Sunshine & Secrets

by Sunshine

  As it happened, she didn’t have to.

  ‘Mum won’t mind me telling you this, but my father has never been a part of my life either. Things were tough when I was growing up, but we managed. I owe her everything for keeping me from succumbing to the scourge of marijuana, or worse, like so many of my contemporaries have.’

  Henri paused, his mind adrift on the wings of difficult memories. Millie glanced across at her new friend, taking in the stubborn determination apparent in his clenched jaw and the strength with which he gripped the steering wheel and studiously avoided meeting her eyes. She decided it was time to grasp the conversation baton from Henri and share a little of her own story with him.

  ‘My parents gave me and my sister, Jen, a happy, carefree childhood in a small village in Provence where my mother grew up, before moving to the suburbs in Oxford, and I make sure I count my good fortune every day. But when Dad died, I forgot about all the good things I’d had and concentrated solely on my grief and sorrow over his loss. Why couldn’t death have stalked a worthier prey? I used to ask of anyone prepared to listen.’

  Millie felt the familiar tightening at her throat as she spoke about her father but found she was able to hold back her tears and continue with their conversation.

  ‘When Mum left to go back home to France, Jen and I decided that we wanted to stay in Oxford. After my training, I landed a fabulous position in a restaurant and met a great guy… well, I thought he was. I thought that with Luke by my side, I could dream of a future where I could allow myself to smile and laugh and not feel guilty. I still think about Dad every day, but with the support of good friends I’ve finally turned the page on my grief.’

  Although it was painful, she thought of the time she had spent with Luke, grateful for the way he had challenged her tendency to wallow in her sadness and urged her to tread the path towards healing. It was ironic that he had also been the person who had sent her reeling back to square one. But she wasn’t ready to share that horror story with Henri quite yet.

  The town of Soufrière appeared before them, red-tiled roofs, brightly painted shutters and verandas, dogs roaming the gutters in search of a discarded morsel for dinner. Ella woke from her doze and Henri slowed down to navigate the bustling streets of the popular town, threading the car skilfully through the tourists spilling out from the colourful shops and bars.

  ‘I’ll jump out here, Henri, if you don’t mind,’ said Ella as they came to a standstill outside Alisha’s Souvenirs. ‘See you at dinner tonight. You’re welcome to join us, Millie? It would be lovely to have your company.’

  ‘Thanks, Ella, but I’m still working on my jet lag. I would be dreadful company. I’ll catch up with you on Monday.’

  ‘Why don’t we all meet for cocktails at the Purple Parrot tomorrow?’ suggested Henri.

  Ella rolled her eyes. ‘No, thanks. I’ve got enough to do getting the recipes for the cookery classes organized. But you should go, Millie. I told you, Andrew makes a mean rum cocktail.’

  ‘Thanks, Ella, I will. I’ll see you on Monday morning then. You will be there when the kitchen fitters arrive, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Millie waved her off before Henri continued their journey. She didn’t want to acknowledge the nerves that spun around her stomach when she thought about dealing with a gang of Caribbean workmen. Issuing orders, directing tasks, pointing out snags had never been her forte. But she knew Ella would possess no such reticence. Their schedule was tight and she hoped they would deliver on time without any need for her to flex her recalcitrant authority.

  ‘Thanks for driving me up the hill.’ Millie smiled at Henri as he pulled up outside the villa.

  After their conversation on the way home she felt they had connected. They occupied the same wavelength on a diverse range of issues and she was comfortable in his company. Maybe it was because of their French genes. There was definitely chemistry between them. It had nothing to do with sexual desire – that was not on the agenda – and she felt even more of an affinity with him for it.

  ‘No problem, Millie. It’s been great to show off a small part of our island. Sorry I droned on about the drugs issue but it’s something that boils my blood. My best friend Leon, who is a police officer in Soufrière, is a potent source of reliable information. It’s my intention to co-publish my academic paper with a former university professor when I’ve finalized my research. I’m hoping it will attract attention and therefore some funding.’

  Millie smiled at him as she opened the car door. ‘See you tomorrow at the Purple Parrot.’

