By Bread Alone

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  “My uncle and I agree exactly on the principles of the boulangerie,” Louis said, his face darkening again, “but not so my father. When the boulangerie passed into his hands Papa was keen to make changes, many changes. My uncle and I were not.”

  He stopped, his lips remaining thin and pursed.

  “What sort of changes?” Charlie persisted.

  “You probably do not understand,” Louis said rather dismissively to Charlie, “but Esme does.” Esme glowed beneath his sentiment. “To bake pain au levain the way we always have, the way we do, is”—he searched for the word, frustrated in his passion—“it is honorable if that is what I mean. The baker has always been at the center of village life in France. He feeds people. And he puts his honor and his love and his skill into every single boule, separately, that is what makes him an artisan. He does it with his hands. That is what makes him different from a machine. That is what makes him want to go to work at midnight and not leave until there is enough bread for everyone and he has left a little bit of himself in every loaf.”

  Charlie looked confused, but Esme reached for Louis’s hand and unclenched it, taking it in her own.

  “Your father didn’t want to do it that way?”

  “My father wanted to borrow money for a machine to cut dough into the right size for baguettes, and for another machine that would roll the dough into the right shape, and for an electric oven that would cook ten times more baguettes than the oak-fired oven we have been using all this time. He wanted to stop making boules and just make baguettes and buy in frozen pastries from a big factory. He wanted to have nothing to do with the bread but the money.”

  Charlie was obviously struggling with the concept that this was unacceptable. “Isn’t that why most people work?” he said. “For the money?”

  “Most people are not artisan bakers,” Louis said, and Esme squeezed his hand tighter.

  “So your father is a baker in Paris?”

  “My father is a businessman in Paris,” Louis corrected him sharply. “He owns a factory that mixes and rises and refrigerates baguette dough and then delivers it through tubes from big tankers to boulangeries throughout Paris. I want nothing to do with it.”

  How Esme loved him in that moment, his face fierce with passion for his work. Her heart swelled with pride.

  “Yes, well, I had better get going,” said Charlie, clearly not as impressed. “Lovely to finally meet you, Louis, and I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

  “Your friend does not like me,” Louis said when he had gone.

  “Oh, he does,” cried Esme. She could not bear the thought that the two most wonderful men in her life might not get on. Plus, she thought the meeting had gone much better than it could have. “That’s just Charlie,” she added lamely. “He’s very, you know . . .”

  “Suspicious?” Louis suggested, which sent a shudder down Esme’s spine.

  “I was going to say English,” she said, and they both laughed.

  That night—she could not keep away—in the bakery, she was so in love with him she wanted to explode. She just couldn’t get close enough, he couldn’t get deep enough, her tongue, her fingers, her secret caverns could not contain him enough for her liking, her loving. It was almost unbearable but deliciously so. And as she watched him weigh out the dough, upend the baskets and carve his swirly signature into every single loaf, leaving a little bit of himself behind him in each one, she was desperate to have more of him.

  “I want to make some myself,” she announced, swathed in linen, from her spot on the stairs. “Sourdough. At home. For you. I want to know what it feels like.”

  “Truly?” Louis asked, his body glistening with sweat and his eyes with interest.

  “Truly,” nodded Esme.

  “But no one in France makes their own bread. Never! Why would they?”

  Because no one has ever wanted to please anyone else this much before, Esme thought to herself. No one has ever loved anyone this much before. No one ever will.

  “Go on,” she wheedled. “Please let me. I want to do it.”

  “You know, the levain has never left the boulangerie before,” Louis said as he kissed her good-bye at dawn, handing over a willow basket, a bag of flour and a stone jar of his family’s precious starter. “I hope it brings you luck.”

  “It already has,” Esme said, leaning in to him again, his lips soft and supple against her own.

  “To think,” he murmured, “there will be some of you and me in the bread you bake, Esme.”

