“Maybe if things had come easier,” she said, “if I hadn’t had to work the bloody hours, to try so hard . . .”
“What?” Granny Mac asked softly. “What might have been different?”
Esme closed her eyes and tried not to think about the chaos, the turmoil, the devastation, the end of her life back in London. Her thoughts felt murky and dangerous and her head full of confusion.
She opened her eyes and concentrated instead on the photo of Jemima.
“Will you look at the size of that rock!” she exclaimed, suddenly noticing the diamond on Jemima’s wedding finger. “It must be four carats at least. It’s bloody enormous.”
“Well, are you going to read me what the wretched woman has written or not?” Granny Mac boldly demanded. “A person could die of boredom lying here listening to your blathering all day long.”
Esme shook the broadsheet newspaper for dramatic effect and started to read.
“‘What a week—why, my feet (thanks for the pedicure, Christien!!) have barely touched the ground. It started on Monday night with an evening of thespian brilliance at the newly refurbished Court Theatre in N1. I didn’t quite make it to the play itself—Marie Claire was getting her first bikini wax and needed my support—but the drinks afterward were a riot. Gorgeous leading man Lin Forbes and I spent ages sipping courtinis (!) and discussing the pros and cons of being supertalented. In fact, we’d probably still be there now if pregnant single supermodel Minty Kloss hadn’t caused such a sensation by turning up in a teeny-weeny Hawaiian skirt and a bra made of coconut shells, not fully grown ones either, by the looks of them. Apparently, she had gotten her invitations muddled and a luau in Brixton was sadly minus her presence. Anyway, as if her entrance wasn’t quite enough of a spectacle, offering up one of the coconuts as an ashtray some time later certainly was. She’s not even going to feel that little head shooting down the birth canal it will be so small. Lucky her.’ God, she’s horrible!”
“Not all sweetness and light like yourself, Esme, I can see why you find her so grating,” said Granny Mac. “And anyway, what’s a luau?”
“It’s a Hawaiian party of some description, I believe,” she said.
“In Brixton? Is that so?” breathed Granny Mac. “She leads a grand old life, does she not, your Jemima? Come on then, keep reading.”
Much as she would have liked to feed the paper piece by piece to The Blind Goat at that moment, Esme found herself lured back to Jemima’s drivel.
“‘Next night,’” she continued in what she thought was a simpering tone, “‘music lovers will appreciate how lucky I was to be invited to a private concert at the London home of Lady Lucinda Grierson-Robbe, who was hosting a special performance by celebrated cellist and conductor Rostrov Millopopovich. The eighty-three-year-old living treasure has been given just a few short months to live and so was making his literal musical swan song at the home of Lady Lucinda. What an event. Unfortunately, I just missed the concert as Cosmo needed picking up from Ceroc classes and Rostrov had toddled off to bed by the time I got there—he doesn’t breathe too well these days apparently—but Lady Lucinda has redecorated since I was last at her home so the trip was not entirely wasted. She’s so brave going back to chintz but what a palette! Her SW1 home is a veritable smorgasbord of florals. Really, it has to be seen to be believed.’
“That is so rude,” said Esme. “I can’t believe how rude she is. Can you believe how rude she is? It’s just plain rude.”
“Get on with it, will you,” Granny Mac exhorted her.
“‘Sadly I had to forgo attending the celebrity premiere of the new movie by that Finnish film director who wins so many awards in favor of spending some quality time with GQ, our middle child, who’s very clever, especially at mathematics. I think he’ll end up in banking like his father. Anyway, the poor child is being persecuted by his schoolmates for his dedication to his studies. I won’t tell you what school, that would be unfair—but all nasty little boys in blue-and-gray-striped blazers should be very careful or they’ll feel the grille of the Volvo station wagon on their backs. Just joking!’”
Esme was so disgusted by that stage, she threw the paper down on the bed for the last time and left the room. There were dirty clothes to be washed, washed clothes to be ironed, ironed clothes to be hung in closets, an oven to be cleaned, floors to be mopped, an old man to be attended to, a small boy to be entertained and a husband to catch up with. She did not have any more time to waste on Jemima Jones.
