The Ingredients of Love (27 page)

I held out a burning match for her. “Quite possibly,” I answered vaguely. And looked at her mouth, which suddenly seemed very close to my face. “But not this evening.”

She leaned back and blew the smoke into the air. “No,” she said. “And I can probably forget dinner with the author too.”

I nodded sympathetically, and thought that her chances of dinner with the author were actually quite good—even if he wasn't called Miller. “Do you know what? Forget about that Miller chap for now: He obviously doesn't know what it is that he wants. Look at it this way: It's the book that is really important. That novel helped you to forget your sorrows—it fell from the heavens, so to speak, to save you. And I think that's great.”

She smiled hesitantly. “Yes, perhaps you're right.” She sat upright and gazed at me for a long time in silence and then said, “Somehow I'm very glad that you're here at this moment, Monsieur Chabanais.”

I took her hand. “My dear Aurélie, you can't possibly imagine how glad I am that I'm here now,” I replied in an emotional voice. Then I stood up. “And now we're going to celebrate your birthday. There's no way you're going to sit here wallowing in misery. Not as long as I can prevent it.” I poured us the rest of the Crémant and Aurélie emptied her glass in one single gulp and put it down determinedly.

“This is how it should be done,” I said, and pulled her up from her chair. “May I lead you to our table, Mademoiselle Bredin? If you reveal where you keep your delicacies, I'll get the drinks and the food.”

Of course Aurélie refused to let anyone else put the final touches to the dishes she had prepared, but at least I was allowed to enter the kitchen, where she instructed me to open the red wine and put the salad in a big stoneware dish while she browned the bacon lardons in a little pan. I had never been in a restaurant kitchen before, and was amazed at the stove with its eight burners and the numerous pots, pans, and ladles that all stood or hung within reach.

We drank the first glass of red wine before we left the kitchen, and the second glass at the table.

“It tastes delicious,” I cried out, dipping my fork into the tender leaves that gleamed under the lardons, and when Aurélie then brought the whole casserole with the lamb ragout from the kitchen and put it on our table I went over to the little stereo system behind the bar and switched the music on.

Georges Brassens sang
“Je M'Suis Fait Tout Petit”
in his seductive voice, and I thought that every man meets once in his life a woman he would gladly allow to tame him.

The lamb melted in our mouths and I said, “Pure poetry!” Then Aurélie told me that the recipe, not to mention the whole menu, had been created by her father, who had died in October, far too early.

“He cooked it for the first time when he … when he…” She became tongue-tied and suddenly blushed. “Anyway, many, many years ago,” she ended the sentence, and reached for her red-wine glass.

While we ate the lamb ragout she told me about Claude, who had deceived her so atrociously, and the story of the red coat that she had been given for her birthday by her best friend, Bernadette, “The blond woman who was there at the reading with me, do you remember, Monsieur Chabanais?”

I looked into her green eyes and could not remember anything, but I nodded enthusiastically and said, “It must be lovely to have such a good friend. Let's drink a glass to Bernadette!”

So we downed a glass to Bernadette and then, at my insistence, another to Aurélie's beautiful eyes.

She giggled, and said, “Now you're getting silly, Monsieur Chabanais.”

“No, not in the slightest,” I countered. “I have never seen eyes like them, you know. Because they are not simply green, they are like … like two precious opals, and now in the candlelight I can see the gentle shimmering of a broad sea in your eyes…”

“My goodness,” she said, impressed. “That's the loveliest thing I have ever heard about my eyes.” And then she told me about Jacquie, the boisterous chef with the heart of gold who missed the broad seas of Normandy.

“I've got a heart of gold too,” I said, then took her hand and placed it on my chest. “Can you feel it?”

She smiled. “Yes, Monsieur Chabanais, I believe you really do,” she said earnestly, and left her hand on my beating heart for a moment. Then she leaped up and shook her hair back. “And now,
mon cher ami,
let's fetch the
gâteaux au chocolat
. That's my specialty. And Jacquie always says that a
gâteau au chocolat
is as sweet as love.” She ran laughing into the kitchen.

