Mother’s Day was tomorrow—the first Sunday in May—so today would be another busy day in the shop. But Christmas had decided to squeeze in a quick early-morning jog before she met Emily for breakfast at Ingleside Bakery. It was exactly what she needed to work off some of the calories she’d inevitably consumed over the Easter weekend, through the necessity of sampling her wares before they went on sale.
On Easter Sunday, Val, Archie and the boys had come to The Apothecary, along with Joseph, for a big brunch set out on the long wooden table in the empty store, and as much chocolate as they could consume. There was much wedding discussion while her nephews hoovered up bars of chocolate and fine handmade pieces. No one had given her chocolate, of course, but the boys offered her a package of rough, unfired and largely unidentifiable clay pieces.
‘Don’t think your nephews don’t love you,’ Val said, sipping coffee and leaning back against Archie’s chest while he wrapped his thick, hairy arm around her. ‘It took them a whole half an hour to do that. Do you know how hard it is to get boys to sit still for that long?’
‘Well, I think they’re just wonderful,’ Christmas said, although of course the clumps of clay were completely awful. She thought about giving specific compliments but was unsure how to identify each piece so decided not to risk offending. ‘Thank you, I’m very touched,’ she said sincerely; apparently satisfied, the boys ran through the swing doors, out through the kitchen and into the small backyard to chase each other around the birdbath.
She told Val, Archie and Joseph about Emily’s surprise, and everyone was duly impressed and talked about how wonderful the trip would be. But then Joseph, arms crossed comfortably at his chest, quietly and perceptively asked, ‘And how do you feel about the French connection to your past?’
Val’s gushing had ceased instantly. ‘Oh, crap, sorry, I hadn’t even made that link yet,’ she said, screwing up her face. ‘I was just thinking about Paris and wine and baguettes.’
Archie was silent but scratched thoughtfully at his hairy face. The boys screeched out in the garden. And all eyes were on Christmas.
‘It’s confusing,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t had much peace and quiet to process it yet with everything going on this weekend.’
‘But surely you’d like to try and look him up?’ Val said. Archie cleared his throat and sipped his coffee and Val shot him a look, clearly wondering if he disapproved of the question.
‘You don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with,’ Joseph said. ‘It would be perfectly okay just to enjoy the experience in France and the chocolate course and not put yourself under any pressure.’
Christmas smiled at him gratefully, warmed by his understanding.
Just then the middle boy, Nate, came in cradling an unconscious sparrow. Braxton followed, trying to take it off him, and Willis strutted importantly to the table as the oldest child to declare, ‘It’s dead.’
‘No, it’s not!’ Nate countered. ‘It’s just sleeping. It’s breathing. See!’
‘What happened?’ Val asked, jumping up.
‘It flew into the window,’ Braxton said breathlessly.
‘And fell to the ground,’ Willis finished. ‘It couldn’t have survived the impact.’
Goodness, Christmas thought, he sounded like a news reporter.
And so the conversation about France had ended there while the poor stunned sparrow was put into a cardboard box and placed in a quiet(ish) section of the room to recover its wits, which it did, thankfully, and a while later they’d all released it with great ceremony.
Now she pushed herself up to a slow jog, something she hadn’t attempted since she lived in Sydney, and was soon puffing hard. Exercise was something she’d learned to do because it was good for her, like occasionally eating Brussels sprouts or mung beans. If she was going to devote her time to working with chocolate, she would be a fool to think she didn’t need to actively burn off some calories. As it was, she was one and a half dress sizes larger than she’d been when she was in PR. She normally walked, sometimes took a class with Emily, but didn’t jog. So she barely managed a wave to Gordon Harding on his penny farthing when she passed him in Pioneer Park and he smiled at her through his thick white moustache and tipped his Ivy tweed cap. Instead she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other and defeating the stitch in her side. She also decided to take the opportunity to think about France, as her overriding physical need to breathe would prevent her from expending too much energy on unnecessary angst.
