The Ingredients of Love (25 page)

Moved, I gave a little nod. “I promise,” I replied with a catch in my voice. Good old Jacquie!

“And do you know what the best thing is when you're there?” he asked, and I joined in with a laugh as he said, “You can see far out to sea!”

I tasted the sauce in the big wooden spoon. “That could definitely do with more red wine,” I said, and poured in more Burgundy. “Now, into the oven with it!” I looked at my watch. “Oh, I've got to set the tables.” I took off my apron, then my headscarf, and shook my hair loose. Then I went over to the little mirror on the wall near the kitchen door and freshened my lipstick.

“Won't make you any prettier,” said Jacquie as I went into the dining room. A few minutes later, Suzette arrived and together we put wineglasses and water glasses on the tables and folded the white linen napkins. I glanced at the reservation book. We were going to have a lot to do in the next couple of weeks and I urgently needed to take on a new server.

December was a really busy month and our little restaurant was actually fully booked almost every evening.

“We've got a Christmas party coming in this evening—sixteen of them,” I said to Suzette, “but it shouldn't be a problem, they're all having the set menu.”

Suzette nodded and shoved the tables next to the wall together.

“When it's time for dessert we must make sure that they all get their crêpes suzette at the same time. Jacquie can come out from the kitchen and flambé them on the dessert wagon.”

For the chef to make a personal appearance to flambé the crêpes suzette at the table in a large copper pan, and fillet the oranges with flamboyant gestures, cutting them into slices, then strew almonds over them and pour Grand Marnier over them, was always a special attraction, and half the restaurant would watch as the bluish flames flared up for a few seconds.

I was just checking the cutlery when the telephone rang. “You get it, Suzette,” I said. “Don't take any more reservations for this evening.”

Suzette went to the telephone, which was at the back of the restaurant near the till.
“Le Temps des Cerises, bonsoir,”
she trilled, her
“bonsoir”
stretching out to include a questioning tone. “
Oui, monsieur,
one moment, please.” She waved to me. “It's for you, Aurélie.” She handed me the phone.

“Hello?” I said, not expecting what was coming.

“Er … Bong soir—do I spik to Mademoiselle Aurélie Bredin?” said a voice with an unmistakable English accent.

“Yes.” I could feel the blood rushing to my head. “Yes, this is Aurélie Bredin.” I turned to the counter where the reservation book lay open.

“Oh, Mademoiselle Bredin, I am so heppy that I reach you. This is Robert Miller, I could only find the number out of the restaurant. Am I disturbing you?”

“No,” I said, and my heart shot into my mouth. “No, no, you're not disturbing me at all, the restaurant doesn't open for another half hour. Are you … are you still in Paris?”

“Oh, no, I'm afraid not,” he replied. “I had to get back to Angland early the next morning. Listen, Mademoiselle Bredin…”

“Yes?” I blurted, pressing the phone to my ear.

“I'm really terribly sorry about yesterday evening,” he said. “I … my goodness!… I was thunderstruck when you were suddenly there, standing in front of me as if you had falled from the heavens. I could only look at you, you were so lovely in your red dress—like from a different galaxy…”

I took a deep breath and bit my lip. “And I thought you wouldn't even remember me,” I said with relief.

“No, no!” he cried. “No, you must not thought that! I remind everything—your lovely letter, the picture! I just could not believe at that first moment that it were really you, Aurélie. And I was so confused by all those many people who all wanted something from me and my editor and my agent who keeped on looking and listened to everything we spoke. And I suddenly was unsure what I must say.” He sighed. “And now I have such fear that you hold me for a great idiot…”

“But no,” I answered, my ears going red. “Everything is all right.”

“My goodness, I have been stupid. Please, you must forgave me. I am not so good with so much people, you know,” he said abjectly. “Be not angry with me.”

Mon Dieu,
was he sweet! “Of course I'm not angry with you, Mr. Miller,” I hurriedly said.

I heard a noise behind me and saw Suzette, who was following our conversation with increasing interest. I decided to ignore her, and leaned over the reservation book.

