Chapter Seven The Château
‘Would you like to see the chateau?’ James asked, surprising himself with the question.
‘My family has this place in the Jura, in France. It’s nothing fancy, well, it’s quite fancy, actually; sixteenth century with towers and things but it’s quiet and there’s good skiing nearby and I thought... if you wanted... we could...’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘I’d like that.’
???
The chateau was, despite James’s disclaimers, extremely fancy.
It sat in a valley in the Jura mountains, surrounded by forests and vineyards and the kind of scenery that made you understand why people had been fighting over this part of France for a thousand years.
The building itself was sixteenth century, all round towers and castellated walls, with a west wing that had been added in the eighteenth century and a kitchen that had been modernised sometime in the mid-1990s and not touched since.
‘The hot water’s temperamental,’ James said, as they pulled up the gravel drive.
‘And there might be a ghost on the third floor, though I’ve never actually seen it, allegedly it speaks French.
And the heating takes about three hours to warm the place up, so we’ll want to light some fires.
But apart from that, it’s quite comfortable. ’
Anastasia looked at the chateau with an expression he couldn’t quite read.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘You think so?’
‘It looks like something from a fairy tale. The kind of place where princesses get locked in towers.’
‘I hope you don’t feel locked in. The towers are quite easy to get out of, there are stairs.’
She laughed. ‘I meant it as a compliment.’
‘Ah. Good. Compliments I like.’
They explored the house together. James showed her the library, with its shelves of leather-bound books that no one had read in decades. The dining room, with its table that could seat twenty and its chandelier that had come from a palace in Vienna. The kitchen, was enormous and impractical.
‘I should have thought about food,’ he admitted. ‘There’s a village about twenty minutes away. We could drive down, find a restaurant...’
‘I can cook.’
‘You can?’
‘Don’t sound so surprised. I’m not completely helpless.’ She opened the refrigerator, which contained, unexpectedly, eggs and butter and cream. ‘The caretaker must have stocked it, I can make something with this.’
The cupboards, it turned out, contained rather more than James had expected. Dried goods, spices, pasta, rice and a large basket of vegetables.
‘What are you going to make?’
‘Borscht. If you can find me some beetroot and onions.’
The vegetables were arranged artistically, so were really there for the decoration, but nestling at the bottom was a bunch of beetroot.
‘I need cooking wine,’ Anastasia said, surveying her ingredients.
James looked in the wine cellar, it did not contain cooking wine. It contained only the kind of bottles that made sommeliers weep with joy.
‘Will this do?’ he asked, holding up a 1990 Bordeaux.
Anastasia stared at him. ‘That’s a serious wine.’
‘I’m afraid that all the wine is like that, we are in France after all. Apart from that it is some very old port, spirits and something my stepfather brought back from Romania that I’m fairly sure is actually paint thinner.’
‘I can’t cook with that. It’s worth a fortune.’
‘It’s wine and wine is for drinking and cooking.’ He found a corkscrew and opened the bottle with the cheerful disregard of a man who had never had to worry about the price of anything. ‘There. Now it’s cooking wine.’
She shook her head, but she was smiling. ‘You’re impossible.’
‘I’ve been told.’
She cooked. James watched, occasionally fetching ingredients, mostly just observing the way she moved around the kitchen with a confidence he’d never seen in her before. Here, with some vegetable peelings on her apron and steam rising from the stove, she seemed different. More herself.
‘You’re staring,’ she said, without turning around.
‘Sorry. You’re interesting to watch.’
‘I’m making soup. It’s not that interesting.’
‘It’s pink soup. That’s quite interesting.’
‘Borscht is supposed to be pink. Red, actually, but the cream makes it pink.’ She tasted from the spoon, adjusted something, tasted again. ‘My grandmother used to make this every Sunday. She said it was the only food worth eating in winter.’
‘Was she a good cook?’
‘She was a good eater. Cooking was part of that. You learned to make something from nothing, to stretch ingredients, to feed a family when there wasn’t enough.
’ She stirred the pot slowly. ‘These days, I make it because it reminds me of her. And because it’s one of the few things I know how to cook properly. ’
James moved closer, looking into the pot. The soup was a deep, vibrant pink, scattered with fresh dill.
‘It smells amazing.’
‘It tastes better. Here.’ She lifted a spoon, cupped her hand beneath it and held it out to him.
