Blood, Wine and Chocolate

by Julie Thomas

  ‘I was very tempted by that dessert myself,’ she said, ‘but I’ve ordered the mousse.’

  ‘An aged Tokaji or a Muscat,’ Belinda said, ‘with white chocolate.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So, what prompted a wine trip?’ Anna asked.

  He settled back in his chair and sipped the wine. ‘As W C Fields said: “What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?”’

  Anna gave a bark of laughter, while Belinda looked as though she had heard the quotation a hundred times before. ‘So you’re a wine buff?’ There was an edge of sarcasm in her question.

  ‘No. I think I’d have to say I’m a wine bluff. But I intend to learn as much as I can, as quickly as I can.’

  Suddenly Anna looked up and pointed at him. ‘Actually, we’re going to Castello Banfi tomorrow. There’s a museum in the castle and a taverna for lunch, with some truly exceptional wines. Why don’t you come with us?’

  Belinda was about to open her mouth, when Vinnie leaned across the table and shook the hand that was still pointing in his direction. He smiled into her eyes. Result.

  ‘Miss Adams, I’d be delighted to accept your invitation. You are too, too, kind.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ANNA

  People disappointed Anna Adams. Almost without exception, they failed to behave the way she expected them to. How hard was it to do the right thing, a good thing, or a thing that demonstrated thoughtfulness? Not that hard, and yet they almost never did.

  She had been born as the 1960s came to a close, her parent’s fourth and last child and only daughter. Her mother, Sybil, was in her thirties when Anna was born, and her father, Colin, was in his forties. He was a doctor at a rural clinic in the Hampshire village of Torbay, and everyone loved him and confided in him. He was bearded and he bellowed when he laughed, and he swung her up in the air as he called her his ‘Little Princess’. Her brothers spoiled her and pulled funny faces to make her laugh. She used to sit on the handlebars of their bicycles as they peddled through the village. Her mother was a homemaker, and baked and sewed and gardened and read to her. When they walked to the shops, people patted Anna on the head and told her she was a ‘pretty wee thing’.

  Life was idyllic and quiet for four years, and then one day it wasn’t anymore. She had been building a castle in her sandpit. When she went inside, her mother was crying and her eldest brother was trying to comfort her.

  ‘Go and play in your room, Anna,’ he said, his voice stern.

  ‘What’s wrong with Mummy?’

  At the sound of her voice, her mother wailed into her handkerchief. Her second brother came through from the kitchen and put a cup of tea on the table beside her mother’s chair.

  ‘Come with me,’ her eldest brother said, more kindly, and he ushered her up the stairs to her bedroom. Once again she asked what was wrong with Mummy, and this time she was told that Daddy had left. Colin had run off to London with his much younger nurse because he ‘needed more excitement’.

  During the years that followed, Colin divorced Sybil, remarried and had another three daughters. He paid for his three sons to go to a public boarding school, while Anna kept her mother company and went to the local village school. She was happy with that solution – she loved being at home, and the idea of coping at a boarding school was too terrifying to contemplate. Besides, Sybil was passing on her excellent cooking skills. In her heart, Anna knew she was not an exciting person – if she had been, Daddy wouldn’t have left because he needed more excitement.

  It was always a time of great joy when the boys were due home for holidays. Biscuit tins were full to overflowing, and Mummy had jerseys knitted in winter and new cricket whites made for summer. Invariably the boys saw their friends, ate her home cooking, and then wanted to go to the city and stay with Daddy and their half-sisters, who were so much more exciting. Anna would have liked to go, too, but it seemed disloyal to her mother, so she stayed at home and baked for the local Women’s Institute competitions and painted pictures.

  As Anna progressed through her unexciting teenage years, one by one her brothers grew up, got jobs and got married. It was like going to the weddings of strangers, where her father gave her an awkward hug and introduced her to her giggling half-sisters, as though she hadn’t met them at the previous wedding.

