“Rosette, no.”
The boat flips again, now pointing at the ice cream stand.
“All right, just one.”
We kissed as Rosette ate her ice cream by the side of the lake, and he was warm and vaguely tobacco scented, like somebody’s father, his cashmere-coated arms folded bearlike over my too-thin red dress and my autumn coat.
It was a good kiss, beginning with my cold fingers and finding its clever, earnest way toward my throat and finally my mouth, unfreezing what the wind had frozen, little by little, like a warm fire, repeating I love you, I love you (he says that a lot), but under his breath, like Hail Marys delivered in haste by an eager child too keen for redemption.
He must have seen something in my face. “What’s wrong? ” he said, serious again.
How to tell him? How to explain? He watched me with sudden earnestness, his blue eyes watery with the cold. He looked so guileless, so ordinary— unable, for all his business acumen, to understand our kind of deceit.
What does he see in Yanne Charbonneau? I’ve tried so hard to understand. And what might he see in Vianne Rocher? Would he mistrust her unconventional ways? Would he sneer at her beliefs? Judge her choices? Feel horror, perhaps, at the way she lied?
Slowly, he kissed my fingertips, putting them one by one in his mouth. He grinned. “You taste of chocolate.”
But the wind was still blowing in my ears, and the sound of the trees all around us made it immense, like an ocean, like a monsoon, sweeping the sky with dead-leaf confetti and the scent of that river, that winter, that wind.
An odd little thought came to me then— What if I told Thierry the truth? What if I told him everything?
To be known; to be loved; to be understood. My breath caught— Oh, if only I dared—
The wind does curious things to people: it turns them around, it makes them dance. In that moment it made Thierry a boy again, tousle-haired, bright-eyed and hopeful. The wind can be seductive that way, bringing wild thoughts and wilder dreams. But all the time I could hear that warn-ing—and even then I think I knew that for all his warmth and all his love, Thierry le Tresset would be no match for the wind.
“I don’t want to lose the chocolate shop,” I told him (or maybe the wind). “I need to keep it. I need it to be mine.”
Thierry laughed. “Is that all? ” he said. “Then marry me, Yanne.” He grinned at me. “You can have all the chocolate shops you want, and all the chocolates. And you’ll taste of chocolate all the time. And you’ll even smell of it—and so will I—”
I couldn’t help laughing at that. And then Thierry took my hands and spun me around on the dry gravel, making Rosette hiccup with laughter.
Perhaps that’s why I said what I did; a moment of fearful impulsiveness, with the wind in my ears and my hair in my face and Thierry holding on for all he was worth, whispering I love you, Yanne, against my hair in a voice that sounded almost afraid.
He’s afraid to lose me, I suddenly thought, and that was when I said it, knowing that there could be no turning back after this, and with tears in my eyes and my nose pink and running from the wintry cold.
“All right,” I said. “But quietly . . .”
His eyes widened a little at the suddenness of it.
“You’re sure? ” he said, a little breathlessly. “I thought you’d want—you know.” He grinned. “The dress. The church. The choir singing. Bridesmaids, bells—the whole shebang.”
I shook my head. “No fuss,” I said.
He kissed me again. “As long as it’s yes.”
And for a moment it was so good; the small, sweet dream right there in my hands. Thierry’s a good man, I thought. A man with roots, with principles.
And money, Vianne, don’t forget that, said the spiteful voice inside my head, but the voice was faint, and getting fainter as I gave myself to the small, sweet dream. Damn her, I thought, and damn the wind. This time it would not blow us away.
Friday, 9 November
Today i quarreled with Suze again. i don’t know why it happens so much; I want to be friends, but the more I try, the harder it gets. This time it was about my hair. Oh, boy. Suze thinks I should get it straightened.
I asked why.
Suzanne shrugged. We were alone in the library during break—the others had gone to buy sweets at the shop, and I was trying to copy some geography notes, but Suze wanted to talk, and there’s no stopping her when that happens.
“Looks weird,” she said. “Like Afro hair.”