Chapter 9
On the train down to the city the next morning Esme wondered why she had chosen to wear her La Perla bra, from the good old days, when she was at least a size bigger than she had been when she bought it and the underwire was practically slicing her in two.
It was a stiflingly hot day and she was overdressed. At one stage, the humidity was so overwhelming that she retreated to the loo and took her nylon-mesh-and-Lycra-mix top off, letting the breeze through the window chill her armpits while she splashed her face with cold water.
However, the possibility of the train crashing and flinging her near-naked body into the countryside to be identified later by her bereaved husband got the better of her and she put the top back on.
She hadn’t mentioned to Pog, in the chaos of the morning, that she was going to be in London for the day. She had simply dropped Rory around the corner to Mrs. McArthur, who looked after him sometimes when he wasn’t booked in with Mrs. Monk, and then made her way directly to the station.
So far the day had been a nightmare. Rory had woken up evil with grumpiness, Henry’s hip was obviously giving him trouble so he had a permanent black cloud above his head and Pog had been completely preoccupied by an early-morning phone call from Ernie Albrecht, who lived on the main road to Stonyborough and was considering adding a pergola to his dumpy little house.
As a result, her nerves were so jangled that she had nearly burned the sourdough, which never happened. After all these years she had developed a built-in timer in her head, and her nose could pick up from as far away as Gaga and Jam-jar’s the scent of her bread being almost ready to come out of the oven.
She could tell, too, just by smelling the air, if one of the power surges they suffered so often at the House in the Clouds was affecting her dough, if the oven needed to be turned down four or five degrees or if one of the steam jets was clogged, thus not sufficiently hardening and crispening the crust in its area.
That morning though, she had been so busy trying to wax her own legs, get Rory out of his Spiderman pajamas, clean cobwebs and bits of orange goop off Brown, who had been somewhere disgusting, comfort The Blind Goat, who had become quite paranoid about the outside world and kept head-butting the front door trying to get inside the house, listen to Pog talking about some coach lanterns, put a load of washing on, tidy the kitchen and pick some zucchinis because another busload had pulled up the previous day and taken photos, that her nose had nearly let her down.
She’d been out in the garden when Henry of all people had opened a window and simply said in that clipped, controlled manner of his, “Bread, Esme.” It was amazing how two such ripe and juicy words could shrivel and die on the wrong lips.
She’d only just caught it in time. It was a little darker than usual but on the right side of the cusp of being damaged. The crust would be extra hard and sharp and there’d be a bite, a zing to it that wouldn’t be there on a perfectly cooked loaf, but the crumb would be unhindered. It would still be delicious. She had planned to freeze it, as neither she nor Rory were going to be there for lunch, but as she’d grabbed the kitchen cloth and leaned down to wipe glitter (who knew where that came from?) off her shoe, she’d seen the loaf sitting there looking embarrassed and had been unable to resist it.
After all these years, every loaf still made her mouth water and her heart hop. It was silly, really. But still, she snatched it off the bench, wrapped it in grease-proof paper and popped it in her tote bag to take to Charlie. He would probably dump it in
a garbage bin on the way home from lunch, but she didn’t need to know that.
Anyway, in all of this she had not mentioned her plans for the day to Pog and, sitting sweatily as the train clattered toward London, it occurred to her that she probably should have left a note. As the train pulled into Liverpool Street station, she surreptitiously patted her dampening armpits and pulled down the front of her top. High-necked but vaguely see-through, it gave her excellent cleavage, which while wasted on Charlie made Esme feel saucy again and it was hard to feel saucy these days given that she was usually covered in animal hair, up to her armpits in compost or covered in glue and sticky paper while Rory sat in a corner saying in that calm, grown-up little voice of his: “But you said you knew how to make a kite.”
On the underground from Liverpool Street to Marylebone, her nose caught flashes of the familiar and comforting sharp, sweet smell of her bread and she was pleased she had brought it with her. Once upon a time London had felt like a comfortable old coat that could be slipped on for any occasion and went with absolutely everything, but now it felt like a leather bustier, size six: perfectly admirable, enviable even, on someone else, just not right for her.
