The Chocolate Promise

by Josephine Moon

  ‘He’s looking so much better,’ Elsa said, admiring his shiny coat and plumper appearance. ‘You’re obviously feeding him well.’

  ‘Do you think it’s too late to teach him manners?’

  ‘I like his manners. He’s honest and straightforward. Something few of us achieve in our whole life.’ She tapped her teeth together. ‘You might as well take that stool with you. I’ll never use it again. Your father was the only one who ever sat on it.’ She suddenly felt cold and reached for the mohair rug on the floor beside her wheelchair. Lincoln picked it up for her, and she slapped his hand away as he tried to place it on her knees. ‘I can do it.’

  Lincoln held his hands in the air in dramatic surrender, just as he’d done as a boy on the rare occasions she spoke crossly to him. He never fought back, just calmly backed away. That irritated her now.

  Lincoln observed her quietly. They held each other’s gaze, each considering the other.

  He broke first. ‘We need to talk about Dad. I know we’ve been ignoring it ever since I got back, pretending everything’s okay now I’m here, but we need to try to resolve this.’

  This wouldn’t be coming from Lincoln, she knew. It wasn’t his style. ‘You’ve spoken to Jenny?’ she guessed.

  Lincoln sat down, stretching his arms above his head and sighing. She wondered if he did yoga. All the celebrities did yoga these days. Even the men. She almost burst out laughing, imagining her Ebe doing yoga out in the paddocks in the forties.

  ‘Yes,’ he confessed. ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Oh, was I? Nothing. Just thinking.’

  ‘Tell me if I’ve got this right: Dad wants you to sell the house and give him his inheritance now.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And you said no, so he’s stopped visiting.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘He’s emotionally blackmailing you?’

  She shuffled in her chair, shifting her weight off her right hip. It had been more painful than usual this week. She should really tell the physio-terrorist, but that would only lead to more poking and prodding. At this stage of life, she might just like some more drugs. Surely they could do that. Didn’t they do that all the time with cancer patients and the like? Just keep giving them morphine and more and more of it until they died?

  She shocked herself with that thought. She didn’t actually want to die. Not yet. She wasn’t done yet. True, some days it was hard to know why, but she still just felt she had something to do here.

  ‘Nan?’

  ‘Blackmail.’ She considered this. ‘I suppose it is. Yes.’

  Lincoln nodded. ‘I did accuse him of that.’

  ‘Did you?’ She was genuinely surprised, and touched. ‘And what did he say?’ she asked, feeling a bit misty.

  He seemed to struggle to know how to answer.

  ‘Just say it. I’m too old for beating around the bush.’

  ‘He said you don’t need the house and he does, so it’s a waste for it to be sitting there waiting for me, someone who’s old enough to look after himself and who doesn’t need to flee to his grandmother’s protection anymore.’

  ‘That was mean and unfair.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s a piece of work, your father.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not sure what I did wrong.’ She thought of brave, funny, music-loving first-born Matthew, blown to bits in Vietnam. And studious Jake, with no skill with cattle but endless patience for boring details and numbers, now on the other side of the world in England, with three grown children and enjoying Sunday roast each week with his wife’s mother. And then Tom, the last born, always whinging, always looking for shortcuts and handouts. As a boy, Tom would steal food from the dogs’ plates, not because he needed or wanted it, just because he felt more entitled to it.

  It must be at least partly her fault. Third-child syndrome. Left to his own devices because she was too tired and distracted to pay him attention. It was probably karma that she’d been left with him now, reaping what she’d failed to sow.

  How had Tom’s own two children, lovely Lincoln and Jenny, turned out so well? Their mother, no doubt. Sweet young Katherine hadn’t known what she was getting herself into when she’d accepted Tom’s proposal. At least she finally saw sense before she lost all her joy and softness; after the divorce she’d gone to north Queensland, the other end of the country, married herself a cane farmer and now happily played bingo each Monday night.

  ‘You know you don’t have to hold onto the house for me, don’t you?’ Lincoln said. ‘I am old enough to take care of myself, and if you need the money or would like the money . . .’

