Paris by Heart Page 7

  He had to attend the lessons, but he didn’t have to let her treat him badly. No, it was decided, he wouldn’t put up with her antics anymore.

  ******

  Paul listened for the chatter of happy patrons as Pépette burst belly-first into the kitchen, but he heard nothing at all.

  The waitress wobbled her arms about. “There’s hardly anyone here. The place is deserted. People are coming up to the door and turning away.”

  Michel glanced over at Paul. “A huge success, huh? I told you. People don’t care about poetry. They care about TV crime shows with dismembered body parts and rock-star clothes, maybe. And alcohol and naked women, of course. That goes without saying.”

  Paul’s stomach tightened. It felt like he’d swallowed a brick. But he wasn’t going to show it and he certainly wasn’t ready to admit defeat. “We’re a café-restaurant, not a strip club. We’re not using naked women. Besides, it’s too much to ask of Yvonne and Pépette.”

  Michel laughed, shaking his head. “No, it wouldn’t be wise. We’d scare people off.”

  Pépette walked by and thumped Michel on the arm. He frowned, rubbing it for a second, but then winked at her.

  “I did say it might take some time to get the formula right,” added Paul.

  Pépette patted his hand. “Of course, it will be fine. Everything takes time.” She glared at Michel. “And with the right support from everyone here, you’ll get there. We’ll all get there.” She handed her two orders to Paul, instead of clipping them as usual to the string that ran over one of the kitchen counters before she returned to the dining room.

  Paul read them. Nothing substantial, true café food. A croque-madame and an omelette. He’d whip them up in no time. They weren’t dishes he could truly sink his teeth into and forget his worries, but it was better than no orders. He sliced some bread, covered it with white sauce and a little cheese and ham. He cut out a small hole in another slice of bread, which became the top layer, filled it with an egg and seasoned it.

  He placed the simple dish under the grill and then prepared the omelette, taking care to make a few holes with a fork in the base as it formed in the hot frying pan, so as to let more of the uncooked egg coat the bottom of the pan in layers. It wasn’t the way you were taught in cooking schools—it was his very own secret—and he found it always made the omelette lighter and fluffier than any other method.

  Soon he emerged from the kitchen with the food. Despite its simplicity he was proud to serve it, and he kept his head high as he strode through the nearly empty café. There were far fewer people in the café than usual. It was a week day, and the summer holidays, too, when most Parisians had gone down south in search of more sunshine, leaving the capital close to deserted. Or at least it seemed that way when you were used to living in a city bursting at the seams, a city that didn’t sleep for ten months of the year. Still, there were normally many more patrons than this. He couldn’t understand it. The poetry readings really had put off the usual diners.

  It wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d imagined opening the door to see not a few smiling faces, but a full house, people queuing up to be seated. He’d even imagined himself following the line with his gaze and gasping at how far it continued down the street. Seafood and poetry, a huge success, and he would have been the one who’d picked it.

  Instead the result was pathetic. There were two long-faced patrons, one at either end of the room, and from their gloominess it was clear that they already regretted being there. Paul had been convinced people were hungry for the unusual, starved of novelty, but this had proven him wrong.

  With as cheerful an expression as he could muster, he served his two customers, an old woman with white hair and a baby-faced man who looked like he should still be in school. Finding new ways to grow a business was not an easy feat. He was going to have to ring Julie soon, too, and tell her how it was going. She’d be mortified and sorry that she’d trusted him.

  He returned to the kitchen, head down, his legs as heavy as stone. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Doing something different, trying something new, was supposed to make people feel alive. It was what made you elated and light, wasn’t it?