Of course she had always been fascinated by France. How could she not be? It was her only link to her history on that side of the family.
She’d had a pen pal while she was in high school, a girl her age called Miriam Deschamps, and Christmas wrote to her every week for seven months, going to the local post office for stamps and airmail stickers and fine, almost weightless, blue paper. Writing to Mim—even though it was always in English—had felt like some sort of validation of Christmas’s ethnicity.
Mim lived in Paris, was studying for the baccalauréat, drank black coffee without any sugar, and read Rolling Stone magazine. They exchanged photos. Mim had mouse-brown hair down to her waist, thick eyebrows and a gappy smile. She was lanky and seemed to wear jeans all the time, in pink, orange, black, white and purple. One day, like so many things in childhood, they just stopped writing to each other.
Actually, now that she was thinking about it, Christmas remembered that Emily had always been dismissive of their contact, snatching letters from Christmas’s school bag and reading them, snorting with derision at Mim’s intensity and her passion for her city, and rolling her eyes at Mim’s poetry. Christmas had enjoyed Mim’s letters, but she remained silent while Emily sneered at them. If she could help it, she kept the letters away from Em’s eyes in the first place. Perhaps it had been jealousy of Mim. Or maybe of her connection to France, which was exotic compared to Hobart.
She gritted her teeth now as she ran, and didn’t glance at the antiques store on High Street or pause for breath when she hit her usual turn-around spot at the old brick water tower at the corner of Cambock Lane. To avoid the car exhaust fumes in High Street she cut through the back of St Andrew’s church. In the quieter residential streets, families shuffled kids into cars, balancing mobile phones and cereal bowls.
Over the years, Christmas had watched lots of movies featuring France, both French films with subtitles and anything from Hollywood set in France. She particularly loved Amélie, Midnight in Paris, French Kiss, A Good Year and, of course, Chocolat. But she’d never gone so far as trying to learn French. She’d thought about it, naturally, but never done it. It was as though going ahead and learning the language would commit her to actually tracking down Gregoire Lachapelle. And while that idea was never too far from her mind, it was also quite scary. He might not exist, after all. And then the few tangents of a life she’d built in her imaginings would be gone and she’d be left with nothing.
Darla assured Christmas that his name was Gregoire Lachapelle, but she could—or would—give her daughter no more details about his life other than that he came from somewhere in the south of France and that he’d spoken once or twice (in his heavy, sometimes indecipherable accent) about a younger sister, whose name Darla couldn’t remember.
Christmas felt that familiar irritation with her mother now, jogging in Falls Park, where she spied Mary Hauser Who Carries Her Schnauzer and gratefully took a break, bending over with her hands on her knees and gasping for breath. Mary put Ferdy down and he jumped and licked at Christmas’s hands while his mistress chatted on about the Easter weekend, the stories she was writing for the newspaper on the expo events and today’s great weather before continuing on her way.
Setting off again at a pace more reasonable for someone who hadn’t jogged in years, Christmas turned up Russell Street once more, heading to the bakery, where she’d organised to meet Emily. Her mind quickly returned to France and all it meant.
Sometime back in the nineties, when the internet had become the primary research tool, Christmas had gone through a phase of obsessive searching for Gregoire Lachapelle. But with nothing else to go on it was impossible to find him. There were more than a thousand Lachapelles listed in Les Pages Blanches. And even if he’d lived in the south of France at one time it didn’t mean he was still there years later. It didn’t mean he was even alive. She didn’t know a single thing about him. And that was the problem. Not knowing gave her imagination far too much freedom to torture her endlessly. That was why she needed to keep busy; her mind left to its own devices found destructive ways to behave. It was something she’d inherited from her mother, sadly, and was why Darla had always taken physical jobs—cleaning, gardening, forestry work, fieldwork. Darla needed to be busy too.