  ‘Three o’clock on the dot!’ Henri called, waving from the window until his tail lights disappeared around the bend at the bottom of the drive.

  Twilight tickled the tops of the palm trees. The Pitons had taken on a dark, sinister aura as fissures of apricot and amber spread over their flanks and the sky above swiftly turned an inky blue. However, the air was still humid and she didn’t feel like retiring to her studio bedroom just yet, despite the dragging exhaustion in her bones.

  She strolled to the villa’s veranda and flicked on the pool’s backlights, which glowed beneath the surface like industrial-sized diamonds. She slipped off her sandals, peeled off her shorts and plunged into its cool embrace in her T-shirt. The water slid over her skin like silk and, with an audience of squawking parrots as encouragement, she swam until her muscles burned with the unexpected exertion. She clung to the edge of the pool, staring down at the town nestled at the bottom of the hill, its lights twinkling next to the calm, coal-black sea – a rippling mirror reflecting the ivory orb of the moon. Peace pressed its blanket of comfort to her ears, broken only by the chirp of the cicadas and the buzz of a solitary motorcycle engine as it strained to overcome the gradient.

  She dragged her limbs from the water and shook away the droplets of water. Slipping her toes into her sandals and stepping back into her shorts, she padded down the garden path, switching on the outdoor lights as she went. The evening’s humidity triggered a veil of mist to rise from the earth like dry ice at an eighties disco. Dragging her hair from her face, she caught a faint whiff of the coconut conditioner she had used that morning in the hope of taming the frizz. She surrendered to the inevitable hair disaster and pressed on with her mission in the hope that her sacrifice of sartorial vanity would lead to the satisfaction of her curiosity.

  To her right, just behind the garage complex, stood a large clay oven, which had been painted in a rich ochre. Millie assumed this was where Claudia roasted the cocoa beans she harvested. She arrived at the edge of the plantation where cliques of birds and butterflies peppered the air with the flutter of their tropical wings, and squinted through the descending gloom. The subsequent rows of the cocoa palms melted into a liquid mirage beyond the path. They were the weirdest things she had seen, their fruit growing from their branches like huge warts on a gnarled finger. She ran her fingers over the wrinkled pods, balancing one in the palm of her hand, curious to see what bounty was held within.

  She noticed a small machete leaning nonchalantly against one of the trunks next to a woven bamboo basket. She had no idea how long the pods in the wooden crates at the villa’s back door had been there, but she craved the chance to dissect a freshly harvested specimen. She weighed the knife in her hand and carefully tapped at the spot where one of the pods joined the tree. It came away easily. She tucked the fruit under her arm and made her way back to the crates on the doorstep, balancing her impromptu harvest on the top of the others ready for its experimental surgery the next day.

  Although her T-shirt was completely dry after her swim, perspiration trickled from her temples and between her breasts. As she unlocked the powder-blue door, a harsh wave of exhaustion grabbed at her bones. She locked the door behind her, mounted the stairs and fell onto her cool cotton sheets to enjoy another deep sleep of the jet-lagged.

  Chapter Six

  When Millie woke the next day the dawn chorus outside her window was well into its second v
erse. She felt rested and enthusiastic to start experimenting, not only with the ingredients she had purchased at Castries market, but with the cocoa pod she had collected the previous evening. She had a plethora of favourite recipes that included chocolate as an ingredient, and was curious to understand where the beans came from.

  She flung back the French doors and inhaled a lungful of the perfumed morning air. It was Sunday and she had the whole morning to herself before she trotted down the hill to check out the Purple Parrot.

  She fixed herself coffee and ran her eyes around the tiny kitchen. There was no mistaking that the studio belonged to a professional chef. Every shelf was crammed with a myriad of cookery books; old and more recent, pristine and well-thumbed, thick, heavy tomes and flimsy pamphlets, a cornucopia of brightly coloured gems waiting to be explored, to be freed from the prison of the shelf and their contents brought to life in the kitchen.

