Page 10 of The Matchmaker's Melody
Their fathers, along with Issy and Jon, were cloistered in the cottage’s living room for a business strategy session, which held no interest at all for either Emma or Gordon. And their mothers had announced that they were off to a large craft fair in a town about a half-hour’s drive away. Still, they had decided that apple pie of some sort must be on the menu for the next day’s Thanksgiving meal—albeit a day early—and for there to be apple pie, there must be apples.
“Since you aren’t doing anything,” Brenda Massey had informed her daughter, “you and Gordon can go to find some.”
For his part, Gordon had announced that supermarkets were boring, and that they should go apple picking instead. With the promise of pleasant weather, Emma agreed.
They parked the car, paid the set fee for the basket, and set about filling it with their choice of fruit from the orchard.
“The Red Delicious are that way,” Gordon pointed, directing Emma’s eyes to the little signs at the end of each long row of trees. “Do you like those for eating? I prefer something a bit crunchier, like Ida or Honeycrisp. And we should get some Golden Delicious or Granny Smiths to add to the pies. Not all Granny Smith, because that gets boring, but they give a pie good texture.”
Emma gaped at him as he strode off to examine a hand-drawn map of the orchard, there to plan his route, his denim-encased legs making short work of the distance. She glanced down at her own pants, which she hoped weren’t too good for scampering about the fields, adjusted her dark blue sunhat—one must protect one’s skin from UV rays, after all—and hurried after him.
“There are different types of apples?” she called. “Not just green and red?”
He spun around with a furrow between his eyes.
You don’t know…?” he began, but rolled his eyes to the patchwork clouds above as Emma laughed.
“I’m joking. And you believed me. I thought you knew me better than that.”
“I’m starting to realise I don’t know you at all,” came the reply. “We’ve really just smiled at each other from across the room for the last few years.”
“Well, I do know my apples. I quite like to cook and bake, and I’ve done a couple of videos on the best sort for different uses, like eating, or baking. Most of the advice questions people send me are about relationships—I have a degree in psychology, you know—but sometimes I get different sorts. Once, someone asked me how to impress his girlfriend, who loved apple pie, and I did my homework.” She smirked. “He wrote back afterwards to thank me. Now they’re married. My apple dessert did the trick.”
He gave a snort as he shook his head. “I doubt it was the apple pie itself. More likely, the fact that he cared enough to go to the trouble to make her favourite treat was what did it. But, since we need to come up with something for tomorrow, what did you tell him?”
She thrust out her chin in pride. “It wasn’t a pie after all. After we selected the best apples, we used puff pastry, brown sugar, cinnamon, and a bit of rosewater, and made a sort of cross between a charlotte and a tarte tatin. It doesn’t matter. She married him. He said they were going to serve it at the wedding.”
“Well then, Mademoiselle Massey, you may command me when we return, and we’ll bake together. I make a decent crust, if we can’t find puff pastry.”
When he wasn’t shouting at her, Gordon was rather good company. They collected their apples with far more laughter than Emma thought possible, and returned to the cottage past the largest supermarket in the area, to procure the ingredients the cottage did not have on hand.
Gordon had been correct. They really didn’t know each other. Funny how that happened, when you grew up with someone. But polite words of greetings and “please pass the bag of chips” really weren’t enough to learn who someone was. After all the years she’d spent half-ignoring Gordon from across the room, hanging out with him was strangely fun. First, they’d shared pizza, and now they were planning dessert. It was almost unsettling how much she enjoyed his company, having him as a friend. She rather liked it, even if he was just a boring engineer.
They spent the following morning putting their created apple masterpiece together, and both beamed proudly at the raves from their parents and siblings.
“You made this up yourself, Emma?” Gordon’s father nodded his appreciation after his third helping. Across from him, Jon mopped up the last traces of rose-caramel sauce with a piece of pastry he tore off the tiny remaining piece in the pan.
“Gordon helped me. I didn’t know he was a good cook.”
“Oh, he is, dear,” Mrs Knight added. “A birthday in our family isn’t a birthday unless he makes the cake. You should cook together more often. See what other treats you can invent.”
Down the table, Gordon raised his eyebrows. Was that an invitation?
Emma smiled.
CHAPTER6
JEAN-FRANÇOIS
The choir sangtheir first concert a couple of weeks later, to great acclaim. This concert was the world premiere of a piece the group had commissioned, and there was a lot of media attention around it. Emma was in her element. She thrived in the spotlight. She haunted the internet for the next few days, searching for posts on all the social media channels about the performance, and especially for ones including photographs. The composer was shy and disappeared as quickly as possible, but Emma was more than happy to pose for any number of flashing cameras and handy cell phones.
She began amassing a collection of suitable shots for her own purposes and linked to all the best ones in all the right places.
Interesting. In almost all the pictures of her, Phil Elton was somewhere in the same frame. He certainly looked acceptable, and she wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with him, but she hadn’t recalled him hovering about quite so much. He must want to be seen as well. Advertising, and therefore publicity, was also his business.
After the concert and subsequent media attention, the choir took a one-week break before starting on rehearsals for the next set of concerts. There were to be two of these at the end of December. The first concert was a simple affair, a selection of Christmas and other seasonal songs, offered for free for anyone who wished to add some music to their enjoyment of the holidays. The music was straightforward, and the choir had sung all the pieces in previous years; it would take relatively little rehearsing to present an excellent show. The second program was a set of two performances of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, the first presented in a town about an hour out of the city and the second performed in Toronto. Again, most of the choir members had sung ‘Messiah’ several times, but it was a big piece, and Randall had dedicated a lot of rehearsal time to it, wanting to offer the best performance the very capable ensemble could manage.
As much as Emma loved all this music, she was the most excited about another, completely non-musical, aspect to these concerts: the arrival of Jean-François Gagnon.