  “Like a child,” she said without thinking, then blushed at her foolishness. Couples in the first flush of true love did not talk about babies, even she knew that. But Louis seemed unfazed. He brushed a curl away from her neck and smiled at her so kindly she wanted to cry.

  “Yes,” he said, “I suppose. Like a child. Made with love.” She could not for a moment imagine Gordon from Charlie’s work being able to say something like that. Louis’s French romantic streak made it possible to hear things from him that would have her wetting her pants with laughter should they be delivered in an English accent. He kissed her again and went back inside.

  Esme floated through the rest of the day, her faith in her lover fully restored. And she baked. For the first time, she baked. One beautiful, brown, slightly lopsided boule of sourdough bread just the way Louis had taught her. Next to the joy of sex, it was the most satisfying discovery she had ever made. She loved the feeling of flour and water under her fingers and the way the texture changed as she mixed it and mixed it until if she closed her eyes she could almost believe it was Louis she was kneading. She slept deeply and untroubled on both three-hour occasions she left her mixture to rise. And despite the unreliable and in fact unknown nature of the apartment’s little oven, she watched through the glass door as her boule turned perfectly from dough into bread.

  What possessed her to deliver her first offering in person to Louis’s house that afternoon, she would never know. She must have realized as she looked up his uncle’s address in the phone book that in the circumstances it was a foolish thing to do. She must have known as she took her first ever boule out of the tricky little oven that delivering it to Louis was not necessary. She could have taken it to him at the bakery at midnight. There was no reason to go to his house. To surprise him. To catch him.

  Or had she known all along he was too good to be true? Had Charlie’s constant scratching away at her certainty triggered more doubt inside her than she had realized? Esme was to ask herself these and similar questions over and over again in years to come, but in the stifling heat of that summer afternoon as she walked up the dusty road toward Lalinde carrying her wonkily shaped slightly flat but sweet-smelling loaf of home baked bread in a linen dish towel, she asked herself nothing.

  When she got to the modest house hidden in the cool shade of half a dozen leafy trees partway to Lalinde she was hot and sticky and tired. Her legs were covered in dust and she had sweat patches under her arms. The pale pink silk shirt she had chosen and tied at the waist above her baggy white shorts seemed like a poor choice now.

  She knocked at the door and it was opened almost immediately by a pretty, tired-looking woman a little older than herself, carrying one child on her hip and another in her belly. The woman had straight brown slightly disheveled hair and a peaches and cream complexion.

  “Hello,” she said. She was English. “Can I help you?”

  Esme stared as a dark-eyed, dark-haired toddler ran up the hallway behind the woman and hurled itself at her legs. Her heart had sunk through her body and was now rolling down the hill up which she had just climbed, leaving big fat splodges of blood in cartoon puddles behind it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I must have the wrong house.”

  “Oh yes?” the woman said. “Who are you looking for?”

  “I’m looking for Louis,” Esme said uncertainly, peering behind the woman and clutching on to the glimmer of hope that she was indeed at the wrong house.

 
“Oh, really?” The woman raised her eyebrows. “What for?”

  “I wanted to give him this,” Esme said, the horror of her situation claiming the pale skin of her cheeks as its own and brightening them radiantly. She held up the bread and the woman opened the dish towel and looked at Esme’s boule, then closed it again.

  “If there’s one thing Louis doesn’t need, trust me, it’s more bread,” she said tiredly. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Esme,” said Esme, the saliva disappearing from inside her mouth as her happiness spiraled downward. “I’ve been helping”—the lie stuck in her throat—“Louis at the boulangerie.” Any pretense of helpfulness slid off the woman’s face. “I’m learning to bake sourdough.”

  The woman hitched the baby up on her hip and looked the dusty, silly young girl on her doorstep scornfully up and down.

  “Who are you?” the dusty, silly young girl asked in a quavery voice.

