Chapter Twenty-Two
Christopher
With the food from Thelma and Dai, and a quick run to the supermarket and corner shops, they have just enough food to feed everyone tomorrow. Hopefully, Christopher thinks, everyone will just be glad of a hot meal and company, and not mind what ends up on the table.
For starters, there’ll be a cream of vegetable soup using all the sadder bits of veg they rescued from the supermarket.
And through a stroke of luck there was only UHT non-dairy cream in stock, so if any vegans show up it’ll work for them, too.
Christopher will bake some sourdough loaves to go with the soup.
Easy – he’ll just have to be up nice and early to get going on that.
They’ve got what is essentially almost all of one of Thelma’s lamb’s legs to roast, which should be more than enough meat for everyone.
Dai threw in a couple of hams, too, which Nash wants to cook first so there’s time for them to cool ahead of slicing.
For the vegetarians, they’ll make a kind of Wellington-cum-nut-roast, which Nash insists he has done before.
And then there are all the various veggies scrounged from the supermarkets and whatever anyone had going spare, and more potatoes than Christopher has ever seen in his life.
As for dessert, Christopher remembers he has some of the Christmas puds left in the cupboard, ready to age for next year, but they’ll be good to eat now.
As evening really draws in, Nash carries all the food home from the community centre, making several trips, while Christopher unloads the supermarket shopping from the van. He’s just about to unpack the bags, too, when Nash stops him.
‘Don’t you have a gingerbread house to make?’
‘It’s not essential.’
Nash gives him a look he can’t quite place. ‘I can handle this. Go make your silly little biscuit building. It’s important to do your traditions, right?’
Something catches in his throat, and Christopher wants to speak, but he’s so tired that all he can really do is nod. He tries not to watch as the shopping piles up, and Nash meticulously organises it, packing things away in the bakery kitchen as though he has been doing so for years.
It’s bordering on night by the time Christopher is finally able to start on the dough for his gingerbread house.
If he was being sensible, he would go to bed early, and put this off another day – or until after Christmas.
After all, he has to cook a whole Christmas dinner for, best estimate, about twenty-five adults tomorrow.
And that’s after a long day of puppy birthing and healing old resentments between former friends, and dealing with annoyingly helpful yet still egotistical and handsome film stars he’d only just slept with. It’s been . . . a day.
But because nothing about this is a normal Christmas, baking gingerbread is at least a tradition he can ground himself in.
Funny how much Nash could sense he needed it, really.
Over the last few years, he’d done a real showstopper, mostly because his mother always wanted to give one away for the Christmas fête she organised.
If he had time, he’d always make one for himself, too.
The thing about making a house out of biscuit is that so much can go wrong, but that’s bizarrely what Christopher likes about it.
Every step has to be meticulous – the structural integrity of the biscuit, the design of the house, the decorations placed outside, which must not overbalance the building itself.
Really, it’s a little like the bakery window displays he likes doing: the balance of bright and edible, the eye-catching and the stable.
Given the general lack of supplies, he’ll have to think on his feet more about decoration, but he falls back on his usual recipe for gingerbread.
It’s a dough not dissimilar from a pepparkakor, but not as thin, so probably more akin to a speculoos.
He’s tried a few other variations in the past – including golden syrup instead of treacle – but this one feels right. It feels like home.
He feels a little embarrassed when he takes down his notebook of recipes from the supplies shelf, self-consciously flicking through to the right page, slightly spattered with icing sugar and spices.
It’s silly but this book feels like the sum of all his hopes and dreams, in some ways.
He started filling it out when he was at patisserie school, determined that writing things out by hand would help techniques stick in his brain.
And now, whenever that dark overwhelm appears, threatening that this dream isn’t going to last because how could it, he comes to this book and flicks through the pages, filled with hopes and knowledge and promises to himself.
A stillness settles over him as he measures out all the spices – cinnamon, of course, ground cardamom too, and a kick of ginger.
Thelma had also brought a couple of boxes of eggs fresh from her farm, so they go into the mix, yolks so golden-orange they might be red.
The lid of the black treacle comes away in a deliciously gooey pop, and the dark syrup folding into all the dry ingredients feels like a kind of alchemy.
