“Oh yes,” she said, suddenly sounding far away. Then she pulled herself together. “Well, no mobiles in those days. You had to learn all your phone numbers by heart.”
“And you still remember all your phone numbers?”
There was a little pause.
“Not all of them, no.”
I swallowed.
“I really do have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you back, I promise.”
And I hung up before she could ask any more or get any more worried.
- - -
The phone in the shop rang for so long that I thought they’d closed up for the morning. I prayed they hadn’t. And that Frédéric would answer, not Benoît.
Thankfully, for once, my prayers were answered. I could hear Frédéric’s shock as I explained as well as I could—my French was all over the place suddenly; it was like something had shaken loose in my brain and I had completely forgotten how to talk. I realized when he asked me which hospital I was in that I didn’t even know and had to ask the grumpy administrator again, who looked at me like I was the biggest idiot ever to walk the face of the earth.
“Hôtel-Dieu,” I said.
“Fine,” said Frédéric. “It’s close by. I’ll shut the shop and let people know…”
He paused and his voice cracked a little.
“Is he…I mean, he’s going to be all right, isn’t he? They’re fixing him?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I really don’t know.”
The doctors invited me in to see him as he was prepped for surgery. It felt absurd, somehow, to care so much for someone I’d known for only a few weeks, but to see him there, unconscious, the great life force of him flat on the bed like a huge walrus, his mustache flopping sadly, covered by a tube inserted in his nose—I immediately burst into tears.
“We give him bypass,” said the young doctor in English. “We hope…we hope it will work. He is a difficult patient.”
“You mean he is too big?” I said.
The doctor nodded. “He is…it is difficult for us to do what we need to do.”
I nodded. It must be. I didn’t envy her, having to get down through all those layers.
“But,” I found myself saying, “he has…he has a big heart, you know? It is worth it.”
She nodded without smiling and snapped briskly, “It’s always worth it.”
- - -
After that and squeezing his hand once more, watching him go in the specially big bed, I sat in the foyer, idly leafing through a magazine I wasn’t even slightly interested in, trying to leave my phone alone, because it really would run completely out of charge if I even touched it once more. When everyone else came, I would go and call Claire and tell her. Although I worried slightly. Thierry had obviously been a friend of hers for a long time. Would it upset her more to know? I could just tell her I’d been lost or something, make some excuse. But then, would that be fair? And also, a little voice said to me again, it was still so very odd that she hadn’t seen him in such a long time. They couldn’t really be such good friends, could they?
I scanned the entrance, waiting for someone, anyone, to show up. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so lonely in my whole life.
- - -
1972
To Thierry, it seemed perfectly simple.
“You are my girl,” he said. “You come back, huh? At Christmas? We shall have a wonderful time; Paris is sensational then. They light up the boulevards with a hundred tiny candles and the Tour Eiffel glows red and green. Perhaps it will snow, and I will keep you warm in my little garret, non? And I will make my hot chocolate for you. It is stirred one thousand times and filled with cream so that it melts down your neck like being embraced by a man who loves you, huh, cherie?”
She tried to smile, as she did so, kicking the first of the falling autumn leaves from the pathway. In four days’ time, she would be putting on a school uniform she had undoubtedly grown out of since last year. She had filled out, she knew. There was color in her cheeks. She had come to Paris a girl and now she felt, indubitably, a woman.
“I don’t know,” she said. Christmas in Kidinsborough involved a lot of helping the Reverend with his Christmas load: visiting the sick in hospital, giving Bibles as gifts to poor families who might, perhaps, have preferred food or toys. And homework, of course. She groaned. She’d brought a whole pile of textbooks with her, thinking she might get some revision done while the children were asleep. Of course, that had not happened. In terms of cause and effect, she did sometimes wonder if her choices might have been different for that very reason. But then of course if she had, she wouldn’t have met Thierry…it was a circular argument with no clear solution, and of course pointless to dwell on.
She clutched his big paw tightly as the first chilling winds of autumn breezed through her thin coat, making her shiver. As much as they were trying to pretend the summer wasn’t over, they both knew it was.
Thierry looked at her.
“Look at you, freezing, my little bird,” he said. “I have a new recipe for hot chocolate, and you are going to be my first customer. Come with me.”
Sitting where Thierry had lifted her onto the low wooden bar that shut off the counter into one single bar, he fussed around her, constantly stirring the huge mixing jug, adding more cream or taking some away, popping in the tiniest bit of rum, letting it smoke off then adding more. He was in a whirl that day, even though it wasn’t even that cold; he wouldn’t let her taste it until he had added tiny pinches of this and that, tasted it, thought about it, bounced in and out the back of the shop, shouted at Benoît, considered melting another batch of chocolate altogether, finally dribbling in a pinch of salt, and at last considering himself satisfied.
As soon as she took one sip, she knew he was right. It spread right through her body, warming every vein. It made her curl up her toes in delight. It tasted like something the White Witch of Narnia might have given Edmund to betray his family, and it tasted like it would have worked.
“Thierry,” she said, aghast.
“I know, I know,” he said distractedly. He was jotting notes on a piece of paper—he never wrote anything down normally, and he had found a small jar with a screw top, into which he was decanting some of the liquid.
“BENOÎT!” he growled through the back, as the burly man came running out. “Make this until it tastes like this. Then lock up the recipe in the safe.”