Bread and Chocolate Read online

  PHILIPPA GREGORY

  Bread and Chocolate

  Dedication

  For Anthony

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Bread and Chocolate

  Coo-eee

  The Favour

  Theories About Men

  Lady Emily’s Swim

  The If Game

  The Conjuring Trick

  The Wave Machine

  The Magic Box

  The Garden

  The Last Swan

  The Bimbo

  The Playmate

  Going Downriver

  The Other Woman

  The Visitor

  Catching the Bus

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Bread and Chocolate

  The sun streamed through the windows set in the vaulted whitewashed ceiling high above Brother James’s head. The golden light illuminated the cloud of flour drifting upwards from his working hands, danced on the dough and was kneaded into the mix along with a whispered prayer and the live pungent yeast. He divided the great body of bread into eight equal pieces and set them to one side, covered in warm tea towels to rise. The scent of yeast and clean cloth filled the high kitchen.

  An arched door opened and one of the younger brothers stuck his tonsured head into the room. Brother James looked up, irritated at the interruption.

  ‘Father Pierce says you are to go to him.’

  Brother James threw one anxious glance towards his rising bread but obeyed the greater imperative. He rubbed his hands, enjoying the familiar pleasure of dry dough peeling from skin, washed them under the tap, dried them on a towel hung in front of the huge monastery cooker and, still wearing his crisp white apron, strode down the length of the kitchen aisle. At the far end, as distant as possible, the young vegetable cook was slicing an avalanche of courgettes.

  ‘May I see to the bread?’

  ‘No!’ Brother James snapped. ‘Leave it alone.’

  He reproved himself for lack of charity as he shut the door on his brother’s crestfallen face. But he cheered up almost immediately. Any man who obeyed the rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, daily and without fail, might allow himself the occasional human error of grumpiness, especially to some damned carrot peeler.

  ‘It’s about your book,’ Father Pierce said without preamble.

  Brother James stood before the huge carved desk, his head slightly bowed to signify his absolute obedience.

  ‘I have a letter here from the publishers. Turns out it’s doing rather well. They want to reprint it.’

  A flicker of what might have been pride gleamed for a moment in Brother James’s face and was instantly repressed.

  ‘People are keen on cookbooks,’ the abbot remarked. ‘And they say that your bread recipes and the spiritual element are exactly right for …’ He consulted the letter ‘… the gourmet new-hippie market.’ He looked at Brother James over his severe horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Gourmet new-hippie? I thought it was just bread recipes with a few prayers.’

  ‘It is,’ Brother James said modestly.

  ‘They want you to do a programme for the television,’ Father Pierce remarked. ‘Show people how to cook the bread, I suppose. They want to film our daily life here, and then cut to the studio kitchen where you will be making our bread.’

  ‘Cut?’

  ‘Should I say slice?’

  Brother James shook his head. ‘They want me on the television?’

  Father Pierce consulted the letter again, he was enjoying himself. ‘They say that if you are sufficiently televisual they could promise you two programmes, and perhaps a new career as a presenter.’ His solemn demeanour cracked and he laughed aloud. ‘They seem to have no notion that you have a career. They seem to think you are employed as a cook here. They don’t understand that your vocation is to God, and that you bake bread as part of your service to the community.’

  ‘And what will you tell them?’ Brother James asked.

  ‘You have no preferences?’ the abbot questioned acutely.

  The younger man bowed his head. ‘I obey, Father Pierce,’ he said simply.

  The abbot thought for a moment. He did not tell the Brother Breadmaker that the fee offered at the foot of the letter would pay for installing central heating in the chapel, a sum for which he had been praying nightly. ‘I think you should do it,’ he said. ‘God speaks in many tongues. Perhaps He is calling you to teach those who ask for a stone and can be given bread.’

  ‘And who will make the bread for the brothers while I am away?’ Brother James asked.

  ‘Your assistant? Brother Gervase?’

  ‘I will bake extra and freeze it. He can be trusted to defrost,’ Brother James said glacially. ‘Nothing more.’

  ‘You should be training him,’ the abbot reminded him gently.

  ‘I am trying to.’ Brother James bowed and went from the room.

  His abbot watched him go. ‘And perhaps the outside world may teach you, Brother James.’

  The arrival of the film crew at Wentworth Monastery was watched by the noviciates from the high window of their dormitory in a state of explosive excitement. The television set was only unveiled at the monastery on occasions of high national solemnity: a royal wedding, a royal funeral, a general election or the outbreak of war. The rest of the time it was shrouded in a purple pall, like an unwanted chalice, and wheeled into a cupboard in the refectory. But now television itself was coming to Wentworth Monastery, was thrusting itself in with lights and cables and vans and cameras and a small crane and track and a mobile generator.

  ‘When you have finished hanging out of the window like a coach-load of schoolgirls I should be glad to see you in chapel,’ the choirmaster observed sourly from the door of the noviciates’ dormitory. ‘And if I catch one, just one, young man looking towards the camera or behaving in any way as if his mind were not on the words of his service then there will be a choir practice which lasts until the middle of next week. You are to behave as if they are not there. And any man of any sense would be wishing they were not.’

  Brother James, torn between vanity and embarrassment, could not behave as if they were not there. They crept behind him with a huge camera in a nightmarish game of grandmother’s footsteps. Every time he paused and looked around, the great square dark eye would be peering at him, looking over his shoulder into the mixing bowl, flinching back from the splash of breaking eggs, dollying forward to catch the gleam of water drops on a toast-brown crust, a duster wildly polishing away the glaze of steam from a loaf newly emerged from the oven.

  ‘This is just actuality, lovey,’ the director assured him.

  Brother James cast one furious look at the young vegetable chef who had never heard one of the brotherhood called ‘lovey’ before.

  ‘When we get you in studio we’ll get in much closer. Some really luscious close-ups. This is just to show you in your natural environment. Tomorrow we’ll have you all to ourselves.’

  The vegetable chef kept his head down and sliced with devotion.

  ‘D’you have another – er – gown?’ the director asked. ‘As a bit of a change? One for best?’

  Brother James looked down at the brown habit and the white rope belt, the white apron overall. ‘No,’ he said shortly.

  ‘We could run you one up. You’d suit blue.’

  Brother James hesitated, unsure how to express revulsion. ‘No,’ he said simply.

  The director took him familiarly by the sleeve. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you look terrific. But we have a natural wood set, very nice, built just for you, very Gothic you know? A