By Bread Alone

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Granny Mac and Pog were at either end of her when she brought the little boys into the world and it was without doubt the happiest day of all of their lives. Ted emerged first at five pounds one ounce and Rory twenty minutes later at five pounds two.

  “Ginger Megses, the two of them,” Granny Mac cried delightedly as Pog looked into his wife’s tired eyes and loved her so much he thought he might burst.

  “Perfect,” the midwife announced as she placed the redheaded babies on their mother’s chest.

  And so heralded a new arrival of Stacks into the tumbledown house in All Souls Road. Even Henry forgot his own private bitterness and entered into the spirit of calming and soothing and to Esme’s surprise playing with the babies, who grew fat and happy under such devoted love and attention.

  Esme had never truly believed it when fresh parents waxed lyrical about the love they felt for their newborns and doubted that she could ever really explain the feeling to childless people herself.

  “It’s like a whole new emotion,” she told Pog as they lay in their bed gazing adoringly at their beautiful children one cozy Sunday morning. “It’s like a combination of crying and laughing and something else completely different. Remember the time we tried to go camping and ended up driving over our picnic and sleeping in the car and we drove through the night to get home and ate a whole loaf of levain when it was so hot I kept dropping it? Remember the taste of biting into that flesh when we were so so hungry?”

  “It was the best feeling in all the world,” Pog said, tears lapping in the pools of his eyes, Teddy’s tiny hand curled around one of his fingers. “Until now.”

  They were fascinated by the twin-ness of their sons. From their very arrival each seemed secretly, silently aware of the other. Take one away and the other would go on alert, eyes wide and ears almost pricked for any sound that might help identify the twin’s whereabouts.

  At first, Esme allowed herself a glimmer of envy that each had the other and always would, and that even as their mother it would be a link she could not share or break.

  “We should be grateful, Es,” Pog said, kissing her nose. “It’s something special. Something extra. Wouldn’t you have wanted another you when you were growing up? I know I would have.”

  “Oooh, Daddy!” Esme squealed. “What is it with men and two girls?” But his words comforted her. Her boys were more blessed than most, she came to believe, and loved them all the more for it.

  Being the mother of twins carried a certain cachet. Esme could not move the double stroller out of All Souls Road without an army of gray-haired old biddies in raincoats and ill-fitting shoes reaching in to pinch cheeks and chuck chins. Teddy loved it, stretching his legs out and wriggling with pleasure but Rory loathed it and would squirm as if trying to escape out of reach.

  “He’s got a redhead’s temperament, that one,” the old biddies would crow, stepping back, and Esme would smile demurely in a way she hoped demonstrated that while she was a redhead herself, she was not one of the bad-tempered variety.

  The boys may have looked identical but their different personalities emerged very early on and were a constant source of fascination. Teddy was impatient and loud while Rory seemed more tolerant and self-contained. Teddy would suck greedily at Esme’s nipple, always hungry for more, while Rory’s attention would wander and he needed encouragement to feed. When they moved on to solids, Teddy only ate egg yolks while Rory only whites. Teddy liked crusts, Rory discarded them. They were matching halves of the same little entity.

  And how those boys were loved!

  Alice, of course, cherished them as well as, to their surprise, did Ridgeley.

  “He’s so good at playing,” Esme marveled as she and her friend sat on the sofa sipping Chardonnay one Sunday afternoon while Ridge assembled a very unusual construction with the boys’ blocks. “I can read books and tell stories and cuddle and kiss but honestly I am hopeless at playing. It’s just not in me. But I swear that Ridge has got more patience and imagination than even Granny Mac and Henners.”

  “He’s always desperate to get here,” Alice smiled. “It’s the only thing he ever shows any enthusiasm for.”

  “Well, he’s practically old enough to father his own children,” Esme said. “Better get your knitting needles out, Nanna!”

  Alice swatted her with a cushion. “If he takes after me he’ll be as old as Methuselah before he can find anyone to father them with.”

  “If he takes after you,” Esme reminded her, “he has only six child-free years left.”

  “Mum’s been seeing a bloke from Ghana,” Ridge said solemnly from the floor where he was kneeling, carefully placing a block at eye-height while the babies looked on. Esme raised her eyebrows at her friend but Alice shook her head.

  “He had potpourri in his bathroom,” she said. “It would never have worked.”

  Of course, it wasn’t all plain sailing, far from it. In the first few months Esme, like many a new mother, suffered the worst excruciating doubt and terror and heart-wrenching regret of her entire life. There were more than a few nights when she fell into bed so numb with exhaustion she silently begged to die in her sleep. There were days when she felt so out of her depth that hysteria was the only emotion she recognized. There were moments when she felt so alone, so responsible, so scared, it was almost unbearable. Plus, a month after the twins were born she was asked when they were due, a low moment that led to so much weeping and wailing and inspection of her post-baby body in the bedroom mirror that Pog feared for her sanity.

  Eventually, though, her convoluted road map of stretch marks began to fade and so did her fear that motherhood was too hard, that she couldn’t do it. She could. It was hard work but Esme was used to that, and soon enough tiny pockets started appearing in the chaos of her bustling day where her mind strayed away from bottles and nappies and sleep patterns and back to the innermost workings of Goodhart Publishing.