“I believe he's absolutely right.” I took the heavy casserole and followed her out. I was intoxicated with the wine, with Aurélie's nearness, with this whole wonderful evening that I just wished would never end.

Aurélie put the plates on the sideboard and opened the stainless steel refrigerator to get out the blood orange parfait, which she assured me was a work of genius in combination with the warm little chocolate cakes (
“C'est tout à fait génial!”
she said)— that irresistible combination of sweet chocolate and the slightly bitter taste of the blood oranges. I listened to her descriptions reverently and was enchanted by the sound of her voice. She was definitely right in what she said, but I believe that I simply found everything irresistible at that moment.

From the dining room I could hear
“La Fée Clochette”
playing, a song that I really liked, and I hummed softly along as the singer went on about how many whiskies he'd drink and how many cigarettes he'd smoke to get that girl, whom he was still searching for, into his bed.

I had found my
fée clochette
! She was standing just a few inches away from me, holding forth passionately about little chocolate cakes.

Aurélie closed the fridge door and turned to me. I was standing so close behind her that we bumped into each other.

“Oops,” she said. And then she looked me straight in the eye. “Can I ask you something, Monsieur Chabanais?” she inquired conspiratorially.

“You can ask me anything,” I responded, whispering like her.

“When I'm going downstairs at night, I never turn round because I'm afraid that there's something there behind me.” Her eyes were opened wide and I fell head over heels into that soft, green sea. “Do you find that funny?” she asked.

“No,” I murmured softly, and leaned my head down toward her. “No, I don't find it funny at all. Everyone knows that you shouldn't turn round on the stairs in the dark.”

And then I kissed her.

The kiss lasted a long time. At some point, when our lips separated for a brief moment, Aurélie said softly: “I'm afraid the blood orange parfait will be melting.”

I kissed her on the shoulder, on the neck, I bit her earlobes tenderly until she sighed softly, and before returning to her mouth I whispered: “I fear we'll just have to live with that.”

And then neither of us said anything for a long,
long
time.

 

Fifteen

My birthday ended in a
nuit blanche,
a white night, a night that never wanted to end.

Midnight was long past when André helped me into my red coat and we dreamily found our way through the silent streets in a close embrace. Every few meters we'd stop for a kiss, and it took ages before we were finally standing at my apartment door. But time had no meaning in that night, which had neither day nor hour.

As I leaned forward to unlock the door, André kissed the nape of my neck. As I took him by the hand and drew him along the hall he put his arm round me from behind and reached for my breast. When we were standing in my bedroom, André slipped the straps of my dress from my shoulders and took my head in his hands with an infinitely tender gesture.

“Aurélie,” he said, and suddenly kissed me so urgently that I almost swooned. “My lovely, lovely fairy.”

Our clothes fell to the parquet floor with a soft rustle, and as we sank into my bed and lost ourselves in it for hours, my last thought was André Chabanais was the right Mr. Wrong.

*   *   *

There was not a single moment in that night that we untwined from each other. Everything was all touching, everything had to be discovered. Was there a single place on our bodies that was overlooked, that was not treated with tenderness, conquered with pleasure? I don't think so.

When I woke up, he was lying next to me, his head supported by his hand, and smiling at me.

“You look so lovely when you're asleep,” he said.

I looked at him, and tried to imprint this morning when we both woke up together on my memory. His broad smile, his brown eyes with their black lashes, the dark wavy hair that had become totally disheveled, his beard, which still showed enough of his face and was far softer than I'd imagined, the light scar over his right eyebrow where he'd fallen into a barbed-wire fence as a little boy—and behind him the balcony door with the half-drawn curtains, a quiet morning in the courtyard, the branches of the big chestnut tree, a patch of sky. I smiled and closed my eyes for a moment.

