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Bread and Chocolate

The sun streamed through the windows set in the vaulted whitewashed ceiling high above Brother James’s head. The golden light illuminated the cloud of flour drifting upwards from his working hands, danced on the dough and was kneaded into the mix along with a whispered prayer and the live pungent yeast. He divided the great body of bread into eight equal pieces and set them to one side, covered in warm tea towels to rise. The scent of yeast and clean cloth filled the high kitchen.

An arched door opened and one of the younger brothers stuck his tonsured head into the room. Brother James looked up, irritated at the interruption. ‘Father Pierce says you are to go to him.’ Brother James threw one anxious glance towards his rising bread but obeyed the greater imperative. He rubbed his hands, enjoying the familiar pleasure of dry dough peeling from skin, washed them under the tap, dried them on a towel hung in front of the huge monastery cooker and, still wearing his crisp white apron, strode down the length of the kitchen aisle. At the far end, as distant as possible, the young vegetable cook was slicing an avalanche of courgettes.

‘May I see to the bread?’

‘No!’ Brother James snapped. ‘Leave it alone.’ He reproved himself for lack of charity as he shut the door on his brother’s crestfallen face. But he cheered up almost immediately. Any man who obeyed the rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, daily and without fail, might allow himself the occasional human error of grumpiness, especially to some damned carrot peeler.

‘It’s about your book,’ Father Pierce said without preamble.

Brother James stood before the huge carved desk, his head slightly bowed to signify his absolute obedience.

‘I have a letter here from the publishers. Turns out it’s doing rather well. They want to reprint it.’

A flicker of what might have been pride gleamed for a moment in Brother James’s face and was instantly repressed.

‘People are keen on cookbooks,’ the abbot remarked. ‘And they say that your bread recipes and the spiritual element are exactly right for…’ He consulted the letter ‘…the gourmet new-hippie market.’ He looked at Brother James over his severe horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Gourmet new-hippie? I thought it was just bread recipes with a few prayers.’

‘It is,’ Brother James said modestly.

‘They want you to do a programme for the television,’ Father Pierce remarked. ‘Show people how to cook the bread, I suppose. They want to film our daily life here, and then cut to the studio kitchen where you will be making our bread.’

‘Cut?’

‘Should I say slice?’

Brother James shook his head. ‘They want me on the television?’

Father Pierce consulted the letter again, he was enjoying himself. ‘They say that if you are sufficiently televisual they could promise you two programmes, and perhaps a new career as a presenter.’ His solemn demeanour cracked and he laughed aloud. ‘They seem to have no notion that you have a career. They seem to think you are employed as a cook here. They don’t understand that your vocation is to God, and that you bake bread as part of your service to the community.’

‘And what will you tell them?’ Brother James asked.

‘You have no preferences?’ the abbot questioned acutely.

The younger man bowed his head. ‘I obey, Father Pierce,’ he said simply.

The abbot thought for a moment. He did not tell the Brother Breadmaker that the fee offered at the foot of the letter would pay for installing central heating in the chapel, a sum for which he had been praying nightly. ‘I think you should do it,’ he said. ‘God speaks in many tongues. Perhaps He is calling you to teach those who ask for a stone and can be given bread.’

‘And who will make the bread for the brothers while I am away?’ Brother James asked.

‘Your assistant? Brother Gervase?’

‘I will bake extra and freeze it. He can be trusted to defrost,’ Brother James said glacially. ‘Nothing more.’

‘You should be training him,’ the abbot reminded him gently.

‘I am trying to.’ Brother James bowed and went from the room.

His abbot watched him go. ‘And perhaps the outside world may teach you, Brother James.’

The arrival of the film crew at Wentworth Monastery was watched by the noviciates from the high window of their dormitory in a state of explosive excitement. The television set was only unveiled at the monastery on occasions of high national solemnity: a royal wedding, a royal funeral, a general election or the outbreak of war. The rest of the time it was shrouded in a purple pall, like an unwanted chalice, and wheeled into a cupboard in the refectory. But now television itself was coming to Wentworth Monastery, was thrusting itself in with lights and cables and vans and cameras and a small crane and track and a mobile generator.

