The Lollipop Shoes (21 page)

Thursday, 22nd November

THREE MISSED CALLS
from Thierry’s phone, and a photograph of the Natural History Museum with a text message reading:
Cave Woman! Turn on Ur fone!
It made me laugh, but not quite easily; I don’t share Thierry’s passion for all things technical, and after trying unsuccessfully to text him back, I hid the phone in the kitchen drawer.

Later, he rang. It seems he’s not going to be able to get back this weekend, although he promises he will next week. In a way, I’m a little relieved. It gives me time to get things in order; to prepare my stock; to become accustomed to this new shop of mine, its habits and its customers.

Nico and Alice were back today. Alice bought a small box of chocolate fudge squares – a very small box, but she ate them herself – and Nico, a kilo of macaroons.

‘Can’t get enough of these bad boys,’ he said. ‘Just keep ’em coming, Yanne – OK?’

I couldn’t help smiling at his exuberance. They sat at a
table in the front of the shop. She had mocha, and he had hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows, while Zozie and I remained discreetly aloof in the back kitchen – unless a customer came in – and Rosette pulled out her drawing pad and began to draw pictures of monkeys, long-tailed and grinning, in every colour in the box.

‘Hey, that’s good,’ said Nico, as Rosette handed him a picture of a fat purple monkey eating a coconut. ‘I guess you must like monkeys, eh?’

He did a monkey face for Rosette, who gave a crow of laughter and signed –
Again!
She’s laughing more often. I’ve noticed that. At Nico, at me, at Anouk, at Zozie – perhaps, next time Thierry calls, she will start to connect with him a little more.

Alice laughed too. Rosette likes her best, perhaps because she is so small, almost a child herself in her short print dress and pale-blue coat. Perhaps because she so rarely speaks; even with Nico, who talks enough for the both of them.

‘That monkey looks like Nico,’ she said. With adults her voice is wispy and reluctant. With Rosette, she has a different tone. Her voice is rich and comical, and Rosette responds with a brilliant smile.

So Rosette drew monkeys for all of us. Zozie’s is wearing bright-red mittens on all four hands. Alice’s monkey is electric blue, with a tiny body and a ridiculously long and curly tail. Mine is embarrassed, hiding its furry face in its hands. She has a knack, no doubt about it: her drawings are crude, but oddly alive; and she manages to convey facial expressions with only a couple of strokes of the pen.

We were still laughing when Madame Luzeron came in with her little fluffy peach-coloured dog. Madame
Luzeron dresses well, in grey twinsets that hide her expanding waist, and well-cut coats in shades of charcoal and black. She lives in one of the big stucco-fronted houses behind the park; goes to Mass every day, to the hairdresser’s every other day – except on Thursdays, when she goes to the cemetery by way of our shop. She might be as young as sixty, but her hands are wrung with arthritis and her thin face is chalky with concealer.

‘Three rum truffles, in a box.’

Madame Luzeron never says ‘please’. That would be too bourgeois, perhaps. Instead she peered at Fat Nico, Alice, the empty cups and the monkeys. An over-plucked eyebrow went up.

‘I see you’ve – redecorated.’ The slightest of pauses before that last word throws doubt on the wisdom of such a move.

‘Fabulous, isn’t it?’ That was Zozie. She isn’t used to Madame’s ways, and Madame gave her a piercing look, taking in the overlong skirt, the hair pinned up with a plastic rose, the jangling bracelets on her arms and the cherry-print wedges on her feet – worn today with a pair of striped stockings in pink and black.

‘We fixed up the chairs ourselves,’ she said, reaching into the display box to select the chocolates. ‘We thought it would be nice to cheer the place up a bit.’

Madame gave the kind of smile you see on the face of a ballet dancer whose shoes are hurting them.

Zozie kept talking, oblivious. ‘Right now. Rum truffles. There you are. What colour ribbon? Pink looks nice. Or maybe red. What do you think?’

