“‘I was gasping for a drink by the time I got to GQ’s Japanese night. He is taking to the language like a duck to water and his father is thrilled. Apparently we would all be learning Japanese if we knew what was good for us. His tutor is a delightful little chap with a name that sounds just like a motorcar and no idea about canapés. That wasabe sure does clear a girl’s sinuses!’ Yes!” Esme answered before the question was asked.
“‘Cosmo and I, along with half the gay population of London and a good proportion of the nuns, are going to The Sound of Music sing-along off Leicester Square this afternoon. Cosmo is going to go as a bee, we have the most gorgeous costume from a dear little place in Knightsbridge—I’m sure he will get lots of wear out of it—and I am going to go as Leisl, wearing a dress I had made for a fancy dress party when I was sixteen going on seventeen!’
“Aaarrrgghh,” Esme threw back her head. “Is there no end to it?”
“But you like The Sound of Music, too,” Granny Mac said wickedly. “Haven’t you been saying you’d like to take Rory down to London to see it?”
“In a dress I had made when I was sixteen going on seventeen—I don’t think so.”
She threw the newspaper on the bed. It was indeed distressing to find herself agreeing with so much of what Jemima had to say.
“So,” said Granny Mac, “are you going to see him again?”
Sometimes Esme wished Granny Mac wasn’t privy to her innermost thoughts.
“I don’t think I can stay away,” she sighed, “even though it is probably the most foolish thing I could possibly do, but he just unlocks something in me that I can’t even get to myself, Granny Mac, and I feel like I have to pursue it. After talking to him, you know”—she dropped her voice because it still seemed such foreign territory—“about Teddy, I just got this glimpse of what I used to be like and it felt so good I just have to get more of it. We’ll just, you know, talk. It’s just talking.”
“Oh aye? Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
“Don’t be so disgusting!” Esme retorted. “It’s not about that.” But she wasn’t so sure and she knew it. And if she knew it, Granny Mac knew it. And if Granny Mac knew it. . . Well. There was nothing more to be said.
The next few days slipped by with Esme lurching from woeful remorse and self-flagellation to a giddy light-headedness of long-gone proportions. She hugged the secret of Louis close to her chest, and with it, stolen thoughts of her angel baby. It was heavenly and hellish, all at the same time.
Pog, who had been monitoring her every shoulder slump for the last long while, was aware that she was battling something, and while the low moods worried him, the highs brought joy to his heart. She had started humming again in the happy, thoroughly tuneless way she had done before. Her bread was tasting so sharp and zingy it made his mouth water just thinking about it. At night though, in their bed, she still turned her back on him. Nestled into the space his soon-to-be-sleeping body made, she would hold his hand around her waist and snuggle, but at any suggestion of anything more, she would straighten up or shrink away.
He could wait though. He would wait. Forever, if he had to.
“I thought I might go down to London again today,” Esme said casually on Thursday morning over breakfast. Until she opened her mouth to suggest it, she had not been sure she was going to go, but Pog beamed at her over his bowl of porridge sprinkled liberally with brown sugar and home-preserved peaches, and she was so encouraged she forgot for a moment why she was going.
“Be sure and give Alice my love, won’t you,” Pog said. “How’s the love life?”
Esme glossed over his wrong conclusion. “Hopeless, as usual,” she said. “The last one hadn’t changed his socks since his A levels. Alice said his feet smelled like the stuff you floss out of your teeth.”
Pog kissed her good-bye and headed off down the six flights of stairs to consider Meg D’ath’s plans to convert her pint-sized potting shed into a granny flat for her mother- in-law.
Esme then spent nearly two hours getting showered and dressed, and dressed again, and dressed a third time before finally settling on a pale green agnés b suit with a seriously short skirt. Then she felt embarrassed about parading in front of Henry, so put her trench coat on over it before she went to find him and check it was okay for him to look after Rory.
“Actually,” Henry said, when Esme found him in his sitting room, “it’s not.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked sweetly. Why hadn’t she thought of this before?
“I am going to play bridge in Stonyborough with Dr. Mason and his wife,” Henry said briskly, closing his book and dusting his trousers. “They’ve been asking me for some time and it felt impolite turning them down yet again.”
She looked out the window where Rory was in the garden, attempting to brush poor Eeyore down with a broom. The pathetic creature seemed to be enjoying it.
“Never mind,” Esme trilled. “I’ll ring Mrs. McArthur.”
Earlier in the week, when she had thought about booking Rory into nursery school for the day, she had decided not to, reasoning that this would keep her from going. Clearly, that was not the case and now there was no way Mrs. Monk would take him at such short notice. It was Mrs. McArthur at five pounds an hour or nothing.
The House in the Clouds seemed to have grown extra stairs. She clattered up to the kitchen to retrieve her address book, stopping outside her bedroom door to kick off her high heels. She really should have organized this sooner, she knew that, but then she would have been forced to admit she was going. It was like the difference between manslaughter and murder.