He ran his finger tenderly over my lips. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I was just thinking that I'd like to preserve this moment,” I said, and held his fingers against my lips to kiss them. “I'm just so happy,” I said. “So absolutely, totally happy.”

“That's lovely,” he said, and took me in his arms. “Because I am too, Aurélie. My Aurélie.” He kissed me, and we lay quietly cuddling for a while. “I'm never going to get up again,” murmured André, and stroked my back. “We'll just stay in bed, shall we?”

I smiled. “Don't you have to go to work?” I asked.

“What work?” he murmured, and his hand slid between my legs. I giggled. “You should at least let them know that you're going to stay here in bed for the rest of your life.” I glanced at the little clock on my bedside table. “It's already nearly eleven.”

He sighed and regretfully removed his hand. “You're a little spoilsport, Mademoiselle Bredin, I've always suspected it,” he said, and tweaked the tip of my nose. “Okay, then I'll ring Madame Petit and say that I'll be late. Or … no, better still—I'll say that I'm sorry, but I can't come in at all today. And then we'll have a super wonderful day—what do you think of that?”

“I think it's a marvelous idea,” I said. “You sort things out while I make us coffee.”

“Then that's what we'll do. But I don't like leaving you…”

“It's not for long,” I responded, and wrapped myself in my short, dark blue dressing gown to go into the kitchen.

“You'll be taking that straight off again,” André called, and I laughed.

“You just can't get enough!”

“No,” he replied, “I can't get enough of you!”

Nor I of you, I thought.

I felt so safe at that moment, oh dear, so safe!

I made two big cups of
café crème
while André was on the phone and then disappeared into the bathroom. I carried them carefully into the bedroom. I pushed Robert Miller's book, which was still on my bedside table, aside and put the cups down.

Was it possible that this was all the result of the
menu d'amour
? Instead of an English writer, I'd dined with a French editor, and all at once we had seen each other with different eyes—almost like Tristan and Isolde, who accidentally drank the love potion and could not live without each other ever again. I could still remember very well how impressed I'd been by the opera as a child when Papa had taken me to see it. And I'd found the business of the love potion particularly exciting.

With a smile, I picked up the clothes that were lying strewn all around the room, and laid them over a chair beside the bed. As I lifted André's jacket, something fell out. It was his wallet. It fell open and a couple of bits of paper slipped out. Coins rolled over the parquet floor.

I knelt down to collect the coins, and could hear André singing happily in the bathroom. Smiling, I put the coins back in the front of the wallet and was just about to slip the papers that were sticking out of the back of the wallet back in when I noticed the photograph. At first I thought it was a picture of André and, a bit nosily, took it out. And then my heart stood still for a terrible moment.

I knew the picture—it was of a woman in a green dress, smiling at the camera. It was a picture of me.

For a few seconds I stared blankly at the photo in my hand, and then the thoughts began flooding in and hundreds of little stills fitted together to make a whole storyboard.

I'd put that photo in with my letter to Robert Miller. It was in André's wallet. André, who had brushed me off in the hall of the publisher's office. André, who had put Robert Miller's reply in the mailbox at my home because the writer had ostensibly lost my address. André, who had sat laughing and joking in La Coupole and knew very well that Robert Miller was never going to turn up there. André, who hadn't said a word to me about the reading—the only time Miller had really been in Paris—and who could not drag the obviously bewildered author away from me quickly enough. André, who had appeared at Le Temps des Cerises with his bouquet just at the moment that Miller had got his agent to cry off.

Miller? Ha!

Who knows who the man that Monsieur Chabanais had got to call me had been. And Robert Miller's letter? How could the author have answered me when he'd never received my letter?

And suddenly I remembered something. Something I'd already noticed after the reading without really being able to make sense of it.

I dropped the photo and rushed to the bedside table.
The Smiles of Women
was there and Miller's letter was stuck in the book. With trembling hands I took out the handwritten pages.