By Bread Alone

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  “Time to put the bread in,” she said to her friend. “Come on, clench those buttocks.”

  “Unfurl the flag, sherpa,” Alice grumbled as she heaved herself off Granny Mac’s bed and headed up the stairs.

  Up in the kitchen Esme’s dough sat proud and floury in its linen-lined basket. Esme loved this last raw look at it. She opened the oven door and pulled out the baking stone she used to even out the temperature and give her bread a crispier bottom and chewier crust.

  Gently but quickly, she upturned the basket just millimeters off the heated stone and out plumped her boule, making an almost imperceptible sizzle as it hit the heated ceramic surface. Swiftly, she took the waiting razor and cut a few clever lines into the skin of the dough, then shut the door and flicked the steam jets on three times in quick succession.

  Although she had done this a thousand times before, she could not help but crouch down and watch her bread through the glass door of the oven. She still saw the magic in every single bake and she was sure she always would.

  “Esme,” Alice said, from her position at the kitchen table, “you never finished telling me about what happened with Charlie.”

  Esme put the kettle on. Yes. Charlie.

  Obviously Esme’s intention, once she got her family back to the House in the Clouds that awful, wonderful day two weeks before, had been to take out a contract on Charlie and get him killed, stone dead.

  He had risked so much, and none of it as his own expense, in his little turn at playing God, that Esme doubted she could ever look at him again let alone speak to him. But it had been Pog, kind, gentle, remarkable Pog, who had finally talked to him at length on the phone and then suggested that maybe Esme should go and meet him and listen to what he had to say.

  So it was that the previous Friday Esme had found herself looking at Charlie over a very expensive glass of Reisling, his treat, and wondering how much of a fuss it would cause if she choked him then and there. It was lunchtime and they were sitting upstairs at Assaggi in Notting Hill, as far away from the pitfalls of Marylebone High Street as Charlie could manage in a busy working day.

  “Darling, I’m so glad you finally agreed to have lunch with me,” he was saying. “It’s been awful these past two weeks. If you’d hung up on me one more time I swear I was going to have to—I don’t know—not top myself but do something pretty drastic. I’ve been quite distraught.”

  Esme took a sip and thought how terribly Charlie this was.

  “Yes,” she said demurely, not ready to let him off the hook, “it must have been dreadful for you.”

  “Oh, Esme,” Charlie said, pushing his wine away, and missing her sarcasm. But she had to admit he did look awful. The glow that normally illuminated the air in front of him had vanished and he looked quite ordinary, which was not a Charlie state at all. “Please, please forgive me, Esme. I never meant to hurt you, of course I didn’t. I would never do that. I would rather, what? Stick needles in my eyes? Wear synthetic boxers? Reveal my natural roots? Oh please don’t freeze me out, Esme, I can’t bear it.”

  Esme swirled the rich straw-colored wine in her glass. Of course, she hadn’t come all this way to ignore him, and she wanted him to know that before they ordered their food so she could order up large and not feel bad that he was paying.

  There were things she had to say to him, though. Questions she had to ask.

  “Why, Charlie?” This was the main one. “Why did you do such a terrible thing?”

  “Well, I would have told you on the phone if you hadn’t kept slamming it down in my ear,” Charlie answered, but the color returned to his cheeks. He could sense progress. He sighed and took a deep breath. “It’s the most terrible cock-up. Really. I was in some Spanish bar off Tottenham Court Road one night,” he said, “not long after I came to stay with you in the country, and there the little turd was, propping up the bar and sniveling into his Rioja.”

  “He was sniveling?”

  “Well, no, but he was pretty bloody miserable. Anyway, I recognized him straightaway. I suppose I had been thinking about him after what you said that night, you know, about him being your one big chance at happiness. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Esme! What do I know about these things? You said that when things were rough—and things have been rough, haven’t they?—that you wondered what it might have been like if you’d ended up with Louis. And there the little shit was sitting right in front of my nose. Well, the idea just came to me. What if you could see him once again? Naturally, I assumed that just one look and you’d realize that the life you’ve been living has been the right one after all. I just wanted to give you a slice of your happiness back, Es. I thought you could have a lovely romantic lunch at my expense, perhaps a bit of a snog in the lavs and then go your separate ways. I thought it would cheer you up.”