Mrs. McArthur proved to be annoyingly engaged. Esme tried her number four times in a row, all the while keeping an eye on Rory out the window and trying not to look at her watch more than once every fifteen seconds. She had to make the eleven o’clock train if she was going to meet Louis at his hotel at one and it was already ten past ten. The thought that she might not be able to make it shattered her in a way that made her think perhaps there really had been no doubt as to her motives. Perhaps it was murder after all.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said under her breath as she quickly made a sandwich for Rory using deliciously mature cheddar and that morning’s sourdough. She scoured the pantry, finding a bashed-up little bag of chips and a squashed chocolate bar, and then tripped down the stairs again, grabbing his little day pack out of his room and putting in a warm jumper, his raincoat, a hat and his hastily prepared lunch.
She slipped into her high heels, then continued down to the bottom of the house and out the door, where she removed the broom from her small son’s clammy little hands and informed him they were off to the babysitter’s.
“But I haven’t got a hankie,” Rory said, panicked. He had a cold and Esme knew that Mrs. McArthur had a pathological fear of snot but would only wipe it with paper towels, which her delicate son found, rightfully so, too abrasive.
“Ooooh,” grumbled Esme. “You hold your bag and I will go and get you one.”
She ran into the house, nearly breaking her ankle in the process. It was useless trying in Granny Mac’s room; she had always used toilet paper if her nose had run. Not for her the extravagance of a handkerchief or tissues! Despite the pulling in her calves, Esme declined to ask Henry yet another favor and so ran up the extra flight to her and Pog’s room, only to find the box of tissues empty. It wasn’t until she went through all the drawers that she remembered there was a whole week’s worth of ironing sitting in a corner in the kitchen. That was where the handkerchiefs would be.
By the time she got back down to Rory, it was twenty to eleven and she merely grabbed his hand and pulled him straight down the lane to Mrs. McArthur’s. The door was open, which it almost always was, and Esme went straight in to find the woman in all her Sunday finery fussing about a little lace-covered table laden with garishly colored cakes.
“Oh!” she said, when she saw who it was with what Esme felt was some disappointment.
“I’m in a terrible spot,” Esme gabbled. “Could you take Rory for the day? I have to go down to London and Henry’s playing bridge with the Masons so he can’t watch him.”
Mrs. McArthur’s lips pursed significantly. “Bridge?” she sniffed. “With the Masons?”
Esme nodded and jiggled Rory’s hand.
“Well, I am actually hosting the inaugural meeting of the Seabury Mah-Jongg Club this morning, in fact I thought you were one of my girls, so I’m sorry but I can’t help you. Bit of a cold, Rory? Poor lamb. Here, have a rice cake.”
Rory reached out and clutched the crunchy dry cake while Esme looked at her watch. She had less than ten minutes to find someone to look after her son and get to the station to catch her train. She had no choice.
“Right-oh,” she said in a jolly voice. “We’ll be off then.” She turned and walked as quickly as her heels would let her down the drive and across the road. She could make it, she could, if she took Rory with her. Her son scurried along at her side.
“What’s happening, Esme?” he asked.
“You’re coming to London with Mummy,” she answered.
“Why?” He broke into a trot to keep up with her.
“Because a man said so,” came her reply. It had answered many a question in the past and would have to do for this one as well.
It wasn’t until they were seated, sweating and steaming, on the train as it pulled out of Seabury Station that it occurred to Esme that while she was now indeed going to be able to make her rendezvous with Louis, it was going to be with the added complication of Rory present and able.
Getting there was only half the battle. It was simply too sordid for words.
“Are we going to see Alice?” Rory asked, looking out the window as the countryside whisked by.
Esme felt wretched at what she was doing and decided then and there that she would take him to Hamleys toy shop then somewhere smart for lunch and perhaps they would meet up with Alice or even go to a movie, and she would forget the ridiculous prospect of rediscovering her lost love even though the opportunity had been handed to her almost on a silver platter and the prospect of not snatching it away made her feel sick to her heart.
But over the course of the next ninety miles she changed her mind, and changed it again, and again, and again until once more she was completely confused about her intentions and could only decide as far as going to the general area of Louis’s hotel, which after all was not far from Hamleys, and where she also knew many a fine lunch spot, having worked in the area and its surrounds for most of her adult life.
It was the sensible thing to do, she told herself.
Chapter 17
An hour later, standing in the street, wind lashing at her ankles and a fine rain starting to fall as her son whimpered beside her, she wondered if she would ever see sense again.
She had found Louis’s hotel and walked past it three times before dragging Rory to the corner and stopping there, flustered and frayed. Her thoughts were having trouble collecting themselves, as though the unseasonable city wind was gathering them up like fallen leaves and blowing them every which way, mixing them up with other city debris like dog ends and chocolate wrappers.
It was just so far from what she had imagined this past week, these past weeks, these past years. She had always fantasized that Louis and she would meet again but that it would be something windswept and wild and hopelessly romantic. Something blurred around the edges and misty like an old black-and-white Katharine Hepburn movie. And in just the past few days she had seen herself so many times knocking on the door of Louis’s room and having him open it, sweep her into his arms and carry her to a four-poster bed where he would make love to her in a way that would put those ancient sacks of flour to shame.
Never had she seen herself standing in the rain outside a grotty bistro with a small snot-faced boy whining desperately that he wanted to do wees.
