Although I thought of what Sami had said too; that here, pleasure was for the taking. Would it have been so bad, I found myself wondering, finishing the rough red wine, letting him lick the last juices of the risotto from my fingers, clutching him to me on the bike as we came home and…
My reverie was broken, as ever, by the idea of him suddenly shouting, “Oh God, what the hell is that?” when confronted with my distorted foot.
“Bonjour, bonjour.” The boys were both very friendly this morning. “Do you think you can do it?” said Frédéric.
“I want to stick to the orange,” I said, then recited what Laurent had told me to do the night before. He nodded gravely. “You know, they will get sick of the orange,” he added. He didn’t have to tell me; I would be quite happy if I never went near the stuff again.
But I set it up to churn more gently and added the ingredients more sparingly and topped down the butter and sure enough, while to a purist it would never be mistaken for the real thing, it was once again notably better enough than the day before for me not to have to face up to everyone’s rancor.
There was, though, no Alice. I wondered what this meant; news, I supposed. Good or bad, I couldn’t tell.
At lunchtime, I announced I was heading up to the hospital. Frédéric looked at me. “Are you taking some of your chocolate?”
I shrugged. I had, in fact, thought I would do that.
Frédéric put his hand on my hand.
“I’m not saying you haven’t come a long way,” he said. “But we don’t want to shock him back into returning too soon.”
“You actually think he would leap out of his bed in horror and charge back to the shop as soon as he smelled it?” I said, injured.
“Let’s just keep on the safe side,” said Frédéric. “Let me know if he’s woken up. I can’t…after I lost my father, I have had some trouble sitting in hospitals.”
“I will,” I said.
- - -
In an ideal world, I would have avoided running into either Laurent or Alice. And for once, this morning, I was in luck. The great white hospital building behind the Place Jean-Paul-II was gleaming and silent as I quietly gave the name to the registrar, who directed me to a small room about a million miles away along endless passageways and differently colored lifts, until I finally found myself outside a door with “Girard” scribbled on a white board in marker pen. Glancing around, I couldn’t see anyone else there, so I knocked. Hearing no answer, I pushed open the door slowly.
This wasn’t intensive care anymore; it was obviously still a high dependency unit, but nothing like as scary. The heart monitor still bleeped, but the form on the bed was no longer connected to the oxygen mask. He seemed to be sleeping, and there was no one else in the room. The blinds were open and I realized, from the eighth floor, that the view to the south was beautiful in the sunlight, almost dazzling even though the room was air-conditioned and cool. I turned around with the sun behind me, half-blinded. The shape on the bed moved.
“Claire?”
I jumped out of my skin.
“Hey,” I said quietly in English, feeling embarrassed about my pounding heart. Blinking to get the sun out of my eyes, I moved forward.
“Thierry?”
He was looking at me, confused. “Claire? You have come.”
“I’m not Claire, Thierry. It’s Anna, remember? I’m Anna.”
I moved closer. His face still looked confused—and slacker. Even in the five days he’d been in the hospital, he seemed to have lost an awful lot of weight.
I patted his hand.
“Anna.”
He indicated the water on the table next to him. I poured him a glass and sat down, helping him drink it.
“You’ve woken up,” I said, after he’d finished. He blinked heavily and seemed to come back to himself.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“How do you feel? Do you want me to get anyone?”
He looked at me. “I thought you were Claire.”
“So I see.”
“You’re Anna,” he said eventually. “You’re working in the shop.”
I felt a huge sense of relief that he was making sense. I’d suddenly gotten very worried he’d had a stroke or something.
“Yes!” I said. “Yes! That’s me.”
He frowned. “How is the shop?”
“Don’t worry about that just now,” I said politically. “Listen. I spoke to Claire.”
His big dark eyes—now he was a little thinner, I could see the resemblance between him and Laurent much more. His long lashes gave him the look of a slightly helpless, very large puppy.
“Oh yes?” he said.
“She wants…she wants to come to Paris.”
His lips suddenly stretched into a wide smile. They were cracked and I passed him some more water.
“She is coming?”
“What on earth happened between you two?” I burst out suddenly, thinking of Laurent’s anger, and Alice’s insistence on being French, and Claire’s funny turn. “How can two pen pals that met like a hundred years ago…I mean, I had to write to a guy in Poland, but I couldn’t tell you his name. It started with a zed though, that was cool. But anyway, I mean. What was it?”
With no small difficulty, Thierry shunted himself up a little on the plump white pillows.
“Careful,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But I think I am going to get better. Do you know what my doctor said? She said she wants me walking up and down today. Walking up and down!”
“You like walking up and down.”
“I like walking to a café and walking toward an aperitif,” said Thierry. “I like walking and disputing and setting the world to rights. I like walking over bridges and through parks and along the Champs-Élysées on a Saturday morning to see the pretty ladies and the small dogs. I do not want to walk up and down the corridors of a hospital in a dress where everyone can see my pee pee.”
I nodded sympathetically. “I know. I’ve been there.”
“You have?” He looked at me.
I nodded. Then, even though the situation was distinctly peculiar, I slipped off my sandal. That was another thing I missed—flip-flops and open-toed pretty sandals and high-heeled shoes and nice pedicures. Thierry squinted at first. Then he did a double take. “You only have…un, deux, trois…”