  Sybil was very proud of her three boys. The eldest, twelve years older than Anna, was a junior banker in the City of London; the next was ten years older and an accountant living in Leeds; and the youngest boy, eight years older, was a trainee journalist with a newspaper in Liverpool.

  The day Anna turned sixteen, she and Sybil celebrated with dinner at a local pizza parlour.

  ‘I’m leaving school at the end of the week.’

  Sybil put down the slice of pizza she was eating and stared at her daughter. ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says me. I’m sixteen, I can make up my own mind.’

  ‘Can you now? And what are you going to do if you’re not going to school?’

  Anna gave her a satisfied grin. She had been waiting for this night, this moment, for weeks.

  ‘I’ve got a job.’

  Sybil was obviously even more shocked at this news. This was all going very well. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘In that new café delicatessen place on the High Street. I went to see the owner, and asked if I could cook something for him. He said, “Yeah, if you like.” So I made the hummingbird cake and he loved it!’

  ‘Did you tell him you were going to leave school?’

  ‘Of course. He doesn’t care. He says I can cook and bake and serve behind the counter.’

  Sybil shook her head. ‘You’ve got it all worked out then, I see.’

  Anna nodded. ‘It’ll be wonderful, Mummy. I’m going to work so hard and show them what I’m made of – it’s my big chance!’

  Food was Anna’s passion, and she kept her word and worked all hours. As well as cooking and baking and serving, she gave out advice about the trendy new products she chose out of catalogues. At night she read cookery books and biographies of great chefs. The café became a showcase for her cakes and desserts, and regular customers began to ask her to create something for their special occasions. She enjoyed the surprise when people came into the shop and enquired about something they had tasted, and the owner introduced them to the tall, gawky, awkward teenager with brown plaits and green eyes, who blushed at any praise.

  When she was eighteen, her maternal grandparents died in quick succession and everything changed again. Sybil was left their cottage and suddenly had some real money of her own. Anna expected most of it to be divided between the four children, and she was sure that was what her brothers expected when they rang to see if their mother needed anything. To Anna’s astonishment, Sybil had other plans.

  ‘We’re moving. We’re going to sell this old house and move to the city. To London.’

  Anna couldn’t speak for a full minute. ‘Why?’ she eventually whispered.

  ‘Why do you think? So you can follow your dream. A proper career in food.’

  Anna’s joy knew no bounds. Her eldest brother found them a funny little cottage in Chelsea: two bedrooms, peeling wallpaper, worn carpet, a sloping kitchen floor and an overgrown backyard. It needed a lot of work, but was a very good buy in an area that would only appreciate in value.

  For the next four years Anna worked all the hours she could. Five days a week she made desserts for a catering company, and at night she went to cookery courses. On Saturdays and Sundays she cooked for a local French pâtisserie, and when she couldn’t sleep, she experimented in her own kitchen. For the first two years she had an on-again, off-again relationship with one of her brothers’ old school friends, a divorced man who tried, and continually failed, to stay sober. Eventually she got sick of her mother asking her whether she had ‘doormat’ engraved on her forehead, and she gave him his marching orders.

  Her day-to-day existence was far too busy for loneliness, or for any feelings
that she was missing out on the social life that her workmates had. But, as she fell into an exhausted sleep at night, she was often overcome by a sense of being in limbo, of being in training for some other kind of life, something else and something bigger.

  That something else was 1991. One freezing February day she came home to the news that her father and his second wife had been killed in a car accident. She knew she should feel grief, but in reality she had grieved for her father many years earlier. Now it felt as though a friend she had kept in vague contact with had died tragically; sad but distant.

  The family gathered at the beautiful Victorian church St Paul’s in Knightsbridge. Anna sat at the back of the congregation and held Sybil’s hand. One by one her brothers spoke, beginning with her eldest brother.

  ‘I know you’ll all agree with me when I say that Dad was a fine man. He cared deeply for his patients, and his family meant the world to him.’

  Her next brother carried on the theme. ‘We have all got where we are today because of the schooling we had, a gift from our father. He was a wonderful husband and a devoted father. I know we shall miss them both deeply.’

