The Parisian Christmas Bake Off Read online

  It was a long day watching Chef work his magic. Rachel was exhausted; every inch of her scrap of paper was filled with notes. Then at the end of the afternoon he told them to make something from the day’s demonstration—something that best showed off their skills—and she found herself breathing a sigh of relief. He’d take her seriously after he tasted her famous profiteroles and Lacey could wipe that smug smile off her face.

  But two and a half hours later Chef was hurling her choux pastry balls one by one out of the window, sneering, ‘These look shit.’

  Rachel fled as soon as she could, stalking down the road, head down, humiliated, hat pulled low, and her coat, still damp from the night before, clutched tight. Her scarf was covering all her face except her streaming eyes.

  ‘Hey, hey—’

  She heard Abby call but kept walking. Feet pounding the pavement in her winter boots. Rachel had already decided she was never going back. She didn’t want this anyway. What had made anyone even think she had it in her to be a baker?

  Saturdays at the counter standing next to her mum didn’t mean anything. She hadn’t actually baked anything that someone had bought, had she? Just pinched steaming loaves from the rack when no one was looking. Or sifted flour into the bowl for the lightest, softest croissants and whipped the egg white for the stickiest meringues while standing on an old bread box so she could reach the counter. It was her mum who’d done everything. All Rachel had done was cut the shapes of the biscuits. Bunnies at Easter. Ears of corn at harvest time. Ghosts at Halloween. Reindeer at Christmas; always with a red blob of icing on their noses. She’d watch her mum flick the nozzle of the piping gun so it was a perfect red dot. Then sometimes turn around and, when Rachel wasn’t expecting it, dot her on the nose with red. My little reindeer.

  ‘Hey, Rachel. Wait up.’

  Rachel paused at the corner, wiping her nose with her glove.

  ‘We’re having a drink.’ Abby was out of breath. ‘Round the corner.’

  ‘Oh, no, thanks.’

  ‘No, come on, we need to get to know each other. That way we’re stronger against Scrooge in there.’ Abby did an impression of Chef Henri, waving his hands in the air in disgust.

  Rachel shook her head. ‘There’s no point for me. I don’t think I’m coming back.’

  ‘Oh, you have to. You have to. You can’t leave. You were so brave in there. I’d have had to run away if it was me.’

  ‘Thanks, but it’s not really how I imagined it. I don’t want to work with him. I’m going to go home actually.’

  There was a laugh behind her. ‘You quit, Flower Girl?’ Neither of them had seen Chef Henri cycling past on his old bike.

  ‘It’s not quitting. I just don’t think it’s for me. I’ve made a mistake.’

  He barked a laugh. ‘You are scared like a little mouse and running back to England with your tail between your legs. All the same, you English girls. Weak. Babies. It’s a little tough and you run home to Mummy. I bet you can’t even make bread.’

  Rachel took a deep breath, affronted and trying to think of something suitably cutting in reply, but he carried on.

  ‘Go on.’ He made a shooing action with his hand. ‘Run away. Run, run, run. One less person for me to get rid of. This is beautiful.’ He laughed and then cycled off, ringing his bell, before she could get the words out that were queuing up in her head.

  She stood staring after him, furious. There was definitely a difference between leaving because it wasn’t right and quitting, wasn’t there?

  ‘Just one drink?’ said Abby, sensing weakness.

  What was it her mum had said when she’d tried to leave the Brownies, gym club, pony club? Just give it one more chance, for me.

  ‘OK, I suppose one drink.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  Chapter Five

  Everyone in the bar was so confident in their skills. Ali was sipping a demi pression. ‘I’ve always known about flavour. That’s my thing. I’m just worried he’s too traditional for me. That we won’t be able to express ourselves.’

  Marcel was feeding coins into the fag machine. ‘You must master the basics before you can express yourself properly.’

  ‘You sound like him,’ snorted Abby.

  ‘There are worse people to sound like.’ Marcel shrugged. ‘In his time he was the best. The greatest. My family, they had all his books. And then—’ he blew a raspberry through closed lips ‘—nothing.’

