The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris

by Jenny Colgan

  - - -

  It became increasingly clear that neither of them wanted to be the first to leave, in case Thierry woke up. It was warm in the room, and with horror I realized I was becoming very drowsy. There must be loads of people they needed to contact, but both were sticking by the signs that there were no mobile phones allowed near the equipment. It was like a power struggle between the two of them, and it made me very cross. Eventually I snapped.

  “I’m going to get coffee,” I said. “Does anyone want anything?”

  Alice jumped up, obviously cross she hadn’t thought of it.

  “No, I’ll go,” she said brusquely, her fingers already fumbling in her Hermès bag for her lighter and phone. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”

  After she had left the room and vanished down the long corridor, Laurent collapsed back onto the chair and let out a long sigh. He let his curly head continue on downward, until it was level with the bottom of the bed. Then he let it collapse into the soft sheets. After several moments of witnessing his shoulders shaking, I realized he was crying.

  I stood up.

  “There, there,” I said, rubbing his back. “There, there. He’s going to be all right, isn’t he? There, there. Look at him, all alive on the bed and everything.”

  I was speaking absolute nonsense, I knew, just crooning reassuring nothings, but it seemed to do the trick. After another moment, without lifting his head, Laurent took my arm and held it.

  “Thank you,” he said, his face muffled in the pillow.

  I patted him. “It’s all right,” I said again. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “It’s never all right,” came the voice.

  I knelt down beside him. “Well,” I said, “maybe this is a really good time to make it up with your dad.”

  “What, before he passes his gun to his left?” said Laurent, turning his face toward me and half-smiling. “Yeah, right. Thanks.”

  “Well, lots of people never get a chance to say good-bye,” I said. “You’re going to be lucky. Be sure of it.”

  “Are you my lucky charm?”

  I smiled. I was the unluckiest person in the world, didn’t he know?

  “If you like.”

  Laurent sat up and wiped his eyes, then ran his fingers through his hair. “Do I look red?” he asked. “I don’t want the wicked witch to know I’ve been crying.”

  “Maybe it’ll soften her up,” I said. “She can see how much you really care.”

  “You couldn’t soften her up with a marshmallow massage,” said Laurent crossly. “I really do think she’s made out of old leather.”

  “She’s panicking,” I said. “People say strange things when they’re worried.”

  “Then she’s permanently worried,” he said.

  “I rather think she is,” I said, patting him again. “Look, I haven’t seen much, but I’m a fast learner, and I bet Frédéric and Benoît can do just about anything. Let’s carry on with the shop for a bit until Thierry’s better. It will cheer him up, I think, to know we’ve gone on in his absence.”

  “Or completely ruin him by the fact that he’s replaceable,” said Laurent with a twisted smile on his face. I noticed he was holding his father’s empty-looking hand in his living one. Apart from the fact that Thierry’s hand was more bloated and a paler color, they were the same hands.

  “Well, we’ll tell him it is obviously much, much worse,” I suggested.

  “Oh, you won’t have to do that,” said Laurent wryly. “He thinks everything is much, much worse without him in it.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” I said. Just then, Alice came back, with three tiny plastic cups of black liquid on a little tray. I squeezed Laurent’s shoulder once more. “I’ll get back to the shop,” I said. “I’m not much use here.”

  Laurent nodded. “I know,” he said reluctantly. “Yes. Do. And answer the phone, do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’ll say he’s…I’ll say he’s…”

  “Say he is going to be fine,” said Alice in a voice that brooked no argument. “Say that he is going to be completely back to normal and that the shop will go on and everything will stay just as it is.”

  Laurent would have probably said that this was just Alice seeking to preserve her investment. I didn’t see it like that though. I saw Alice keeping Thierry alive just by saying she was going to. And even though I didn’t want to be, I was slightly impressed.