As Christopher works the dough, he can’t help but watch Nash from across the kitchen, settled in a contemplative quiet as he makes the plan for tomorrow with all the timings. He’s thorough, and generous with his time and thoughts.
Christopher doesn’t mind the number-juggling part, but he’s really quite glad that Nash has taken the thinking out of tomorrow for him.
Naturally, he’ll double check – he’s still Christopher after all – but still.
As he’ll be the one leading the cooking, he’s glad he’ll have Nash’s plan to work from.
Perhaps all this planning has the same effect on Nash as working the dough has on Christopher?
Nash certainly liked it when they were cooking for everyone a few days – and what feels like a lifetime – ago.
He wonders, just for a moment, how this side of Nash shows up in his life in LA, away from Christopher.
Being a working actor sounds as if there’s a lot of showing up when someone tells you to, so where does he find the time to take charge and plan something? Or even cook?
There’s so much he doesn’t know about this man.
What he does know are things like his remarkable handiness, the easy ability to charm people, and how he sounds when . . .
Spices and sugar crowd the air and Christopher feels for a moment as if he can’t breathe. He shakes his head, and flips the dough round, clapping flour into his hands. He has to move. If he stays too still, the thoughts rush in.
‘Are you okay?’ Nash asks, his concentration replaced with concern.
‘Yes. Fine.’
His phone hums with a text, and he’s grateful for the distraction.
Shaz: Tell Nash I sourced the pastry. Also, be proud, I’m helping Ursula wrangle the guests for tomorrow. Personal growth, a Christmas miracle x
‘Err, Shaz says she sourced the pastry?’ he says to Nash with confusion.
‘Oh great. Tell her thanks.’
‘You know this is a bakery. We can just make it from scratch ourselves.’
‘For vegans? This seems to be a very butter-central kind of bakery.’
‘Oh,’ he says, suitably chastened. ‘That’s a good point.’
‘Plus, who can be fucked to make pastry?’
‘Me? I’m quite literally a baker.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, none of us have forgotten that,’ Nash says with a smile.
Christopher huffs but can’t keep the grin from his lips. ‘Fine, I take your point, I probably don’t have what we need to hand.’
‘Nah, but luckily the vegans insist that pre-made is in fact usually vegan, so I set Shaz a mission to steal as much as she could from people’s freezers.’
‘Excellent thinking.’
‘I’m really not just a pretty face, Calloway.’
His mouth goes dry thinking about kissing that pretty face just last night.
‘Are you almost done?’ Nash asks, when Christopher doesn’t respond.
‘Yeah, I think so. I just need to let it rest for a while.’ He wraps it in a rather finicky bit of clingfilm and places it in the fridge, in a space Nash had left for it.
Gingerbread always rolls out better when it’s chilled, he finds.
Plus, he gets a more reliable size of biscuit if the butter isn’t starting out half-melted.
He turns to find Nash, who is fiddling with a bit of clingfilm he’d ripped off. ‘Is this Britain’s excuse for plastic wrap?’
‘Yeah, it’s not very good, is it?’
‘Well, it’s a point in your favour of not being a murderer, because you’d never be able to wrap me up in this stuff. The whole premise of Dexter would have fallen apart.’
‘Always glad to hear you’re still coming round to the idea that I’m not going to murder you.’
‘It’s a work in progress.’
Christopher peers over at the paper Nash was working on, only to see it is actually many, many pages full of timings, diagrams and instructions. It’s meticulous. ‘Have you worked out the plan of action?’ A slightly redundant question considering the depth of what he’s looking at.
Nash guides Christopher through the timings and his ideas.
‘I think so. And I’ve got the recipes to hand for us so, if you’re too busy and you need me to cook anything, I can just follow that.
We’re going to have to do more individual dishes rather than batch-cook a couple of big things, as we don’t really have enough of any group of ingredients to do that, but I think it’s doable. There’ll be food.’
‘Speaking of food, I think it might be beans on toast for dinner.’
Nash winces. ‘I knew I’d be participating in a British culinary exchange, but does it have to be that?’
They stomp up the stairs together to investigate what’s left in Christopher’s rather bare cupboards.
‘Aha!’ cries Nash, on his hands and knees with his head deep in a cupboard. He wriggles out with a packet of instant risotto. ‘I can work with this.’
‘I didn’t even know that was in there.’