  ‘It’s been since uni—I used to be in the Chemistry lab making cherry essence rather than recreating photosynthesis. I’m like a flavour alchemist.’ Ali went on as if he hadn’t heard anything else that had been said.

  Marcel rolled his eyes heavenward behind him and leant against the cigarette machine, unwrapping the cellophane on his packet while Ali waffled on a bit more about the chemistry of taste.

  ‘Did you know about Lacey?’ said Abby, cutting in.

  ‘No, what?’

  Heads crowded together over the table; Cheryl knocked over the sugar shaker. Rachel looked away at the posters of famous film stars like Clark Gable and Bridget Bardot that lined the walls, not wanting to hear that much more.

  ‘Big businesswoman. Thirty years CEO of a luxury goods company. Jacked it all in for this.’

  ‘Really?’ George was shocked.

  ‘Apparently.’ Abby nodded.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Cheryl, quietly.

  ‘And how about you?’ Ali turned to Cheryl, who was pouring more red wine from the carafe on the table as unobtrusively as she could. ‘How did you get into this?’

  Cheryl blushed. ‘Same as everyone.’

  ‘Oh, no, love,’ said George, his accent thick Yorkshire. ‘We’re all different.’

  Cheryl had a neat red bob, perfect, as if it had been cut with a set square. Rachel watched her flick it so it covered more of her face. ‘I used to be a bit bigger.’

  ‘I understand.’ Abby patted her on the arm.

  ‘How big?’ asked George.

  Rachel made a face across the table, trying to encourage him to be a bit more tactful with his questions.

  ‘Pretty big,’ said Cheryl, blushing again, her hair getting further over her face. ‘To lose it I had to relearn about food. Learn to cook.’

  ‘But all them cakes—aren’t you tempted?’

  She shook her head. ‘I make them for my family, or for the neighbours. It’s the baking that hooks me. I just love it and for some reason I’ve found that if I make it, I don’t eat it.’ She laughed for the first time.

  Everyone smiled but Rachel saw Ali do a little eye roll behind his beer to himself. As if Cheryl was easy pickings.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she whispered to Abby.

  ‘Really, no? Don’t go. We’re getting to know each other.’

  The last thing Rachel needed was these probing, nosy questions and people sizing her up as competition. ‘Yeah, I really should go.’

  ‘Will we see you tomorrow?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Rachel walked to the bus stop and when the bus didn’t come she walked back all the way to her dingy flat. There was thin drizzle in the night air, the droplets flecking in the beam of the overhead lights. All the narrow streets were lit with Christmas stars that had been twined up the lampposts and tinsel hung from windows and around doors. Outside the churches little nativity scenes glowed bright, but she barely noticed.

  When she got to her building she stopped and looked up—at the blazing light from Madame Charles’s and then to the dark shutters in the roof—and thought of her lovely flat at home. Everything arranged just as she liked it. No surprises. All warm and cosy and hers.

  Trudging up the stairs, she wished she were back home—sitting on her lumpy sofa, marking homework with smiley faces, secretly weeping at The X Factor—rather than here, in this draughty loft, baking with a load of strangers.

  Inside she boiled up water on the rusty stove-top kettle and sat on the chair thinking a
bout Chef laughing and cycling away. How could she have been so bad? It was gutting. And he was so cruel. She could make bread, for God’s sake. OK, she hadn’t baked it for years, but that wasn’t to say she couldn’t.

  Bread was the one thing her hands simply refused to make, as if the dough held too much power in its smells, its texture, its taste—just the simple process of kneading and rolling was like her own personal Pandora’s box. But she’d always been good at it. Her gran could often be heard lamenting Rachel’s refusal to make her a batch of rolls or a wholemeal. As she thought about it she wondered if Ali, with his flavour combinations, could make a decent loaf.

  Damn Chef. He must have weaknesses. No one had come into the workshop and giggled at his past failures, had they?

