Christmas at Tiffany's (36 page)

‘Not really.’

‘Well, I mean . . . I scarcely know anyone here, my job is basically paid tourism, there’s no man on the horizon . . . and yet the quality of life out here is making me happy even without those things. I always used to think happiness depended upon them, but cycling about, shopping at the markets, cooking with Claude, unwinding at the hammam . . .’

‘The what?’

‘There’s just an indolence here that makes my bones buzz.’

‘Well, now, I like the sound of
that
,’ he said, sliding further down the bed, his hands clasped behind his head. ‘But I guess I’m gonna have to meet your bear man and make sure he looks after you for me.’

‘He’ll just snarl at you,’ she warned.

‘No he won’t,’ he replied confidently. ‘I’ll know how to sweet-talk him. Everyone knows bears love honey.’

Cassie smiled brightly as she shook hands with the agent and started walking briskly away down the street towards the golden dome of Les Invalides. The strident pace and chic ensemble – navy beret and belted camel coat – helped hide her mounting panic. It was three in the afternoon, the last week in February, and there were only seven weeks to go till the party. The guest list was in the final edit stage as the powers-that-be ruthlessly whittled away the numbers to leave only the biggest spenders standing. The problem was, until they knew the venue, they couldn’t confirm final numbers – it wouldn’t do to have too many people crammed into a tiny space; and even worse, to have too few in a large space. Not to mention the fact that the printers needed a location to put on the copperplate.

Cassie had put various deluxe options in front of Florence – most of which were from Suzy’s list – but they’d all been rejected as too ‘straight’. It wasn’t that the venues Suzy had given her weren’t beautiful or spacious or historic, but none of them stood out – not at an international level anyway. This party was for people who spent half a million euros every six months just on their clothes. What did they care about a chateau? It was just a cottage in the country to them. The Eiffel Tower? A garden ornament, no doubt.

‘The thing is, Cassie,’ Florence had explained patiently, ‘this party is about what Monsieur Westley has brought to the company. It is not about the tradition and formality of the legacy he inherited. Monsieur Westley, he is a rebel. He used to be called the ‘bad boy of fashion’. And our customers love that. They like the frisson of excitement that comes with the renegade, with breaking the rules. For most of our customers, they are constrained by appearances, there is a level of decorum that must be maintained. But they like that Monsieur Westley can undercut the stiffness, take a bit of air out of the pomposity. He delivers a little bit of the punk into the couture – and we must do the same for his party.’

Cassie had nodded enthusiastically, as though that speech was going to somehow translate into a solution, but two weeks later she still had nothing suitable to show her. This building – a converted prison that was, ironically, too luxurious now – had been her last option and they were due to have a final-decision meeting tomorrow.

Cassie rounded a corner, and as soon as she was sure she was out of sight, slowed to a dejected shuffle, her shoulders slumping, hands now clasped behind her back, her bag swinging into her knees. She blew out through her cheeks and came to a stop in the Esplanade. She sat down on a bench, knees knocked together, stumped. In her heart, she knew there was nothing for it – she’d have to come clean. She’d asked Suzy, Anouk and even Bas, and had spent weeks cycling and walking all over the city taking photographs of interesting-looking buildings, but to no avail. She was all out of ideas.

Even on a day as bleak as this one – the sun had called in sick – rollerbladers raced past and elderly gentlemen convened for games of pétanque between the trees. At the steps of the Dome Church, noisy school groups in matching sweatshirts and baseball caps goofed about on the statues making bunny ears for each other’s photographs, and every twenty yards, street sellers heckled the passing pedestrians, trying to flog tacky snow globes of the Arc de Triomphe and mini replicas of Notre Dame.

She looked away, trying to avoid their gaze, and caught sight of a man sitting on the bench diametrically opposite. He was staring at the ground directly in front of his feet, utterly oblivious to all the noise and movement around him. He looked like he’d been cast in stone. He didn’t even seem to blink.

Cassie hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to intrude. She knew from bitter experience that he was graceless at the best of times, but something made her get up and walk over anyway.

‘Claude?’

He looked up at her slowly, as though disoriented by the sound of his own name.

‘Hi,’ she smiled as his eyes focused on her. ‘I was just passing . . .’

He looked back down again.

She knew she should probably go, that she’d regret it the second he opened his mouth. But it seemed so . . . extraordinary to run into him out here, so far from their usual meeting place in the quatrième district. Shopping and cooking with him had rapidly become the high point of her week, something she counted down towards like a child at Christmas, and she couldn’t bear to pass him by on this bonus encounter. He was never going to win any charm awards, but his manner had begun to approach a pale shade of cordial in recent weeks, and she sensed that deep, deep down, under all the hair and gruffness, he maybe even, perhaps, liked her – a little bit.

‘May I join you?’

He sighed heavily, as though waking from a deep sleep, flicking his index finger ever so lightly. She took it to mean ‘possibly’, and sat down.

‘Shitty weather,’ she muttered, instantly regretting it. He wasn’t a man for small talk at the best of times, much less when he looked like this. Hunched, frozen, desolate.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked instead.

Nothing.

She looked away, watching a group of pigeons fighting over some cake the schoolchildren had left in a wrapper on the wall. She ought to go back to the office, see if anyone else had any last-ditch off-beat ideas . . .

A bus stopped a hundred yards away, the Bebe Washington campaign slapped to its side. She’d seen it a few times now and the shock was beginning to wear off. She studied the glowing image that stared back at her – heady and enigmatic; watched as people in the queue stared at it. Kelly had told her the red top had already sold out (and that some late orders had come in for the collection as a result of the campaign) as other women tried to be her. But even she couldn’t do that now. That girl was gone already, replaced by another. She was just a golden phantom.