  - - -

  It felt amazing to me that I stepped back out of the hospital on that same, beautiful June day. The sky had tiny ribbons of cloud floating across it, and the afternoon sun fell warmly on the backs and necks of shoppers and sightseers, every one of them, I speculated, happy and carefree without a problem in the world.

  I realized I had no idea where I was, walked a long way, then figured out I could see the Eiffel Tower over my left shoulder and that therefore I was on the Left Bank, had gone the wrong way, and needed to cross the river again. Yes, I’d been on the Île de la Cité the whole time. If I craned my neck, I could just make out the familiar shape of Notre Dame, far away to my right. It would have been a lot quicker to take a cab or the Metro—everything in Paris is farther away than it looks—but I decided I needed the walk to clear my head. Incredibly careful when looking for traffic, I stepped out, my toes hurting again because they had responded badly to the smell of hospitals, I thought. Or bad weather was coming, but as far as I was concerned, all the bad things were already here. So I walked, slowing myself down to a tourist’s pace instead of the bustling Parisian march, as the locals threaded themselves in and out of the visitors, occasionally huffing their displeasure. I zigged and zagged the roads. But as long as I could keep Notre Dame in my sights, I kept heading doggedly onward.

  There was something about it—I knew; forever it had stood for sanctuary, back when the city was really no more than the island and its church. It was impossible not to think about the Hunchback, and Esmeralda, or to look at the gargoyles and shudder to think of a world where people believed in them absolutely, believed that hell was only a blink or a misstep away, that it was pain for all eternity and the monsters carved on the wall were literal and real and there to tear you apart.

  At secondary school, there was a bit of religious education and it was quite fashionable for a while—don’t ask me why—to go to church and pray and stuff. I don’t know why except it was seen as quite a clever thing to do, or to match with the Muslim kids who prayed properly and were seen as much cooler, and church kind of turned into this big social event, and I toyed with it till I asked Mrs. Shawcourt about it and her face went a bit stiff and she just said, “Ooh, I have had a lot of church, believe me. Quite enough to be getting on with for this lifetime,” and I was a lot less committed after that.

  Around Notre Dame though, I felt something else. Seeing the queues of people waiting to get in—most of them bored-looking Italian school kids larking about, or rich-looking young American students talking really loudly, or elderly couples dressed almost exactly alike, ticking things off in their books. But among them were different people—nuns and people on their own who didn’t have a holiday look about them at all, but rather something very serious and grave. The distinctive twin towers at the front made it seem different, somehow special.

  As I drew nearer, I realized you only had to queue if you wanted a tour or to go up and see the bells and things. If you just wanted to peek in, you could wander up. Even though my feet were killing me and I hadn’t eaten a thing for hours and I just wanted to lie down and rest, I found myself mounting the steps.

  Inside it was huge. It smelled faintly of flowers and floor polish and something else that I supposed was that incense-y stuff my gran says Catholics use. They were playing organ music gently through speakers, which was a bit confusing. The scale of it was massive. If I thought it was massive now, living in the days of skyscra
pers and jumbo jets and cruise ships, I can’t imagine what it must have felt like hundreds of years ago. The huge friezes of the Stations of the Cross covered the walls in intricate details, like the huge rose stained-glass window. It must have been like watching television.

  Dotted on the pews, looking tiny as ants, were people, mostly singly, just sitting, contemplating. I couldn’t join them without paying the entrance fee, and I didn’t have a God I could talk to, and even if I did I couldn’t imagine any kind of God taking time off from massacres and famines to help out an aging, very, very fat man I barely knew. But even so. My heart formed a silent plea—please—said over and over again. Please. Just, please.

  I felt better.

  - - -

  The shop had a sign on it—fermé cause de maladie—and some concerned people milling around outside, who’d obviously made the trip specially and everything. I knocked heavily on the roll door. The workshop around the back technically had a fire exit, but I had no idea where it went out, so I kept banging till I heard Frédéric.

  “We’re shut! Go away!” he shouted.

  “It’s me!” I yelled.

  Immediately the shutters were raised.

