Abigail
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To: Abigail Hurst
From: Christmas Livingstone
Re: Shop Update
Hi Abigail, thanks for the update. I’m in Provence now and we’re off on farm tours tomorrow.
Glad to hear all is going well but it’s a bit strange about Cheyenne. Do you think you should pop around to her place and make sure she’s okay? Maybe hold off on flowers until you’ve spoken to her. For now, try arranging some vertical products in the silver flower buckets, maybe dried lavender bunches, those little heart-shaped blackboards on sticks, and some soap pyramids in between.
Thanks, Christmas
P.S. Could you let me know as soon as you know that Cheyenne’s okay? That’s a bit worrying.
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To: Christmas Livingstone
From: Rosemary McCaw
Subject: You
Dearest Christmas Angel,
I hope this letter finds you calm of spirit. I have been keeping a watchful eye on The Chocolate Apothecary. Your vibrancy is sorely missed. The place feels empty and bereft of ambience. The Abigail girl is doing her best, but she has no charm or enviable attributes as far as I can see. Don’t get me wrong; transactions are happening and customers seem content. But the intangible gift of your ageless wisdom and guiding hand—your very breath that is part of every square of this abode—is noticeable to anyone who is of that persuasion. Still, the shop is in no immediate danger. And you are doing exactly as you should.
But you have not told me. Did you kiss him?
Your confidante,
Rosemary
•
‘There are only two things in life that involve all five senses,’ Master Le Coutre declared from the front of the minibus. They were alternately speeding along flat, straight stretches of road and then slowing to ascend the hills of the Luberon, an easy drive from Aix. Although on the first night they’d been told that today would be spent in the kitchen, the very next day Master Le Coutre had changed the plan. Again. He seemed not to care much for organisation, itineraries or actual chocolate making. Christmas had begun to wonder if he might be a Wizard of Oz–type figure and not really make chocolate at all but simply hide behind pomp and smokescreens. It probably should have irritated her, but since no promises were made in advance as to what they’d be doing when they got to France, and she was having a delightful time, it seemed churlish to be annoyed. She was just going to enjoy whatever came her way. There had to be some sort of method in the man’s madness.
‘The first is food,’ he said, pinching his fingers in a cluster and miming eating. ‘You’ve heard it said that you eat with your eyes first. The look of the food is as crucial as the actual taste. So too the aroma, the sharp citrus smell, the sweet caramel, the spicy bursts, the herbaceous warmth. You hear the food sizzling, crunching, snapping, opening. And touch—eating with your fingers is so much more sensual. Why do babies eat with their hands? It is natural. It is fun. It is stimulating. You’re connected to your food. And you feel it on your lips, over your tongue, as you swallow and it descends your throat, and even when it’s in your stomach. Sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. It is all there.’ He paused for a second. ‘Oui?’
‘Oui,’ the group responded.
‘And what is the other?’ he asked, grabbing onto the back of a seat as the minibus lurched around a particularly sharp corner.
Christmas was pretty sure she knew the answer to this, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud.
Tibbie Tottie put up her hand and waved it around excitedly, her silver bangles jangling. Master Le Coutre raised an eyebrow in her direction.
‘Tequila slammers in a noisy bar.’
Philomena smiled at Tibbie and patted her tanned knee. ‘No, darlin’. He means making sweet love.’
‘Ah! Making love!’ Master Le Coutre closed his eyes and hummed a tune to himself, rocking backwards and forwards on his feet until the bus driver slammed on the brakes for a herd of small brown and white goats crossing the road and Master Le Coutre fell back against the dashboard.
Jackson Kent leapt to his assistance and steadied him before resuming his seat. They all rushed to take pictures through the window of the bleating and tail-wagging goats while the driver unleashed some swiftly executed hand gestures at the goat keeper, accompanied by a spray of rapid French.