  “But you bought him a suit, Charlie. You turned him into someone he wasn’t,” protested Esme.

  “He was already someone he wasn’t!” Charlie argued. “He was always someone he wasn’t.” He took a gulp of his wine. “Okay, look, to be honest, the suit was a bit of a mistake, I agree. I’ve had it for a while, actually bought it for someone else but, oh, never mind. Anyway, it was you who turned Louis into the handsome prince, not me. And I am incredibly sorry for what I did and when I think of how much worse it could have been I cringe, darling, I honestly cringe but I didn’t do it to hurt you. I thought I was doing you a favor. Adding a bit of spice to your life. I was trying to be nice.”

  “Well, why couldn’t you tell me that he was working in a sarnie shop in Hounslow and let me go and find him the way he really is?”

  “Yes,” Charlie agreed. “I can see now that would have been better but at the time I wanted you to have your little dream, Es. You love all that romantic stuff. You always have. You know I don’t understand it myself but I love how you love it. And I thought how marvelous to meet this man looking all dashing and international and saving sourdough all around the world. Of course he was supposed to tell you that he was still happily married and that he hoped you were too but the cretin obviously got one look at you and decided he wanted a piece of that for himself.”

  “But can you see what a dreadful thing it was to do?” Esme asked him. “Charlie, what if Rory really had been snatched? What if Louis had turned nasty? Or Pog had left me?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Charlie said. “I have been torturing myself with the same possibilities, I told you, I have been cringing. But that part of it is really not my fault. I mean, the slimy little bastard was supposed to disappear after the first lunch. I had no idea he was going to hoodwink you so badly, Esme. To hurt you all over again. Good Lord, that’s the last thing I would ever want. You are precious to me. You are my oldest friend. I love you more than my new Rolex. Have you noticed it, Es? Twenty-four-carat gold. Anyway, if I ever see the lying, cheating, sneaky little toad again I will box him in the nose all over again, I promise you.”

  “Well, if you are ever in Hounslow and feeling peckish,” Esme told him, “don’t hold back on my account.”

  The waiter approached and Charlie looked at her, worry creasing his brow in a way she knew would have him shrieking for forehead-smoothing surgery should he catch sight of the wrinkles in a mirror. The damage had been done. And repaired. And with one smile they put their angst behind them and ordered vast quantities of food and another bottle of wine.

  The truth was that Charlie was precious to Esme, too. So, he would never understand what true love was, or what her idea of true love was, but then her idea of true love had completely changed. And she could not in all honesty stay angry with Charlie. The whole sorry mess had been her own fault.

  She had stupidly told him she thought Louis was the key to her happiness, and in the bleakness of losing Granny Mac she had truly believed that to be the case. She had reached into her past and plucked out the most vivid uncomplicated happiness she could find and dreamed of re-creating it. An impossible task, as it turned out. Not to mention a foolish one. />
  “The funny thing is,” she said sheepishly to Alice as they sat nursing their second cup of tea high in the Suffolk sky, “despite all the, you know, terribleness, the drama, the upset I’ve caused, everything is better now.”

  Better than it had been in two long, awful years. She knew now how much she loved Pog. She knew how much he loved her back and it was a thousand times more than Louis, than anyone else, ever could. Henry, finally trusting that she did not blame him, was a changed man and while not exactly a delight to have about the place, not a curse, either. And Rory, well, Rory: Her heart simply swelled with adoration. Something about relieving herself of the silent, secret ghost of Teddy had allowed her to love Rory in a way she had not thought possible before. And free of the blame for taking his twin-ness away from him, she was able to see, as clear as day, that just like his father, Rory loved her back, too. It was simply euphoric.

  Pog, looking blissfully boyish, Alice thought, clattered into the kitchen, his nose sniffing the air.

  “Am I on time?” he asked as he kissed his wife and smiled at her friend.

  “I swear,” said Esme, “you are getting almost as good as I am.”