  When the boys were a little over nine months old, she went back to work, leaving her babies in the care of a sunny, outgoing Australian nanny called Tracey. She had thought she was ready for it, had looked forward to it even. But on her first morning back she had felt physically sick with guilt, was crying in the loo by lunchtime and at two concocted a business meeting in Chelsea, lunged for her bag and ran out the door to get home to her boys.

  They were pleased to see her but had survived the day better than she had. As Pog said, their twin-ness was a huge help. They were never alone. They always had each other. And now they had the irrepressible Tracey and, lurking in the background, Granny Mac and Henry, who watched like hawks for signs she was an alcoholic or a slave trader.

  She was neither and the boys loved her. Granny Mac was not convinced, saying she reminded her of a horse rustler she once met in Gretna Green, and Henry was similarly unimpressed. He didn’t think it was a good idea, he told Pog, for the boys to be minded by someone with a voice like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  Esme trusted her, though, and as the days passed into weeks and months, her enthusiasm for her work returned in spades until mixed with motherhood there was barely a second in her day left unspoken for. Her schedule was so grueling that she had to have details written in three different places just to keep track. She moved her planning meetings from ten in the morning until nine, just to fit them in, which meant two early departures from the house a week. She worked till nine on a Thursday so she could have Friday mornings off to take the boys to a neighborhood coffee group. She held a conference call with her editors from home on a Sunday evening to smooth the way for her Mondays (Rory famously throwing up down her cleavage during one of them). Her Wednesdays gave her shivers just thinking about them. Sebastian had asked her to actively court the architectural magazine, which meant endless phone calls, lunches and meetings, and Wednesdays she dedicated to this.

  She felt pulled in a thousand different directions but somehow managed to hold it all together and even allowed herself to believe—in the rare moments she had to
indulge in such thought—that perhaps she could be a career woman and a mother and be good at both.

  Through it all, she baked. It was another tug at the restraints of her time but no one, nothing, could persuade Esme to give up her sourdough.

  “We could always buy bread, Esme,” Pog said gently one night as he watched her, eyes sliding closed as she sat on the sofa waiting to knock back the bread before refrigerating it, a trick she had learned, which meant she could start the bread at night and slow rise it. “There is an organic bakery in Chalk Farm now, you know. We could get Tracey to go there or send one of the Crumblies on the bus.”

  Esme felt suddenly and sadly overemotional.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I adore it, Pog, you know I do. It’s just a bit tricky at the moment with the babies this age and work and everything but it’s the only thing that ever stays the same. If I ever stop doing it,” she said, heaving her body off the sofa, “you’ll know I’ve lost the plot and you might as well just take me outside and shoot me.”

  Pog looked worried.

  “We don’t have to do this, you know,” he said quietly, following her into the kitchen. “You could stop work or go freelance and have more time to do the things you like doing.”

  “I like working,” objected Esme. “And we want to get enough money together to sort the house out, don’t we? Make it a lovely big home for the boys to grow up in? We do. You know we do. Now Pog, does anything need ironing for tomorrow?”

  The childcare arrangement, however, threatened to come horribly unstuck when Tracey’s sunny personality began to recede behind a cloud. Nine months of being at home with Granny Mac and Henry Stack could do that to a sweet- natured young thing from the colonies.

  “They’re just so mean,” she wailed to Esme, who came home one day to find her sitting outside on the front steps crying. “They sent me to put the rubbish out and locked the door behind me. And that was at three o’clock. I’ve been trying to get in all afternoon but they just keep holding the babies up at the window and waving.”

  “It’s like having four children in the house,” Esme complained when she fell into bed, exhausted, that night. “And the littlest ones are the least trouble of all. It’s those old ones causing all the trouble.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Pog asked her, hating to see her tired and worried.

  “Maybe the boys would be better off in a nursery during the day. That way Henry and Granny Mac can fight it out on their own during the day and we’ll let natural selection do its bit.”

  “That’s not fair,” Pog said. “We may have to draft in some extra senior citizens to give Granny Mac some real competition. Too easy for her otherwise.”

  Esme laughed and burrowed in as close as she could to her cuddly husband. Despite being exhausted, despite being worried, despite trying to split herself in too many directions, she had never felt happier. Everything she had ever wanted was in this house and as long as she had her boys and her Granny, she was okay. More than okay.

  But she had perhaps underestimated what an important part of the equation Tracey was. When the still-distraught girl rang the next morning at seven o’clock to say that she was not coming back it ripped something of a hole in the fabric of the happy household. But before Esme could even look into nursery fees Granny Mac and Henry formed a seemingly united front and insisted that between them, they could look after the twins.

  “Was this the evil old menaces’ plan all along, do you think?” Esme asked Pog over the phone during the day. “Did they torture that poor girl all this time just so they could get the boys to themselves?”

  Pog refused to see the dark side. “Look at it this way, Es,” he enthused. “Without paying the nanny, we can probably afford the renovations.”

  “My fountain!” squealed Esme.