He tasted. It was extraordinary: earthy, sweet and complex, nothing like the standard chicken and tomato soups that were his go-to when he wanted some hot wet food.
‘That’s incredible.’
‘It’s just soup.’
‘It’s not just soup. It’s...’ He searched for the right word. ‘It’s you. In food form. That sounds strange. I mean...’
‘I know what you mean.’
They stood there, in the vast kitchen, with the soup bubbling and the Bordeaux breathing and the winter light fading outside the windows. Anastasia had a smudge of flour on her cheek. James reached out, without thinking and brushed it away.
She didn’t move back.
‘James,’ she said quietly.
‘Yes?’
‘I think I might be falling for you. And I’m not sure what to do about it.’
His heart stopped. Or felt like it stopped. Or did something that hearts weren’t supposed to do but which felt, in that moment, entirely appropriate.
‘You could keep falling,’ he suggested. ‘I promise I’ll catch you.’
‘That’s very romantic.’
‘I have my moments.’
She laughed and then she kissed him. Or he kissed her.
It was hard to tell who moved first. But suddenly they were kissing, in the kitchen of a sixteenth-century chateau, with pink soup on the stove and a bottle of serious Bordeaux on the counter, James thought: this is it.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.
When they finally pulled apart, both slightly breathless, Anastasia looked at him with her magnificent grey-green eyes and said: ‘The soup is going to burn.’
‘Let it.’
‘It took an hour to make.’
‘Worth it.’
She laughed again and turned back to the stove. But she reached out with one hand, found his and held it.
They ate the soup by the fire in the library, drinking the wine. It was, James had to admit, too good to waste on cooking and Anastasia had to admit was not in the recipe anyway. Outside, the stars twinkled as a frost fell on the chateau, not that either of them noticed.
‘I should go to bed,’ Anastasia said eventually, though she didn’t move.
‘You should. We’re skiing tomorrow. If you still want to.’
‘I still want to.’
‘Good.’ He paused. ‘Your room is the one at the top of the stairs. The one with the blue wallpaper. Unless you’d rather...’
‘The blue room is fine.’
‘Right. Good. I’ll be down the hall. If you need anything.’
She stood, stretched, looked down at him with an expression that made his heart do that thing again.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For this. For the chateau and the extremely expensive cooking wine. For all of this...’
She bent down and kissed him once more, quickly, softly. ‘Goodnight, James.’
‘Goodnight.’
She left. James sat by the fire for a long time, watching the flames, thinking about everything and nothing.
He was, he realised, completely and utterly in love.
He had no idea what to do about it.
But for once, that didn’t seem like a problem.
???
They skied the next day and the day after that.
James had worried that Anastasia might be a beginner and that he’d have to spend the weekend on the nursery slopes, patiently explaining snowploughs, but she turned out to be terrifyingly competent.
She had learned as a teenager, she explained, on trips to the Carpathians and while she hadn’t skied in years, the muscle memory came back quickly.
By the second afternoon, she was overtaking him on runs he’d considered challenging.
‘You’re very good,’ he said, as they paused at the top of a ridge, looking out over the valley.
‘I’m adequate. You’re the one who’s good. When you’re not showing off.’
‘I wasn’t showing off.’
‘You were absolutely showing off. That last run, with the jumps...’
‘Those weren’t jumps. Those were... enthusiastic turns.’
‘They were jumps. You were trying to impress me.’
‘Was it working?’
She smiled. ‘Maybe.’
They skied down together, not racing, just enjoying the mountain and the snow and the particular pleasure of moving through space with someone who understood what you were doing.
That night, by the fire again, James told her about his father.
He hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t something he talked about, not really, not the details, anyway. Everyone knew the basic outline: father left, mother remarried etc. But the specifics, the waiting, the hoping, the slow realisation that hope was pointless, those he kept to himself.
But Anastasia asked and James found himself answering.
‘I kept his room ready,’ he said, staring into the fire. ‘For years. I was convinced he was coming back. That there had been some mistake, some misunderstanding and one day he’d walk through the door and explain everything and it would all make sense.’
‘How old were you when you stopped believing that?’
‘Fifteen. Maybe sixteen. I’d been holding onto this idea that he’d come back for my birthday, my sixteenth birthday, the big one and when he didn’t, when there wasn’t even a card, I finally understood.
He wasn’t coming back. He’d never been planning to come back.
He just... left. Like we were a house he’d lived in for a while and then moved out of. ’
‘That must have been awful.’