Madame said nothing, although Zozie seemed not to require an answer. She wrapped the chocolates in their
little box, added a ribbon and a paper flower, and placed the confection on the counter between them.

‘These truffles look different,’ said Madame, looking at them suspiciously through the cellophane.

‘They are,’ said Zozie. ‘Yanne makes them herself.’

‘Pity,’ said Madame. ‘I liked the others.’

‘You’ll like these better,’ said Zozie. ‘Try one. It’s on the house.’

I could have told her she was wasting her time. City people are often suspicious of a free gift. Some refuse automatically, as if unwilling to be beholden to anyone, even to the tune of a single chocolate. Madame gave a little sniff – a well-bred version of Laurent’s
mweh
. She put down the coins on the counter-top—

And it was then that I thought I saw it. An almost invisible flick of the fingers as her hand brushed against Zozie’s. A brief gleam of something in the grey November air. It might have been the flicker of a neon sign across the square – except that Le P’tit Pinson is shut, and it would be another four hours at least before the street-lights went on. Besides, I ought to know that gleam. That spark, like electricity, that leaps from one person to the next—

‘Go on,’ said Zozie. ‘It’s been so long since you indulged.’

Madame had felt it just as I had. In a moment I saw her expression change. Beneath the refinement of powder and paste, a confusion; a longing; a loneliness; loss – feelings that shifted like clouds across her pinched pale features—

Hastily, I averted my eyes.
I don’t want to know your secrets
, I thought.
I don’t want to know your thoughts. Take your silly little dog and your chocolates and go home before it’s
—

Too late. I’d seen.

The cemetery; a broad gravestone of pale grey marble, shaped like the curve of an ocean wave. I saw the picture set into the stone: a boy of thirteen or so, grinning brashly and toothily at the camera. A school photograph, perhaps, the last one taken before his death, shot in black-and-white but tinted in pastel shades for the occasion. And underneath it there are the chocolates; rows of little boxes, wasted by the rain. One for every Thursday, lying untouched; beribboned in yellow and pink and green . . .

I look up. She is staring – but not at me. Her frightened, exhausted pale-blue eyes are wide and strangely hopeful.

‘I’ll be late,’ she says in a small voice.

‘You’ve got time,’ says Zozie gently. ‘Sit down awhile. Rest your feet. Nico and Alice were just leaving. Come on,’ she insists, as Madame seems about to protest. ‘Sit down and have some chocolate. It’s raining, and your boy can wait.’

And to my amazement, Madame obeys.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and sits down in her chair, looking ludicrously out of place against the bright-pink leopard print, and eats her chocolate, eyes closed, head resting against the fluffy fake fur.

And she looks so peaceful – and yes, so
happy
.

And outside, the wind rattles the newly painted sign, and the rain sizzles down on the cobbled streets, and December is only a heartbeat away, and it feels so safe and so solid that I can almost forget that our walls are made of paper; our lives of glass; that a gust of wind could shatter us; that a winter storm could blow us away.

5

Friday, 23rd November

I SHOULD HAVE
known she’d helped them along. It’s what I might have done myself, once, in the days of Lansquenet. First, Alice and Nico, so oddly alike; and I happen to know that he’s noticed her before, calls in at the florist’s once a week to buy daffodils (his favourite), but has never yet found the courage to speak to her or to ask her out.

Now suddenly, over chocolate—

Coincidence
, I tell myself.

And now Madame Luzeron, once so brittle and self-contained; releasing her secrets like scent from a bottle that everyone thought had dried up long ago.

And that sunny glow around the door – even when it’s raining – leads me to fear that someone may have been easing things along; that the stream of customers we’ve had over the past few days is not due entirely to our confectionery.

I know what my mother would say.

Where’s the harm? No one gets hurt. Don’t they deserve it, Vianne?

Don’t we?

