“I see you’re thinking ahead,” she muttered. Claire colored again and turned back.
“Now,” said Mme. LeGuarde, all business. “Nothing too somber. She’s not a French girl; she’ll just look like a clumpy English girl on her way to a funeral.”
Claire was barely listening; she was still following the form and feel of the fabrics lining the extraordinary treasure cave of a room. The street noise and traffic of Paris outside had disappeared; she felt as if she were in another world.
Marie-France did a sniff. “She cannot be chic.”
“I don’t want her to be chic,” fired back Mme. LeGuarde. “Chic is for spoiled bobo girls who never work a day in their lives. I want her to be what she is; young and pretty and unspoiled.”
“For how long?” said Marie-France, and Claire wondered how such a rude woman could even get up in the morning without everyone she knew wanting to kill her, but she didn’t have much time to think about that as Mme. LeGuarde, with a practiced eye, picked out a light cream poplin lined with a navy stripe, and a soft, green fine cotton, with a border of gentle yellow wildflowers.
Seconds later, to her regret, she was back in the main atelier, where the tiny woman, who didn’t say a word through her mouthful of pins, started pinning her at the speed of light, as Marie-France and Mme. LeGuarde bickered and disputed and lengthened and shortened. There was no mirror ahead of her, so Claire let her thoughts wander…to what Thierry would say when he saw her in her new finery, and beyond, what she would do…what she could do…in a week where she would have the entire house to herself. It made her heart beat terribly fast. Of course Thierry had asked her back to his apartment, and of course she had refused. It didn’t seem right.
It wouldn’t seem right under her host’s roof either, but Mme. LeGuarde had been so matter-of-fact, so open about what she thought was a healthy stage of development that…well, she didn’t think she would mind. Claire bit her lip nervously. But would it seem terribly forward? Terribly rude?
But then, the way Thierry made her feel every time he touched her hand, every time he maneuvered her by the elbow down the street…it made her feel hot and cold and completely overwhelmed, unable to concentrate on anything. And now it was mid-July, and in just a few short weeks, she would be headed back, back to Kidinsborough, and the Reverend, and sixth form college, and then on to secretarial, or the grim teacher-training college they had up the road, not the university her teachers had been so keen to encourage her to. Who would pay for it? Not Mme. LeGuarde.
But did she dare?
“Bon,” said Marie-France, finally, without smiling. “You can stop. You stood well.”
“She liked you,” said Mme. LeGuarde, as they stepped out on the hot pavement. They shared a look, then, an instant later, both of them dissolved in giggles, for one instant, more like friends than employee and friend of the parents. Claire didn’t think she’d ever seen Mme. LeGuarde laugh like that before. It made her look even younger.
- - -
A mere week later, the dresses were ready. Claire went nervously into the shop, where the wordless seamstress was making final adjustments. Marie-France raised an eyebrow and barked a quick Bonjour in greeting, then marched her upstairs. This time Claire was grudgingly accepting of the fact that she would be stripping down in public and had worn her whitest set of underwear. The first dress shimmied over her head like a light silken waterfall. As the silent seamstress zipped up the side zip, Claire could already feel it fitted her absolutely perfectly. For a tiny second, Marie-France and Mme. LeGuarde regarded her, totally silently, until Claire worried if there was something terribly wrong with it or it didn’t suit her. Until Marie-France sighed, just a touch, and said, very quietly, “Oh, to be young again,” and with a move of her hand, indicated to the seamstress to roll out a long mirror that had been hidden behind the wall. The sun streaming through the back windows, Claire suddenly caught a glimpse of herself—not, as she was used to in the bathroom mirror, the pinched, pale-faced English girl with the scrubbed-looking nose and slightly doleful expression, the hair colorless, the shoulders thin.
The summer Parisian sun had added a very light, golden tan to her skin and brought out tiny, cute freckles all over her nose. The green of the silk dress pulled out the color of her eyes and gave them an intensity they’d never had before. Her hair had light streaks in it and had grown down past her shoulders, and suddenly her thinness, which had always caused her to be described as peaky-looking, was flattered and emphasized by the dress; her tiny waist was cinched in, then curves had been added to her hips by the full skirt—not at all in fashion, but what did it matter when it suited her so well. The line of yellow flowers along the bottom emphasized the pretty leanness of her calves, without drawing attention to the fact that she was still shorter than average.
It was beautiful. And even though Claire Forest, little, scrawny, shy only child of the fearsome Reverend Forest, had never been praised for her looks in her life—her father thought it vain and rather wicked to be proud of the way you looked—Claire too felt beautiful.
- - -
The next few weeks, I started to settle in. The work was extremely hard and unrelenting, but I liked it and was even starting to get the hang of the husking and the conch. Frédéric was funny and flirtatious. (A different girl every week would turn up for him at the shop, all of them pouty and disdainful, which was exactly how he liked them—he liked, he explained, to prostrate himself fully in front of a strong woman who would control everything. It was no surprise our flirtation hadn’t exactly progressed.) He was voluble and fiercely purist about every stage of the chocolate-making process. Benoît continued to treat his job like a monastic calling. Alice never quite got over the look of distaste she put on every day to see me turn up, but Thierry was taken with me and liked to chat—and I liked to listen, thankfully—as he pontificated on life, and chocolate, with chocolate being by far the most important, obviously. He would often take me for lunch while Alice toiled away, showing me the best croque-madame or how to eat shellfish properly. I would set my alarm for naps, then often go out with Sami too, after work, who turned out to be the most fun omnisexual Algerian flatmate I’d ever had, when he wasn’t complaining about opera singers who got too fat and budgets that got too small. I didn’t see Laurent about much after he’d dropped me off. Sami said he was quite the boulevardier, always with a different model on his arm. I imagined Thierry had been similar when he’d been younger. Poor Claire.