Slowly, our hands swinging, we started talking about the offer from Paris, delicately, neither of us really discussing the great underlying question, as to what might happen to us. A stream fell suddenly down the mountain to our left, tumbling and cascading, its lace of white water leaving a trail of mossy carpet on shiny veins of feldspar. I remember, like it was yesterday, the way Margaret looked that morning, the faded blue jeans, the light blue fleece, the day’s wind naturally raising color on her cheeks.
“It’s a good offer, Hassan. Well deserved. You must take it.”
“Yes. It is. And yet . . .”
Something was holding me back, an oppressive knot sitting inside my rib cage, and I didn’t really understand, at that point, what it was all about. But the main river, the fast-running Oudon to our right, took a bend at that point, creating a long deep pool and a forest flat at its banks. It was the perfect setting for lunch, and I deposited our rucksack on a lichen-covered boulder, under the immensely ancient pines, lindens, and horse chestnuts, the icy river in sight just beyond their trunks.
We stretched ourselves flat across a rock and languidly ate our lunch, the apples and cheese and the thick-crusted bread Margaret herself had made, which we slathered in lemon curd. I am not sure at what stage we heard the voices, but I remember the way they came to us through the woods, distant at first, but then ever louder as the figures moved across the forest floor, hunched, like crabs scuttling across a seabed. Margaret and I lay still, dozy with contentment, watching in silence as the figures approached.
It was mushroom season and this damp part of the state forest was locally known for prize cèpes and chanterelles. Madame Picard’s family had for years controlled the mushroom-picking license for this patch of the forest, and the widow was the first to come into view. Swathed in her trademark black sweater and skirt, under a billowing rain slicker, Madame Picard jumped from forest clump to forest clump like a mountain goat, kicking rotten birch tree stumps with her army boots, to reveal hidden clusters of pieds-de-mouton under the rotting cover.
Suddenly a squawk of excitement, as Madame Picard stood upright, clutching in her grimy hand trompettes-de-la-mort, the coal black and prized chanterelle that indeed does look like a trumpet of death but is actually very tasty and safe to eat. She turned to her lumbering companion behind her, a large man panting heavily and lugging two large baskets that were filling rapidly with their musty finds.
“Be careful with these trompettes. Leave them on the top. So they won’t get crushed.”
“Yes, bossy madame.”
Papa stood there like a bear in the forest, still in his favorite tan kurta, but buried now under a massive waxed coat that perhaps had once belonged to the late Monsieur Picard. On his feet, he, too, wore army boots, but in his case they were untied, the tongues pulled this way and that, the laces unraveled and wet and dragging behind him in the forest, making him appear, of all things, like a rapper from Paris’s suburbs.
Margaret was just about to call out, to wave them over, but, I don’t know why, I put my hand on her forearm and shook my head.
“I tink it is time we rested. And ate. I am rather hungry.”
“You will drive me crazy, Abbas! We just got started. At least one full basket before lunch.”
Papa sighed.
But when Madame Picard turned, to bend down with her stubby knife and cut another mushroom out from the forest floor, Papa saw something that was of great interest. For he tiptoed forward, reached in between Madame Picard’s legs for a grab, and yelled, “I found a truffle!” Madame Picard instantly screamed and almost fell forward on her face. But when she found her balance and stood again, the two of them were roaring with laughter. Clearly, she had rather enjoyed Papa’s goose.
I was horrified. My head instantly filled with images of my mother and Papa, walking together along Juhu Beach, from so long ago. I felt a heart pang. She was so elegant and understated, my Mummy, unlike this crude woman before me. But after a few moments I finally saw Papa as he truly was, just a man snatching a few of life’s simple pleasures.
He was not at that moment thinking about the responsibilities of the restaurant, or of the family, all of which consumed his waking hours day in and day out. He was just an aging man, with a few decades more of life, enjoying his brief time on earth. I was suddenly ashamed of myself. Papa, who shouldered so much for so many, he, of all people, deserved this carefree and joyous moment without my brow furrowed in distaste. And the more I watched Madame Picard and Papa carrying on like randy teenagers—both slightly bent, both hustlers—the more I realized this was entirely right.
It came to me then: it was not my family that was having trouble letting me go to Paris, it was me not wanting to let go of them. This, I would say, was the moment when I finally grew up, because it was in that wet forest that I was able to say to myself, Good-bye, Papa! I am off to see the world!
So the hardest good-bye, those final days, was in the end not with the family, or with Madame Mallory, but with Margaret herself. That talented and decent sous chef was just five years older than I, but the affair we had while we both worked at Le Saule Pleureur, it made me a man.
But our relationship reached its logical conclusion during those closing days in Lumière one morning while I was at her tiny flat in town, just above the village’s pâtisserie. It was our day off and we were having a late-morning breakfast at the little table under the tall window of her kitchen.
Lumière’s famous light was pouring in through the old panes, where a few dried wildflowers—oxlip and yellow gentian—stood in a glass jar on the sill. We were wordlessly having café au lait and brioche and a quince jam her mother had made, each in our own world.
I was sitting at the table in my underpants and a T-shirt, looking out the window, when skinny Monsieur Iten and his plump wife walked hand in hand down Rue Rollin. They suddenly stopped in their tracks and gave each other lusciously wet kisses, before parting company, he to get into their Lancia, she to enter the local branch of Société Générale.
Margaret was naked under her kimono, reading the local paper next to me, and I am not sure why, but I stretched my hand across the table and spontaneously said, “Come.”
My voice was shaking as I held out my hand, hoping the woman across the table would grasp the fingers blindly searching contact in the air.
“Come with me to Paris. Please.”
Margaret slowly put down the paper and told me—I still remember that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach—that Lumière was where she was born, where her parents and siblings lived, where her grandparents were buried, up on the hill. She appreciated the offer, loved me for it, but she could not—she was sorry—she could not leave the Jura.
So I took back my hand and we went our separate ways.
Paris
Chapter Thirteen
If I am honest, my rise in Paris over the next twenty years, it was not as difficult as one would suspect. It was as if some unseen spirit were clearing obstacles and helping me take the path that I believe was always destined for me. For I was, as promised, promoted after just two years to the position of premier sous chef, at La Gavroche, that one-star restaurant behind the Élysée Palace.
But here is the great mystery, which I suspect I will never unravel: Was Madame Mallory somehow involved in my steady rise over the following years? Or did I imagine it?