Robert Miller made a sound of relief. “That is so nice of you, Aurélie—could I say Aurélie?”

“Yes, of course.” I nodded—I could have gone on with this conversation forever.

“Aurélie … could I then still hope for eating with you? Or will you no more invite me to your little sweet restaurant?”

“Yes, of course I will, I will!” I almost shouted, and turned to see the question mark in Suzette's eyes as she busied herself behind me. “You only have to say when you can make it.”

Robert Miller was silent for a moment and I could hear the rustle of paper. “How about the sixteenth of December?” he said. “I've got business near Paris all day, but the evening belongs to you.”

I closed my eyes and smiled. The sixteenth of December was my birthday. And it was a Monday. It looked as if everything that was important in my life just then was on a Monday.

It was on a Monday that I'd found Miller's book in the little bookstore. It was on a Monday that I'd encountered the faithless Claude and his pregnant girlfriend in La Palette. It was on a Monday that I'd seen Robert Miller for the first time at a reading I'd only heard about just in time. And it would be on a Monday that also happened to be my birthday that a little private dinner with a most interesting writer would take place. If things went on like this, I'd probably marry on a Monday, too, and die on a Monday, and Mrs. Dinsmore would water my grave with her little watering can.

I smiled again.

“Hello, Mademoiselle Aurélie? Are you still there?” Miller's voice sounded worried. “If the Monday is not a good day then we will seek another day. But the eating must take place, I insist.”

“The meal
will
take place.” I laughed happily. “On Monday the sixteenth of December at eight o'clock. I'm looking forward to seeing you, Monsieur Miller!”

“As much as I am looking forward could you not look forward,” he said.

Then he added hesitantly, “Could I also ask you a little favor, Mademoiselle Aurélie? Please don't say nothing about our meeting to André Chabanais. He's very nice, but he is some of the times a bit, how do you say … business obsessed. If he knows I am in Paris he will also want to see me and then we won't have enough time for us…”

“Don't worry, Mr. Miller. I'll be as silent as the grave.”

When I hung up, Suzette looked at me wide-eyed.

“
Mon Dieu,
who
was
that man?” she asked. “Did he proposition you, or what?”

I smiled. “That was the man who'll be my dinner guest here on the sixteenth of December,” I said. “And my
only
guest, at that!”

And with those cryptic words I left the astonished Suzette standing and unlocked the restaurant door.

The meeting with Robert Miller would remain my little secret.

*   *   *

Paris is not called the City of Light for nothing. And to my mind Paris particularly deserves the name in December.

No matter how gray November had been with its rain and those days when you had the feeling that it would never be bright again—in December Paris was transformed as it was every year into a sea of sparkling light. You really got the feeling that a fairy had flown through the streets and sprinkled the houses with stardust. And if you drove through Paris in the afternoon or evening, the city with its Christmas decorations shone like a fairyland in silver and white.

The gnarled trees on the Champs-Élysées were adorned with thousands of little lights; children and even adults stood in amazement at the window displays in Galeries Lafayette, Printemps, or the smaller but very up-market department store Bon Marché, admiring the glittering decorations; in the little streets and great boulevards you could see people with the beribboned paper bags that held their Christmas gifts; there were no long lines outside the museums anymore—even in the Louvre you could get through to the
Mona Lisa
with no trouble in those last weekends before Christmas and wonder at her enigmatic smile to your heart's content. And over everything else the Eiffel Tower shone out—that powerful and yet delicately filigreed symbol of the city, a magnet for all lovers visiting the city for the first time.

I'd been skating there twice with little Marie, Bernadette's daughter.
Patiner sur la Tour Eiffel,
announced the sky blue poster that showed a white Eiffel Tower with a pair of old-fashioned skaters in front of it. Marie had insisted on going up to the first level of the tower on foot. I hadn't been up the tower for ages, and as we climbed up kept stopping to look down between the iron supports, which from really close up looked gigantic. The cold air and the climb took my breath away, but then we were at the platform, circling the ice on our skates, flying with reddened cheeks and shining eyes above the sparkling, glittering city, and for a few moments I actually felt like a child once more myself.