  She leant forward and turned on the oven, watched the flames roar to life through the glass and turned it off again. Then she found herself on her feet taking flour from the shelf, butter she’d got from the Carrefour out of the fridge and breaking eggs into a chipped mixing bowl. Before she knew it she was flouring the worktop and kneading and stretching her dough as if she was on autopilot. Not thinking, just doing. When she looked down and saw the little round blob of dough it almost took her by surprise. She was glad to be able to leave it to prove on the table and got as far away from it as she could, going to the window to stare out at the Champs-Élysées view.

  She gazed at the perfect strands of fairy lights on the beautifully trimmed trees. It was dazzling—not a blown bulb or twig out of place. But combined with the sweet, sticky smell of raw dough in the air, it all made her suddenly feel quite homesick. Made her think of the monstrous great big tree that they hauled into the centre of Nettleton every year, branches sticking out all over the place. She’d always get needles itching down her back from helping to carry, and Jackie would stand on the church steps, bossing everyone about which side should face front. The great tree would wobble precariously as Mrs Pritchard’s handyman, Kenneth, secured the base and her son tied the top with rope to a lamppost and the old King’s Head sign. She sniggered at the memory of the year they’d forgotten to tie the top and it had crashed through the upstairs pub window at two in the morning almost skewering a pair of sleeping ramblers.

  Compared to these Champs-Élysées trees theirs was like the giant at the top of the beanstalk. Too big, hugely ugly and draped with a ramshackle selection of lights that the village had accumulated over the years. Some were big coloured light bulbs, others small maniacally flashing fairy lights that Jackie’s grandmother claimed had given her a funny turn. Around the lower branches the kids hung the snowflake decorations they made at school, all in a big cluster. And on the top was an angel that her gran could remember as a child. It was a disastrous beast. These perfect, beautiful French trees would turn their backs on it in disgust. They would shun the pride and joy of Nettleton.

  Rachel had a sudden urge to ask Jackie to text her a photo of it, but stopped mid-message, not wanting her to think she was a pathetic, needy idiot.

  Instead the alarm on her phone went off to tell her the dough was ready. In the past she would have plaited plump strands into individual little loaves but this time she just wanted it out of sight and hurled it into the oven, like a hot potato, where it sat off-centre on the baking tray.

  There was a knock on the door as she was still staring into the oven trying to work out how there was bread baking in there after so many years of her steering well clear. Surprised, she ran over, oven gloves still on, and pulled it open.

  Madame Charles’s housekeeper was standing on the landing, a big basket clutched in front of her paisley-patterned housecoat.

  ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Bonsoir—’ Rachel paused.

  ‘Chantal.’

  ‘Bonsoir, Chantal.’

  There was silence. Rachel leant by the door unsure whether to invite her in or if she was just about to be told that she’d done something wrong. She wondered whether she should tell Chantal now that she was leaving tomorrow.

  ‘I bring you some things.’ Chantal held up the basket, then peered round Rachel into the flat. ‘For your room.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rachel didn’t know what to say. ‘I think I have everything I need. Actually I’m leav—’

  Chantal cut her off. ‘Things to make it—je ne sais pas—happy?’

  ‘Happy?’ Rachel looked down at the bag as Chantal squeezed past her and put it down on the table.

  As Rachel closed the door Chantal pulled out two red cushions, a little frayed around the edges, and went and rested them on the sofa, plumping them up with both hands and then pulling the corners straight so they sat beautifully, as they might have once done in Madame Charles’s flat. Coming back to her bag, she took out a strip of thick aquamarine wool and, shaking it out, draped it over the ratty armchair in the corner, tucking it in neatly around the edges of the cushioned seat. Then she stood back, arms pointing to the objects, as if highlighting to Rachel what she was trying to do.

  ‘Happy,’ she said again.

  Slightly perplexed, Rachel watched her go back to her Mary Poppins basket and pull out a mirror with pink china flowers across the top. Pointing to a chip, Chantal rolled her eyes and said, ‘That Madame Charles throws away.’

  Next came a spider plant that she carried through the alcove and sat on the window sill alongside a tiny snow-globe of the Eiffel Tower; this she shook and held out to Rachel.

  ‘I buy this for you.’

