Chapter 11
In the kitchen, she got Dan to break a bar of dark chocolate into small pieces while she chopped a block of unsalted butter into cubes. She placed the bowl containing the butter and chocolate on top of a pan of boiling water, and they watched them gradually melt.
“I can see you’re a dab hand at this,” said Dan. “I mean you’re following a recipe for my sake, but you clearly know what you’re doing.”
“Oh yeah,” she said loftily. “Me and baking go way back. Worry not, Dan, you’re in safe hands. It’s going to be dual control, just like in your car. You won’t crash or burn with me.”
She removed the bowl from the pan, almost dropping it because she forgot to use oven gloves. Sucking on her burnt finger, she said, “We should switch the oven on now to…” – she consulted the recipe – “… one eighty degrees.”
The rest of the preparations went relatively smoothly. They mixed up eggs and sugar into a creamy mousse, poured the cooled chocolate and butter blend onto this and folded it together, before mixing it with cocoa powder and flour and decanting the final mixture into a tin.
“It looks and smells amazing,” said Dan. “I’m clearly in the hands of a master.”
Elaine stuck in a finger and licked it off, and her eyes sprang wide open. “Oh my God it is amazing!” She scooped up another bit on her forefinger and held it up to Dan. “Try!”
“Seriously?” He leaned down towards the proffered digit, stuck out the tip of his tongue and took a tentative lick.
“What do you call that?” she smirked. “Go on, suck it off!”
“Alright,” he grinned, and he took the whole top of her finger in his mouth and sucked it like a lollypop. It felt intimate, almost sexual, and he barely remembered to taste the mix.
She laughed at his expression. “Enjoyed that, did you? Right, let’s pop it in the oven, and then we can open some wine.”
Five minutes later, Dan was back on the sofa, and Elaine was seated on the floor with her elbow on the coffee table and her legs tucked beneath her, one knee just an inch or so from the toe of Dan’s shoe. A bottle of white wine and two filled glasses sat on the coffee table within easy reach of both of them.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Elaine asked him as she fondled the stem of her wine glass. “I don’t mean ghosts of the dead, but of the living?”
“I never realised that was a thing,” said Dan. “If you’re asking whether I think a living person could have a separate existence as a ghost, I’d have to say no. What about you?”
“I’ve sensed the presence of my father’s ghost, and maybe even glimpsed it a few times, and he’s still alive.”
“Oh.” Dan felt like the conversation had taken a bend a little too fast and left him stranded. “And have you told him you’ve seen his ghost?”
“I can’t, because I don’t know where he is. He disappeared sixteen years ago.” She took a gulp of her wine. “There’s this particular place where he and I used to go. It’s very special to both of us, like our own secret place, even though it’s open to the public.”
“Where’s that then?”
“The Hill Garden and Pergola in Hampstead Heath. Have you heard of it?”
At the sound of those words, a stream of images fell like confetti through Dan’s mind: wisteria-clad pillars in misty sunshine, the shadow of a couple on a bare white wall, a wooden dome framing the blue sky, lilies as big as boats on a rectangular pond. It made his heart both warmly alive and eaten through with regret.
“I have, yes,” he said. “It’s a little slice of Heaven.” That had been Lorna’s description of it on one of their walks there back in the day.
“That’s exactly how I think of it,” sighed Elaine. “Like a faded sort of Eden. Dad used to take me there when I was little. We’d sit on the grass and he’d smoke – something he wasn’t allowed to do at home – and tell me stories about the fairies who lived in the bushes.”
“Of course,” said Dan. “If fairies lived anywhere, that’s exactly where they’d be.”
“He said they were very shy and normally stayed hidden, but sometimes on quiet days when it was only him around and he lay very still, he’d glimpse them coming out onto the grass. Once, he said, a fairy even tried to steal the wedding ring from his finger. It was only because his finger had grown so fat, and it was on so tight, that the little thief failed. He also told me he’d heard stories of them loosening the teeth of sleeping children.”
“He sounds like a character, your Dad.”
She glanced up through the window blinds, as if seeking her father in the sky outside. The soft bands of sunlight on her neck and face were like faint zebra stripes.