  Of course, Millie had devoured all of Claudia’s published cookery books – over twenty in total – each extolling a unique take on British and European cuisine. Her favourite was The Baking Blend – a collection of recipes and reminiscences from Claudia’s childhood in Cornwall. She wondered whether Claudia’s next book would be a Caribbean-inspired one, or perhaps one that focused solely on chocolate recipes. To Millie, cookery books, like all books, provided a portal into another world: one in which seemingly disparate ingredients could be moulded into taste bud-zinging perfection. Even now, she still experienced the surge of intense pleasure whenever she peeled back a book’s cover and ingested the scent of a newly printed page.

  Growing up, she had dreamed of becoming a cookery writer. She had rushed home from school after food technology classes, her heart ablaze with a plethora of possibilities for new recipes, which she recorded on pieces of scrap paper scattered around her bedroom. Her teenage self had no reason to believe that her dream would not come true, that life did not always deliver a positive outcome.

  She’d developed her obsession with culinary alchemy at the age of seven when her eyes had landed on her aunt’s wedding cake, resplendent with a froth of sugar-paste flowers that would have been frowned on today. A monument to melodramatic 1980s taste excess, it had reigned on the top table, drawing her gaze to its suggestion of fantasy like a princess’s ballgown more likely to be worn by her sister Jen.

  However, intrinsically linked with her enduring desire to emulate the best in the field was the fatal flaw in her plan – her inherent tendency to scatter utensils and ingredients far and wide. She tried to be organized, to make lists, to stack jars with the labels facing front, but the hassle just irritated the hell out of her so she ditched the futile attempt and simply reverted to her natural state of dishevelled chaos. She had been born with the clumsy-clutter gene, whilst her sister had been gifted the characteristics of Little Miss Neat and Tidy. She smiled as she recalled the occasion in her teens when she had shoved a bag of caster sugar into her woven raffia shopping basket and left a trail all the way home like Hansel in the forest. But despite the amusement of Jen and her friends, the incident hadn’t swayed her one inch from her ambitions. Unlike most childhood dreams, this one did not trickle away at the introduction of Barbie or Blyton or boys.

  She had been encouraged in her ambitions by her food tech teacher, Mrs Dovedale, who promised that, if she insisted on pinning her future on the culinary roulette wheel, then she would support her. An angel lurking beneath a battleaxe exterior, Mrs Dovedale spotted a fellow experimentalist in her midst and nurtured Millie’s blossoming talent. Millie knew she had her to thank for her career success as she had flunked her more academic subjects. Anyway, what use was being able to quote extensively from Shakespeare or Thomas Hardy if you couldn’t master the skills required to feed yourself and your family?

  The piles of discarded tomes grew taller as Millie continued her bibliographic archaeology. Eventually she selected one at random – for how could she choose from the kaleidoscope of options? She smoothed her palm over its glossy cover – the face it presented to the world – and selected the first page, inhaling the faint fragrance loitering within of dried dust and printer’s ink.

  Devouring the contents of a recipe book had always been her go-to therapy whenever her demons invaded, but the best medicine of all was plunging her hands into a bowl of flour or whipping up a soufflé by hand. An idea crept into her mind and she knew immediately how she was going to spend her day. It was what she had been engaged to do anyway.

  She extracted her phone and googled information on cocoa production. She found there were several well-known and well-regarded cocoa plantations in the southern area of St Lucia which produced cocoa beans on a commercial scale, unlike Claudia’s five acres. She cast her eyes down the listed articles and selected one from the website of a famous chocolate house whose products Jen adored and always requested for her birthday or Christmas gift.

  The commentary told her that the Caribbean provided ideal conditions for the precious pods to grow – fertile volcanic soil, high altitudes, heavy rainfall, both sunshine and shade. The trees produced delicate pink-and-white flowers, which matured into the pods she had collected. She learned that one of the reasons cocoa production fell into decline in St Lucia was due to the harvesting being so labour intensive. Each pod had to be carefully selected and cut from the tree so as not to disturb the remaining pods. After they had been split by hand, the beans were removed and allowed to ferment on a bed of banana leaves in wooden boxes, then dried under the Caribbean sun. She was surprised to note that the nibs used to produce the cocoa were inside the bean and not the actual bean itself. It was these nibs that were roasted to a rich, dark brown colour to acquire their chocolatey flavour.