  Crossing the room, Rachel picked the ball of plastic out of Chantal’s hands, lost for words. When she shook it she noticed her hands were shaking as she watched the snow fall gently round the spire—twisting and swirling round the miniature statue.

  The oven timer pinged but Rachel couldn’t take her eyes from her globe. Chantal wandered over, peered in through the oven door and, smelling the freshly baked bread in the air, she sighed.

  Finally tearing herself away from the plastic dome, Rachel glanced at Chantal and said, ‘Would you like some bread?’

  ‘Oh.’ Chantal rested her hands across her waist and stood as if this were what she’d been waiting for all along. ‘If it is not an intrusion.’

  Rachel shook her head. If anything it was something of a relief to have someone there with her.

  A few minutes later Chantal was sitting at the table with a cup of tea, smiling through a mouthful of warm, soft bread. ‘C’est très bon. Parfait.’ Tearing off another piece, she said, ‘You make very good bread.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Rachel didn’t really hear; she was somewhere else entirely, overwhelmed by the smell of fresh-baked bread and distracted by her snow-globe and the red cushions.

  ‘Yes. It is very good. Très bon. Like the boulangerie at the end of the road.’

  Rachel thought again about what her mum would say: One more chance. For me.

  ‘You compete, oui? For the bread? That is the competition.’

  ‘Pretty much. With Henri Salernes.’

  ‘Oh la la, Henri Salernes. Very grand. Whatever happened to him? I had his book. Very good, a very clever man. Trying to prove too much too young, I think. That is what the papers say if I remember, grew up badly—not a good home, you understand?’

  ‘I don’t really know that much about him. Just that he was an amazing baker once.’

  ‘Oui, once. He was the youngest and the most celebrated. He changed the way we bake. Then it all goes, pouf, like that. All the money on the drink and the drugs, I think. It is always on the drink and the drugs. Silly man. He had a lot of talent. But…’ she held her arms out wide ‘…c’est la vie.’ She popped the rest of her slice of bread in her mouth. ‘Well, if I was the judge, you will win already. You do very well.’

  One more chance. For me.

  ‘Very well. Very good bread.’

  For me?

  OK, Mum. She nearly said it out loud, nodding and holding tight to the globe.

  ‘You find it better? Yes?’ said Chantal, following her gaze from the snow-globe to the rest
of the room.

  ‘Yes. Thank you,’ Rachel replied. ‘I find it much better.’

  Chapter Six

  Next morning Rachel arrived at the pâtisserie with all the flowers snipped off her apron, determined to prove to Chef Henri he was wrong about her.

  Then she might leave.

  Walking up the stairs, she came across a man in a suit who flattened himself against the wall to let her pass.

  ‘Merci beaucoup,’ she said, not really paying attention, caught up in her determined stand against Chef.

  ‘It is my pleasure,’ he replied as she passed. His perfect English made her glance back. Short, neat black hair, sharp, tailor-made slate-grey cashmere suit, thick, dark eyebrows that drew together now over big brown eyes as he watched her looking at him.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said again and then felt foolish. ‘I er…’ she started, pointing up the stairs.

  But he just held two fingers to his forehead in a salute and smiled before turning away and clipping down the stairs.

  She watched him leave, pulling on a dark grey woollen coat as he got to the bottom step before yanking open the door into the icy cold. A lingering smell of expensive aftershave and soap made her close her eyes and consider how well groomed the French were. She breathed in again, trying to catch the scent once more, but it was gone. Running her finger along her bottom lip, she did a flash replay of the momentary conversation in her head and found that all she could remember was his eyes.

  ‘He is nice, non?’ Françoise, who worked in the pâtisserie, had stuck her head out of the doorway that adjoined the corridor and was following Rachel’s gaze.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know,’ she said too quickly.

  ‘He is very nice, I am telling you.’

  ‘Well…’ Rachel shrugged as if it barely mattered because she would never see him again.

  ‘Do you want an espresso?’ Françoise asked as she wiped her hands on her apron.

  ‘I shouldn’t really. But—’ Rachel glanced up the gloomy staircase to the workshop. ‘Go on, then.’