’ she said, picking up the last violet cream macaroon.
‘Do you have to call any other strangers in Paris?’
‘No, thank God! It’s now completely apparent to me why my parents always told me not to speak to strangers. You’ve put me off that for life.’ She laughed. ‘But I do have to somehow get myself invited on to some secret picnic society. I don’t suppose you’ve any contacts on that front?’
Claude shrugged and looked at her blankly.
‘And I’ve got to go to the catacombs.’
‘Oh, mon Dieu,’ he said, giving a shiver.
‘What?’
‘Four hundred miles of tunnels that go down over seven levels below the city. Most are unmapped.’ He looked at her. ‘They are very dangerous to explore alone.’
Cassie stopped eating. ‘And my night vision is appalling.’
‘Well, there is a short section open to the public. It is well-lit and clean there. You will be fine.’ He looked at her. ‘So long as you’re okay about bones.’
‘Bones!’
‘Yes. The walls down there are built from human bones and skulls.’
Cassie paused. ‘Why?’
‘Because by the end of the eighteenth century the cemeteries in the city were completely full and there was nowhere left to put the bodies, so they exhumed the human remains and relocated them to the limestone quarries which Haussmann had mined. They say there are over six million bones down there.’
Cassie grimaced. ‘Oh, great. It’ll be a party,’ she muttered.
‘For sure,’ Claude smiled, motioning for the bill and bringing the waitress racing over.
They settled up – Claude insisted on paying – grabbed their coats and walked back out into the chilly evening air with their cheeks pinked.
He pulled the hood of his parka up and turned to her, and for a second she thought how very frightened she’d be to pass him on a quiet street. He looked so menacing and dark, and yet for all his growling and sneers, there was something of the child about him, something vulnerable. Anouk was by far the more scary to encounter, especially at the moment. ‘I have been thinking – if you would like, we could meet more often. On Tuesday evenings, per’aps? And Thursdays too?’
‘If I would like? I would love!’ she squealed, hugging him hard, determined to make their goodbye on fonder terms than their hello. Claude stood like a plank in her embrace, but she didn’t care. If they were meeting three times a week then some barriers had to start coming down between them. He was rapidly becoming one of the most important people in her life, and she’d be damned if she couldn’t call him a friend too.
Claude nodded, embarrassed. ‘Okay. I see you tomorrow night then.’ And he turned away without further ceremony.
Cassie shrugged happily and watched him shuffle off. She put on her beret and belted her coat tightly before turning and walking in the opposite direction towards the river. She didn’t feel like cycling tonight – she didn’t trust herself to keep her hands on the handlebars, for one thing – and she was close to home here anyway. But there was something else, something else Claude had said which was knocking about in her head and giving her a plan.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cassie glanced around anxiously, wondering if this still counted as Paris at all, or whether she was in the suburbs now. She was only in the quinzième arrondissement, but whereas the buildings in the first, fourth and fifth were carved from limestone and decorated with pretty lead roof tiles, here they were square, concrete tower blocks. The balconies had bikes and washing on them, and there wasn’t a gargoyle or tourist in sight.
The park was easy to find, though, and she jogged through the gates, aware that the heavens were about to open, past two giant bull statues, beyond the old vineyards where the Pinot Noir grapes still grew and towards the pavilions she’d been told to head for. In their previous life they’d been the sheds of the old horse market, but now they housed the antique book market, and that was the reason she’d come.
She stepped under the roof just as it began to spit and she looked back up at the sky crossly. It was menacing and heavy, with billowing black clouds – the last thing she needed when she had a long bike ride home, freshly done hair and ten people for dinner tonight. It was Anouk’s birthday, and she was jangling with nerves, not only because this was her second attempt at making friends with Anouk’s circle, but also because somehow she had persuaded Claude to help her cook for it.
It had been Bas’s idea for her to check out the book fair. He’d overheard a famous designer saying the market was one of his secret stops for design inspiration, but she didn’t have much time to browse – Claude was coming over at three.