  “Why didn’t you call? Where have you been?” he shouted at me.

  “Because my phone is dead,” I explained. “And you can’t use the phones in the hospital.”

  “Well, that’s not very helpful,” he grumbled. “We’ve been waiting. Any change?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. But no change is good at this point.”

  Frédéric snorted. “I don’t know about that.”

  I noticed something. There was no noise in the shop.

  “Why are the churns switched off?” I asked.

  Frédéric shrugged. “Oh, of course we cannot continue without the chef, cherie. It’s not possible.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not possible? Are you going on strike?”

  “No. But without him…”

  “You’re telling me you’ve worked here all these years and you don’t know what he’s doing?”

  Frédéric’s little face grew cross.

  “Of course we see what he is doing. But what he is doing and what an artisan would do…for the conch, it is not precisely the same, madame. It is the difference between daubs on a wall and an artist’s canvas. It could not be.”

  I was used to working in a factory, where our industrial processes basically meant that a monkey could turn out the same chocolate day after day as long as he could remember what sequence of buttons to push. It might mean a lot of banana flavor though.

  “Of course you can,” I prodded. “Benoît has been here man and boy. Surely we can honor Thierry and continue making chocolate.”

  “It is impossible,” he said, looking at me as if he was explaining something very simple to a particularly stupid child. “It cannot be the same.”

  “Well, I hope it can,” I said. “Because I think Alice wants us all to stay open. If you want to say no to her, though, go ahead, be my guest.”

  Frédéric visibly paled.

  “She cannot say that,” he said.

  “She did,” I said. “I heard her at the hospital.”

  He shook his head. “She does not understand.”

  I was kind of on Alice’s side over this. Wages had to be paid, I assumed, hopefully including mine. People would still come. Thierry was mostly all about the sizzle and the salesmanship at the front of the shop, I was sure of it; Frédéric and Benoît could carry out all the workshop duties. And I could help, I thought to myself. I’d watched them all over the weeks, hadn’t I? I had a good nose for this kind of thing.

  Frédéric called on Benoît, and in a low, deep-seated, 100 mile per hour growl that reminded me once again how much people were modifying the way they spoke when they spoke to me so I could understand it, started to explain how crazy everyone was being. Benoît as usual did little more than grunt in response, but in a way that seemed to indicate more displeasure than usual.

  “Les anglais,” was the only remark he made eventually, which made me indignant, as he’d obviously lumped me in with Alice’s side of everything.

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” I said eventually, backing away. “Speak to Alice, okay? Do we need cleaning up?”

  Benoît shook his head.

  “It’s done,” he said ominously. And then in English: “It’s over.”

  I could hardly climb the stairs. All I wanted was to get back in, to be home, to get some sleep. Oh God, and I would have to phone Claire, of course I would. I hadn’t even thought about that. Well, I would need to charge the phone first, then I could think about it. Maybe after a bath.

  Of course, Sami was there. Today he was wearing a peacock-blue fringed shawl over his tanned torso, and bright blue eyeliner. He was obviously waiting for me.

  “Darling!” he exclaimed. “I heard the horrible, horrible news. Look, I have cognac. It’s good for shock.”

  At that point in time, cognac didn’t seem like a bad idea, even though I had only the haziest idea what it actually was. Sami just liked to be in on the good gossip.

  “It is the talk of Paris! Where will we get our hot chocolate now? You know, the tenor, Istoban Emerenovitz, will only sing here if he has a constant supply! Now we shall lose him to the New York Met and the world will mourn.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure that the world would mourn something like that, but I gave a half-smile and said not to worry, everything was going to be all right. It was odd how, in the space of a few hours, suddenly I had become the center of information.

  “And you were there?” said Sami, kindness fighting with his curiosity for gossip. “Poor little bird. Was it awful?”

  For the first time since the nightmarish dash to the hospital and all its memories, I just let myself go and burst into floods of tears.