  The youngest boy was concerned for his half-sisters. ‘I want you all to know that we will take care of you. We are just as much your family as your maternal relations, and we are all here for you.’

  At the wake Anna passed her only comment to her family: the cake was from a third-rate commercial bakery and tasted like plastic, and the egg filling in the sandwiches was far too salty.

  Two months later she joined her siblings at the offices of a lawyer for the reading of Colin’s will, and was surprised and delighted to be left a £40,000 legacy and his golf clubs. Their conversation about her wanting to make the time to take up golf had slipped her mind but, obviously, not his. While she still didn’t have time for golf, she was touched by the gesture.

  ‘Anna?’

  She was about to take her leave, and turned back to see one of her brothers standing by the table. He was frowning and he looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry to be a pain, but I took Dad’s clubs from the house before the funeral and I’m already using them.’

  Anna smiled. Nothing about this surprised her. She toyed with making it harder for him, making him suffer. ‘That’s fine. Maybe we could swap them for something else? What about that boat painting I gave him for Christmas? It was in his study.’

  Her brother shifted and his embarrassment was palpable. ‘Actually, it’s already in the house in Cornwall – it looks great there. Why don’t you take some of the money he left you and buy something to remember him by?’

  She smiled again. Really she should make him squirm, but what was the point? ‘Why don’t I do that?’

  Anna wanted to make some improvements to the cottage, but her mother insisted she leave the money in the bank for the moment and consider her future. She did look for a keepsake of her father, and the fact that she couldn’t find one only served to reinforce how little she had known him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LIMBO

  It was a hot Saturday in June, and Anna was whisking crème pâtissière over heat at the local pastry shop. Her concentration was broken by the sound of the telephone. The kitchen was empty.

  ‘Damn!’

  She put the saucepan aside and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ She knew her tone was brusque.

  ‘Is … is that you, Anna?’

  It was her neighbour, and she sounded upset.

  ‘Yes, sorry Jill, it’s me. I was up to my elbows in custard. What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s your mum. Apparently, she’s had a fall. Philip rang here looking for you. She’s been taken to hospital. I think you had better get there.’

  As Anna drove through the streets, she imagined a broken hip or wrist or ankle, hospital care and lots of TLC and rehabilitation. Her mother was a strong woman and very determined.

  When she got to the hospital and gave the staff at the emergency desk her name, a nurse ushered her into a room, where she was joined almost immediately by a doctor.

  ‘What were you told on the phone, Ms Adams?’

  She gave him a puzzled frown. ‘My neighbour said that Mum had had a fall and my brother was looking for me.’

  ‘You brother is on his way, but is not here yet. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news … Ms Adams, your mother suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in the lower part of her brainstem, which damaged her vagus nerve. I can, and will, give you a more detailed explanation, but for now all you need to know is that death was almost instantaneous. She was dead before she hit the pavement.’

  As shock set in, Anna really didn’t hear anything more he said. She spent the night sitting beside Sybil’s body and found the fact that the woman couldn’t answer back strangely liberating. Although they had been as close as a mother and daughter could be, neither of them had been very good at expressing emotion. Now all that seemed to fall away.

  ‘I know you sacrificed a lot. You could have found someone else and led another life. Been loved again. But you chose to devote yourself to my happiness. I don’t know why I’ve never thanked you for that. Maybe you should have reminded me once in a while.’

  She leaned forward and kissed her mother on the forehead. It was a strange sensation, kissing human skin that was not blood warm. Sybil’s eyes were shut, but her mouth was slightly open. They had brushed her white hair, and it formed a halo around her head on the pillow.

  ‘But you knew, and I know, that you were my world and I was yours, and we loved each other to bits. I will make you proud of me, Mum, I promise you. Someday I’ll do something important and I’ll know that I’ve made you proud.’