I didn’t care, and told her so.
Suze made the fish-mouth face she always makes when someone contradicts her. “So—your dad wasn’t black, was he? ” she said.
I shook my head, feeling like a liar. Suzanne thinks my father’s dead. But he might have been black for all I know. For all I know he might have been a pirate, or a serial killer, or a king.
“Because, you know, people might think—”
“If by people, you mean Chantal—”
“No,” said Suzanne crossly, but her pink face went a shade pinker, and she didn’t quite meet my eyes as she said it. “Listen,” she went on, putting her arm around my shoulders. “You’re new to this school. You’re new to us. The rest of us went to the primary school. We learnt to fit in.”
Learn to fit in. I had a teacher called Madame Drou, back in the days at Lansquenet, who used to say the exact same thing.
“But you’re different,” said Suze. “I’ve been trying to help—”
“Help me how? ” I snapped, thinking of my geography notes and how I never, never get to do what I want when she’s around. It’s always her games, her problems and her Annie please stop following me around when somebody better comes along. She knew I didn’t mean to snap, but she looked hurt anyway, pushing back her (straightened) hair in what she thinks is a very adult fashion and saying, “Well, if you won’t even listen. . . .”
“All right,” I said. “What’s wrong with me ? ”
She looked at me for a moment or two. Then the lesson bell rang, and she gave me a sudden, brilliant smile and handed me a folded piece of paper.
“I made a list.”
Iread the list in geography class. Monsieur Gestin was talking to us about Budapest, where we’d lived once, for a while, though I don’t remember much about it now. Only the river, and the snow, and the old quarter, which looks so like Montmartre to me somehow, with its winding streets and its steep stairways and the old castle on the little hill. The list was written on half a sheet of exercise-book paper in Suze’s neat, pudgy hand. There were tips on grooming (hair straight, nails filed, legs shaved, always carry deodorant); dress (no socks with skirts, wear pink, but not orange); culture (chick-lit good, boy-books bad); films and music (recent hits only); what to watch on television, websites (as if I had a computer anyway), how to spend my free time; and what type of mobile phone to carry. I thought at first it was another joke; but after school, when I met her queuing for the bus, I realized she was serious. “You have to make an effort,” she said. “Otherwise people will say you’re weird.” “I’m not weird,” I said. “I’m just—” “Different.” “What’s so bad about being different? ” “Well, Annie, if you want to have friends . . .” “Real friends shouldn’t care about that kind of thing.” Suze went red. She often does when she’s annoyed, and it makes her face clash with her hair. “Well, I do,” she hissed, and her eyes went to the front of the queue.
There’s a code in queuing for the bus, you know, just as there’s a code when you’re going into class, or picking teams in games. Suze and I stand about halfway. In front of us there’s the A-list: the girls who play basketball for the school; the older ones who wear lipstick, who roll their skirts up at the waistband and smoke Gitanes outside the school gates. And then there are the boys: the best-looking ones; the team members; the ones who wear their collars turned up and their hair gelled.
And there’s the new boy: Jean-Loup Rimbault. Suzanne has a crush on him. Chantal really likes him too
—though he never seems to notice either of them much and never joins in any of their games. I began to see what was going on in Suze’s mind.
Freaks and losers stand at the back. First, the black kids from the other side of the Butte, who keep to their group and don’t talk to the rest of us. Then Claude Meunier, who stutters; Mathilde Chagrin, the fat girl; and the Muslim girls, a dozen or so of them, all in a bunch, who caused such a fuss about wearing their head scarves at the beginning of term. They were wearing them now, I noticed as my eyes went to the back of the queue; they put them on the minute they leave the school gates, even though they’re not allowed them at school. Suze thinks they’re stupid to wear head scarves, and that they should be like us if they’re going to live in our country—but she’s just repeating what Chantal says. I don’t see why a head scarf should make a difference any more than a T-shirt, or a pair of jeans. Surely what they wear is their business.