The animals passed and they set off again, Master Le Coutre leaning back on the dashboard for added safety as he returned to his theme. ‘Making love. The feel of another’s body. Their scent. Their voice in your ear, the murmurs from their throat. The way they look by candlelight as they slowly undress. The taste of their salty skin. Other than eating, and making love, is there anything that fully employs all five senses at once? Non.’
‘Are we going to make chocolate today?’ Henry Jacobs asked, his tweed jacket removed, revealing a short-sleeved cotton shirt, on account of the heat.
Master Le Coutre stared at him for so long that Christmas began to feel sorry for Henry. It was, after all, what they were all thinking. Except perhaps for Tibbie Tottie, who seemed not to care about cooking as much as she did about tweeting. Christmas wondered just why Tibbie Tottie had been selected for this course.
Finally, Master Le Coutre spoke, ignoring Henry and addressing the rest of them. ‘Today, we are visiting our flavour ingredients—our partners in the chocolate dance. For a true partnership, a perfect match, you must know your partner’s origins. You must know their history. Where and how they grew up. This is what we’re here to do. Uncover the birthplaces of our most important significant others.’
Master Le Coutre sat for the last half of the journey and Christmas stared in wonder at the passing scenery—the blue-grey Luberon ranges in the distance behind ochre fields of grapevines tethered in straight rows under the blazing sun; the seas of purple lavender that seemed to greet them around every second bend; the dry-stone borie huts with their pointed roofs and their ancient origins as shelters for shepherds and wanderers; the obscenely bright yellow sunflowers nodding in the summer breeze and smiling at everyone who passed by. It felt like another world, yet one somehow anchored into her bones.
Master Le Coutre’s words had stirred something in her. For a true partnership, a perfect match, you must know your partner’s origins. But what if she didn’t really know her own origins?
Since arriving in France, she’d once or twice found herself staring at men she thought would be around Gregoire Lachapelle’s age and wondering if she could see any resemblance to herself, or whether she could sense any sort of connection to them. Because surely she would feel it, wouldn’t she, the same way she was feeling this pull towards Provence? But she’d brushed the thoughts aside almost as fast as they arose because it simply wasn’t relevant to this trip.
Eventually the group tumbled out of the minibus at a rolling lavender farm drenched in mauve in all directions, with a stone farmhouse standing tall above the flowers. Dozens of small wooden boxes chequered the landscape, housing beehives. It was late morning and Christmas wasn’t sure whether she was imagining it but a purple haze seemed to hang over the fields, as though the atmosphere was reflecting the intensity of the flowers.
The lavender farmer, Paul, kissed Master Le Coutre on each cheek and welcomed them all to his champs de fleurs, then invited them to wander the fields at leisure. ‘Come back when I start the tractor,’ he said, mopping his forehead with a red handkerchief from around his neck. ‘Then we’ll work.’ He grinned and shooed them on their way.
The five of them moved off as one, mobile phones and cameras at the ready to capture the beauty of the scene, leaving Master Le Coutre to catch up with his friend. Their own chatter soon faded away and they spread out, each walking alone, except for Philomena and Henry, who walked in easy silence.
Christmas waded into the ocean of flowers and let it swallow her whole. The scent of the lavender was overwhelming. The drone of the bees, enchanting. She let the tall stems brush ag
ainst her legs and waist, reached out to rub the flowers between her fingers, surprised yet again that the oil wasn’t oily at all, but kind of sticky. She’d done this before, of course; Tasmania was famous for its lavender fields too. It was different here though. It was the difference between visiting an exotic animal in a very nice zoo and seeing it in its homeland. This was where lavender belonged.
She kept walking, wading deeper into the ocean of purple beneath the wide open blue skies, hearing the church bells tolling in a nearby town. A lone eagle hovered high in the air above her. She felt each footstep on the soil, brushed her palms against the waving flowers, and listened to the hum of bees drunk on lavender perfume.
Then Paul started his tractor in the distance and she turned around to head back to shore.