  He searched his memory for the last time he’d felt like that, happy and excited, enticed by something new and fresh, and his eye began to twitch the instant he remembered. It was only last week, when he’d seen Elise for the very first time, her hair shining in the early morning light. She’d seemed so radiant and pure, such a refreshing change from the fancy, artificial women who sashayed the streets of the posh quarters of Paris, with their painted nails, designer clothes, fake eyelashes and God knows what else. Yes, she’d been a breath of fresh air. Well, it had been nothing but a fleeting moment, a moment of distraction simply because he knew nothing about her. The real Elise had turned out to be very different from that image. In fact, she was a royal pain in the buttocks, anything but a breath of fresh air.

  With her, he’d gone from a moment of insane hope and incomprehensible excitement to bitter disappointment in no time, just like he had today with his stupid theme lunch. As Paul prepared to swing open the kitchen door, he took one last look at the virtually empty room. How many clients had he lost today? How would he make up for it?

  A younger man of slight build, dressed in black from head to toe, entered the café and walked over to Yvonne, a book in hand, and caught Paul’s eye. The dreaminess in the youth’s gaze made it clear to Paul that he was the next poet he had booked. Paul had only spoken to him once over the phone, and Yvonne had looked after all the details from then on.

  After exchanging a few words with Yvonne, the dreamy young man stood in a corner of the dining room and cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, or should I say lady and gentleman, I’m Jean Desbois. I’m a poet and I’m here today to read to you from my new book The Young Man and the Sea. As the title indicates, it’s about a young man, me in case you hadn’t guessed, and the sea, that beautiful blue mass of water that cleanses us. More than that, it’s about love. It’s not something we males are taught to talk about very much, but there isn’t one man whose life wouldn’t make more sense if he found true love. Perhaps you have to be a poet to be allowed to say that out loud, though.”

  The two patrons and staff laughed, and so did Paul, though his chuckle was bitter. What was the point of dreaming of true love? He’d believed in it with Nicole, and look at how that had turned out. An occasional fling, perhaps, when his body couldn’t cope any longer with the hardships of celibacy, was what he should be aiming for, nothing more. Women were not worth the trouble.

  Yes, he wanted to believe that he could be an island, emotionally and physically self-sufficient, like a farmer growing everything he needed to live. Still, he had the niggling feeling that Jean Desbois was right. Life would make a million times more sense if he found true love, but finding that rare elixir was worse than coming across a needle in a haystack. It was more like digging around for a needle at the bottom of the ocean—a search as risky and unlikely to succeed as today’s venture with the café.

  No, true love was not for Paul. It was for people like Jean Desbois, young dreamers who spent their life alone in a corner, their vision too clouded to see that happy endings only existed in stories.

  All he had to do was get Elise off his mind and everything would be fine. If only he didn’t have to see her at the upcoming English lesson.

  Chapter 9

  Elise whisked the egg yolks as fast as she could, while adding the olive oil slowly and steadily. She couldn’t understand why everyone else’s had formed thick mayonnaise while hers remained watery. She didn’t want to ask Madame Delapaix, the austere, rake-thin chef who showed no love of cooking or food for that matter, for assistance.

  The woman had already helped Elise with a sauce earlier that day, and that certainly hadn’t been a pleasant experience. Madame Delapaix had been snappy and what’s more, Elise had trouble with the woman’s accent. It wasn’t any old French accent—
Elise was rather pleased at how well she was managing with Parisians considering it was only her second week in France. But Madame Delapaix was from Toulouse, down south, and was so much harder to understand. That she acted like she was from a different planet altogether didn’t help, either.

  Elise leaned over to the student next to her, a tall, corpulent woman who never failed a dish and didn’t seem to need to go to cooking school at all. “How do you get your eggs to behave so perfectly? Mine don’t want to listen to me. I must have picked the most rebellious ones in the basket.”

  Madame Delapaix heard Elise’s voice. “Quiet over there. This requires concentration. Is something the matter?”

  Elise smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, I’m having a little trouble with the egg yolks. Or maybe the oil.”

  The teacher stomped over, tight-lipped. She grabbed Elise’s bowl and threw its contents into a bin. “You have egg white in there.”

