Heavenly Pleasures by Kerry Greenwood

placements on my chart.’ He scribbled the time on a list which already had several entries. I noticed that Selima, with another pair of tongs, was making up the little boxes of eight chocolates which had refreshed many an afternoon, farewelled many a personal assistant and made up many a quarrel. She ranged all over the displays, seemingly at random, filling the little boxes and then sealing each one with a sticky gold label before tying the ribbon.
    ‘She’s made ten boxes,’ said Daniel.
    The boxes were piled artlessly on the end of the display case, for customers who were in too much of a hurry to select their own. Blue and gold packaging. Very dramatic. I remember someone saying that you couldn’t package food in blue or green because people wouldn’t like it, but this did not apply to Heavenly Pleasures choccies. I would personally buy them in brown paper and string. Or bright orange plastic. Or even bare in the palm of my hand.
    People came in. Every person was greeted politely by Selima or Juliette, and every person bought something. Considering the prices of their wares, the sisters must be coining money hand over fist. Most customers gave themselves the pleasure of considering which fillings they would like and ranged up and down the glass case, pointing and, in two cases, slavering.
    Each person was given a nickname and entered into Daniel’s log. The customers were varied. Men, women, children; well-dressed, ill-dressed, trackpants to Italian handmade suits and some tradesmen in overalls. The men were either hoping to heal a quarrel or intending to behave in such a way as to start one when they finally got home. Or they had forgotten someone’s birthday. They all looked rather apologetic and embarrassed at being in this dainty blue and gold palace of sweetness. Women, however, settled in for a good long conversation. Chocolate is a female birthright.
    One elderly lady was definitely Mrs Sylvia Dawson. I pointed her out to Daniel. She must have been buying a box of eight chocolates for her own consumption and was indulged with several tastes by Juliette before she closed her eyes in ecstasy and purchased a whole box of one type, and another for good measure.
    ‘Caramel Delight,’ diagnosed Daniel, checking his list. ‘In milk chocolate. She likes hard centres. And the other box she bought was chocolate covered hazelnuts.’
    ‘A decided character,’ I said. ‘Oh dear,’ I added.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s Kylie,’ I said. ‘Or Goss.’
    ‘And they can’t eat chocolates?’ asked Daniel.
    ‘They’re on a famine diet,’ I explained. ‘It’s too much for flesh and blood to stand, all that chicken and grapes. They’ll eat all the choccies and then they’ll starve for two days to stay thin.’
    ‘Amongst your many virtues,’ said Daniel, noting down Kylie or Goss’s purchase of two boxes of soft centred chocolates, ‘is your total refusal to diet. I do admire it. What do you do when people say “just follow this diet and you’ll be thin”?’
    ‘If they said it,’ I said, snuggling, ‘I’d spit in their eye. But they don’t.’ I had heard from other fat women that perfect strangers came up to them in the street and offered them diet plans or magic herbs. No one had ever done that to me. Which is fortunate, of course, because I would not have been pleased and might have been armed. I assumed that people who left me alone had some elementary sense of self-protection.
    Perhaps I didn’t give off the right air of being sorry for existing. Even when I was imprisoned in a tough girls school and forced to play hockey and ridiculed because I couldn’t, I have never been sorry that I existed. I have, of course, been sorry that a lot of other people existed, beginning with certain politicians (they know who they are; George, are you listening?)
    and my ex, James, but not, as it happens, me. Daniel spoke
    suddenly and I snapped myself out of my reverie.
    ‘Here’s Vivienne,’ he