‘When you have finished hanging out of the window like a coach-load of schoolgirls I should be glad to see you in chapel,’ the choirmaster observed sourly from the door of the noviciates’ dormitory. ‘And if I catch one, just one, young man looking towards the camera or behaving in any way as if his mind were not on the words of his service then there will be a choir practice which lasts until the middle of next week. You are to behave as if they are not there. And any man of any sense would be wishing they were not.’

Brother James, torn between vanity and embarrassment, could not behave as if they were not there. They crept behind him with a huge camera in a nightmarish game of grandmother’s footsteps. Every time he paused and looked around, the great square dark eye would be peering at him, looking over his shoulder into the mixing bowl, flinching back from the splash of breaking eggs, dollying forward to catch the gleam of water drops on a toast-brown crust, a duster wildly polishing away the glaze of steam from a loaf newly emerged from the oven.

‘This is just actuality, lovey,’ the director assured him.

Brother James cast one furious look at the young vegetable chef who had never heard one of the brotherhood called ‘lovey’ before.

‘When we get you in studio we’ll get in much closer. Some really luscious close-ups. This is just to show you in your natural environment. Tomorrow we’ll have you all to ourselves.’

The vegetable chef kept his head down and sliced with devotion.

‘D’you have another – er – gown?’ the director asked. ‘As a bit of a change? One for best?’

Brother James looked down at the brown habit and the white rope belt, the white apron overall. ‘No,’ he said shortly.

‘We could run you one up. You’d suit blue.’

Brother James hesitated, unsure how to express revulsion. ‘No,’ he said simply.

The director took him familiarly by the sleeve. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you look terrific. But we have a natural wood set, very nice, built just for you, very Gothic you know? And I thought you’d look wonderful behind the pine wood table in blue. I saw you in blue.’

Brother James unclasped the fingers and stepped away. ‘This is the colour of my order,’ he said gently. ‘It is part of my vow of obedience to wear it. I could not wear anything else.’

‘Oh.’ The director was taken aback. ‘Can’t they let you off, just for once?’

‘I have made a vow, a solemn vow, of poverty, obedience and celibacy,’ Brother James told him firmly. ‘There is no ‘‘let-off ‘‘.’

The director looked at him in amazement. ‘You’ve promised to be poor? To be obedient? And don’t tell me you never –’

It was too much for the vegetable chef. With a wail he dropped his knife and fled from the kitchen.

They took Brother James to the television studio in a long limousine. He sat awkwardly in the back hugging a big box of bread ingredients and his favourite mixing bowl, spoons, and bread tins. He did not release the box until they showed him to the table in the corner of the studio which they had dressed as a monastery kitchen.

‘Is this absolutely right?’ asked the assistant director, a waif-like girl swathed completely in black, peering through her glasses. ‘Just like the monastery?’

‘I don’t have a crucifix hanging over the cooker,’ Brother James remarked.

‘No? OK.’ She turned her head. ‘Kill the crucifix – I mean – sorry, er, Mr James – take the crucifix down.’

‘You call me Brother James,’ he said mildly.

She looked pleased. ‘I’m Liz. Can I leave the Bible in shot?’

‘I don’t read the Bible in the kitchen,’ he said.

‘OK. OK. But we wanted something to show the spiritual element. You say in your book that you bless the bread before you start baking. Would that be with holy water? Or an incense burner – one of those, whatd’youcallit, censers – or something?’

Brother James felt unaccountably weary. ‘I just ask for a blessing on the work,’ he said. ‘This is bread that is going to feed my brothers. It should be made with love and respect.’

That stopped her for a moment. ‘That’s really neat,’ she said. ‘Really neat. And I guess you don’t need incense to do that?’

‘No.’

She glanced at her clipboard. ‘You’re a segment,’ she told him. ‘We’ll do you, and the rising dough, and then we’ll cut away to Caroline. She’s going to do sensual puddings. She’s doing Devil’s Food Cake – a sort of a joke, you see – holy bread and sinful puddings. Then we’ll come back to you for the final kneading and putting the dough in. Then at the end of the programme we’ll see you take the bread out of the oven and break it and say grace. You do say grace, don’t you?’

He nodded.

‘I’ll introduce you to Caroline,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘She can be a little – a little difficult sometimes. But I’m sure you’ll get on wonderfully well.’

He put on his apron and tied the straps around his waist. He felt safer with the armour of stiff white linen around him, and the familiar scent of the clean cloth.

