What had I done? We’d churned it the right way, conched it, used all the same fresh, fresh ingredients. But watching someone create and actually doing it yourself are two very different things. Something was missing. It was the difference between an Old Master and a painting by numbers kit.
I made a face. The boys jumped up. Those bastards, they were pleased! I think they’d been terrified this entire time that I turned out to have been good at it.
“This is despicable,” said Frédéric.
“It’s not that bad,” I said.
Benoît simply spat his piece out into a large and grimy cloth handkerchief.
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, you guys. It’s my first time!”
“We can’t sell this,” said Frédéric.
“It’s not that bad!” I said again. He shrugged, as if to say there were so many levels on which I couldn’t understand how bad it was that there was no point trying to explain it to me.
The bell tinged in the front and our heads shot up. Oh lord, it was Alice.
She clacked back in. To my total and utter astonishment, she’d been away having her hair done. She held out her hand for the phone, and I felt in my apron pocket. The last number, I saw, was Laurent’s. My heart started to beat faster. Did he have news? Was he at the hospital? What was it?
Alice nibbled a tiny corner of the chocolate.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“It’s not,” said Frédéric, but she shot him a warning look.
“Go out and sell,” she said warningly. “Or I’m canceling lunch.”
This seemed to strike scandalized horror into both of them.
“Right. I’m ready for the hospital,” said Alice.
“Uhm, I think Laurent rang.”
Alice looked annoyed, scrolling through her calls. “But not the hospital. So it can’t be that serious.”
“Aren’t you going to call him?” I said as she slipped the phone back in her bag. She stared at me blankly.
“Chop chop, open up,” she said in English.
- - -
There was even more of a crowd in the shop than usual when we finally opened the doors; Thierry’s illness had been mentioned in the press and there were lots of people there who knew his reputation for only the freshest of chocolate, anxious to see what was going on and suspicious, I was guessing, about quality control. I sighed, full of nerves. They were about to find out.
- - -
Nobody said anything, of course, except Frédéric who kept giving me meaningful looks across the counter. They would go outside, nibble a bit, try a piece, then look at each other. If it was their first time to the shop, they seemed to be saying to each other, wow, I wonder what all the fuss was about for this stuff that tastes like any mass-produced supermarket brand.
If they were regulars, it was much, much worse. They would taste a little, like policemen on television testing cocaine, then they would nod at each other as if confirming their worst fears, discard the rest, and leave quickly. It was awful. And at the back all the time was Frédéric, smug and making his I told you so face. During my lunch break, I went to seek out a quiet spot—always near impossible on the Île de la Cité—and sobbed my heart out. Then I remembered someone I hadn’t called.
“Claire?”
“Oh, thank goodness.”
Her voice was frail, but the relief was unmistakable, and I could have kicked myself for not calling her earlier.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “My battery died, and then it was late.”
“But you’re all right?”
“Ye-es,” I said reluctantly.
“What is it?”
“It’s Thierry.”
- - -
Claire knew it then. She knew against all the certainties that life should grow over old wounds, that people grew up and moved on with their lives, all the truisms she’d been told and learned from other people and taken to heart and pretended to herself for years and years and years that they were true, even as she had raised another man’s children and been another man’s wife, and another man’s divorcee whose body showed up its own pain…even through all of that, the way the electricity shot through her heart meant it could have been yesterday; the years just fell off her. Nothing had changed, not a tiny thing.
“What about him?” she asked, grasping anxiously at the oxygen cylinder.
“Is everything all right, Mum?” Patsy called cheerfully from the kitchen. Claire didn’t like her daughters-in-law calling her Mum; it made her feel about a million years old, but she wouldn’t dream of mentioning it.
“Fine, thank you.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
Claire shook her head in vexation.
“So,” she said, “what? What is it?”
A painful lump formed in her throat. He couldn’t be…he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be. Mind you, she nearly was, she thought to herself bitterly. But not Thierry, with so much life bursting from him.
- - -
“He had a heart attack,” I said, as plainly as I could. “He’s in the hospital.”
“A heart attack? A serious one?”
“Yes.”
Claire found herself giggling with nerves and hysteria. “Oh, all that chocolate, all that butter,” she said. “Is he…is he…oh Lord.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s in the hospital. He’s had an operation to put in a stent. They don’t know if he’s going to be all right.”
“But if he’s had the operation?”
“Yes, but it’s difficult…” I wasn’t quite sure how to say it. “He is terribly fat.”
“Oh!” Claire looked down at her pin-thin wrists and shook her head. Her voice quavered; she was still giggling in confusion. The difference between them would be greater than ever. “Oh,” she said again. “But he’s still alive?”
I didn’t understand why she was laughing. This wasn’t good news.
“Well, yes, but he’s very seriously ill.”
“Ha, well, that’s…well, that’s…”
Claire was nearly breathless now with her giggling fit. Patsy came rushing through from the kitchen.
“Mum! What’s the matter?”