The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris

by Jenny Colgan

  I nodded again, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Oh God,” he said. “I am the worst, most selfish man in the world. I don’t want to be like him, Anna.”

  He grabbed me onto his lap and held me, close and tight, my head burrowed in his shoulder.

  “I never want to make you cry again,” he whispered in my ear. “Never again.”

  “Too late,” I said, making a funny snortling noise and holding on to him like I would never let him go till he was kissing me again. There was a stern knock on the window. Frédéric was looking anxious. Benoît, I was amazed to notice, appeared to be smiling.

  “CUSTOMERS!” Frédéric was saying.

  “YES!” said Laurent, leaping to his feet. “Let us cook!”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Just…your mum.”

  “Brain tumor,” said Laurent shortly. “When I was fifteen. Dad paid all the hospital bills. Wanted her to come to Paris, but she didn’t want to intrude. Then he brought me here, got me into an apprenticeship, set me cooking. It’s been all I wanted to do ever since.”

  “But not in the way he wanted?”

  “No,” said Laurent. “He felt guilty, and I was fifteen and needed someone to blame. He offered to set me up in a house; he never did for Mum. She lived in that crappy apartment block all her life.”

  “That’s why you wouldn’t take his money?”

  There was a long pause.

  “You know,” I said, “I bet you didn’t ruin her life. I bet you made her very happy.”

  “That’s what she said,” said Laurent. “Doesn’t stop me hating fucking hospitals though. But I think I’ve just about forgiven Dad.”

  He held me by my hips and looked straight at me.

  “I don’t know what it is about you, Anna Tron,” he said. “You seem to make me calm and happy when you’re about and miserable when you’re not. I don’t know what that is.”

  I fumbled. I was thirty years old and I had said the words, but never in a way that I meant as truly and as sincerely as I did now; not to Darr, God bless his spotty soul.

  “It’s because I love you,” I said. I wouldn’t have, normally, said it first, but oh, I was so exhausted, punch-drunk, emotional. And, I realized, I loved him so very terribly much, even when he was petulant, even when he was grumpy, even when he was teasing me. I thought I might very much have been in love with him from the second he’d given me a lift on his scooter.

  “Oh,” said Laurent, his mouth opening. “Yes. Yes, that must be it. I must love you. We must be in love. Of course. Of COURSE!” He comically banged his hand on his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

  And he gathered me up into himself as Frédéric banged “CUSTOMERS!!!” repeatedly on the windows of the greenhouse, and Laurent only stopped kissing me for long enough to shout, “But we are IN LOVE!” back at him.

  And then I realized something else. It was like someone turning off a radio I hadn’t even realized was still playing. Suddenly, the itching, the fuss, the pain, the twinges, all the sense in my missing toes that weren’t really there simply vanished. And I felt completely whole.

  - - -

  Thierry was fastening his tie in the mirror. For the first time in a very long time, he seemed to have space in the collar. Alice came up behind him and smoothed down the shoulders.

  “Ah, don’t fuss me.”

  “No,” she said and looked away. “I shan’t fuss you.”

  He looked at her. He had slept so well and woken up feeling better than he had in years. He found it annoying on a very deep level that less wine and pastis was making him feel this much better.

  “Alice,” he said, his voice softening. “You know in my life I have loved three women. One of them is dead, one of them is dying, and one of them is you. So please, do not be cross with me today.”

  Alice came back up behind him and ran her hands through his still thick hair. She burrowed her face in it.

  “I can’t lose you,” she said.

  “You won’t,” said Thierry. “You won’t. I promise.”

  He twisted himself around, carefully, to face her. She could see the scar, still angry-looking, through his unbuttoned shirt.

  “I have done so many…well, no. I have not done many things in my life. I have made chocolate and thought that that was enough.”

  Alice blinked hard.

  “I have not looked after my toys like a good boy,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Can I make it up to you now?”

  Alice thought of the years she had spent loving him, even when he was old and fat, even when she had shelved her plans for children, knowing they were too busy, seeing how he was with his own little boy, who hero-worshipped him so painfully. Some people always sacrificed more, she knew.

  “Yes,” she said, kissing his head.

  “But I must also…”

  “Do this. Yes. I know.”

  She drove him to the hotel as he requested, to see the woman he had never forgotten, the slender Englishwoman who had shaped his taste so very much…but she did not stay.

  - - -

  I had seen him in the kitchens at his hotel, but not here. I knew my place; I sat at the back out of the way, my arms around myself, as if I was hugging a secret too good to hold. He knew his way around it, though; of course he did, probably better than anywhere—he’d played beneath it as a boy. He looked at the plants along the back walls as he set the vats churning in motion, husked faster than anyone I’d ever seen, doing the conch like an artist, his arms moving with the same graceful flow as his father’s, taking yesterday’s batch, adding cream and testing, taking it away. Then he went up to a high store cupboard and found what he was looking for: a large pepper grinder Benoît used sometimes to season his lunch when he brought it in. He seized it in triumph and bounded back down the stepladder, winking at me as he did so. Then he went to the lemon tree and stripped it completely of all its lemons. We’d never used them; Frédéric said they were only for nougatine. Laurent chopped them roughly, then stood over the churn, squeezing and tasting again.