  She closed her eyes and was almost able to smell the sweet aroma of her favourite recipes. Further internet searching revealed that she already knew – and something that she repeatedly spouted when challenged over her excessive intake of ‘the food of the gods’ – chocolate makes you happy! It contains flavonoids and antioxidants, which some research confirmed have anti-ageing properties. One report even went further to extol the benefits of cocoa in extending brain function and memory.

  Her academic research over, she turned to her favourite pastime – researching recipes. Just flicking through Claudia’s cookbooks for chocolate recipes threw up a myriad of suggestions from the expected to the obscure – from brownies, cookies and cupcakes, to sauces for wild boar and even a mix for a chocolate face mask. Millie could have spent all day subsumed in the pages of cookery advice when real life receded and she could soar away from her problems.

  She took a quick inventory of the provisions in the cupboards and the fridge that Claudia had arranged to be delivered before she arrived, and went off in search of her trusty scrap box of recipes. Its contents had been collected over many years from every corner of England and France, jotted on the back of dog-eared theatre programmes, curled-up bus tickets, even napkins and old postcards of St Tropez. She had intended to create a carefully catalogued filing system but somehow it had never materialized, and anyway, her unique version of a Rolodex was a system of sorts. For instance, she knew that the recipe for her mini lemon-curd roulades was on the back of a grease-stained till receipt from Harrods, the ingredients for the chocolate-ganache torte her grandmother used to make were scribbled on an old French Christmas card, and she had no trouble remembering how to rustle up her famous lime-drizzle-and-poppy-seed muffins.

  She decided on a batch of her mum’s favourite melt-in-the-mouth madeleines, a few mini chocolate-truffle tortes, then maybe some chocolate-and-orange-marmalade cupcakes, taking advantage of the ready availability of the fresh oranges that hung from the trees just outside her window for her home-made marmalade. She also decided it was the perfect opportunity to perform her autopsy on the cocoa pod she had picked the previous night. A curl of excitement wriggled through her chest as she anticipated making a new discovery.

  She trotted down the stairs and across the gravelled courtyard
to the villa’s rear door.

  No way! Was she going crazy?

  The two scarred wooden crates were still on the whitewashed steps, but they were empty. Not a wrinkled pod in sight – even the solitary specimen she had picked the night before had disappeared.

  Yes, okay, she knew she was famous for her clumsiness, her disorganized approach to all things culinary. She accepted that she was messy and forgetful and kept her beloved recipes scrawled on beer mats and receipts in a scrap box. But there was no way she would have dreamed up an entire episode of harvesting a cocoa pod with a machete. And she hadn’t allowed a sip of alcohol to pass her lips!

  She lifted the lid to peer into the depths of the top crate, which had been lined with a bed of bedraggled banana leaves. A fetid stench reached her nostrils – but there were no cocoa pods. She tried to think how many of the shrivelled rugby balls would have been in each of the crates – probably at least a dozen.

  But not one remained. She chanced a glance over her shoulder, peering into the lush palm trees as if she were expecting someone to leap out and shout, ‘Surprise!’ but of course no one did. She skirted the white-painted veranda to the front of the villa overlooking the serene, undisturbed surface of the pool. She checked the handles of the French doors – locked. There was nothing to indicate anyone had been there. No note, no envelope, no boots by the back door.

  She shook her head and rubbed the heels of her palms over her eyes before meandering back to the studio, reasoning that Ella must have dropped by and taken the pods home. But even as she filed the mystery away into her mind’s Rolodex, she knew it was an unlikely conclusion to grasp on to. For one thing, Ella didn’t drive.

  Once back in the kitchen, Millie’s spirits lifted, her hands sped up and she baked, baked, baked as though her life depended on it. She creamed the butter and caster sugar for the cupcakes by hand before adding the eggs, flour and a sprinkle of cocoa and grated orange peel, the smell causing her mouth to water. Finally, she divided up the mixture into five muffin trays and slotted them into the oven.