  “Oh, my little bird,” said Sami, giving me a rather oddly scented hug. “Would you like your uncle Sami to take you to a party? Yes? We shall go to a party and you can tell everyone all about it and feel much better.”

  At that precise moment, there was nothing I would rather do less. I explained this to Sami, who got exactly the same confused dog look about my not wanting to go to a party as Frédéric had gotten at the idea of imitating Thierry’s recipes, but he eventually left me in peace.

  I had little doubt that Alice would get her way—she was just that kind of person—so I was going to spend the next few weeks very busy indeed. I just hoped I was going to be up to it.

  - - -

  1972

  Although completely wrapped up in herself when she got back to school, it finally penetrated Claire’s haze that something was up with another girl. At first she couldn’t put her finger on what was different about Lorraine Hennessy. Then everyone started gossiping and whispering, and poor Lorraine could no longer do her skirt up and that was that; she had gotten herself pregnant, some people said by a boy who’d come around that summer on the carny and whizzed her too hard on the Tilt-a-Whirl.

  It wasn’t quite still the days of sending women off to special homes for fallen ladies then in Kidinsborough, but they weren’t that far away. And for Lorraine to have made it all the way to senior year…as the wives gossiped in the covered market, you think you get that far, then everything is plain sailing after that. Poor Lorraine had fallen at the last hurdle, for a twinkling-eyed boy with a missing tooth, dirty fingernails, and wild, long, curly hair. She left school at the autumn half-term and most people carried on regardless.

  Claire, though, was obsessed. Even when the Reverend brought it up at supper, with much tutting and judgment and disapproval, she couldn’t help thinking about it. She was simply too careful. She imagined herself carrying Thierry’s baby, a round, chubby, pink-cheeked laughing little cherub. She looked carefully every day at her stomach, just in case. Ye
s, they used precautions, but as the Reverend had said in one of his more risqué sermons, contraception was next to useless; the only true protection was chastity and the love of Jesus Christ.

  She wished they’d been less careful. When she ran into Lorraine in the high street—her mother, conscious that her father’s spies might be around, wanted to hurry her back—Claire stopped and said hello. She couldn’t help it; she drank in every feature of Lorraine’s full vase-shape; her newly rounded, pale breasts; the tight, high bump, so unfathomable that inside was another being; the trembling, defiant look in her eye.

  “Good luck,” she said to Lorraine. In the two minutes they’d been standing there, they’d both already ignored whispers from passersby.

  “Aye,” said Lorraine, whose mother, next to her, seemed to have aged ten years. Lorraine didn’t look proud, but her glowing, fruitful body did. Claire was the only girl at Kidinsborough Modern who envied her, who didn’t join in the nasty chatter disguised as concern. She would have taken her bump in her arms and gone straight to the ferry and taken the train and turned up late at night in Thierry’s garret, and he would have been delighted to see her. She ignored, once more, the lack of letters, the possibility that in fact his face would fall as she arrived, confused, that there might even be some other girl in his bed; she was under no illusion that he was short of offers. No, she would be there and he would jump up, that wonderful broad smile on his face, his mustache tickling her belly as he kissed it and kissed it again and they sat up all night making plans for their little one and how he would be the bonniest, best fed baby in all of Paris, until the dawning sun hit the rooftops of the rue de Rivoli and bright pink morning turned Paris’s white streets into a sea of roses with the promise of a fresh golden day beyond…

  “You seem distracted.” It was Mrs. Carr, the French teacher. She had been unflatteringly surprised at the improvement of Claire’s French during the holidays and was pushing her hard to take it to a higher level—Claire was smart, she could go to university, be a translator, travel the world…Claire’s distraction and lack of interest drove her crazy. Years later, Claire tried harder with the dreamy children than almost anything else. Naughty children needed boundaries and direction; that was easy. Motivated children of course easier still. But it was the ones with their heads in the air, miles away, who were the hardest to get through to. You never knew what was going on with them.