  “This is the only way,” he said to me. Well, I suppose it was for him. I wouldn’t know what I was tasting for. Until I learned, I supposed. He added more, then lifted the pepper grinder.

  “M’sieur!” protested Benoît, but it was too late. He unleashed the ground black pepper directly into the chocolate mix.

  “That,” I stated, “looks like it’s going to be disgusting.”

  “We will make a gourmet of you yet,” said Laurent, grinning. He tasted a little more and made a face.

  “Yes, you’re right. It is disgusting. You have to balance. Without balance, it is just horrible. With balance, you can do anything.”

  He looked at me.

  “When you lost your toes, could you balance?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But now you can do anything, right? You compensated and made it better?”

  I shrugged. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Well. Just like that. And I will hold up this chocolate just like I will hold you up.”

  “I’m not sure this metaphor is really hanging together,” I said, smiling, but he hushed me and kept on working feverishly.

  Finally, he tried one last time, then immediately stopped the paddles from turning.

  I opened my mouth obediently.

  “That’s what I like to see,” said Laurent, then let a drop cool and rest on my tongue.

  I’d expected it to be awful, just weird, but it wasn’t. The depths of the chocolate base were deepened by the pepper, giving it a dark edge, but then shot through with a sublime light sharpness. It was clean, delicious, and utterly moreish.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I have to eat more of that.”

  “Yes!” said Laurent. “That’s right.” He tried some himself. “Yes, exactly. Perfec
t. I am a genius.”

  “Can you teach me how to make it?”

  He looked me up and down. “Two months ago, I would have said no. Now, I think you can do anything.”

  Frédéric interrupted us kissing to say that there was going to be a riot in the queue lining up outside and did we want him just to call the Bastille now? Everyone left in Paris knew that we reopened today and there was a rumor that Thierry was on the mend and would be here too—I knew the hotel was going to call a taxi for Claire and Thierry, but I wasn’t sure when. I felt a momentary stab of concern, before remembering Claire chiding me to get on with things. They would be all right.

  Frédéric set the chocolate in the freezer double quick and started slicing, as Laurent twirled off to start another batch of mint and bitterest aniseed. I started to clean up, then out of interest, went to see what happened when the lemon went on sale.

  The first person to try some was M. Beausier, one of our regulars. He was small and slight, considering the amount of our chocolate he put away. Perhaps it was his staple diet. He took one bite and his eyes popped open.

  “Mon Dieu,” he said. “Is Thierry back in the kitchen?”

  Excitedly he turned around to the queue and started handing out little squares for people to taste.

  “Try this, try this,” he was saying excitedly. “I must have some more!” he called over to Frédéric, who raised his eyebrows and sighed in a dramatic way. The people in the crowd who’d tried it started muttering excitedly and placing large orders.

  “I think you’d better make some more,” I said, coming back to Laurent. “They’re going to start a stampede out there.”

  He straightened up. His face looked nervous and exhilarated at once.

  “What do you mean? They’re hating it?”

  “Nooo,” I said. “They’re loving it.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course really! Come on, my love, you know you can cook.”

  “But in my father’s kitchen…” he muttered, pushing his hair out of his eyes.

  “Yes,” I said. “In your father’s kitchen. You are also wonderful.”

  He smiled, and I felt in that instant both immense love for him and a sudden immense rush of love for my own lovely father, who would love me no matter what, whatever I did and how. He wasn’t famous or a brilliant genius or world-renowned. Except to me.

  “Now, get on with it,” I said, but Laurent couldn’t; he had to come and see for himself. The crowd was standing around in the shop, unable to disperse, telling each other how amazing it was. And of course because there were lots of people, other people had come up behind to see what was going on and were watching and adding themselves to the queue, and the entire stock had nearly sold out.

  M. Beausier, who had known Thierry a long time, gasped when he saw Laurent. But everyone else’s attention was diverted by a long car pulling up outside.

  - - -

  Thierry seemed stronger already than when she saw him yesterday, Claire thought, as she said “come in” to the soft knock at the door. He was very smartly dressed and carrying a large bunch of flowers. This would be how it would be, she supposed. He would get better and better and recover as she got worse and worse. She had had a very bad coughing fit in the bathroom that morning that, she knew, would have made her oncologist order her straight back to the hospital. For a moment, she nearly weakened, thinking suddenly how nice it would be to call an ambulance and let the professionals take over, slip into a drugged sleep, and let them clear her lungs and drain what they needed to drain to make her more comfortable…

  But she knew, more than anything, that the next time she went into the hospital, she wasn’t sure whether she would be coming out again. She had one chance, only one chance, to do this. Plucking up all her courage, her hand shaking, she managed to insert the tiny chips of emerald in her ears.

  She didn’t want to take too much morphine either; it helped, but it blurred the edges, made her feel as if she was walking through a cotton-wool dream, where nothing really mattered. This did matter; it mattered to her a lot. And it was only one more day. So she wanted to stay clear for it, even if she felt at any moment that her bones might shatter or her whole body might simply curl up and immolate, like a film she had once seen about nuclear war.

