“Weasel’s piss?” suggested Alice.
“Yes, weasel’s piss. It’s just too much. It feels like just too much.” The wind, indeed, felt taken out of Esme’s sails, and Alice could tell.
“Nobody will know it’s you,” she said assertively, deciding to be supportive. “And anyway, Pog doesn’t read the Sunday Times and Henry wouldn’t bother with Jemima’s column and to be honest, you should be thankful that she didn’t come to your house. You should hear what she has to say about Primrose Beckwith-Stuyvesant’s new place.”
“Really?” Esme asked without interest. Her own troubles seemed too many and varied to contemplate anyone else’s.
“Get a load of this,” Alice started. “It’s right under the bit about you. ‘I had heard that poor dear Primrose had decided to do the decorating herself but nobody had quite prepared me for her spectacular lack of skill let alone flair in this department. You’d imagine that someone with a name like Primrose would know the difference between caramel and brown, would you not? Between chartreuse and lime green? Between cerise and shocking pink? Anyway, I am sure that somewhere in Morocco lurks a second-rate seventies bordello owner who is seriously wondering what happened to all his furnishings. Try Belgravia, Achmed! That’s my advice. All eyes were supposed to be on Juniper Smythe, the stepniece of the hostess, who has recently announced her engagement to PR king Lance Silverspoon, but frankly it was hard to make the poor girl out among the kaleidescope of garishness that is Primrose’s drawing room. Let’s hope the wedding will be held somewhere more demure. In the finger painting room of the local nursery school, for example.’”
Esme’s own misery was left bobbing, temporarily, in a sea of sympathy for poor Primrose.
“She is a complete and utter cow,” she breathed, astonished at the level of Jemima’s bitchery. Whatever had poor Primrose done to deserve such a public lambasting? “It’s like a horrible nightmare.”
“I won’t read you the bit about little Marie Claire’s first piano recital then,” suggested Alice, “because it may give you a duodenal ulcer. And compared to poor Primrose, you didn’t do so badly really.”
“No, I’m just a fat, lonely has-been with ginger hair in need of clips that looks permed but isn’t,” said Esme. “I’m just swell.”
“God knows where she got the story about the hairclips. The woman is obviously completely deranged.”
“Yes, well,” coughed Esme, “I did see her at the bar in the Orrery and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation. In fact she bought me the drink, or the nine-year-old TV producers who were courting her did, much to their own horror. Oh, God, what a mess!” Her head raced with illegal thoughts of the bar, the restaurant, Louis.
“Don’t tell me she is getting her own TV show,” shrilled Alice. “If she gets her own TV show you won’t have to kill her because I will have done it for you. Did she look good?”
“Gorgeous,” Esme said dully. “A little masklike in the face obviously but very tall and slim and blond and—”
“Ridge!” Alice pulled away from the phone and called to her son. “Ridge! Wait a minute! Esme, I have to go. Ridge has just come in and it’s been three days since I’ve seen him. Hold on,” she called to her son. “I’ll ring you back later,” she garbled to Esme, “to tell you about the Armenian with the extra nipple. Disastrous. Don’t worry. Talk to you soon. Ridge!” And she was gone.
For the rest of Sunday Esme felt so close to tears or a nervous breakdown or a full confession (even though she hadn’t really done anything, she kept telling herself) that Pog put her to bed, like Peter Rabbit, with a cup of chamomile tea at 7:30. Every time the phone rang, her heart dropped down to the pit of her stomach and churned.
The next day she stumbled through her chores convinced that her husband was going to storm into the house at any moment waving the newspaper and shouting, “What is the meaning of this, you filthy hussy,” which, of course he never did. Pog was not a stormer and anyway, the House in the Clouds was probably not an ideal place to storm. If you were still full of bluster and huff after six flights of stairs you were most likely not someone who liked chocolate sauce on their cornflakes and who preferred eating homemade bread with your wife to watching football with the lads down at the local.