Christmas staggered through the double iron gates into the courtyard of Ingleside Bakery, just a few doors up from The Apothecary. Emily was already there. She was always early, something that seemed incongruous with so many of her other disorganised traits. She wore a hand-knitted scarf (due to the gaping holes in it, Christmas concluded that it was probably made by one of her nieces going through a craft phase) that draped around her in a layered nest, entwined with her long, tangled hair.
Seeing Christmas, Emily jumped to her feet, scraping the metal chair along the brickwork. ‘Hi!’ Emily hugged her, and her hair tickled Christmas’s nose. ‘What have you been doing? You’re all sweaty and red!’
‘Oh, sorry. I’ve been jogging,’ Christmas said, still struggling for breath and wiping at sweat beads under her eyes.
‘God, why?’
‘I probably consumed about five kilos of chocolate over the past couple of weeks. Thought I should do something about it.’
Emily grimaced. ‘Fair enough, I suppose.’
Despite the runner’s high—okay, maybe a runner’s lift—she was on, Christmas felt awkward, suddenly feeling a bit needled by the memory of Emily mocking Mim’s letters, and not really sure of Em’s true intentions when she’d put in the scholarship application. How much of it had been to do with Gregoire Lachapelle? She didn’t like feeling out of sorts with Em. She was like a second sister to her, indeed more of a sister in many ways than Val, since they were the same age.
‘They have custard tarts,’ Emily said.
‘For breakfast?’
‘Live a little,’ Emily ordered.
They queued up at the long counter inside the bakery, which had been converted from the 1860s council chambers building and retained the original grand high ceilings and stately tall arched windows. It was warm inside, like most buildings in Tasmania, built to withstand the freezing cold rather than accommodate the few weeks of hot weather they got each year. Emily ordered them both custard tarts and lattes and they returned outside to sit beneath the pretty pale pink roses cascading down the brickwork.
‘So you’re back on the coffee?’ Christmas said, gulping a glass of water.
‘I tried drinking chai, as per your suggestion. Totally awful. Imposter coffee. Bah!’ Emily poked out her tongue and made a face.
‘But how did you feel in that time?’ Christmas prompted.
‘Like complete shite. Migraines. Sugar cravings.’
‘No different then.’
‘Exactly. I’m writing that one off as a terrible experiment that should never be repeated. But I am making one concession: I’ve decided to try to give up sugar in my coffee at least. Commando coffee, I’m calling it.’
‘That’s clever.’
‘I started with “bareback coffee”, but then decided it was a bit rude.’
‘Commando coffee is cute.’
‘I thought so. And it makes me feel all brave and warrior-like. Speaking of warrior types, how’s your mum? Where is she now?’
‘Same as usual. Terse. Impossible. Frustrating. She’s somewhere in central Victoria right now. Her latest job is fieldwork for a PhD student who’s examining the wear and tear on marsupials’ teeth to study their dietary habits, or something like that.’
‘Doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘No. Except that to study dental patterns, the PhD student needs teeth.’
Emily put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh no.’
‘Uh-huh. Mum drives around by herself on lonely roads in the middle of nowhere, decapitating marsupial road kill and storing the heads in the boot of her car until she can deliver them to her employer.’
Emily paled.
‘Apparently the trick is to make sure the marsupials have been dead for some time so they don’t smell.’
‘Can we talk about something else?’
‘Definitely.’ Christmas took a deep breath, releasing the tension that always gripped her body whenever she talked about her mother. Their coffees and tarts arrived and they both leapt on them. ‘Hey, I met an interesting guy last week.’
‘In Evandale?’ Emily said through a mouthful of tart.
‘I know, shocking, isn’t it? He just got off a plane from Ecuador, where he’s been working. He’s a botanist but comes from Tasmania. He’s staying around here for a while.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Tall. A bit scruffy. Interesting.’
Emily raised her eyebrows, which were in need of a trim. ‘That sounds promising. But also a bit suspicious. Why isn’t he married?’