“He was a character,” she said. “I mean he is. I know he’s still alive, but he could be anywhere, living under a different name, with a new wife and family. He was a doctor, so finding work wouldn’t be a problem. But I’m sure, wherever he is, that he misses me and he often thinks of the times we spent there at the Hill Garden and Pergola. And whenever he goes back there in his mind, and I happen to be there too, I’ll sense him. It couldn’t happen anywhere else I don’t think, but it’s special there, as you know, and it allows for those kind of connections.”
“There is something about that place,” said Dan. “It’s as if the walls between our world and other worlds are thinner there, whether we’re talking the world of fairies, or ghosts.”
She looked at him eagerly, her eyes reminding him of the restless blue-grey of Grove Park lake on a spring morning. “You’re right, it is like that!” she said. “Have you ever sensed anything there yourself?”
“No, apart from a slightly giddy feeling that anything is possible.”
A bit like now , he thought, taking another sip of his wine. A warm, rich scent of baked chocolate was emanating from the kitchen.
“Anything is possible,” she murmured, almost to herself. “That’s so true.”
“But you have to be sensitive to it, and I don’t think I am,” said Dan. “At least I’ve never allowed myself be.”
“Why’s that?”
“It goes back to when my parents died.”
She blinked a few times, as if reeling in her mind from some far off, watery world. “I remember you telling me about that. How old were you when it happened?”
“Thirteen.”
“God, that’s so young.”
Dan shrugged. “My brother was even younger. He was only nine. I became a sort of father figure to him, and it changed me, not completely for the better I have to say. I became this tough, practical person, a bit like my dad had been. We moved in with my uncle, who had a noisy, draughty old house, and my brother thought he could hear my parents at night. He’d hear the sound of a flute – which our mum used to play – coming from the attic, and sometimes he'd hear my dad’s hobbling footsteps on the stairs. Dad had a permanent limp from an old rugby injury. I told my brother there were no such things as ghosts and he was just imagining these things because he missed Mum and Dad. I wish I’d been more sensitive. He was just a grieving boy, missing his mum and dad. But I was trying to be the grown-up, and that meant I couldn’t believe in ghosts, or allow him to believe in them. As far as I was concerned, our parents were gone and we had to face the future without them.”
“I can understand that,” said Elaine. “You were only thirteen yourself, and you had little Jeremy to look after. That’s a lot of responsibility suddenly landing on your shoulders.”
And that wasn’t the half of it , thought Dan, but he didn’t want to tell her about Uncle Nigel, at least not yet. It was too depressing a topic. Also, something was nagging at him – something not quite right with what she’d said just now – his mind scratched around for it but couldn’t get any purchase. He settled for another sip of wine. It probably wasn’t important. More interesting by far were the vibrations he could feel coming through the air right now, soft as a sparrow’s slipstream. He sensed them in his own breathing, the pulsing in her neck and the way she was holding his gaze.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for the two of you,” said Elaine. He looked at the pale skin of her lower calf, visible beneath the hem of her watermelon skirt, and the tightness of the smooth fabric against her thigh. He glanced up to find her boldly staring at him. She was tugging at a strand of her dark brown, wavy hair, teasing it between her fingertips. In the soft bands of cloudy light coming through the blind, he saw hints of copper in the brown. He reached over and touched the strand she was holding. It was an intuitive motion. He was motoring along an open road without signposts, with no clear destination in mind, led only by a boyish wonder in the presence of beauty. He ran his finger slowly along the lock of hair until it met her hand, which he gently enclosed in his. Looking up at him, her smile was one of simple surprise and warmth, an unexpected light in the deep ocean. Her hand turned inside his and squeezed it.
A moment later, she rose up as stealthily as the tide and seated herself beside him. Her mouth was soft against his, her tongue light and teasing at first, then generous and passionate. Their hands moved over each other, clutching and caressing. He could feel the gentle swell of her breathing against his chest like the waves on a beach. It didn’t feel like a beginning for Dan, only the next step in a path they’d both been following since they first met .
And that was when he started to smell burning.