  “I’m Diana, his wife,” said Diana, his wife. “Did he not mention me?” Her eyes had hardened to a frightening shade of icy ocean blue. She turned and yelled over her shoulder. “Louis!” Esme tried as hard as she could to believe that the man this woman was hailing—her husband, of all people—was not her Louis, the Louis who had told her he loved her a hundred times over the past few weeks. The Louis who knew her body better than she knew it herself, who purred when she whispered what she loved about him in his ear, in whose arms she fitted so perfectly. But as he rounded the corner into the hallway, tucking a white T-shirt into the front of his faded blue jeans, jeans she could unbutton in her sleep, possibly even had done, there was no doubt at all that her Louis and this other woman’s husband were one and the same.

  He looked up and saw her and seemingly without even flinching came to the door and stood behind the woman. His wife. His English wife. The best friend who had moved here when Louis was thirteen? “It’s good to share, no?” How could Esme have been so stupid?

  “Hello,” Louis said. “So, you try the baking yourself?” The mild hiccup in his English was the only sign he was at all unnerved.

  “Who is she?” his wife asked rudely, shifting the baby on her hip again and shushing the toddler behind her.

  “I told you,” Louis answered, “she is the English girl who wants to learn about pain au levain. Tante Marie needs help in her room, Diana. Can you go?”

  “You told me no such thing,” his wife snapped back. “I’m not completely stupid, Louis.”

  Ignoring her, he leaned over toward Esme and lifted the dish towel, raising his eyebrow and shaking his head in a mildly approving fashion. “Not too bad,” he said, looking at her and meeting her eyes as though he had not stared into them just hours before professing his deep and undying devotion. “I say you need to work a little on your mixing technique. Maybe leave the dough a little longer in the basket.”

  Esme struggled to keep breathing. Louis’s wife was looking at her with such contempt she was surprised her skin wasn’t breaking into welts.

  “Come back tomorrow,” Louis said casually, “and we can work on your kneading.”

  Esme tried to smile but the muscles that were usually so easily at her beck and call had frozen in fear and panic. “Thank you,” she found her voice saying politely, if not a little shakily, “but I am just about to leave. For England.” Louis gave a little lackluster shrug and Esme wondered how she was expected to keep on living. “I just wanted to say,” she fought on, even though tears had actually sprung from her eyes now and were trailing down her cheeks, “thank you,” she whispered. Then she turned and fled.

  “You bastard!” she heard his wife spit behind her. “You filthy little bastard.”

  Louis started to protest but Esme was running as fast as she could away from him, his wife and his children and did not care to know what he was saying. His shrug of indifference at the news she was leaving had told her everything she needed to know. As if the fact he was married and the father of two, nearly three children was not enough on its own. She had been sleeping with a married man! Louis had given her something that was not rightfully his to give. The contemptuous look on his wife’s face kept flashing in front of her as she ran all the way back to Venolat. She felt guilt and disgust mixing in her gut as her feet kicked up mushroom clouds of dust where they pounded the road. Charlie had been right, she was a fool; a clueless, hopeless, silly little fool.

  Her tears formed streaks through the dust on her cheeks as she pushed open the door of the apartment and ran up to her room, pulling her suitcase from under the bed and clumsily throwing her clothes into it, her ribs aching with the sobs that racked her.

  She pulled the case down to the kitchen and, barely able to think, to breathe, started scratching out a note to Charlie.

  “You were right,” was all she could manage in the end. “He’s married. Gone home. Esme.”

  The words “He’s married” pounded in her head as she searched the kitchen for her tote bag. How could she have been so wrong about him? It didn’t seem possible. How could her feelings have let her down, betrayed her, lulled her into thinking she deserved a love like that? And if she hadn’t been wrong, if he really had loved her, well, that was even worse because his love could never belong to her anyway. It belonged to his pretty wife and their black-eyed children and she had nothing to show for it, nothing, nothing but this awful black bottomless feeling.