  Elise shook her head. “I was really careful not to get any in it. I double-checked.”

  “Well, it was a mess. It would never have been good enough. You must start again. And add the oil slowly, with care this time, Mademoiselle.”

  Elise felt the heat of her reddening cheeks as every single student turned to stare at her, some seemingly annoyed at the interruption, others with pity in their eyes. She rinsed her bowl, wiped it with a tea towel and once again took two eggs out of the wire basket on the bench top. What if she started over but failed to improve? She’d always thought of herself as a good cook although not a professional but somehow everything she’d touched at the Cordon d’Or had turned out ordinary at best.

  The austere teacher crossed her arms. “Actually, it’s too late. The class is about to finish. Just watch your neighbour and try to learn something.”

  Elise put down the egg she was ready to break. “Certainly, Madame Delapaix. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot that way because she’s a wonderful teacher.”

  While the students chuckled, the teacher stared open-mouthed at her. Well, it served her right. The woman had disliked Elise the moment she’d set eyes on her and hadn’t bothered to hide it, even though Elise was paying good money for her services. She certainly wasn’t the kind of teacher students would dream of. Elise had imagined a jovial, easy-going chef with a fabulous sense of humour—and on occasion she’d wished for a suave, good-looking one, too. If only there was someone nicer to teach her, someone like…She clicked her tongue as she briefly closed her eyes and saw Paul standing before the class.

  There was no doubt about it, Paul would make a much more attractive teacher with his sun-kissed skin and his dark bedroom eyes. He’d have all the women swooning over him. But he wasn’t nice. He was difficult—and probably a cheat. Who needed that? Perhaps Madame Delapaix wasn’t the worst kind of teacher after all.

  Perhaps Paul would be.

  ******

  Elise was happy the cooking lesson was over and she was free for the rest of the day. She hadn’t expected to feel that way, had fully expected to relish every instant at the Cordon d’Or, but the experience was proving far from pleasant most of the time. There were too many students in the classroom, not enough laughter and she wasn’t even getting the help she needed from Madame Delapaix. Plus the woman was arrogant. It was obviously, far too obviously, a venture run just to make money.

  At least the rest of the day was Elise’s to enjoy now. She’d thought of grabbing a sandwich—not the two slices of brown bread she was used to at home, but a quarter of a freshly baked baguette, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, filled with rillettes, a delicious kind of pâté with chunks of melt-in-the-mouth meat.

  After that she’d head over to the Louvre for the afternoon. But her feet were swollen with the heat and compressed in her normally comfortable ballet flats. She could feel a blister coming on. Thirty-two degrees in Paris with the hot pavements, the buildings, the lack of air-conditioning in most places and definitely no sea breeze, felt more like thirty-eight back home. She decided to return to her apartment first and change into her runners, which wouldn’t rub against her sore feet.

  When she got there she was surprised to find the Café des Amoureux nearly empty. It was a few minutes after one o’clock, the busiest time of the day for meals, and there was hardly anyone there, just a handful of uninspired faces. The source of their boredom appeared to be standing in a corner, a young man reciting something. She then remembered seeing a flyer about a poetry reading– this must have been it. It was a shame she didn’t master the language well enough to understand or she might have stayed to listen to the man who clearly seemed morose enough to be a poet. She chuckled to herself.

  She hobbled across the room, trying not to put pressure on the left side of her foot where she was certain she’d now developed a full-blown blister when Paul appeared, a bowl of soup in hand. She made the effort to smile politely. After all, she was going to spend an hour or so with him tonight. “It’s the poetry day,” she started.

  He didn’t let her finish. “Please. I have realised it was a terrible idea.” Hanging his head he turned to walk away.