‘Did Henry tell you about me?’ she asked quietly. ‘Did he tell you what happened?’ She stared at the bus as the passengers climbed on, her voice little more than a murmur. ‘I think he did. I think he told you.’

The bus closed its doors and pulled away. ‘Because I keep wondering – why did he put us together? Why did he get me to ring you? He couldn’t have known how I feel about cooking.
I
didn’t know how I felt about cooking till I met you.’

Silence.

She shot him a sideways look and gathered up her courage as if she was making a snowball. ‘I think he’s put us together for another reason,’ she said bravely. ‘I think it’s the thing that made you stop cooking.’

Nothing. Not a muscle-twitch or blink.

She sighed and they sat awhile in the cold, their breath hanging like baby dragon puffs in the air before them. Her bottom started to go numb from being still for so long, and her nose tingled with the cold, but she sat on.

Eight, ten minutes passed and he didn’t once move, stir, twitch or even register that she was sitting there.

Finally she got up, feeling sad not to have made any progress. He had, quite literally, frozen her out. Clearly, whatever they shared in the kitchen stayed in the kitchen.

‘Well, I’ll see you on Saturday then, Claude,’ she said, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘Usual time. I won’t be late.’

She walked away and had just reached the rue Saint-Dominique when she heard heavy footsteps behind her. She turned.

‘It’s cold out here,’ he said, as though he’d only just noticed.

‘Yes.’ She was too surprised to comment further.

He looked at her for a moment then gave a nod, as though agreeing with something. ‘Let’s go and warm up.’

She had been intending to go back to the office and admit her failure to Florence, but she didn’t dare disagree with him. He took her by the elbow and led her towards the rank of scooters all parked askew further along the road. His – a dusty grey model with bald tyres – looked far too small to transport such a big bear of a man, but he handed her a helmet and she climbed on behind him, not quite able to get her arms around his chest.

He drove slowly, although without much care, totally disregarding one-way signs and dawdling pedestrians, until they stopped ten minutes later outside a green panelled shop on the corner of rue Bonaparte. Its windows were stacked with boxes that looked like they would house scented soaps, and they came in every pastel colour – baby pink, mint, sky blue – with chicks and bunnies alongside, motifs to bring the promise of spring to grey days. But she peered closer and saw it wasn’t soaps they were selling.

Claude led her in and the bell above the door jangled merrily. Cassie marvelled at the pâtissiers’ treasures stacked in colour-coded rows beneath the glass-covered cabinets that looked like they’d been sourced from an old apothecary. On the far wall, streams of ribbons in pink and mint hung down from their reels, fluttering gently in the breeze created by clamouring customers.

He led her towards the far end, past conical towers of pistachio and chocolate macaroons that defied gravity as well as belief, and into a small café. A baroque chandelier glinted roundly in the encroaching dusk, and they sat on a napoleon-blue velvet sofa. Claude ordered for them without looking at the menu. From the speed and deference with which they served him, they seemed to know exactly who he was.

‘What is this place?’ she asked, shrugging off her coat and shaking her hair out from under her beret. ‘It’s amazing.’

‘This is Ladurée.’ He said it with the same authority he’d said ‘I am Claude’ at their first meeting.

‘Ladurée? I’ve heard of that.’

‘I should hope so. This is the home of the most exquisite macaroons in the whole of France.’ He pinched his fingers to his lips. ‘You cannot claim to be a lover of French food – of Paris – if you have not been here.’

A waitress quickly brought their orders – jasmine tea and a tiered cake stand piled with macaroons in pistachio, raspberry, petal, violet cream, orange blossom and crème anglaise.

Cassie’s eyes widened with delight.

‘Try one,’ Claude said, bringing the stand closer to her.

She picked one up and took a small bite. The outer pastry was so light it was like biting into a cloud puff, and the cream filling was so rich, so intense, she had to close her eyes. ‘I feel like I’m Marie Antoinette,’ she sighed.

Claude smiled with his eyes, watching her intently. ‘We shall make these next,’ he said, holding one between his fingers and looking at it like a jewel. He dropped his voice. ‘There are two secrets to making them. One is to cook them on double trays, the other to let the dough form a shell
before
you put it in the oven.’

She smacked her lips together. ‘Very, very good,’ she smiled, wiping her fingers with a napkin. God knows she could never let Suzy in here. She’d seen what that woman could do to a cupcake.

‘Well, at least now Henry’s list is making more sense. He told me not just to come to Ladurée . . .’ she took a sip of tea . . . ‘but to make
a habit
of coming here.’ She picked up an orange blossom macaroon and sighed happily just looking at it. ‘And that I shall do gladly.’

She took another heavenly bite.

Claude watched her.

‘He is a good friend to you.’

‘Who?’ Cassie had to put her hand over her mouth. She swallowed quickly. ‘Henry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, technically speaking, he’s my friend’s brother. We’re not that close. I hadn’t seen him for ten years before this summer.’

‘And yet he has done this
list
for you.’

‘Yes, well, he’s a man of the world, isn’t he? He goes to places where no one’s ever been before. I think it was just unthinkable to him that I didn’t have any ambitions about getting to know the cities I was living in.’

‘And why didn’t you?’

Cassie looked at him. It sounded like Henry hadn’t told him her back-story after all. ‘Because I didn’t leave my home out of choice. I had made a life for myself. I had roots. I wasn’t looking to suddenly rip myself away from them and start exploring the great cities.’

Claude looked out of the window, nodding to himself again as though reading between the lines.

‘Well, he has never suffered loss, Henry,’ he said. ‘The world is still straightforward to him. Still a present to be unwrapped. I suppose he is trying to make you a gift, to see the world through his eyes – something to be enjoyed and discovered.’

‘I guess I’d have to say it’s working, then. All the greatest moments I’ve had since . . . leaving have come to me through his lists.’