By the end of the next day Esme had started to relax and think that maybe Alice was right, that no one would ever know it was she that Jemima was talking about, and that although she didn’t really have anything to be ashamed about, she could stay privately not ashamed of it without any dreadful consequences.
By the end of the day after that, however, her relief was verging on something that seemed to approach resentment. She had even gone so far as to get Alice to fax a copy of the hideous column up to her—she had definitely not bought the paper herself—so she could read it to Granny Mac once “I Was Only Joking” faded away to a reasonable level.
“It’s bloody hilarious,” her grandmother roared. “Oh, she has spunk, that one. ‘Ginger-No-Friends,’ I’ve not heard that before, Esme. I’ve not laughed so much in a long, long while. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Och, read it again will you?”
“No, I will not!” Esme answered. “It’s not funny, it’s horrible. She’s humiliated me.”
“In front of whom?” Granny Mac asked her. “As Alice says, no one would ever know it was you. I mean in the first instance most people would presume that a fag mag is something subscribed to by homosexuals, not cigar smokers. And who would ever imagine that you would be sitting in a fancy bar in Marylebone swilling cocktails on your own in the middle of the day? Nobody, that’s who. It’s a ridiculous notion.”
Granny Mac had, as was her wont, hit the nail on Esme’s head. Who would ever imagine that she would be sitting in a fancy bar in Marylebone drinking cocktails on her own in the middle of the day?
Nobody. That’s who. It was a ridiculous notion. They, whoever they were, would be too busy imagining her running up and down a thousand stairs in her hideaway hole in the country with her head in the clouds like the rest of her house. They would be imagining her trying to tighten the splint on her donkey’s broken leg, milking her blind goat, taming some mad bees, kowtowing to her difficult father-in-law, wrangling her recalcitrant son, pouring all her leftover love and ancient desire into fat, brown, round loaves of bread, hiding from the tragedy about which others still spoke among themselves with words that stayed choked up and constipated in her own throat.
“It hasn’t always been a ridiculous notion,” she told her grandmother. “Once upon a time nobody would have been surprised to find me swilling French 75s in swanky surroundings in the middle of a weekday. Quite the opposite—they would have been surprised if that wasn’t what I was doing. And now, you’re telling me not one single reader of England’s most famous Sunday newspaper has put two and two together and come up with four? Am I so much of a has-been bloody hausfrau these days that no one could be surprised by me? When did I get so pathetic? So predictable?”
Her grandmother looked at her. “Is a French 75 the one with the gin or the one with the cherry?” she asked.
“Granny Mac,” Esme said as calmly as she could, fixing her eyes on the hydrangea hat atop the wardrobe. “I am in trouble here. Please help me.”
“The problem is not that you are a has-been bloody hausfrau,” Granny Mac answered her eventually. “And the problem is not Jemima Jones.”
The room was deathly silent. The temperature seemed to have plummeted. Esme felt cold with dread. She started to shiver.
“The problem is you, Esme. You and your loss.” The words came painfully slowly and cut right through her. “The worst loss a woman, a mother can suffer.”
“It’s not that,” Esme said, her teeth chattering.
“You can’t keep pushing it away and not feeling it, Esme. It’s not working. Especially not now with me the way I am.”
“It’s not about that,” whispered Esme. “It’s not about him.”
“Oh, Esme, aren’t you tired of this?”
She was tired, unbelievably tired. Too tired to deal with what her grandmother wanted from her. “It’s about Louis,” she insisted, feeling cowardly but determined. “It’s all about Louis.”
Her grandmother’s displeasure was palpable, the air in the dingy room clanged with it. “Have it your way, then,” Granny Mac said finally. “But if it is Louis stirring you up, for God’s sake at least have the guts to let yourself be stirred.”
Esme sat stock-still on the end of her grandmother’s bed.
“He wants to meet me for lunch again tomorrow,” she said.
“I know,” answered Granny Mac.
“I want to go,” said Esme.
