“I can imagine,” I said, which was as close as I could get right then to an apology, with my heart still racing at a million miles an hour. “Oh God, I’ve hurt you.”
As if he hadn’t realized before, he put a large hand to his face, only to feel the blood trickling down. He pulled his hand away and looked at it.
“Gross,” I said, appalled. I felt in my bag in case I had a tissue, but I didn’t have one on me.
“That is awful,” he said, suddenly looking very wobbly himself. “Have you stabbed me?”
“Of course I haven’t stabbed you,” I said defiantly. “I’ve keyed you.”
He didn’t understand the word till I showed him the keys, then recognition dawned. My already anxious body suddenly pounded with fear that he was going to be furious. Instead, to my enormous, shattering relief, he shook his head, opened his mouth, revealing a white-toothed smile, and started to laugh.
“Come, come with me,” he said, then directed me up a tiny alleyway that looked forbiddingly dark. I had one more second of panic, at which he said, “Please. I certainly wouldn’t attack you again.”
“I have my keys,” I said, nervously giggling as the adrenalin finally started to leave my body.
To my total surprise, the narrow alleyway opened out onto a wide, brightly lit thoroughfare that still had cars thundering down it and, here and there, a café still open. The man led me through to a tiny coffee shop, tucked away, inhabited by several Turkish men using a hookah and a dark-eyed proprietress with bags under her eyes who raised an eyebrow but nodded brusquely as the man asked her for two coffees and a bathroom.
I sat there quietly until he came back, his wound cleaned up somewhat, holding tissue paper to his head.
“I’m sorry,” I said again quietly. The coffee arrived. It was hot, black, and about 50 percent sugar. It was just what I wanted.
He shook his head, then glanced at his watch.
“Argh,” he said.
“Don’t show me,” I said. “I have to be up in a few hours.”
“I know,” he said.
I looked at him. “Who are you?”
He grinned and I caught something then…saw something in his face.
“I’m Laurent,” he said. “You’re Anna, I remember now. You work for my dad.”
- - -
1972
Thierry worked from first thing in the morning, but at noon he made a stated decision to close the shop for three hours rather than the traditional two. When Benoît Sr. suggested this was commercial suicide, he pointed out that Italian shops closed for four hours and would he rather that, and that people would wait.
They would.
Then Claire would put the children down for their naps, under the cheerful guidance of Inez, the housemaid, and slip out, Mme. LeGuarde and Inez swapping meaningful looks.
They would wander across Paris’s bridges, each more beautiful than the last—on one foggy day, which turned the city into black and white, like a Doisneau photograph, they strolled the Pont Neuf, every cobble, it felt to Claire, smoothed away by lovers meandering across it for hundreds of years.
Thierry would talk and talk—of flavors and schemes and what he had learned, in Innsbruck and Geneva and Bruges, and occasionally would remember to ask Claire what she thought of things too, but it didn’t really matter to Claire; she was happy to listen to him, to rejoice in her understanding, which improved day by day, to revel in the warmth of his full attention, because when he got back to the shop, or went out, he would instantly be surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him—some business, or a word, or an idea, or to congratulate him on his taste or ask him about something in the newspaper. When they were in public, he was everybody’s. Tracing out their own, circuitous routes of Paris, he was all hers, and she found herself unable to ask any more.
Usually by the time he thought to ask her what she thought, it was nearing time for him to get back—never again in Claire’s life would time speed away from her as quickly as it did during those walks, those lunches. Three hours felt like the blinking of an eye, and she would float through the afternoon, so light-humored and good-natured that Arnaud and Claudette would cling to her, happily repeating the English songs she taught them, lisping along to “hun-eee oh! Sugar, sugar.”
Mme. LeGuarde kept a close eye on her and, when she judged the time to be right, casually came in to Claire’s room one night and sat down on the bed.
“Now, cherie,” she said kindly, “please tell me you know about contraception.”
Of all the shocking and strange things that had happened to Claire on her trip, none was as strange and bizarre as this elegant lady of the world referring to…well…matters. Of course she had a rough idea, picked up from her time at Chelsea Girl; she knew what a rubber was, kind of, and the girls spoke casually about being on the pill, although the thought of going to nice old Doctor Black, who’d known her since she was a baby, and asking him for pills to have sex, even if she had met anyone she’d have liked to have sex with apart from Davy Jones, was completely beyond her comprehension levels. The idea of these matters being discussed under the Reverend’s roof was simply impossible.
It being in another language helped, of course. But Mme. LeGuarde’s cool, confident manner in discussing sexual hygiene, as if it were nothing more nor less important than regular hygiene (which, indeed, in Mme. LeGuarde’s eyes, it wasn’t), was an eye-opener to Claire in more ways than one. Firstly, she declined the offer of prophylactics but promised to ensure they were used. Secondly, she took Mme. LeGuarde’s matter-of-fact tone and unflustered manner and stored it away somewhere. Years later, she was to end up taking all the sexual education classes in the school, as most of the other teachers couldn’t bear it. Statisticians in later years always marked down the lower rate of STDs and teen pregnancies in the Standish ward of Kidinsborough, an otherwise very deprived area, as a blip. It was nothing of the sort.
- - -
Of course, as soon as he said it, I realized immediately. Of course he was. The build, the dark brown eyes; he was far more handsome than Thierry could ever have been, but fundamentally they were very similar, down to the long black eyelashes and the spark of mischief in the eyes, now the panicking was over.
“You look…”
“Please don’t say I am like a thin version of my father.” Laurent looked down and patted his small stomach with a weary look. “Aha, not so thin.”