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‘Why are we stopping?’
‘I’m sorry, madam, but I’ll have to drop you off here. There’s no way my old taxi will make it up the hill to the house in this rain.’
‘But you can’t leave me here! We’re in the middle of a hurricane!’
The elderly taxi driver chuckled at Millie’s exaggeration.
‘This is no hurricane, my dear. It’s merely the St Lucian daily deluge. Look.’ He tapped the face of his incongruously large diver’s watch and treated her to a display of his tobacco-stained teeth. ‘It’s three o’clock. It’ll be over in twenty minutes, and I promised to collect Ella from Soufrière and bring her back to the villa to meet you. So go on, hop out into what we Caribbean natives call the liquid sunshine!’
Millie stared out of the windscreen. It was like being in a car wash. She had never experienced anything like it, even during her visits to see Luke’s parents in Snowdonia. Torrential rain hammered down from a canopy of leaden clouds onto the steep strip of tarmac which led up to Claudia Croft’s plantation house. Multiple rivulets of water chased down the slope and the palm trees lining the access road tilted almost horizontally to the storm’s demands.
She cursed her misplaced optimism that her two-week break in St Lucia would be filled with long, sun-soaked days stretched out in a hammock by the pool, a cocktail in one hand, Kindle in the other, a gentle tropical breeze rippling through the air. After a final glance at the taxi driver – who had introduced himself as Clavie – in the rear-view mirror, just to make sure he wasn’t joking, she gathered her straw shoulder bag and resigned herself to a soaking.
As she cracked opened the taxi door, a volley of raindrops attacked her with such vengeance that within seconds she was drenched through to her underwear. Her strappy scarlet tee-shirt clung uncomfortably to the contours of her body, and her hair was plastered to her cheeks. She had a premonition that whilst this was the first time she had experienced the phenomenon of “liquid sunshine”, it would not be the last.
She twisted her lips at the amusement she saw scrawled across Clavie’s wrinkled face and slammed the door with as much force as she could muster after nine hours of long-haul travel. She noticed that he made no attempt to exit his warm, comfortable,dryseat to extricate her luggage from the boot. So much for chivalry, or customer service, thought Millie as she hooked her stiffened fingers around the handle of her over-stuffed suitcase and heaved it over the lip of the boot before dropping it with a thud onto her toe.
‘Ouch!’
But Clavie simply gave her a brief wave and sped away, the mellifluous tones of a calypso rhythm spilling from his ancient vehicle, which was more rust than bucket. Millie watched the red taillights disappear from view, fighting the urge to sit down amongst the tropical vegetation that framed the edge of the road and indulge in a fit of sobbing.
Not only had she endured a two-hour flight delay at Gatwick, she had also been forced to wait over an hour for her luggage to arrive on the tiny carousel at Hewanorra airport. She could have collected it from the hold quicker herself. Then, the incredibly turbulent ride from the airport to Soufrière in the taxi had just about finished her off. Okay, the scenery had been spectacular, but she felt as though her bones had been shaken to dust.
Why had she agreed to come?
Was she evencapableof supervising the installation of a professional-standard kitchen and making sure everything was ready for the first of the Paradise Cookery School tutorials? She squashed her demons of self-doubt back into their box for later dissection. There was no way she was going to open the cupboard door on all her yesterdays when the only thing she wanted to do was strip off her wet clothes and sleep.
Millie had received the promised email from Jen and had studied the attachments during the flight. It turned out her sister hadn’t told her the full story – nothing new there. Not only did she have to oversee the villa’s kitchen renovations, but it turned out she was also expected to triple-test and finalise the course recipes and menu cards. It was going to be a challenge – it would be years before she could aspire to match the brilliance of Claudia Croft, if ever.
However, to her untold relief, the email had gone on to state that Claudia had arranged for her friend and local Caribbean cook, Ella Johnson, to be an integral part of the testing committee. Despite the course attendees’ desire to indulge in a fun-filled, pre-wedding celebration, Millie knew that the price the bride’s mother had paid for the classes meant they would be a discerning and demanding audience – foodies with an interest in furthering their skills and repertoire to include a cocoa-flavoured twist.
So, a siesta was obviously out of the question.
Ella would be arriving shortly to meet her, and Millie wanted to reassure her new colleague that she was up to the job. She straightened her shoulders, grabbed the handle of her wheelie suitcase, and drew in a lungful of breath. The sweet fragrance of jasmine, mingled with wet soil, tickled her nostrils as she dragged her luggage and her exhausted body up the incline towards the house, which proved to be steeper than she had expected.
She paused briefly to toss her mermaid-esque hair over her shoulder, wishing she had thought to tie it back, and to hoist her bag higher up her shoulder so she could protect her trusty scrap box of recipes with her arm. Unfortunately, her jerky movement dislodged an apple from the top of her bag and it rolled away down the hill, picking up speed until it rounded the corner and disappeared from view.
Millie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She certainly wasn’t going to chase after it.
The celestial director of meteorology had clearly decided to ratchet up the special effects for her arrival on stage as the daily deluge continued its onslaught with no sign of a let-up. To her surprise, Millie felt tears gather along her lashes. Not only was she drenched, with a throbbing toe and burning lungs from the unfamiliar exertion of tackling the hill, but a juggernaut of tiredness had rammed into her bones.
However, her excursion into self-pity didn’t last long.
As she emerged from a dense grove of banana trees, the welcome sight of the old plantation house erased her lethargy in an instant. Built in the French colonial style, with a white-painted veranda and balustrades and pale blue jalousie shutters, the villa nestled comfortably against the foliage of the lush tropical rainforest. It was so picturesque, Millie could easily see it gracing the cover of the Caribbean version ofArchitecture Monthly, even though she was too exhausted to fully appreciate its splendour.
She ditched her luggage next to a stack of scarred wooden crates, stuffed to bursting with weird-looking purple-brown pods, loitering on the doorstep like sentries, and trotted around the wooden veranda to the front of the house.
What she saw whipped the breath from her lungs.
A set of smooth white marble steps descended towards the most stunning expanse of aquamarine she had ever seen. The infinity pool’s decking was home to six navy-and-white striped sun-loungers and was bordered by a necklace of lush banana trees, their leaves sporting a glossy sheen from the recent downpour. But she barely noticed this arboreal glory compared to the majesty of the panorama spread out in front of her.
She felt her jaw drop.
To her left, the twin peaks of Gros Piton and Petit Piton reared up from the azure of the Caribbean Sea like two ancient pyramids swathed in a mantle of undulating emerald velvet. At their foot nestled the old French capital of St Lucia, Soufrière, its church spire and telegraph poles jutting from a patchwork of red-roofed homes stitched together by palm trees.
Despite the dribbles of perspiration mingled with raindrops that were scuttling down the back of her neck, Millie couldn’t drag her eyes away from the display of nature’s perfection. This was her idea of paradise and Claudia had certainly picked the most apt name for her new venture – with a view like this the Paradise Cookery School couldn’t fail to be a success. She felt the tension of the last few hours melt from her temples and join the streams of sweat on their journey southwards.
‘Ahh,’ she breathed, momentarily unable to conjure up words sufficient to do justice to the landscape. Even in the pouring rain it was so perfect that it seemed almost unreal; a painting or a movie set created for a Hollywood producer who had demanded a glorious depiction of the Garden of Eden in all its technicoloured splendour.
