Page 13 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas
The date was being held in a cookery school. Kate parked her car and crunched along the gravel drive and through a stone archway decorated with ivy and twinkling fairy lights. She was met at the door by a Lightning Strikes rep who took her name and told her to head for workbench five.
The walls were hung with more swags of ivy and holly. A Christmas tree that must have been twelve feet high stood in one corner, the fairy at the top almost lost in the vast ceiling. The room was filled with workbenches, each with its own cooktop and oven beneath. Around the edges of the room were more worktops with food mixers and electric hand whisks, and hundreds of hooks with utensils swinging from them.
Two gigantic saucepans steamed at the back of the room and filled the place with the heady scents of mulled wine and cinnamon. Out of one, a rosy-cheeked woman ladled hot wine into glass-handled jars, and a similarly flustered-looking man did the same with the saucepan labelednonalcoholic. Kate got herself a jar of the latter and took her place by bench five. She sincerely hoped her date turned up tonight.
All the benches faced toward a huge expanse of glass at the front, which lent a view of a generous walled kitchen garden, lit by floodlights. Just as the noise of excitable amateur chefs was becoming unbearable, a stream of youths in white chef tunics glided in carrying wicker baskets laden with vegetables and meats and fish. A rotund ruddy-faced woman waddled in with an air of authority, and the room hushed.
Kate felt someone brush her arm. She turned to see her very handsome date smiling at her, and she smiled back far too broadly.
“I’m Michael,” he whispered as the head chef boomed instructions from the front of the room. “And you must be Kate.”
He held out his hand and she shook it, still smiling.This could be something,she thought.This could actually be something.And her stomach gave a little lurch of excitement.
For obvious reasons Kate and Michael cooked a vegetable dish.Kate and Michael, Michael and Kate.She ran their names together around in her head, and she liked the way they sounded.Oh, hi! This is Michael; we fell in love over a vegetable tagine.She chided herself for being such a schoolgirl. But it was hard not to be, when you were in a classroom with the best-looking boy in the school.
Michael was very handy in the kitchen as it turned out, and they worked well together, chatting and laughing as they followed the extensive list of instructions. They were making a Thai vegetable curry—making the fragrant curry paste from scratch—with sticky coconut rice.
“If you don’t mind me saying,” said Kate as she stirred the bubbling pot of pale red sauce, “you don’t seem like the sort of person who would need all this to meet someone.” She gestured around the room with her free arm.
Michael carefully dropped handfuls of chopped baby corns and green beans into the thin but potent liquor. He smiled.
“I could say the same about you,” he said.
“But it’s different for me,” said Kate. “I live in a tiny village; we don’t exactly have a steady stream of attractive single men passing through. You work in an art gallery in the city.”
“A bigger pool doesn’t necessarily mean a better swim,” said Michael.
He looked down at Kate and gave her a cheeky half smile, and she felt her cheeks—already glowing from the steamy pot—redden.
With their meals cooked, the couples plated their spoils and headed through to a candlelit converted barn to eat. It was cooler there, and Kate was glad of it. The seating was informal; two large banqueting tables ran the length of the barn with benches on either side.
Kate and Michael—she still loved how that sounded—sat opposite each other and began to eat. Invariably as their comfort with each other grew, the lighthearted conversation moved on to more serious topics.
Their backgrounds were very different, but their politics were the same. He made no bones about the fact that he had “father issues” owing to his dad’s controlling nature, and Kate found herself confiding in him that her mother’s affair with the estate agent had been far from her first indiscretion.
“I mean, no one likes to admit that their mother was a bit of a slapper,” said Kate. “But unfortunately, my mother was a bit of a slapper.”
Michael laughed.
“I genuinely think that my mother would have been much happier if she had had affairs,” said Michael. “Instead of being a begrudging martyr.”
“Why do people stay together when they’re clearly so unhappy?” Kate asked. “It makes no sense.”
“To save face?” suggested Michael.
“Maybe in the 1940s,” said Kate. “But not now, surely?”
“In some social circles it would still cause a scandal,” Michael said in such a knowing way that Kate determined to look his family up in Laura’s high-society gossip magazines.
“So,” said Kate as she poured them each another glass of water from the carafe. “The big question is, are our parents’ inadequacies the reasonwe find ourselves midthirties and still single?” And she smiled broadly at what she thought was quite a humorous suggestion.
Michael didn’t smile. He looked down at his plate and gently rested his cutlery across it. A curtain of dirty-blond hair fell over his eyes, but Kate could see by the way he bit his lip that he was fighting back tears.
Kate didn’t know what to do. The noise in the barn burst through the conversational cocoon she’d been wrapped in, and she was suddenly very aware of people all around her laughing and shouting and preening at their dates, or the dates of others in some cases, and of her and Michael’s awkward silence in the middle of it all.
“I’m so sorry,” said Kate. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just trying to be funny.”
Michael sniffed. Kate handed him her napkin and he dabbed his eyes and wiped his nose.