  Once again the family gathered, but this time Anna was in charge, and the church was smaller and the vicar knew Sybil. Two of her brothers tried to insist that the situation would be too much for her – she wouldn’t be able to speak, or she would go on for too long, and that would be embarrassing. Anna didn’t get angry, but she told them that if the funeral was too embarrassing for them, they were welcome to pay their respects long distance, as they had for so much of their mother’s life. They stared at her open-mouthed. She didn’t feel overcome by grief at any stage – this was what her mother would have wanted, but it had nothing to do with her own mourning. In the end she was the only one who spoke.

  ‘I was my mother’s best friend. When I was four, her other best friend left and found a new life. So it was just Mummy and me. Family came and went when it suited them, ate our cooking and made polite conversation, but we stuck it out together.’

  She watched as her brothers squirmed in the front pew and rubbed their faces, and she couldn’t help a small smile.

  The food at the wake was spectacular and drew many compliments.

  When a patient of her father’s asked her if Sybil had had bad circulation, she couldn’t resist. ‘Well, she does now,’ she replied, without a shadow of a smile. The woman was horrified at such sacrilege, and Anna wondered if the whole world had lost its sense of humour.

  Everything her mother owned was left to her, and the limbo was over. Anna waited a week, then handed in her notice at work and took the entire contents of her wardrobe, and her mother’s wardrobe, to a local charity shop. The next day she went shopping for dresses, shirts, trousers and skirts in bold prints and large blocks of bright colour – everything her mother had objected to. She bought new makeup, chunky jewellery, fashionable shoes with heels and silk scarves. On the way home she bought a bottle of Krug, and that night she spread all her new possessions out and looked at them while she drank the whole bottle.

  Over the following weeks she had the kitchen remodelled to give herself more bench space and bought new appliances. Then she redecorated the rest of the cottage with new wallpaper, curtains and artwork, ripped up the carpet and polished the wooden floors, added rugs, cushions and a home entertainment system. She gave away her mother’s bed, took down the curtains to let in the
natural light, and turned the room into a studio, with an easel, canvases and paints. Colour, creativity and music exploded throughout the house.

  There were a few pieces from the family life – the old kitchen table, a carved glory box, a fine china dinner set, some portraits – which she send to an auction house. She informed her brothers that if they wanted them, they could bid.

  If she concentrated on what she had to do and didn’t think about her mother, she could keep the grief at bay and assure everyone she was fine. When she made herself think about conversations, car trips, holidays and birthdays, she felt as though she was standing on the edge of a black pool of grief, waiting to dip even the tip of her big toe in.

  The discovery that stopped her in her tracks for a whole day was made when she opened the bottom cupboard of her mother’s bedside cabinet. It was full of letters, nearly seven hundred letters, each one written by her mother to her father. Every fortnight, from the day he left until the day he died, she had written to him and then put the letter in her bedside cabinet. Anna sat on her bed and read about how her mother had felt through the years, about her pride in Anna’s achievements, how much she had missed seeing her sons regularly, and how her pain had slowly diminished. To start with, she had blamed herself for their separation and wanted to know what she could do to entice him back, then she had blamed him and cried out to know how he could have left his family so easily, and then, at last, she had accepted his actions and forgiven him, and told him about the life going on in the world he had walked away from.

  Anna’s tears flowed as she read, and she ached to take her mother in her arms and comfort her. There were no living objects for her anger and sorrow, apart from her siblings, so she had some of the letters copied and sent them on, then swore to herself that she would have nothing more to do with any of them.

  In August she went to an auction sale with half a mind to buy some chocolate-making equipment. Chocolate was her passion, and as soon as she saw the stock being auctioned, it became clear that the magic of chocolate was calling to her. In quick succession she bought a table-top chocolate tempering machine, a tempering table, a vibrator to get rid of air bubbles, moulds, tins, thermometers, and other useful bits. She had leaflets printed, offering free samples of the unusual and amazing chocolate creations she could supply for upmarket dinner parties. If you wanted an Anna Adams creation, you had to be in quick and pay for the privilege.