A woman was threading through the confusion of the studio, coming towards them. Unlike everyone else she was not wearing blue denim or washed-out black. She was wearing a deep purple suit, dark as a Victoria plum. The skirt dropped, slim as a spatula, to her knees; the matching jacket swung like an archbishop’s cape as she strode towards him, her hips swaying, her paces long. Her hair was thick: dark and lustrous as liquorice; her eyes brown as chocolate, her mouth a sulky kissable bud, stained as if she had been eating blackcurrant jam.

She had come to complain to the assistant director about a slight, about an oversight, about something wrong with the layout of her table, of the preparation of the Devil’s Food Cake, but when she raised her long eyelashes and saw Brother James she paused.

‘Oh,’ she said.

And Brother James, holding tight to his mixing bowl and his wooden spoon, for the first time in his life looked desire in the face and longed to taste.

‘Oh,’ he replied.

Caroline Davis put out a manicured hand to Brother James. ‘How do you do?’

Her voice was warm and smooth, as if she had been drinking the chocolate she so liberally applied to her famous puddings.

‘You must think this place is a mad house.’

‘It’s very different from the monastery,’ he said shortly.

‘I bet. What sort of bread are you making?’

It was the first time that anyone had asked him about his work. He could not help but warm to her.

‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I brought the ingredients for everything. I bake plain bread and bread rolls every day for the brothers, and I thought it might be simple and honest to start with a white bread. But we have some wonderful celebration breads with fruit and nuts, and I wanted to share them too. We have corn breads, and sourdough breads…’

‘Show me the recipes,’ she commanded. Suddenly she was brisk and helpful and businesslike. He opened his looseleaf folder and watched her read.

‘This is a treasury,’ she remarked.

‘It matters to me,’ he volunteered. ‘It’s a staple food, of course. But it’s more than that. Our Lord named himself as bread. He ordered us to pray for our daily bread. I serve my brothers when I bake for them.’

‘How did you learn? Where did you get all these recipes?’

‘I was taught by a brother baker. And I will teach my apprentice. The skills are handed down, the recipes too.’

‘I can’t teach. I don’t have the patience,’ she remarked.

He remembered with a flicker of guilt the disappointed face of Brother Gervase. ‘I mean I will teach my apprentice,’ he promised himself. ‘Some time.’

One recipe she rejected at once, pointing out that it would be hard for him to prepare in the time allowed. Another was rejected on the grounds that it would not film well.

‘It’s not how it tastes in television cookery,’ she said dismissively. ‘We can all stand around saying: ‘‘Oh, how delicious!’’ It’s how it looks that counts. It’s how you look while you cook it that counts.’

He hesitated. ‘Where I come from it is never how things look. It is always how they are.’

She gave him a quick sweet smile. ‘This is the outside world now, Brother James. This is all surface, a world of meringue, not meat.’

The assistant director hovered and then approached. ‘Time to go to makeup,’ she said to Brother James.

‘Don’t be a complete fool,’ Caroline Davis said sharply. ‘He’s as handsome as a Greek god. What d’you want to do? Give him lip gloss?’ To James she turned and said reassuringly, ‘Be yourself. Nothing else is more important,’ and then she was gone.

Brother James watched her stride away to the other side of the studio and snap at the assistant cook who was unpacking ingredients from cling-filmed bowls.

‘Was she all right?’ the assistant director asked nervously.

‘Wonderful,’ he said.

He cooked a plain peasant bread as she had recommended and became absorbed, as he always did, in the familiar comfort of kneading the dough, feeling it come alive under his fingers, under the heel of his hand, the transformation of individual ingredients into the wonderful elasticity of dough with its hidden life which would warm and swell under the secret shield of the tea towel.

When the camera crew moved in a rush from his table to Caroline’s he went with them and watched her long fingers pointing at the ingredients, deftly spooning the glutinous shining body of chocolate batter, as rounded and gleaming as a slug. And then came the little miracle of television cookery – the arrival of the perfectly cooked dish at the very moment it was needed. She spun on her heel to the eye-level cooker and produced a cake at the very second of perfection. Smoothly she turned it out on to a wire rack, and it slid from the tin keeping its perfect shape: a sponge as light as air, as dark as lust. He could smell the hot cake from where he was standing and he felt the saliva rush into his mouth like a presentiment of sin. The assistant director had to nudge him to rush back to his own mock-Gothic pine table to bring the loaves out of the oven and to break the bread as part of the closing credits. His bread was golden and wholesome with a toast-brown crust. He broke it before the dark observing eye of the camera and smelt the familiar scent of home.