Suze was still watching Jean-Loup. He’s quite tall, good-looking, I suppose, with black hair and a fringe that covers most of his face. He’s twelve, a year older than the rest of us. He should be in a higher form. Suze says he was kept back last year, but he’s really bright, always top of the class. A lot of the girls like him; but today he was just trying to be cool, leaning against the bus stop, looking through the viewfinder of the little digital camera he never seems to be without.
“Oh, my God,” whispered Suze.
“Well, why don’t you talk to him for once ? ”
Suze shushed me furiously. Jean-Loup looked up brief ly at the noise, then went back to his camera. Suze went even redder than before. “He looked at me! ” she squeaked, then, hiding behind the hood of her anorak, turned to me and rolled her eyes. “I’m going to get highlights. There’s a place that Chantal goes to for hers.” She grasped my arm so hard it hurt. “I know,” she said. “We could go together! I’ll get highlights, and you can get yours straightened.”
“Stop going on about my hair,” I said.
“Come on, Annie! It’ll be cool. And—”
“I said stop it! ” Now I was beginning to feel really angry. “Why do you keep going on about it? ”
“Oh, you’re hopeless,” said Suze, losing her temper. “You look like a freak, and you don’t even care? ”
That’s another thing she does, you know. Makes a sentence sound like a question when it isn’t.
“Why should I? ” I said. By now the anger had become something like a sneeze, and I could feel it coming, building, ready to burst whether I liked it or not. And then I remembered what Zozie had said in the English tea shop and wished I could do something to take the smug look off Suzanne’s face. Not something bad—I’d never do that—but something to teach her, all the same.
I forked my fingers behind my back and spoke to her in my shadow-voice— See how you like it, for a change.
And for a second, I thought I saw something. A flash of something across her face; something that was gone before I’d really seen it.
“I’d rather be a freak than a clone,” I said.
Then I turned and walked to the back of the queue, with everyone staring and Suze wide-eyed and ugly, quite ugly with her red hair and her red face and her mouth hanging open in disbelief as I stood there and waited for the bus to arrive.
I’m not sure if I expected her to follow me or not. I thought perhaps she would, but she didn’t; and when the bus came at last she sat next to Sandrine and never even looked at me again.
Itried to tell Maman about it when I got home, but by then she was trying to talk to Nico and wrap a box of rum truffles and fix Rosette’s snack at the same time and I couldn’t quite find the words to tell her how I felt.
“Just ignore them,” she said at last, pouring milk into a copper pan. “Here, watch this for me, will you, Nanou? Just stir it gently while I wrap this box. . . .”
She keeps the ingredients for the hot chocolate in a cabinet at the back of the kitchen. At the front she has some copper pans, some shiny molds for making chocolate shapes, the granite slab for tempering. Not that she uses them anymore; most of her old things are downstairs in the cellar, and even before Madame Poussin died, there was scarcely any time for making our specials.
But there’s always time for hot chocolate, made with milk and grated nutmeg, vanilla, chilli, brown sugar, cardamom, and 70 percent couverture chocolate—the only chocolate worth buying, she says—and it tastes rich and just slightly bitter on the back of the tongue, like caramel as it begins to turn. The chilli gives it a touch of heat—never too much, just a taste—and the spices give it that churchy smell that reminds me of lansquenet somehow, and of nights above the chocolate shop, just Maman and me, with Pantoufle sitting to one side and candles burning on the orange-box table.
No orange-boxes here, of course. Last year Thierry got us a complete new kitchen. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He is the landlord, after all— he’s got lots of money, and besides, he’s supposed to fix the house. But Ma-man insisted on making a fuss and cooking him a special dinner in the new kitchen. Oh, boy. Like we’d never had a kitchen before. So even the mugs are new now, with Chocolat written on them in fancy lettering. Thierry bought them—one for each of us and one for Madame Poussin—though he doesn’t actually like hot chocolate. (I can tell because he adds too much sugar.)
I used to have my own cup, a fat red one that Roux gave me, slightly chipped, with a painted letter A for Anouk. I don’t have it now; I don’t even remember what happened to it. Perhaps it got broken or left behind. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I don’t drink chocolate anymore.