‘I don’t know,’ Christmas said.
‘You better find out. If he’s not gay or horribly dysfunctional—a little dysfunctional is okay, we’re all a bit dysfunctional—then it could be good.’
Christmas bit into her own tart, thinking she’d have to go and run another block now to work it off, and talked through a mouthful. ‘You know I’m not interested.’
‘Oh, please. Look at you. You’re totally interested!’ Emily laughed. ‘You’re jogging, for God’s sake!’
‘That’s just . . . good sense!’ Christmas protested. I’m not interested, am I? ‘And you know it’s not allowed.’
‘Yes. The rules. I know,’ Emily said, with a bit of an effort to be nice, Christmas thought. She watched Emily for a moment as she scraped up crumbs with her spoon. Was there something going on between them that wasn’t explicit? And if so, should it be brought out into the open? She was loath to ignite any latent friction. But it was bothering her.
She took a deep breath. ‘Is there something . . . ?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Well, do you think I should be trying to look for my father while I’m in France? Is that the real reason you put in the application?’
Emily took her time to lick her spoon and sip on her latte, and it was so uncharacteristic of her to think before she spoke that Christmas knew there was something going on.
‘Yes,’ Emily said at last.
‘Wow. I didn’t actually expect you to just come out and say it.’
‘Well, why not? You’ve only moaned for the past thirty years—’
Moaned?
‘—about how you don’t know him and how irresponsible your mother was for not helping you to know him and how there’s this missing piece of your life. I’ve never understood why you don’t just go to France and try to meet him instead of obsessing about the country and making up stories about him and building a little mini France all around you at home and in your shop!’
That stung.
‘Shit, sorry,’ Emily said, sighing and rubbing her forehead. ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that.’ She looked stricken. ‘I was trying to be a good friend. I knew you’d love the chance to do the scholarship course and it just seemed like the perfect opportunity to, I don’t know, exorcise some ghosts of the past or something.’
Had Emily been a good friend in getting Christmas over to France? Or had she been motivated by something else? Was she—and this was a horrible thought—fed up with Christmas’s moaning, as she’d put it, and felt Christmas had become self-indulgent, obsessed, whiny and addicted to this little family drama she kept playing out in her head?
And, mortifyingly, might Emily actually be right if she had thought all those things?
Christmas swallowed more water, uncomfortable. Guilty. Like she’d done something really mean and was now ashamed but unable to say sorry even though she knew she should.
Her chest was tightening in on itself. She knew this feeling and what was to follow—the heavy tethering weight of unidentifiable gloom. Depression. A lesson learned in the laps of her mother and grandmother. It was this very feeling she worked so hard to keep at bay. She was determined not to follow in their footsteps. The genetics might be there but that just gave her knowledge and the power to control the variables.
The rules for happiness were there precisely because of this. And it was exactly for this reason that she couldn’t be interested in Lincoln and she couldn’t look for Gregoire. The unknown was just too dangerous.
‘You know why not, Em,’ she said.
But Emily shook her head slowly. ‘Once upon a time I might have accepted that.’ She reached out and took Christmas’s hand. ‘But I don’t anymore. You’ve come a long way since those days hiding in your room in Sydney. You’re stronger now.’
Christmas couldn’t answer.
‘Look, I don’t want to fight about this,’ Emily said, releasing Christmas’s hand and pushing her plate away and leaning back from the table. ‘You’ve got yourself a free holiday and a week-long course with a master chocolatier. That’s good, right?’
‘Yes, and I’m grateful, I really am. I can’t thank you enough. It’s the most incredible—’
Emily held up a hand. ‘Just think about the rest, okay? Will you do that? Just give it some thought?’
‘Alright. I will think about it.’
Christmas checked the time. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, partly pleased they’d cleared the air and partly annoyed she had to leave now when there was still some lingering unease. She hugged Emily goodbye and just hoped time would smooth out the ruffles in their relationship that had been stirred up in the past week.