There's something about Christmas that always throws us back upon ourselves, on our memories and wishes, our childhood self, which is always standing wide-eyed with amazement outside the great door behind which the wonder is waiting.

Rustling paper, whispered words, burning candles, decorated windows, the smell of cinnamon and cloves, wishes that are written on paper or spoken to the heavens and that may perhaps come true—Christmas wakens, whether you want it or not, that eternal desire for the wonderful. And the wonderful is not something you can possess or hold on to, it doesn't
belong
to you and yet it is always there like something that is gifted to us.

I leaned my head happily against the window of the taxi as it crossed the Seine and looked down on the river glistening in the sunlight. On my lap, wrapped in tissue paper, lay the red coat. Bernadette, who had invited me to breakfast that morning, had given it to me for my birthday.

All in all this sixteenth of December had begun very promisingly—it had actually begun the night before as we all, after the last guests left at about half past twelve, drank a champagne toast to my thirty-third birthday: Jacquie, Paul, Claude, Marie, and Pierre, our new kitchen boy, who at sixteen was the youngest of us all; Suzette, who had spent the whole evening hinting that there was yet another surprise awaiting me; and Juliette Meunier, who had been helping out almost every evening since the first week in December.

Jacquie had baked a delicious chocolate cake with raspberries, and we all ate a slice. He also presented me with a big bouquet of flowers on behalf of them all. There were brightly wrapped packages for me—a thick scarf with matching knitted gloves from Suzette, a little notebook with an oriental pattern from Paul, and from Jacquie a satin bag of shells containing a train ticket.

It was a lovely, almost family moment as we all stood in the empty restaurant and rang in my new year with champagne. And when I pulled the covers up about two o'clock, I fell asleep to the thought that I was about to have an exciting rendezvous with a good-looking writer whom I didn't really know, though I thought I did.

The taxi driver drove over a bump in the road and the paper the coat was wrapped in rustled.

“You're crazy!” I'd cried out as I opened the big package that was lying on the breakfast table. “The red coat! You're really crazy, Bernadette, it's far too expensive!”

“It's to bring you luck,” Bernadette had answered as I hugged her tight with tears in my eyes. “This evening … and always, whenever you wear it.”

And so it came about that in the early afternoon of the sixteenth of December I was standing in a carmine red coat outside Le Temps des Cerises, which was actually closed on Mondays—an adventurer wrapped in the scent of Heliotrop and the color of happiness.

Half an hour later I was standing in the kitchen preparing the meal. It was my birthday dinner, but more than that it was the menu with which I wished to show my gratitude for the fact that a terribly unhappy November day had ended with a happy smile—a smile that would prepare the way for something new.

And last but not least it was also, of course, my first dinner with Robert Miller.

I had thought for a long time about what culinary delights I would impress the English writer with—but had still ended up with the
menu d'amour
my father had left me.

It was certainly not the most refined menu French cuisine had to offer, but it had two unbeatable advantages: It was easy, and I could cook it perfectly, so that I could give my undivided attention during the meal to the man whose arrival I was—I have to admit it—awaiting with delicious anxiety.

I put on my white apron and unpacked the bags I'd filled at the market at midday: fresh field salad; two heads of celery; oranges; macadamia nuts; little white mushrooms; a bunch of carrots; red onions; shiny, almost black eggplants and two gleaming red pomegranates; lamb; and bacon fat. There was always a supply of potatoes, cream, tomatoes, herbs, and baguettes in the kitchen, and I'd prepared the blood orange parfait with cinnamon that, together with the
gâteaux au chocolat,
formed the crowning glorious finale to the
menu d'amour,
the evening before.

The hors d'oeuvre was to be field salad with fresh mushrooms, avocados, macadamia nuts, and little cubes of crisp-fried bacon. Over this I would pour—and that was the really special ingredient—Papa's delicious potato vinaigrette.