  She moved over to the oven, put on her mitts, and opened the door, letting the heat and strength of the sourdough aroma engulf her. Reverently, she lifted out the pain au levain and set it on the countertop wooden rack she had for just that purpose. It sat there, fat and crisp and brown, radiating warmth and good taste.

  The kitchen filled instantly with that moist, sweet, salty smell. Pog and Esme’s eyes met above the boule and they smiled at each other. Their sadness aside, all seemed right with the world.

  Even Alice licked her lips. “What’s that?” she asked, peering over Esme’s shoulder.

  Sliced into the loaf was not the E that Esme had so deftly carved all these years, but an impression of the house in which they now stood.

  “It’s Bread from the House in the Clouds,” Pog answered her, getting a jar of apricot jam from the pantry, a dish of butter from the fridge and a breadboard and bread knife from the kitchen drawers.

  “What are you on about?” Alice asked, sitting down again, as Esme brought the bread to the table.

  “You tell her,” Esme said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Tell you to make the most of Granny Mac’s room while you can,” said Pog, handing the knife to Esme. “Because in a month or two right where you were just sitting and gossiping will be a roaring oak-fired oven.”

  Alice was confused. “I don’t follow,” she said, looking at Esme for guidance. “Is that an exorcism thing?”

  “I told you we had a lot to catch up on,” Esme said. She took the knife and expertly sawed through the thick, solid crust, the sound tickling her ears, a new, luscious, more- honeyed smell releasing into the air. The gorgeous gassy holes of the cream-colored crumb glistened with health.

  “We’re opening a bakery,” she said, “right here at the bottom of the stack of Stacks. Bread from the House in the Clouds. What do you think?”

  “I think I need a lie-down before Granny Mac’s bed is chopped into a thousand pieces and fed into the furnace,” Alice answered. “You’re going to bake at the bottom of your house and have people come here and buy the bread?”

  “People come here anyway,” Pog pointed out. “To marvel at Esme’s vegetarian protuberances and offer incontinent animals.”

  Esme laughed as she slathered a thick slice of her bread with homemade jam.

  Alice chewed on her own unseemly chunk of sourdough. “I thought your bread was just for you, Esme,” she said wickedly. “Not for everyone. That you couldn’t mass-produce it. That it’s personal.”

  Esme just smiled. “Why, Alice,” she said. “It’s bread. It’s the staff of bleeding life. People put butter and jam on it and eat it.”

  “Seriously, Esme, you are going to do this for a job?’”

  “Yes, she is,” answered Pog. “No one cares more about sourdough than Esme and artisan breadmakers are a dying breed these days, even in France, hey, Esme?”

  “Hey, yourself.” Esme grinned back, her cup overrunning with love for him.

  “You two!” Alice was disgusted. “Get a motel! You’ve got a sad, sorry singleton in your midst, let’s not forget.”

  “I shall leave you to it, then,” Pog said. “I’m sure there’s a lot of girl talk still to be had. Have you told her about you-know-who?”

  Alice looked confused. “I thought you hadn’t told him?” she said to Esme.

  “I haven’t.”

  “Haven’t told me what?” Pog wanted to know.

  “Nothing, Pog. Something Granny Mac said. Some things Granny Mac said. I will tell you later.”

  Pog disappeared down the stairs.

  “What is going on here today?” demanded Alice. “Who is you-know-who?”

  “Jemima Jones,” Esme announced, swallowing the last mouthful of her bread and missing it as soon as it was gone. “I banged into Jemima Jones again.”

  It had been the same day she’d lunched with Charlie, she told Alice. He’d had to get back to work and she had decided to walk to Portobello Road and have a coffee at the Electric before heading to the station to make her train.

  But no sooner had she sat down with her low-fat latte, than who should fly in the door but Jemima, her cream Armani coat flapping at her sides and her stilettos screeching across the floorboards.

  “Vodka tonic, double, and be quick about it,” she slung at the barman as she collapsed in a chair at the table right next to Esme. She flung her tote bag on the chair next to her and scrabbled around in it until she pulled out a box of tissues and loudly blew her nose.