‘Well done,’ Caroline Davis said as the film crew were clearing up. There was a tradition that the food cooked for the programme was shared out with a glass of wine. She offered him a slice of her Devil’s Food Cake. ‘D’you want a taste?’ she asked.

He took a paper plate and plastic fork. The icing was as dark and moist and heavenly sweet as the cake itself. The first forkful adhered to the roof of his mouth in a melting mass. He closed his eyes in pleasure. When he opened them he saw that she was watching him with a cool measuring gaze.

‘Stay behind,’ she said quietly. ‘When all this lot have gone. Stay behind and we’ll have a glass of wine on our own.’

‘They’ve ordered a car to take me back –’

‘It’ll wait.’

The crew thinned out, disappeared. Someone said a whispered word to Caroline and she snapped at him and then the two of them were left alone in the darkness of the studio which was as cavernous and quiet as an empty cathedral, with only the two altars of the cooking tables illuminated. Caroline drew closer to him and put her slim hand on the white bib of his apron. ‘You are quite, quite fascinating,’ she said very quietly.

He knew himself to be in great moral danger. ‘Why did you want me to stay?’ he asked.

Her gaze did not waver. ‘I imagine you know why. I felt – didn’t you? – an instant attraction.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I am not available for instant attractions,’ he said clumsily. ‘Nor, er, lasting ones. I have given my life to…’

‘D’you know,’ she interrupted him before he could speak his refusal, ‘I think I must taste of chocolate.’ She turned her face towards him so close that he could feel her warm breath on his lips. He smelled her: the scent of a woman, a heady mixture of warm makeup, perfume, her liquorice hair, her vanilla skin, and the deep erotic odour of chocolate. He was lost.

‘I never saw such a rich sponge that was so light,’ he gabbled. ‘Will you show me how you did it?’

She was diverted for a moment, then she laughed. ‘You must pay me,’ she said. ‘I don’t work without a fee.’

‘I don’t have any…my vows are obedience, poverty and…and…’

‘Pay me with a kiss.’

They brought Brother James back to the monastery by limousine, still holding his large box of ingredients and utensils. His apron, still crisply white, was folded on top of the box. Brother Gervase was waiting at the door to greet him.

‘Did you use the frozen bread?’ Brother James demanded without a word of greeting. ‘Did it defrost all right?’

‘Yes, Brother. I did just as you said. We all saw you on the television. It was a wonderful programme, Brother. And the cake! Brother Jerome said you could make it for us for Easter – that chocolate cake that the woman made.’

‘I might,’ Brother James said grudgingly.

The young man led the way into their shared kitchen. Brother James hesitated on the threshold. At his marble top, where he, and he alone, always made the monastery’s bread there was already a fine dusting of flour and the shrouded bowls of rising loaves. He turned on the younger brother with a face like thunder.

‘I thought you wouldn’t mind if I started some rolls for the brothers’ dinner,’ the young man stammered. ‘I so want to learn, Brother James. I so want you to teach me!’

Brother James placed the box heavily on the wooden worktop and strode to his breadmaking board. He shook out his apron with an outraged flourish and tied it on like a warrior girding himself for battle. Then he hesitated. The dough was well kneaded, the yeast was worked evenly through the cream-coloured mixture. It was rising in pleasing rounded shapes. It would be good bread.

His anger and sense of intrusion died away. The brother was young and had a right to learn his trade. Perhaps he had been too hard on the lad. A little charity should always have a place in a well-run kitchen. And no-one is perfect. He smelled the intoxicating smell of warm yeast, the smell of fertile female life itself filling the kitchen with its warmth. No-one can promise to be perfect, we all need forgiveness for one sin or another.

‘Brother James? Shall I fetch you a clean apron?’

Brother James glanced down at the immaculate white of his starched apron and then gasped. In the very centre, dark against the whiteness, was the unmistakable cupid’s bow outline of a chocolate kiss.

Brother James paused for a moment, remembering something which had been very sweet and very surprising. Like a rich chocolate cake but as light as air.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Fetch me a clean apron and we’ll make a start.’