  Her eyes fell on the stone jar of levain sitting on the kitchen counter and she picked it up and pressed it, cool as the waters of the river below, against her burning cheek. Her eyes closed and her sobbing slowed. So, Louis had lied. So, he had tricked Esme into handing him her heart. So, nothing about him was real. Nothing except his bread. That was real. She had seen it, she had smelled it, she had tasted it. She had made it. She slid the stone jar into her tote bag and slipped out of the apartment. So, she would have something to show for it after all.

  Chapter 11

  A decade and a half later, sitting across a crisp white linen tablecloth from each other on the opposite side of the Channel, Esme and Louis agreed, with fewer than a dozen words between them, that the bread was as good as you could get at any restaurant in London but not as good as Lapoine’s.

  After a glass of Bollinger, which she downed with indecent haste, Esme concentrated on trying to stop worrying about the implications of meeting in secret with her old lover, even though it had been a secret even from herself.

  She watched Louis’s slim brown fingers gently crumble his olive roll onto his plate as he looked at her and smiled his comfortable smile.

  “I suppose I should stop acting like such a bloody jessie and ask you what you are doing here,” she said rather brightly, although up until she heard the words out and about and clanging around her own ears she had assumed she was only thinking them.

  “I suppose you should,” Louis agreed.

  Esme’s hands flew to her hot cheeks. She was mortified, afraid that her blush was going to spread to the tablecloth and the Orrery’s white walls and the street outside and take over the whole of London until it made the six o’clock news and Pog would know it was her and wonder what the hell she was doing there.

  Louis let the breadcrumbs fall away from his fingers.

  “Esme,” he said with such kindness that she felt it in her toenails. “It’s all right. Relax.”

  Her hands fell back down into her lap. She was suddenly tired of being herself. She didn’t want to get gum in her hair. She didn’t want to blush and stutter and stammer and keep the things she really wanted to feel, to know, at arm’s length. It was exhausting. It was pathetic. It was a habit so ingrained that she had begun to think it came naturally, but sitting here with Louis she realized how bloody hard it was. She relaxed.

  “How could you do that to me, Louis?” she asked him. “How could you tell me all those things—that you loved me, that you wanted to be with me forever, that I was special—when you were married to Diana, when you obviously loved her, when you had children with her? I didn�
�t understand it, Louis, I still don’t understand it. I thought I was the one. I was sure I was the one. You certainly made me feel as though I was. How could you say all those things without meaning them? How could you possibly do that?”

  At that moment Louis turned seamlessly to the waiter, who appeared just then for their order. “I will have the foie gras and the beef and madam will have the soup and the salmon,” he said. The waiter nodded and retreated and Esme continued as though they had never been interrupted.

  “Do you know what that did to me, Louis?” she asked, aware that she was opening the floodgates yet feeling strangely detached from the flood. “It took years to let anyone love me again. Years! I’m only just managing it now. I could never believe a word anyone told me after Venolat. I assumed everyone was like you, unbelievably good at lying and totally heartless. What you did to me was cruel, Louis. It was unspeakably cruel. And yet I don’t think you are an unspeakably cruel person.”

  Louis looked away from her for a moment, but when he looked back his eyes were far from weak or apologetic.

  “I meant everything I said to you, Esme. Everything,” he said with a passion disguised by the smooth low timbre of his voice. Yet for the first time he seemed slightly flustered and Esme felt a flutter of something but couldn’t work out whether it was satisfaction or fear or something completely different. “But the time was not right,” Louis said. “I apologize for that but not for what I said to you. I mean every word, Esme.” He stopped, and shook his head. “I meant every word.”

  “But you had a wife, Louis, and little children. How could you possibly have meant every word?”

  “Just because I did not act the way a gentleman should does not mean that I was not being honest with you, Esme.”

  “Well, you were certainly not being honest with one of us, Louis.”

  “Yes, but I am not the one who ran away in the night, Esme, never to come back,” he said.