She had read before that it took a hundred kilos of lavender to produce just a couple of litres of the essential oil, or thereabouts, but until Christmas saw it for herself these were only numbers. Paul set them to work dragging the harvested lavender plants off the trailer and laying them out on cotton sheets on the ground. They all pitched in, even Henry and, remarkably, Tibbie Tottie, who must have been high on the aroma because she couldn’t stop smiling the whole time and didn’t tweet anything once. Soon the harvest was all spread out on the sheets, standing tall over their heads in rows of fabulous-smelling and colourful haystacks. Master Le Coutre had lavender pieces in his hair and caught on his shirt and he kept rubbing his hands together and placing them over his nose and inhaling like an addict.
Paul ushered them into the stone barn, where they stuffed lavender down into the huge metal still, big enough for them to climb in barefoot and help to stamp down the cuttings, which they all did, even Jackson Kent, who Christmas thought would have been too uptight to take off his shoes in public. But he must have been high on the oils too, because he looked genuinely relaxed and happy as he respectfully squashed down the lavender.
When the still was as full as they could possibly get it, the enormous lid was put on top and clamped down and Paul disappeared downstairs to set the controls and begin the steam distillation process. They watched in fascination as the steam, having built up inside the still, began to make its way out through the glass tubes, the heavier oil separating and dripping into a beaker as it went. The pale yellow oil collected in the bottom of the beaker and the process continued at length until no more oil came out.
‘There it is!’ Paul shouted, holding the beaker up to the light, then closing his eyes and sniffing from the opening at the top, swirling the contents and moaning and murmuring like a passionate wine lover. Next he strained the oil through coffee paper to remove any stray particles, and at the end they had just half a litre of oil from the mountain of lavender they had dragged off the trailer.
‘Unbelievable,’ Christmas said. ‘Here I was just casually adding a drop of lavender oil here and there to my chocolate work, and look how many plants were needed for my one tiny bottle.’
‘So much harder for rose oil.’ Paul grimaced. ‘You need tonnes of petals. Tonnes!’
‘What happens to the rest?’ Jackson asked, pointing to the still.
‘Ah!’ Paul held up a finger. ‘Watch.’ He unclamped the lid of the still and then hoisted up the contents with chains and a pulley, and a wet, matted mass of hot vegetation rose into the air, shooting steam around the room and giving Christmas an instant facial. ‘We use it as mulch, feed it back to the lavender plants, and what we can’t use we burn.’
He picked a glass pipette out of a tub of clean implements, drew up some oil from the beaker and placed a single drop on each person’s fingertip. ‘Try it!’ he said.
Master Le Coutre wasted not a second, putting his finger to his mouth and licking off the oil. ‘Bravo,’ he said, applauding Paul. ‘Another perfect drop.’
Christmas licked the tiny bead of oil on her fingertip and it instantly felt as though her whole head, from her chin to the roots of her hair, had been gassed with lavender. It was impossible to understand how one teeny drop could have that much punch.
If Paris was a place of giants and grandeur and thoughts as big as the cosmos, then Provence, Christmas thought now, was the land of single grains of sand, just as William Blake had put it hundreds of years before: To see a world in a grain of sand; And a heaven in a wildflower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand; And eternity in an hour.
Their next stop was a dairy that specialised in goat cheeses. They took a guided tour and then the farmer tied up one of his nannies for Master Le Coutre to milk.
Their fearless leader got down on a stool and hand-milked the soft-eyed brown and white nanny goat, her yellowish creamy milk squirting into a metal pail with a ting and a froth while he sang to her. Her small tail flicked from side to side and her bell jangled on its leather collar as she shook away the flies. Master Le Coutre finished, wiping his brow with his surprisingly muscly forearm, bare where he’d rolled up the sleeve, then dipped a cup into the milk and drank from it.