  Something in the way he held himself, a little hunched over, folding in on himself when he usually stood so tall and proud, made her want to hold him. He seemed so vulnerable, a little boy who’d found his favourite toy trampled and broken into a million pieces, that she couldn’t walk away without reaching out to him. “No, it’s a wonderful idea. In fact I’m going to stay and listen. I may not follow everything but perhaps you can fill in the gaps later, at our English lesson.” She sat at the nearest table.

  His face brightened immediately. He gazed straight into her eyes and her heart skipped a beat. There was gratefulness in those beautiful eyes now, warmth she hadn’t expected. “Would you like a menu?” he asked.

  Elise shrugged. “Is there something you can recommend?”

  “I would recommend everything” He grinned before taking a step closer to her. “Personally I like the bouillabaisse, this beautiful fish and tomato soup with a hint of fennel, a little saffron, and a lot of love.”

  Something inside her stirred as he mentioned love. It was stupid and she was annoyed with herself. She was reacting like a teenager. How could talking of love for a dish give you butterflies? She moved back in her chair. It obviously could if Paul was doing the talking.

  Paul frowned. “I was just trying to show you the soup.”

  She played dumb—she didn’t have to play too hard as inadequacy came naturally in Paul’s presence. “The soup? Of course! Sorry. It looks perfect. Yes, one of those, please. Thank you. Sorry. Did I already say that? I already said that.”

  The corner of his lip twisted into a half-smile as he hurried off to serve the bowl he was carrying. Elise sighed, rubbing her forehead. What was it about him that made her become a bumbling, self-conscious weakling whenever he was near? And why had she been even more troubled than usual the minute he’d mentioned love?

  She had to get a grip on herself. She had to remember all the reasons why she should stay away from Paul, and there were as many as the culinary delights in France: he was arrogant, he was dating Julie, he couldn’t be trusted since he was probably a cheater, he was moody, he lived in France and she in Australia, she didn’t need a man, didn’t want a man and—

  Paul returned with another steaming bowl of bouillabaisse, this time for Elise. “Voilà, Mademoiselle. I hope you enjoy.”

  She tasted it. The rich tomato, the layer upon layer of flavour created by the different fish, herbs and spices combined to deliver Heaven in a bowl. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. The fennel was there, cutting through the tomato, but there was something else, subtle and delicate in the background. Was that saffron?

  She hadn’t intended to eat here, and could have done without the additional expense really, but she hadn’t had the heart to walk away once she’d seen how disappointed Paul was with the poor turnout. She shouldn’t have cared really, after all Paul had been abrupt with her mo
re often than not. But she was certainly warming to him, had enjoyed teaching him last week and she didn’t like to see anyone fail when they went after their dream. It took courage to step out of your own comfort zone and take a risk. It especially took guts to go against what most people thought. Paul had done just that and deserved some support. And she could give him that—as long as it stopped there.

  The poet at the end of the room recited something again. She listened carefully but the words he was using were probably too sophisticated to be part of her vocabulary. From the softness of the young man’s voice and the dreaminess in his eyes she thought that he was talking about a woman, perhaps even someone he’d lost. Then he said “amour” and she smiled, pleased that she had picked up the word love.

  It was at that moment she noticed Paul standing in the corner of the restaurant, studying her. Their eyes met. He smiled at her and the sincerity and warmth of his expression touched her to the core. He’d connected with her and she with him. She felt an impulse to go to him, to be near him and it was crazy, the very last thing she wanted. Her whole body tingled with excitement and she couldn’t understand it. She didn’t even really like the man. She didn’t, did she?

  She looked down at her soup, trying her best to appear unaffected by Paul’s seductive gaze and the unexplainable chemistry between them. After a deep breath and a spoonful of soup she dared look up again, determined to remain unmoved by Paul this time, but when she did he was gone. Her heart sank and she couldn’t deny her disappointment. Still, she told herself it was better that way. A few more people arrived and it was Yvonne, not Paul, who came out to serve this time. Maybe Paul was busy in the kitchen, or maybe he’d noticed that Elise was trying her best to keep her distance.