  ‘I don’t need the money. Not now. But that’s the point. Your grandfather and I worked hard our whole lives and we—actually I—carefully put aside savings.’ She’d been the money manager. Ebe was naive at best, volatile at worst. But somehow she’d managed to steer their ship through the rough waters to safe harbour, tucking pound notes into books she knew he never read, burying tins of notes in the chook yards. ‘All you need to know is that I’m fine. Your father might not come and see me anymore, but life’s rarely neat. Truth be told, I never really enjoyed his company anyway.’

  Lincoln grunted.

  ‘I don’t need his miserable company,’ she said.

  ‘But you know . . . you know I won’t be here all the time,’ he said carefully.

  She knew—hence the attempted matchmaking. But she nodded in answer to his question, not wanting to let on that she held hopes that he would end his wandering.

  ‘There’s just no real opportunities for me here,’ he explained.

  ‘Tasmania’s an island. You need to go where you can. That’s reality.’

  A large white delivery van rumbled over the pebbles outside and pulled up at the back of the main building. The driver’s door clicked open, he stepped out and sang a friendly hello to a passing nurse, and the van’s side door slid back in a metallic whoosh.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ Lincoln said. ‘I’m worried you’ll be lonely. Depressed.’

  She scoffed. ‘I’m made of tougher stuff than that.’

  He smiled tightly and she knew he was thinking of her mortality.

  ‘The best gift you can give me is to live your life with joy,’ she said. ‘That will make me happy.’

  He smiled, relieved.

  ‘But if you’d like to get married and give me a tribe of fat great-grandchildren, that would be wonderful.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say it doesn’t look like there’s anything on the horizon,’ he said.

  ‘What about Christmas Livingstone?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and he looked sad.

  Elsa’s heart leapt. Ah! So it wasn’t straightforward. That was good. ‘It seemed like you two had something,’ she pressed him. ‘I thought, maybe, since you were working on the book together there might have been shared interests, common goals, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I thought so too, for a while.’

  Interesting. ‘Well, did you make it clear how you felt?’

  ‘I thought I did.’ He lifted a heavy shoulder, weighed down by a bit of a chip by the looks of it, his masculine pride battered. ‘She turned me down.’ He moved to the couch and shoved Caesar over so he could fit on the edge. Caesar snuffled and rearranged his head for optimal proximity to Lincoln’s lap so his ears could be rubbed.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, trying not to sound too interested.

  He focused on the carpet, thinking, but no words came. She knew she wasn’t going to get much more out of him today. But she had enough to go on. There was a chink in the wall. Light could still get through. There was still hope. She couldn’t wait to go back and tell Rita!

  Then she tapped her nail on the rubber wheel of her chair as a thought struck her. Perhaps she needed more than Rita. This was a mission that might call for strategy, determination and fierce commitment to winning.

  And there was only one person in t
his place who fitted that description.

  •

  Miriam Deschamps had finished her fourth coffee since picking Christmas up at Charles de Gaulle airport. Thanks to Mim’s repeated request for un café for herself and un café au lait for her Tasmanian pen pal, Christmas already felt confident she’d be able to negotiate her own caffeine needs in Paris from tomorrow. Now, as they walked into the lobby of an elegant apartment building, it looked as though Mim was hearing the call for her fifth. In the few hours they’d been together, Christmas had noticed that Mim’s nose and left eye began to twitch when her caffeine levels fell.

  ‘Nearly there.’ She smiled, with perfect white teeth, much improved from how they looked in photos of her as a teenager, Christmas noticed—the benefits of being married to a dentist.

  In the elevator, Mim entered the passcode into the security panel and pressed the button for the fourth floor and they whizzed silently upwards, then gently slid to a halt.

  The doors opened directly into the apartment and Christmas could have cried with relief. After more hours in the air than she could add up, serious leg, neck and back pains from the cramped seat, dehydration, anxiety about what lay before her in the coming weeks, and the relentless mind games she’d been playing with herself over Lincoln van Luc and the awful, rotten way she’d said goodbye to him, she now found herself entering a place of total calm and aesthetic order.