‘Ahh,’ he exhaled, smiling, wiping his lips. ‘Try it!’ He offered the pail and cup to Tibbie Tottie, who vehemently refused; to Philomena, who happily accepted, commented on its unique flavour and made notes in her book; to Jackson, who drank without expression as though it was just one more task he needed to complete; and to Henry, whose eyes lit up and who talked about life as a young boy back in England, drinking milk straight from their cow.
Christmas was last, and even though others had already commented on this, she was shocked at its warmth. ‘It’s different,’ she said, smiling politely at Master Le Coutre and handing back the cup. In truth, it felt weird drinking something that was just a moment ago sitting inside a hairy goat’s udder. It felt disconcertingly as though the milk was still alive, like the goat herself, rather than the way she normally experienced milk, as something sterile and cold, sitting in a cardboard carton, a composition from many faceless cows.
This experience felt almost like eating a piece of the goat herself while it was still alive and watching her. She suppressed an urge to apologise to the nanny. Instead, she bent down and patted her neck and rubbed her ears. The nanny turned her nose to Christmas, and its downy lips snuffled into her outstretched hand. The goat herder came to stand at her side, beaming down at her and his goat.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Christmas said, though she didn’t know if he spoke English, and he didn’t respond. But his pride in his animal and his work was palpable. She stood straight again and gave the goat a final scratch between the shoulder blades.
In that moment, she was acutely aware of the modern disconnect between the way food was produced and the way it was consumed. The thought suddenly struck her that Master Le Coutre was a genius after all. How could you make chocolate—or anything at all—if you had no true knowledge of it? If you didn’t even know where it came from?
The goat let out a shaky bleat and pulled at the rope tying her to the post. She wanted to be on her way, back to her friends in the green meadow beyond the straw-filled yard. The farmer, tanned by fifty summers, let her go with a gentle slap on her rump.
And if Christmas had let herself, she would have heard a tiny, soft voice inside her wondering what it might be like to know where she came from too. But she wasn’t listening.
21
Lincoln checked the caller ID on his phone.
‘Well, if it isn’t the dinosaur artist gone walkabout. How’s it going?’
‘What’s that sawing sound? Where are you?’
‘The butcher, getting bones and meat for Caesar.’
‘Well, grab two pieces of rump steak and a bottle of the finest red wine you can find. I’m on my way back and we need to celebrate.’
Lincoln pointed through the glass at the rump steaks and then held up two fingers to the butcher’s expectant face. ‘What are we celebrating?’
‘I’m getting married.’
‘What? To who? You don’t even have a girlfriend.’
‘I’ll tell you all about it tomo
rrow night. I’m in Sydney now and I’m about to board the plane home.’
‘I’m confused. This is big news.’
‘You’re right, it is. Better make it two bottles of red. And buy the dog a rump steak too. My shout.’
•
It was early morning in Aix and the streets were mostly deserted. Christmas had woken when it was still dark with that clear sense that dawn was fast approaching. She’d always been an early riser, so that wasn’t unusual, and after a few moments of checking in with herself to see if she was likely to go back to sleep, she’d got up, pulled her hair back into a low ponytail and put on casual clothes and sneakers to wander outside. She found the northern hemisphere with its lengthy daylight hours in the height of summer both exhilarating and exhausting. But she wasn’t here for long so she might as well make the most of it.
She found herself in a silent cobblestoned alley, flanked by rows of tall weathered stone buildings. A lone cat wandered at leisure, its sleek black coat a deep contrast to the greys of the cobblestones and walls, the archways and their iron gates, and the light greens and flushing reds of the leafy foliage climbing up the walls, window eaves and rooftops. The feline flicked an ear in her direction but continued unconcerned, its lithe shoulders assured of its claim on this alley and its soft pads evidently treading a well-worn path. It was completely oblivious to the obscene beauty of the morning sun filtering down through the gables of the buildings. The alley just begged to be filled with wagons of colourful produce and serenading minstrels.
The Chocolate Promise Page 23