  “Yes and the relining and new stairs and carpet and kitchen and bathrooms,” Pog said. “It’s major, Es. Do you think we can cope?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Esme, not even stopping to really think about it. A full-time job, boisterous babies, two evil old people—what was there to cope with?

  And so, at eighteen months of age, the twins were left at home with their grandfather and great-grandmother who, while abhorring each other, adored them.

  Despite any doubts anyone had about this new regime, the twins thrived. Teddy walked in the first week—they were late developers when it came to moving—with his not nearly so curious twin following in his footsteps a fortnight later, miraculously on a Saturday when his parents were home and at that exact moment watching him.

  Teddy embraced his mother’s exotic palate and devoured pâtés and spicy chutneys and anchovy pizza and on one exceptionally greedy occasion caviar, while Rory’s taste leaned more toward his father’s preference for eggs on toast and baked beans.

  Teddy remained cuddly and kissable while Rory squirmed and squiggled out of arm’s reach from the moment he could crawl. Esme loved their differences. She loved that most people could not tell them apart yet she could point out, with her eyes shut, the seventeen physical dissimilarities that made them Rory and Ted, not “the twins.”

  She was the only one who never (apart from on one occasion) got them mixed up. And how could you, she often wondered, when Rory had that little freckle just below his left earlobe and Teddy’s eyelashes were at least two shades paler than his brother’s?

  Esme was intrigued by the boys’ connection with each other. They had almost never, even as tiny babies, cried at the same time, as though they had silently secretly worked out that it was better to have all their mother’s attention than half of it, even if it meant starving or putting up with a wet nappy for a bit longer.

  Teddy also kindly waited until Rory’s chicken pox had cleared up before getting his own walloping case of them, and despite their genetic ties they teethed at completely different times, meaning Esme and Pog could spread their sleeplessness around a little.

  They were slower than most toddlers to talk, which Esme, at first concerned, read was quite common with identical twins; and one magical afternoon when everybody else in the house was out or resting she watched her babies share a secret silent joke for the first time ever and it made her feel something so deep and strong in the pit of her stomach that she thought she was going to faint. It thrilled her that Rory and Ted would always have each other. That there would always be the two of them. The leader and the led. The loud and the quiet. The happy and the sad.

  Chapter 15

  Both Louis’s arms were stretched across the table now, holding Esme’s hands in his, his handsome face etched with dismay at the tale his lost love was telling.

  “I am so sorry,” he murmured softly. “You do not have to tell me, Esme.”

  But it was too late. The dreadful details had been kept too long in the dark and could not help but pour out, into the light of the Orrery dining room.

  “I should have known,” Esme said, staring into Louis’s eyes and seeing only their blackness. “How could I not have known?”

  The day Rory became an only child had not started like any other and afterward Esme could not believe she had not seen disaster hanging heavy and horrid in the air.

  For a start, she had slept in even though it was a planning meeting morning and she had to be out of the house by 8:30 or her day went to pieces.

  She had been up in the night twice to see to Rory, who had a streaming cold, and she was grumpy even before she stubbed her toe on a large power tool left lying in the dusty hallway by one of the builders.

  The house was in ruins. The floorboards had been sanded but not polished, baseboards replaced but not painted, walls framed but not lined and bathrooms plumbed but not completely. The kitchen was all but finished and so was the living room and the boys’ bedroom, thankfully, so that the children had somewhere to play when the builders were working, but it was far from ideal.

  And in an idiotic burst of wanting to get it all over and done
with as quickly as possible, Esme had brought the landscapers in at the same time. The backyard was only partially tiled and spotted with large pyramids of dirt, and she had not been able to work out whether these were coming or going.

  In the midst of this sat her fountain, or the pieces that would eventually become her fountain. The bowl had been sited by the stonemason himself and bolted to a concrete pad but the centerpiece lay on its side, providing a leaning post for two spades, a large sack of compost and the assorted unidentifiable detritus of half a dozen laborers.

  It did not look remotely gorgeous. It looked like a bomb site and a week of depressingly wet weather had not helped.

  On top of this, though, and far more worrying, Granny Mac was not her normal self. Pog had actually been the first to notice it and had mentioned to Esme that her grandmother had twice failed to bite back when Henry was obnoxious. Esme had hardly given it a thought until she followed her grandmother up the stairs a few days later and had to slow herself down to avoid overtaking her. She could not remember a time when she had not had to run to keep up with the woman.

  She kept an eagle eye on her grandmother over the next little while and although there was nothing glaringly obvious, she thought she detected a subtle slowing down, as though Granny Mac’s batteries were running out.

  “Are you all right?” Esme had asked her after seeing her grandmother obviously think twice about picking up Teddy, then wince with the exertion.

  “Och, what are you doing sneaking up on me like that?” Granny Mac had grumbled. “Can an old woman not even be an old woman these days? No, that would be right, I suppose. We’re all supposed to be Sebastian bloody Coe. Makes perfect sense that does, oh aye.”

  But the morning that Esme slept in, she was astonished to find that Granny Mac, who’d been an early riser since Adam was a cowboy, was still in her bed, too.