She had never felt less like Katharine Hepburn in her life. Here she was, her shoes splashed with rain and quite possibly ruined, dark sweaty stains under her armpits and her coat wearing the best part of a puddle from a number 17 bus bearing the wrinkle-free visage of Jemima Jones, which had swept past her just seconds after they had emerged from the Underground.
She had lost three pounds over the course of the past week but could still feel her waistband cutting into the flesh around her middle. Her crotch felt sweaty as well. She felt crumpled and ruffled and grubby and cheap.
The gods, she had to accept, were conspiring against her. No matter how much she wanted to feel Louis’s smooth nut-brown skin pressed hotly against hers, it wasn’t going to happen.
She looked at her son’s damp ginger curls. Had she really thought she would take Rory with her to meet Louis? Or had she brought him to keep herself from doing just that? Was Rory ruining her chances, or saving her life? Her marriage? Her bruised and battered heart?
“Come on, Ror,” she said finally, blocking out her thoughts and making her decision. “We’ll find a loo and have a nice cup of tea somewhere.” She took his hand and started back down the street.
Rory perked up instantly. “Can I have one of those little cakes that’s half brown and half white?” he asked enthusiastically, trotting along slightly behind her. “And a pot of tea all to my own self?”
“Of course you can, darling.” Esme looked at her watch. She had kissed her chances with Louis good-bye. Her feelings, at that moment, as she pulled Rory along were so complicated she could barely identify them. Her insides roiled with conflicting thoughts. Did she want to be a woman who cheated on her husband, anyway? Did she have it in her? Was that who she was? A cheat? An adulterer? A slut? The part of her that hoped she was not felt relief as she left Louis behind. But what if he truly was the big love of her life? Would she ever find happiness by walking away from him? A second time? The part of her that lusted after whatever it was he awoke in her felt anguish and resentment.
“Esme,” Rory wailed, adding to her turmoil. “You’re going too fast. I want to do weeeeees.” His little face was red with exertion and he was clutching at his trousers in desperation. Esme felt dreadful. On top of everything, she was a bad mother. She was still a bad mother.
She stopped and looked around the street. It was just three blocks from where she had worked at Goodhart Publishing and she knew there was no public lavatory nearby, just offices and a few furniture shops and her old gym, Body Works, which was just across the road. Of course!
“It’s okay, Rory,” she said. “We’ll go where Mummy used to do her exercises,” and she dragged him across the road and up the stairs to the front desk, where the same yappy receptionist who had been there when she still frequented the place, albeit sporadically, before their move to the country, was filing the same old nails and reading what looked like the same old magazine.
“Blimey, we haven’t seen you in donkey’s ages,” she said.
“Don’t mention donkeys.” Esme smiled, she couldn’t remember the girl’s name. “But I have a little boy desperate to go to the loo. Could he . . . ?”
“’Course, but you’ll have to send him into the Gents’. We get complaints, you know.” She rolled her eyes and Esme nodded sympathetically, then shuffled Rory toward the men’s changing rooms, pushing him in the door and telling him to find the toilet as quickly as he could, use it and come straight back out.
Waiting outside the door, she was straightening her coat and attempting to run her fingers through her frizz when she was distracted by the sound of children laughing and clapping their hands. As it dawned on her what the sound was, a plot hatched so virulently in her mind that she was powerless to stop it.
The gym had a day care. She knew that. For a fiver an hour, you could leave your children under expert supervision while you did your thing in the weights room or the aerobics studio. Esme, with two ancient child-minders built in for free at home, had never used the day care herself but other women she used to work with had.
The par
t of Esme that did not want to be a woman who had an affair told her to not give it another thought, to stay right there and wait for her son. The part that cried out for Louis told her that if she tried she could still make it to the hotel. He might still be there.
Esme teetered on the brink of her options. She could do nothing and go home to her husband and the rest of her life, complete with the complications of the past, or she could follow her pheromones and rekindle the intoxicating, overpowering, awe-inspiring, all-consuming passion she had discovered with Louis before the rest of her life had happened.
Esme shuffled on her heels. Everything up until this point had been conspiring against her, or conspiring against Louis. Yet here she was with a child who needed minding and a facility to do just that. Was it fate?
Of course, she was no longer a member of the gym but her friend (whatever her name was) on reception might overlook that. Perhaps that could be the deciding factor.
“You wouldn’t do me a favor,” she said, sidling up to the reception desk. “I’ve a couple more hours’ shopping to do and my son is already dead on his feet. I couldn’t possibly . . . ?”
The receptionist quickly checked that no one else was close enough to hear them. Esme was obviously not the first person to make this request.
“Twenty quid,” she said. “And you’d better be back in two hours or I will sell him to the Gypsies.”
Rory emerged from the bathroom with a big happy smile on his face and Esme tucked him in and explained what was happening. He was more than happy with the arrangement. Like his father, he was not a shopper, and while he sensed the change of plan meant his very own pot of tea was no longer just around the corner, he was happy to avoid an afternoon of shoes and handbags. Gluing colored things onto other colored things and biffing Play-Doh around a room was a pretty good alternative as far as he was concerned.
By Bread Alone Page 26