“I know,” answered Granny Mac.
Silence filled the room and left Esme with nothing but the pounding of her heart and the contents of her head.
“Because even though it is vastly complicating matters, it feels”—she sought out the word from the carnival in her head—“good. Like the end of something. Or”—she was loath to even think such a thing—“heaven forbid, the beginning.”
“I know,” said Granny Mac. “Just not like you’re stuck forever in the bollocking middle.”
“That’s right,” agreed Esme. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
“I know everything you do,” said Granny Mac. “It’s just that sometimes I know it sooner. I’m good like that.”
“You don’t think I’m wicked?”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself. You’re just a girl in the world, Esme, trying to get through life without killing someone or having a nervous breakdown just like the next person. You truly think you’re the first person to suffer a loss so enormous you can’t get your head out of the sand to confront it? You think no one else has ever tried to escape the reality of their life with the fantasy of another? It’s nothing new. It’s all been done before.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“You tell me what it’s supposed to make you feel.”
“Honestly, times like this I don’t know why I bother, Granny Mac,” Esme snapped, straightening her soft pink lamb’s-wool jumper, and standing up to leave.
“Oh, aye,” Granny Mac said rudely. “Silly me. Pants down, bottom smacked.”
Esme left the room and started the climb up to the kitchen. She had soup to make, a pair of Pog’s pants to mend and afternoon tea to prepare for Henry and Rory plus the oven was horribly overdue for a clean and the windows in the sitting room were so filthy she could barely see out of them. She had a lot of housework to get through if she was going down to London the next day to meet the love of her life.
“The first love,” she corrected herself out loud.
“What was that?”
Unfortunately, she had corrected herself out loud while passing Henry on the first floor landing.
“Oh, nothing,” she smiled. “Just talking to myself.”
“Yes, well, there would seem to be an awful lot of that going on around here lately,” he said gruffly. “And in my day that thing out there would have earned itself a bullet between the eyes, not a lot of fussy mollycoddling by a bunch of ignorant city people.”
It took Esme a few seconds to work out that he was talking about poor Eeyore.
“I thought you liked the donkey,” she said, surprised. “And Rory certainly seems to. It’s good for him to have another friend about the place.” She smiled brightly but Henry shot her a look of such inexplicable contempt that she simply turned and traipsed up the stairs.
She defrosted some chicken stock, chopped a pile of carrots and parsnips, hand-stitched the pants Pog had split bending over at Enid Entwhistle’s house to inspect a blocked drain, then rang Alice at work to see what was happening with the wayward Ridge.
“He’s got a job at some restaurant in the West End,” Alice garbled into the phone. “And I think he is spending the nights with Mrs. Miller. He barely speaks to me, just grunts as he comes and goes, and I seem incapable of doing anything about it. It’s such fun.”
“What about Mr. Miller?”
“He’s off on an oil rig for six weeks at a time, I do know that much, but not from my hulking ingrate of an offspring. From Olive upstairs.”
“The blowsy midmorning gin drinker?”
“No, the mild-mannered mousy librarian. Oh! And she’s not a librarian. She’s a hostess at some private drinking club in the City all full of ancient old relics in fancy suits sipping cognac and wetting their pants. Who’d have guessed? Anyway, she says it’s not the first time Mrs. Miller has ‘entertained’ during her husband’s absence and that I should not be too worried and that, get this, Ridge is such a nice young man. He picks up her shopping from the supermarket and brings it home for her. Every week. Has done for nearly a year. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The things you find out!”
Esme heard the pride in Alice’s voice and felt thrilled for her.
“We always knew he would turn out well in the end, didn’t we? How could he not have, with you as a mother and a procession of three-nippled psychopaths with bicycle clip issues as ‘uncles’?”
Alice groaned. “Don’t talk to me about ‘uncles.’ I swear, if I don’t have sex soon I am going to explode in an unsightly fashion all over Nose Hair’s shredder. It’s not fair that I am approaching my sexual peak and there is no one for me to peak on. I’m considering going into one of those shops in Soho to buy a big pink rubber thing with multiple attachments and a key pad of instructions.”