  Mim stepped out into the open-plan home, her killer heels tick-tacking their way across the polished boards. Sunlight streamed in through the large windows, reflecting off the white panelled walls and illuminating Mim’s shiny black ponytail and slightly sparkly makeup. She slung her handbag over the back of a chair and held out her arms. ‘Bienvenue à la maison! Our home is yours for the next week.’

  ‘This is such a beautiful place. Thank you so much for having me. Merci.’

  ‘It is our pleasure. Well, it’s my pleasure, and Hank’s pleasure. It’s probably not Margot’s pleasure.’ Mim folded her thin arms across the front of her tightly buttoned blouse, a line appearing between her perfectly shaped brows, and tapped her foot, a gesture Christmas suspected the Margot in question saw plenty of.

  Then Mim shrugged off her annoyance and clapped her hands. ‘We have a few hours before the others get home, so would you like to have some rest? Can I get you a tisane of verbena to settle you?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. I think I might have a heart attack if I have one more coffee.’

  Mim snorted. ‘It makes no difference to me. I could have twelve cups a day and still sleep peacefully.’

  Christmas wandered across to the window seat and drank in the view. Spreading out in all directions in Neuilly-sur-Seine was block after block of the classic Haussmann-style buildings, just like the one she was in right now. It was surprising that something so ordered, neat and repetitive could be so beautiful. Big wide boulevards lined with cafes and leafy green trees lay at the feet of six-storey buildings currently bathed in golden light. The identical buildings, each with the same tall, slender windows and narrow wrought-iron balconies, were stately and grand. They were a light-filled cream colour and reminded her of formal wedding cakes. Or miniature castles.

  ‘How old are these buildings?’ she called to Mim.

  ‘Mid eighteen hundreds,’ Mim called back, cups clattering onto the stone benchtop in the kitchen.

  There was nothing like these buildings in Australia, let alone Tasmania. Christmas loved the history of Tasmania and her lovely Georgian Apothecary and the early colonial buildings that made the state so beautiful. But it was almost impossible to fathom that at the same time as convicts were still being transported to Tasmania in horrendous conditions on ships, to be worked in freezing conditions in chains, lashed to the bone by the cat o’ nine tails, starved and kept in coffin-sized isolation, bustling Paris was undergoing a major urban redevelopment to create the magnificent city it was today.

  A week in Paris was going to go by much too fast. She couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of its history. She took a deep breath, the rest of the world forgotten for the moment as she relished the bliss of simply being here. She had to hand it to Emily. She was right, Christmas had always been obsessed with France, but she’d never realised just how much she needed to be here until now. She pulled her mobile phone out of her pocket, snapped an image of the view from the window and sent it to Emily with a heartfelt message of thanks for making all this happen. It had been an inspired thing to do.

  The sounds of the espresso machine whirring in the narrow galley kitchen and Mim muttering to herself were like comforting mind chatter, the kind that takes up space and stops you thinking about anything too serious. There’d be lots of time in the months ahead to think serious thoughts. Right now, she just wanted to absorb everything.

  She wasn’t aware of how long she’d been grinning until her cheeks began to ache.

  Christmas’s guest room was as immaculately styled as the rest of the Neuilly apartment—minimalist, modern, with muted tones. The stone-tiled ensuite had glass basins, and warm lighting that made her face look a lot better than she felt even after a night’s sleep.

  She had met the stocky, effusive Hank last night when he came home late after an emergency extraction, smelling of some sort of chemical and speaking in a mixture of French and English with a confident American accent, kissing his wife and nuzzling her neck in a way that made Christmas uncomfortable: she had to keep shifting her eyes away.

  She’d also met the terrifying Margot, who came home in time for dinner. She was completely different from how Christmas had pictured her. She’d expected the girl to be dressed in black, festooned with piercings, with dreadfully dyed hair, sullen eyes and a sour expression. But she was devastatingly beautiful, with California beach-girl looks, French chic and soft, gentle curls to die for. Blue eyes. A slim figure. She wore a pastel-pink dress and cardigan and pink lip gloss. She was terribly sweet and interested in Christmas, and it was several hours into listening to her talking to Mim and to her friends on her phone—a device nearly continuously jammed to her ear—that Christmas started to get a sense of Margot’s game.