  She had drunk some more water and did her best with her face. She could not, she found, walk across the bathroom to get back to the bedroom.

  Cursing roundly in a way that would have surprised many of her ex-pupils, Claire crawled, very slowly, across the floor.

  “How are you?” Thierry asked emphatically, covering her with kisses. “I have been ordered to walk about and take exercise so I walked to the lift to see you.”

  Claire smiled.

  “Can you take a walk with me?”

  “No,” said Claire. “Not today.”

  “Well, that is a shame,” said Thierry. “I always enjoyed our walks.”

  “So did I,” said Claire. “But I have ordered tea. Now tell me everything.”

  “And you too,” insisted Thierry. “Then I shall take you to the shop.”

  “I would like that,” said Claire. “I would like that very much.”

  - - -

  I realized later that the taxi hadn’t had space for a wheelchair, and the hotel had had to order a bigger car. But it did look a bit like a limo had drawn up, as Thierry stepped out of the big black car.

  The crowd instantly burst into applause. Thierry looked incredibly jolly and better already than he had the day before, never mind those awful days in the hospital, and acknowledged their applause with his hand. Someone started taking photographs.

  Then father and son saw each other. Thierry stood stock-still for an instant. I saw a look of fear and nerves and defiant pride pass over Laurent’s features as clear as day; I could already read him so well. Someone handed Thierry a piece of the chocolate. Slowly, very slowly, Thierry placed it on his tongue and held it there, closing his mouth. There was absolute silence on the rue Chanoinesse. All the other shopkeepers had come out to see what was going on.

  Thierry chewed, meditatively and carefully. Then he stopped and gave a short sharp nod.

  “Mon fils,” said Thierry simply, and he opened his arms. Laurent ran into them like a little boy.

  - - -

  I helped Claire out of the car and into the chair, which barely fit in the narrow shop, and through into the greenhouse beyond. Laurent went back to making his new chocolate and another batch of the lemon. Thierry kept a beady eye on him and remarked, as Laurent wielded the pepper grinder, that he was going to give him another heart attack, but mostly stayed out of the way. Claire sat comfortably by the plants and I took a couple of photos. It was funny to think she’d been here before. Had it changed?

  “Not at all,” she said. “Benoît, I knew you here as a boy.”

  Benoît merely grunted.

  “That’s what he was like as a boy,” she confided. Thierry went over to the sink and washed his hands.

  “I am going to make you some medicine,” he said to Claire, who smiled.

  “I would like that very much.”

  I watched, fascinated, as he picked up a tiny whisk, which looked absurdly small in his huge hands, and a little metal pole and started working in his own way over a low heat, adding brandy and vanilla in tiny drops, tasting too as he went. I spotted Laurent watching him while pretending not to.

  Eventually it was made and warmed and poured into a huge clay cup, slightly chipped. Thierry took a tiny knife and carved tiny, perfect scrolls of chocolate from a large plain bar to decorate the froth at the top. Then it was taken over to be presented to Claire as if it was on a silver salver.

  “It’s the same cup,” she exclaimed with pleasure.

  “I kept everything that reminded me of you,” said Thierry simply. “When I returned from
the fighting…ah, I had changed. Life had changed. It made everything more complicated and less free and…well. I liked to keep some things to remember.”

  I watched as Claire drank. She closed her eyes briefly. We didn’t serve hot chocolate in the summertime, but I knew how legendary it was because people kept telling me about it.

  “Oh,” she said, and this will sound fanciful, but she really did look slightly restored after she drank it; more color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. And she drank the whole cup with obvious pleasure, the first time I had seen her eat or drink with real appetite in nearly a year.

  “Did you come all this way for a cup of hot chocolate?” I asked, and she smiled slightly.

  “Well, mostly.”

  Thierry followed the exchange and burst into a huge grin.

  “I still have it.”

  “Of course.”

  He poured the last dregs in her cup and she finished them regretfully.

  “I shall make you another.”

  “You can make me one tomorrow, before I go,” she said.

  I looked at Thierry, who had nodded without trying to insist that she stay longer. She had obviously told him everything then.

  “Now, Anna,” said Claire, turning her attention to me. “I want to see where you live.”

  “Do you?” I said. I wondered who Sami would have staying over today from the demimonde. “No, don’t. It’s up loads of steps, and it’s just a tiny apartment, just a box room really.”

  “I’ve come here to see you and I’d like to see it,” said Claire in a “do your homework” voice, so I wheeled her around the corner over the cobbles, leaving the boys behind to work and deal with the lengthening line of excited customers.

  - - -

  It didn’t take long, even though maneuvering the wheelchair on and off curbs was a tedious business. Paris is not a city built for wheelchairs. As usual, the hallway was in total darkness. Claire scanned the faded list of bells.

  “I haven’t put my name on it,” I said. “I’m only here temporarily.”

  Claire looked at me with that penetrating gaze of hers.

  “Are you?” she said. I squirmed and looked down.