Marylebone High Street had undergone a complete personality transplant since she’d last been there. Once a slightly dowdy, often forgotten poor relation of its fashionable neighbors Soho and Mayfair, it had become something of a spangly starlet in its own right. There were smart-looking bars and coffee shops wherever she looked and trendy furniture and clothes shops, too. There were even enough people on the street to give Esme a good jostle—whoever would have thought? She checked her watch and was slightly dismayed to find herself with twenty minutes to wait before meeting Charlie at the Orrery. The thought of twenty minutes to fill did nothing for her: her mind being full of things she could be doing, should be doing with twenty minutes at home.
She tried to start dawdling toward the restaurant but this required some skill as Esme was not a dawdler by nature. She did everything at a hundred miles an hour, she was known for it. Even before pregnancy and old people and animals, loitering had not been an option. In the magazine world, everything was done at a rush to meet, or at least not miss by too much, ridiculous deadlines, plus there had been the whirlwind of her social life to consider. She may have edited an odd hodgepodge of titles, but the invitations had come thick and fast, nonetheless, and then there was her own circle of friends to keep up with and Pog’s, too.
Motherhood had slowed her down, obviously, but not that much. Not enough, anyway, Esme thought, bashing the thought away and abandoning her lingering and deciding to go to the restaurant and have a posh cocktail, a somethingtini no doubt, after all.
The Orrery did look beautiful; she could see why Charlie liked it. Beautifully understated, not much color, not much noise—the exact opposite of Charlie himself really, but the menu read so well she had to fight hard to keep herself from salivating.
“You must be Esme.” A waitperson of around twelve years of age, Esme gauged, approached her, somewhat surprising her by knowing her name.
“Well, I know it’s a big deal for me to go out for lunch but I didn’t expect everyone to hear about it.” She smiled.
The waiter smiled back. “Mr. Edmonds has called and sends his apologies but he’s going to be half an hour late. Would you like to wait in the bar? My colleague Michael is in there all on his own and he makes a mean French 75.”
“Is that the one with gin and champagne?” Esme asked. “Because I had six of those once before and I never did find that camisole again.” With a jolt she realized what she was doing: flirting with a boy young enough to be her son. She really did not get out enough.
“You know there’s a Conran Shop next door,” the boy said, kindly ignoring her, “if you’re not keen on a cocktail.”
The Conran Shop was full of willowy wisps wafting around either shopping or working there, it was hard to tell which. Esme sucked in her stomach even though her Lycra mix was supposed to do that for her and tried her best to waft, too, although the concentration involved in wishing she had enough money to buy some of the beautiful furniture kept distracting her.
Rounding a corner on the second floor of the store, however, she happened upon a sitting receptacle of the utmost elegance, a Barcelona chair, and her stomach popped right out again as she admired it. Pog had often rattled magazines in her direction and pointed out the exact same chair, a big square combination of leather and chrome apparently designed for the king and queen of Spain, and all Esme had done was pour scorn on the cost—one thousand pounds, indeed. For a chair? That didn’t even turn into a sofa? Just think of the shoes and handbags she could buy with that.
But in the flesh, the chairs were rather inviting. Deciding against the white one for fear of dirtying it, Esme sat herself grandly down in the black one, wriggling her way to the back of it and stretching her legs out in front of her, luxuriating in the feel and comfort and price.
She closed her eyes and for a moment imagined being the queen of something but almost immediately her stomach began to rumble and she was reminded that lunch was the reason she was in London, yet lunch was what she had not yet had and precisely what she needed. She opened her eyes and stood up, or tried to, but something held her back, kept her from rising.
She knew instantly what the problem was and it made her feel sick. It had happened to her once before on a bench in Clapham Common. She thought about the tube and how she had lurched off it at Marylebone station. A belch of panic worked its way up from her hungry stomach. She was 99 percent sure she was stuck to the chair with someone else’s gum.