“Suzanne says I’m weird,” I said as Maman came back into the kitchen.
“Well, you’re not,” she said, scraping the inside out of a vanilla pod. The chocolate was nearly ready by now, simmering gently in the pan. “Want some ? It’s good.”
“No thanks.”
“OK.”
She poured some for Rosette instead and added sprinkles and a dollop of cream. It looked good and smelled even better, but I didn’t want to let it show. I looked in the cupboard and found half a croissant from breakfast and some jam.
“Pay no attention to Suzanne,” said Maman, pouring out chocolate for herself into an espresso cup. I noticed neither she nor Rosette was using the Chocolat mugs. “I know her type. Try to make friends with somebody else.”
Well, easier said than done, I thought. Besides, what’s the point? It wouldn’t be me they were friends with at all. Fake hair, fake clothes, fake me.
“Like who? ” I said.
“I don’t know.” Her voice was impatient as she put the spices back into the cupboard. “There must be someone you get on with.”
It isn’t my fault, I wanted to say. Why does she think I’m the difficult one? The problem is that Maman never really went to school—learned everything the practical way, so she says—and all she knows about it now is what she’s read in children’s books, or seen through the wrong side of some school yard railings. From the other side, believe me, it’s not all jolly hockey sticks.
“Well? ” Still that impatience, that tone that says you should be grateful, I worked hard to get you here, to send you to a proper school, to save you from the life I had— “Can I ask you something? ” I said.
“Of course, Nanou. Is anything wrong? ”
“Was my father a black man? ”
She gave a start, so small that I wouldn’t have seen it if it hadn’t been in her colors.
“That’s what Chantal says at school.”
“Really? ” said Maman, beginning to slice up some bread for Rosette. Bread, knife, chocolate spread. Rosette with her little monkey fingers turning the bread slice over and over. A look of intense concentration in Maman’s face as she worked. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her eyes were as dark as Africa, impossible to read.
“Would it matter? ” she said at last.
“Dunno.” I shrugged.
She turned to me then, and for a second she looked almost lik
e the old Maman, the one who never cared what anyone thought.
“You know, Anouk,” she said slowly, “for a long time I didn’t think you even needed a father. I thought it would always be just the two of us, the way it was with my mother and me. And then Rosette came along, and I thought, well maybe—” She broke off, and smiled, and changed the subject so fast that for a minute I didn’t realize that she hadn’t actually changed it at all, like one of those fairground acts with the three cups and a ball. “You do like Thierry, don’t you? ” she said.
I shrugged again. “He’s OK.”
“I thought you did. He likes you.”
I bit the corner off my croissant. Sitting in her little chair, Rosette was making an airplane out of her slice of bread.
“I mean, if either of you didn’t like him—”
Actually, I don’t like him that much. He’s too loud, and he smells of cigars. And he’s always interrupting Maman when she’s talking, and he calls me jeune fille, like it’s a joke, and he doesn’t get Rosette at all, or understand when she signs at him, and he’s always pointing out long words and what they mean, as if I’d never heard them before.
“He’s OK,” I said again.
“Well—Thierry wants to marry me.”
“Since when? ” I said.
“He mentioned it first to me last year. I told him I didn’t want to be involved with anybody just then—there was Rosette to think of, and Madame Poussin—and he said he was happy to wait. But now we’re alone. . . .”
“You didn’t say yes, did you? ” I said, too loudly for Rosette, who put her hands over her ears.
“It’s complicated.” She sounded tired.
“You always say that.”
“That’s because it’s always complicated.”
Well, I don’t see why. It seems simple to me. She’s never been married before, has she ? So why would she want to get married now?
“Things have changed, Nanou,” she said.
“What things? ” I wanted to know.
“Well, the chocolaterie, for a start. The rent’s paid till the end of the year. But after that . . .” She gave a sigh. “It won’t be easy making it work. And I can’t just take money from Thierry. He keeps offering, but it wouldn’t be fair. And I thought. . . .”