She dived straight in, weaving in and around the trestle tables laid out with ancient tablecloths and laden with boxes filled with musty old books. Pure heaven! There were occasional modern books in the mix, but almost everything she picked up was at least fifty years old and quite a few three hundred or more. They were generally arranged with their spines up, the titles picked out in gilt lettering against the fraying leather covers.
Every time she picked up a book she couldn’t stop herself from smelling the pages. What was it Robin had called them? Volatile organic compounds? Well if this was decay, they could bottle it up and sell it to her. She smiled lightly as she recalled that new-born memory, sitting in the dark underneath Manhattan, reading from Dickens’ very own book. She wondered what the stallholders here would think of that story.
Cassie moved slowly from one table to the next, not entirely sure what she was even looking for. A small emerald-green leather notebook caught her eye, and she picked it up. It was filled with black-and-white photographs of a woman, and from the way her hair was done and the clothes she was wearing, it looked like they were taken in the 1920s. The first photographs showed her fully-clothed, hatted and demure, but as she turned each page an item of clothing was removed until, at the back of the book, she was naked, her modesty gone with her clothes. There were a good few pages left at the back after all her clothes were shed which testified to that. It was early porn, but no less shocking. She put it back quickly, aware the vendor was watching her.
Some stalls specialized – in philosophy, or poetry, or military history, or history of art – and the haggling was done in low, intense voices, far more so than at the food market, where everyone used their hands, eyebrows and smiles to try to drive down the price of sweet onions. Most of the browsers were solitary, like her, wrapped up against the mid-winter chill, and were it not for the sound of children playing in the nearby playground, it would have been just like being in a library, the sound of pages flicking and turning, coughs muffled behind scarves, eyes down.
She made a purchase for herself – an early edition of Larousse Gastronomique – but nothing suitable to give to Anouk, and she was scanning the last row, about to give up, when a title caught her eye. Bijoux des Anciennes. She picked it up and began looking through it – it was all about the jewellery of the Egyptian and Roman empires, and showed jade necklaces, pearl-drop earrings, hammered gold cuffs, lapis lazuli and onyx rings, emerald and peridot collars . . . The illustrations were full-colour and beautifully rendered, showing how they would have been worn.
It was perfect! Anouk would love it. The materials they’d used were precious yet rough still, not whittled to cultivated perfection like modern jewellery but retaining that guileless rusticity that Anouk managed to
make so luxurious.
She bought it quickly, eager to get back, even though it was still raining. Pulling her beret out of her pocket, she tucked as much of her hair as she could into it, and trotted quickly towards the park gates. It was raining too hard to cycle now. She would have to catch the metro.
Everyone was jogging, dodging puddles, trying to get to cover. She saw a man ahead of her. He was walking briskly, the collar of his coat turned up and obscuring his face, but still she recognized him.
‘Jacques!’ she called, flagging up her arm to get his attention. ‘Hey, Jacques!’
But he was already out of the park and on to the streets. By the time she passed the bull statues and got to the pavement herself, he was gone.
She had just finished chopping the tarragon when she heard the curt rap at the door and felt her heart give a startled leap in her chest – even his door knock managed to sound stroppy. She wiped her hands on a tea towel and went to let him in, casting anxious eyes over the apartment as she passed through. Everything was immaculate – the table was set for ten, the crystal gleaming, the wine chilling and all the guests’ flowers – sent in advance, as was polite in Paris – decanted into vases of every shape. She’d even managed to save her hair from the worst of the rain. Now all she needed was the Michelin-starred chef.
Anouk was still detoxifying at the hammam – the worst of the crisis appeared to have blown over with Pierre but she was still on edge – and wouldn’t be back till after five. Cassie was hoping all the food prep would be done by then and they could enjoy a quiet glass before everyone else arrived. It was usual for gifts to be opened in front of the giver, and although Cassie was pleased with her purchase, the book, at over one hundred and fifty years old, was in poor condition with its flapping spine and yellowed pages. It was a thoughtful gift, but probably not a Parisian gift. She’d prefer to present it to her privately.
‘Claude,’ she smiled, letting him in and leading him through to the kitchen. She hoped he would pass comment on her outfit, or the way she’d laid out the kitchen utensils like his. But he walked straight through, his nose in the air, nostrils flaring like a bull about to charge.