Taking a deep breath, she wrenched herself sharply up and away, but unable to look at the chair, she instead swiveled her skirt around so that its back was at her front and sure enough, a great gob, even worse, half a great gob of baboon-bum pink bubble gum was smeared across the rump of her skirt, stringy tentacles hanging from it. Slowly, she turned around to inspect the £1,000 chair—the other half of the gum was there, sitting plum in the middle of the black leather and looking not very big, at least, but extremely pleased with itself.
Why did these things have to happen to her? She bet nothing like this ever happened to Jemima Jones. She must have picked it up in the train. Was that why the sweet seller at the station had eyed her rear end with such a grin? A grin she had mistaken for admiration?
A lissome brunette wearing a Conran Shop badge rounded the corner by the elevator shaft and Esme sat herself back down on the offending chair (avoiding the goop) so quickly that both her knees clicked, drawing the pale creature’s attention.
“You all right there?” she asked, not stopping, as she glided by.
“Fine, fine, really. Absolutely fine,” Esme answered, recognizing the panic in her own voice and trying to counter it with a smile that felt frightening from the inside, never mind what it looked like on the outside. The assistant moved gracefully on, her eyes blank, and disappeared through a door behind the cushions.
“Fu-u-u-uck,” Esme whispered under her breath as she scrabbled in her bag, looking for the Barbie manicure set Rory had given her for her birthday and insisted she take with her everywhere. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The feel of her bread underneath its paper wrapping did nothing to calm her but she did find the pink zip-up purse, extracted the metal nail file, then slid to the floor on her knees. After a furtive glance to check for staff she leaned in over the chair and started to scrape at the splatter of gum on the soft hide with the nail file, lifting the stuck bit up around its disgusting sides as carefully as she could.
She was making good progress when the whish and whoosh of the elevator machinations distracted her. Someone was coming to the first floor! She picked as quickly as she could at the gum, relieved to see that it had not done too much damage to the leather beneath it. A small stain, perhaps, but nothing that some lucky soul with a spare £1,000 would spot without a magnifying glass.
The elevator whizzed and burred behind her as it ap
proached, making her hands tremble. She didn’t want to rush the delicate surgery at hand for fear of botching it but she didn’t want to be caught doing it, either. The sticky mess was so close to being removed—so close, but not quite there.
The elevator doors clanged open and Esme again whispered, “please, please, please,” under her breath as she tried desperately to get the last of the gum off the chair. Suddenly the last obstinate sinew miraculously came away, and concealing a whoop of joy, she looked up just as an exceptionally well-dressed, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned man walked around the corner from the elevator shaft, saw her, looked away, then stopped still in his tracks and looked at her again.
The world, for a moment, seemed a strange and unfamiliar place. More like space, Esme thought afterward, where ordinary things float around in slow motion.
For a while nothing happened. They simply stared at each other in disbelief. But there could be no doubt. She knew at once that it could be no one else but him. She could feel it in the air between them. It was Louis, long-lost Louis, rising from the ashes of her past and standing there staring at her.
“Esme,” Louis finally said in his voice made of melted dark-chocolate Hershey bars. “Esme, is that you?”
“Yes,” Esme answered in a voice she recognized not from screaming at Brown or placating her son or discouraging her vegetables but from many, many years ago, “of course it’s me.”
They stared at each other again, unsure as to what to do next, until Louis took a hesitant step forward.
“You are on the floor,” he said gently, reminding Esme exactly where, indeed, she was. With a hiccup of jerky movement, she stood, then made a crucial mistake. She ran her hand through her hair, which she often did when rattled. But she was not often holding a Barbie nail file complete with recycled gum at the time. On this occasion though, she was, and once the still relatively juicy blob made contact with Esme’s unwieldy collection of curls, it glued itself to a hundred strands of her strong red hair and did not want to come out. When Esme realized this, she wanted to die. She stood there, her hand in her hair, knowing she only had two choices, to leave the hand there, or bring it out without the nail file. Neither seemed fetching.
By Bread Alone Page 14