  Margot Banks was a sugar spider. Someone who wove sugary sweet webs of charm and deceit and then wrapped you up in a sticky prison and kept you alive in the corner till she sank her fangs into you when she could be bothered. She was the girl who would come home one day engaged to a fifty-year-old. The girl who said she was studying when she was really snorting coke at the back of a club. The girl who’d take her clothes off for photographers, swearing to them she was eighteen. The girl who could lie as easily as she could smile. And all the while she’d be getting straight As and going to confession. Christmas had to agree with Mim—she was terrifying.

  She fished in her toiletries bag for some anti-frizz serum to smooth down her hair, feeling guilty that she’d overslept. The house was quiet and she knew everyone had left for the day.

  Last night Mim had helped her plan out her first day’s activities. ‘I have everything done,’ she’d said, presenting Christmas with an elegant black leather journal. She snapped it open and went through the pages of information, all clearly colour-coded. There was a Metro map and instructions on how to buy tickets and find the right stops; a highlighted city map; lists of phone numbers to call if she got lost or needed help; the address of the apartment and directions on how to get there so she could hand it to a taxi driver if necessary, and the same for the dental surgery; and notes on how to tip in France, something Christmas was particularly grateful for. She’d also given Christmas a set of keys to the building and a few useful phrases written on cards.

  Christmas felt prepared and confident as she adjusted a silk scarf so that the V of the material hung down to her chest, tied in front with a classy knot, one that suggested she was an expert at wrangling scarves. She wasn’t. But it would be a perfect match with her new dark blue jeans. She felt different. Parisian. And ready for adventure.

  With Mim’s encouragement,
she’d decided to have a leisurely day. ‘You cannot possibly see all of Paris in a week,’ Mim had lamented. ‘But never mind. You’ll be back, oui?’

  ‘How do you say absolutely?’ Christmas had asked, still high on enough caffeine to raise an elephant from the dead, and on the magical view of the lights of Paris turning on like a perfectly orchestrated symphony as the sun went down. Right now, she might agree to never going home at all.

  ‘Absolument!’

  ‘Absolument,’ Christmas had repeated, practising her accent.

  ‘Then don’t do her badly this time. Elle est belle—she is beautiful. She deserves undivided attention. Go at leisure. Eat. Drink.’

  ‘Sounds like wonderful advice,’ Christmas had said, sipping her first glass of French wine on French soil.

  So today she’d decided to follow Mim’s advice and take it easy. She hit the boulevard at nine thirty under a bright blue sky, and at Les Sablons Metro station she headed underground and boarded the sleek silver train, pungent with the smell of rubber, and zoomed through the dark tunnels towards Charles de Gaulle–Etoile, where she swapped lines in a confused rush of platforms, escalators, old chewing gum, and dim lighting to head to Louvre–Rivoli station.

  Back on the surface, she was greeted by more Haussmann-style buildings flanking each side of the wide street. She headed towards the Seine, along with hordes of other tourists, with cameras, backpacks and guide maps, doing exactly as she was: heading to the magnificent sights of the Louvre. However, she’d decided not to go inside on this trip.

  ‘It is mammoth,’ Mim had said, holding out both hands as though measuring an enormous fish. ‘You’ll be exhausted. Your poor feet will be dead before you start. And the Mona Lisa? Pft! Is tiny! So tiny and so many people crowded in front of her, you won’t even see.’

  Christmas hadn’t needed much convincing. The inside of museums had never done much for her. She’d far rather be out in the fresh air, watching life.

  So she deliberately set her walking pace to half that of the tourists around her, all marching earnestly towards the Louvre. She also took the opportunity to sip a café au lait under the pale orange awning that spanned the stone archways of Le Fumoir, and added a croissant in observance of rule number two: Never let yourself get hungry. Around her, dogs sat beneath tables, their narrow muzzles resting on pointed toes, and a white-haired man hid behind the open pages of Le Monde while his youthful female companion polished her sunglasses. A taxi sounded its horn at a pedestrian in the middle of the road. Cigarette smoke drifted through the air. High heels clacked on the flagstones.