I tried to warn Zozie yesterday. To explain why she mustn’t interfere. But I couldn’t. The box of secrets, once opened, may never again be closed. And she finds me unreasonable, I sense that. As mean as she is generous, like the miserly baker in the old tale who charged for the smell of the baking bread.

What harm is there?
I know she’d say.
What do we lose from helping them?

Oh, I came so close to telling her. But every time, I stopped myself. Besides, it
might
be coincidence.

But something else happened today. Something that confirmed my doubts. The unlikely catalyst – Laurent Pinson. I’ve noticed him in Le Rocher de Montmartre several times already this week. That’s hardly news; and unless I’m much mistaken, it is not our chocolate that brings him here.

But he was here again this morning; peering at the chocolates in their glass cases; sniffing at the price tags; taking in every detail of our improvements with a sour face and an occasional grunt of barely concealed disapproval.

‘
Mweh
.’

It was one of those sunny November days, all the more precious for being so few. Still as midsummer, with that high clear sky, and the vapour-trails like scratches against the blue.

‘Nice day,’ I said.

‘
Mweh
,’ said Laurent.

‘Just browsing, or shall I get you a drink?’

‘At those prices?’

‘On the house.’

Some people are incapable of turning down a free drink. Grudgingly Laurent sat down, accepted a cup of coffee and a praline, and began his usual litany.

‘To close me down, at this time of year – it’s bloody victimization, that’s what it is. Someone’s out to ruin me.’

‘What happened?’ I said.

He poured out his woes. Someone had complained about him microwaving leftovers; some idiot had fallen ill; they had sent him an environmental health inspector who could barely speak proper French and although Laurent had been
perfectly
civil to the fellow, he’d taken offence at something he’d said and—

‘Bang! Closed! Just like that! I mean, what is the country coming to, when a perfectly decent café – a café that’s been here decades – can be shut down by some bloody
pied-noir
. . .’

I pretended to listen, whilst itemizing in my mind the chocolates that had sold best, and the ones where stock was running low. I pretended, too, not to notice when Laurent helped himself to another of my pralines without being asked. I could afford it. And he needed to talk.

After a while, Zozie came out of the kitchen, where she’d been helping me with the chocolate logs. Abruptly Laurent ceased his tirade and flushed to the creases in his earlobes.

‘Zozie, good day,’ he said, with exaggerated dignity.

She grinned. It’s no secret that he admires her – who wouldn’t? – and today she was looking beautiful, in a velvet dress down to the floor and ankle-boots in the same shade of cornflower blue.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Zozie’s an attractive woman, and Laurent is at that age when a man’s head is most easily turned. But it struck me that now we’d have him underfoot every day between now and Christmas, cadging free drinks, annoying the customers, stealing the sugar and complaining about the neighbourhood going to the dogs and—

I almost missed it as I turned away and she forked the sign behind her back. My mother’s sign, to banish malchance.

Tsk-tsk, begone!

I saw Laurent slap at his neck, as if an insect had bitten him there. I drew a breath – too late. It was done. So naturally – as I myself would have done in Lansquenet, if the past four years had never happened.

‘Laurent?’ I said.

‘Must go,’ said Laurent. ‘Things to do, you know – no time to waste.’ And, still rubbing the back of his neck, he hauled himself out of the armchair he had been occupying for the best part of half an hour and almost scuttled out of the shop.

Zozie grinned. ‘At last,’ she said.

I sat down heavily on the chair.

‘Are you all right?’

I looked at her. This is the way it always begins: with the little things; the things that don’t count. But one little thing leads to another, and another, and before you know it, it has started again, and the wind is turning, and the Kindly Ones have picked up the scent and—

And for a second, I blamed Zozie. After all, it was she who had transformed my ordinary
chocolaterie
into this pirates’ cave. Before she came, I was quite content to be Yanne Charbonneau – to run a shop like other shops, to
wear Thierry’s ring, to allow the world to run its course without the slightest interference.