“Considering it?” Esme asked. “I thought you would have a cupboardful by now.”
“I’ve been resisting it on the grounds that if I find something to have sex with, why would I bother with an actual man?”
“Well, I think you deserve points for optimism and perhaps a medal from Prince Charles.”
“Ooooh you are nasty,” Alice squawked. “Fancy mentioning Prince Charles when you know I am all fizzy down below.”
“Alice, I thought we had a rule about the Royal Family.”
“Sweetie, he isn’t married, has his own car and a big lump in his jodhpurs, of course I fancy him. And at least it keeps my mind off Prince William.”
Esme shrieked. “That’s illegal!”
“Well, I may even have to jump the bones of one of the poor pathetic wretches I am dating this week,” Alice said matter-of-factly. “That is what it has come to.”
If Alice was considering actually seeing one of her heinous microbes without his clothes on, Esme knew she was in a bad way.
“But there’s more to life than sex, Alice,” she said supportively. “We have talked about this before.”
“You have talked about it before, Esme, because you are having it. I just listen and wish I had someone like Pog to curl up in bed with at night and make mad, passionate love to in the morning.”
“I could loan him to you like what’s-her-name did with Kevin Kline in The Big Chill,” Esme offered. “Although I would be scared he might not come back to me.”
She realized that this was true. Their dwindling, or rather dwindled sex life was just another thing that she and Pog chose to ignore, but she had not discussed this with Alice. It seemed mean to have it all on tap and not be thirsty.
Her mind turned to Louis and his tongue on the curve of her belly.
“I thought I would come down to London tomorrow,” she said, reining in her imagination, “and we could catch up for a drink in town after work. Do you fancy it?”
“Do I what!” said Alice.
When Esme woke up the next morning, she felt an excitement she could remember from the Christmas mornings of her childhood. If she closed her eyes she could almost smell the pine needle spray Granny Mac had gone to town with in the absence of a real tree with real pine needles.
Pog, in his sleep, snorted, rolled over in their bed and flung one arm over her middle. Esme looked down at his floppy hair and his sleep-squashed face and wondered how she could love him so much but have a stomachful of butterflies f
luttering in anticipation of a different man altogether.
When had she turned into this person who could lie and keep such dangerous secrets? She gently removed his arm, got dressed and went up to the kitchen to get her bread started. Even high up in the sky she could smell the rain that had fallen on the grass overnight and, if she was not mistaken, there was a hint of donkey in the air as well. Her senses were on red alert, just as they had been all those years ago in Venolat.
As Esme dragged the flour bin out of the pantry, she was sure she could smell wheat, in the fields, and maybe a wisp of the water used to turn the wheel at the mill in Pakenham where she bought it.
Her own tap water jumped excitedly into the jug before she poured it in with the flour, and her starter seemed more wildly exuberant than usual. She could swear that it smelled of that little boulangerie by the fountain. Esme lifted the jar to her face and breathed it in. There was definitely something special in the air this morning.
She plunged her hand into the bowl and swirled the wet mixture between her fingers, then squeezed it against the palm of her hands until all the ingredients were mixed together. Again and again she danced around the bowl until the floury, watery mixture turned into dough and started to feel like skin against her hand. She was getting hot. She threw the salt into the bowl and kneaded it into the dough, feeling every grain resist disappearing into that luxurious blend but pressing and pushing and ever so gently pummeling until the crunchiness was gone and the dough was silky and skinlike again.
She rolled it out of the bowl and started working it on the counter. With the heel of her hand she pushed it away from herself and with the curve of her cupped fingers she pulled it back, again and again and again until she could feel sweat trickle between her shoulder blades.
With every pump of her arm she thought of Louis. Her teeth on his skin, her lips on his neck, his fingers in her—
By Bread Alone Page 21