  Esme pressed herself back into her own chair and twisted slightly away from Jemima, in the hope she would disappear. She did not.

  “Oh,” said Jemima Jones looking up and noticing her. “Esme.”

  Esme nodded, dumbly.

  “How’s the book coming along?”

  Esme opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  “If you’re worried it’s going to end up in my column,” Jemima said, “don’t be. They’ve dropped it. I’ve been given the arse. Fucking Primrose Beckwith-Stuyvesant. How was I supposed to know her uncle is apparently the patron saint of all newspaper bosses and godfather to half of News International?”

  The barman delivered her drink, which she knocked back in almost one gulp. “Same again,” she said, then put one bare pretty ankle on her knee and took off her shoe. “Bloody corns are giving me hell,” she said, rubbing her toes. “What kind of demented homosexual woman-hater would design shoes like these, anyway?”

  And to Esme’s amazement and alarm, the gorgeous Jemima burst into loud, wet tears.

  Esme and the barman stared at each other for a moment, then he quietly put Jemima’s drink down beside her and slithered away, leaving the two women alone together. In the absence of knowing what else to do, Esme went and sat beside the weeping woman and cautiously gave her a rub on her bony little back. The coat felt beautiful.

  “Gregory’s leaving me,” wept Jemima. “And this time, it’s for good. I’m not ‘adventurous’ enough for him, apparently, and he’s found some eighteen-year-old eastern European model-cum-waitress who doesn’t mind if he soils her underwear—while he’s still in it—so he’s going to live with her. GQ hasn’t come out of his room since he found out—Christ only knows what he is doing in there with that sodding computer of his, porn I expect, he is such an odd boy—and Marie Claire is eating us out of house and home. A home we won’t even have for much longer.” Her mascara had done scary things to her flawless face. Tears swept unfettered by wrinkles down her smooth cheeks. “It’s all gone horribly wrong and I don’t know what to do about it,” she sobbed.

  “What about your television show?” Esme asked feebly.

  “Those twitty nine-year-olds!” Jemima cried. “They wanted me to bankroll it. Dropped me like a hot potato when they realized that wasn’t going t
o happen. It’s so unfair! The world is a horrible place.”

  Esme kept rubbing.

  Jemima stopped crying.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, blowing her nose again. “I really am sorry.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Esme said brightly. “I’m constantly blubbing into my vodka tonics.”

  “No,” said Jemima, sniffing. “I’m sorry about stiffing you at TV Now! You were always very nice to me and it was a rotten way to pay you back.”

  “Oh, that,” Esme said, as though she could barely remember it. “That was nothing, really.”

  “And I’m sorry for writing about you like that in my column.”

  “Oh, was that me?” Esme asked wetly.

  Jemima cleared her throat. “Somebody at the Sunday Times told me about your little boy. I didn’t know that’s why you left London and put on the weight and everything. I would never have said anything in that stupid bloody column if I had known about that. I’m a mother. I can’t imagine how awful that must have been. I felt like a real shit, I can tell you.”

  She burst into tears again. Put on the weight? Esme repeated in her mind, her fingers itching to give Jemima a pinch.

  “My life is such a mess,” Jemima wept. “I wish I lived in the country and wrote books about hairclips like you do.”

  How long would that blessed lie come back to haunt her? Esme wondered. She looked at the sorry sight in front of her and marveled at the way the world worked.

  “Actually,” she said, deciding then and there to set the record straight, “there is no book about hairclips, Jemima. Please, stop crying. Look, I’m sure everything’s going to be all right. Do you think we should have a cup of tea?”

  Upon hearing this part of the story, Alice lost her cool. “You asked her if she wanted a cup of tea? You were nice to her? You bloody well have lost your marbles, Esme. Truly!”

  Esme was prepared for this.

  “She was a wreck, Alice. A total disaster area—it was terrible.” She picked up a tray she had prepared for Henry and Rory and started down the stairs, indicating for Alice to follow her. “She’s just another one of us, you know, trying to muddle through and make sense of it all without having a nervous breakdown or killing someone. She’s not so different from you or me.”