By Bread Alone

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  “Oh, darling,” she said. “You got it? Congratulations. I’m so sorry. That’s wonderful news. When did you find out?”

  “Oh, not long ago,” he said brightly. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter.” This was not true and they both knew it. But who between them would be the first to open the Pandora’s box of what really mattered? Pog, though, thinking of Rory’s sad little face and inquiring eyes out on the Meare and feeling suddenly reckless, decided on the spur of the moment to at least wriggle the lock.

  “Esme,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About counseling.”

  “Oh, really?” Esme’s voice was light but her shoulders had frozen. “For whom?”

  For us, Pog wanted to say. For you and me and our two darling boys. He eyed his wife and her square, frightened shoulders across the canyon of grief between them.

  “Esme,” he said quietly. “We can’t go on like this.”

  “Like what?” she whispered.

  “Like two normal people constantly tiptoeing around this great gaping puddle, terrified of stepping in it in case we bloody drown.”

  “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please, Pog, don’t.”

  “I miss him, Esme,” Pog said, and his voice caught. “I want to talk about him.”

  He expected her to flee, but she didn’t. She stayed there, stiff and square, looking straight at him.

  “I’m not ready,” she finally whispered, barely audible.

  “But I am,” Pog answered her, the strength almost back in his voice. “I am.”

  “Then you talk about him,” she said. “You get counseling.”

  She looked so frightened then, so lonely and small and lost and hunted, that Pog’s bravery abandoned him.

  “Silly idea,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re right. Forget I mentioned it.”

  Her shoulders stayed tense, her face rigid with fear. Pog felt cruel. He knew she wasn’t ready. But like Rory, he wondered how long they would all have to wait.

  After two years of sidestepping the puddle, however, they were both surefooted.

  “Any chance of a sarnie?” he asked, abandoning the dreadful subject and watching her shoulders slowly relax. He’d already had a bag of chips and two doughnuts since breakfast, but the kitchen was ringing with the sweet smell of freshly baked sourdough, and if there was one thing that would give Esme back her equilibrium, move them away from the torture of his failed attempt at progress, it was slicing into a freshly baked loaf.

  Her face collapsed with relief and she jumped up and pulled out a bread knife.

  She wasn’t ready, but she was closer. He knew that. Those weeks when she had stopped baking he’d been worried, but since her return to sourdough there had definitely been a change, a lift, in her spirits. Without that early-morning ritual life had been torturous in the House in the Clouds. Without the rhythm of Esme’s breadbaking it had been hard to recognize the place as his own. Practically every routine they had, from folding the washing to paying the bills to fitting in a quick shag, in the good old days, had been introduced around the various stages in the process, and once Esme abandoned her bread, nothing fell into place anymore.

  The jams and chutneys and preserves had stopped her from taking to her bed entirely, something Granny Mac, half delirious with her pneumonia, had warned him could one day happen, but her heart had not been in them. Her heart was in her sourdough. And then, after those few bleak weeks, she had started making it again and Pog had just about collapsed with relief because it heralded the beginnings of a return to normal, if life could ever be considered normal at the House in the Clouds. For once he felt he had done the right thing in his despair by feeding the starter despite Esme’s insistence that she would never need it again.

  So it hadn’t bubbled and burped the way it did when Esme mollycoddled it, but it had smelled vinegary and sharp and had not turned its nose up at the healthy meals of flour and water he fed it.

  And when, for whatever reason—Would she ever tell him? Would he ever know?—Esme returned to it as he had prayed she would, it had turned itself into a perfect boule and hurrah, they were back in business again. So his wife’s behavior had been slightly odd since her return to breadbaking—it was her slightly odd behavior that had attracted him to her in the first place.

  He had spotted her across the room: a life raft of color in a sea of black-clad architects. Her hair had been piled on top of her head so that her red curls were like an eccentric fountain cascading down over her shoulders and back. She was wearing a citrus green wraparound top that hugged her curves, a black full skirt with matching green embroidery of some sort winding its way around the bottom, red platform boots and a tiny red leather backpack, and was picking at a tray of smoked salmon canapés. When he got closer, Pog saw that she was taking capers off some of the soggy little pancake things, and placing them on others, which she was then popping in her mouth.

  “We’re a perfect match,” he said to her from across the catering table as he reached for a de-capered snack. “I don’t care for the little green balls myself.” She looked up at him, her big emerald eyes slightly horrified at having been caught, and he fell in love with her there and then.

  She looked like a fallen angel.

  A blush that matched her backpack crept up her chest and onto her face and she opened her mouth to speak but, realizing it was still full of food, shut it again. Pog felt an urge to snatch her into his arms, which as it turned out was pretty much what happened. The capers in Esme’s mouth, confused by being interrupted during their journey to her stomach, became confused and went down the wrong way. Esme choked.

  Pog then leaped, fast as lightning, around the table, and reaching around her from behind, her backpack buckle scratching his belly as he did so, crushed her with such force that a mouthful of munched up blini and sour cream spotted with half-chewed caper shot out her mouth. They gazed, aghast, as the creamy-looking clump flew straight back onto the catering table where it landed in the middle of a plate of cheese-and-walnut balls.

  Before either of them could move a muscle, a hand belonging to the extremely fat convenor of the judging panel—who was standing right next to the platter boring a young architect’s wife rigid with stories of rambling in the Cotswolds—reached, unseeing, and popped Esme’s regurgitated snack into his own phlegmy mouth.

  Pog was frozen in fascination, Esme in horror. Yet nobody else seemed to have seen. The fat judge merely licked his fingers and reached for more canapés.

  “I think we should get married,” Pog said when his paralysis evaporated and he held out his hand to introduce himself. “I’m Hugo Stack.”

  “Esme MacDougall,” reciprocated Esme. “I think we should have a sit-down meal at the wedding, don’t you? Bite-sized snacks can be dangerous.”

  The first night they stayed up talking and laughing and watching old Peter Sellers films. The next day they walked in Kew Gardens, ate at the River Café—how he loved to watch her eat!—listened to jazz until the wee small hours and then the next day she took him home to Granny Mac and fed him her homemade sourdough. Sitting in her warm little flat eating cannellini bean and pesto soup with his first ever inch-thick slice of Esme’s pain au levain, it seemed to Pog that the missing piece of the jumbled jigsaw puzzle he had long felt like had been found.

  Every minute he had spent without her ever since had been a minute he didn’t care for. He thanked his lucky stars every morning he woke up and smelled her there in the bed beside him. Without her he was like old lemonade. Flat and tasteless. She provided the bubbles that made his life worth living, worth loving.

  He doubted, often, from the very beginning whether he was exciting enough for her, whether he was anything enough for her, although she laughed off these suggestions as completely ridiculous.

  “Wearing fawn-colored corduroy is not the worst crime in the world, you know,” she had said in the early days of their courtship.

 
“Corduroy is a crime?” Pog had asked her, bewildered. “How am I supposed to know these things?”

  He had loved Granny Mac from the word go, too. She was just the opposite of everyone in his family. Totally outspoken, insatiably curious, straightforward to the point of irascibility. He loved it and she loved him. She thought he was perfect for Esme and told him so within a minute of meeting him. Esme, who blushed at everything, simply smiled and laughed at this, unembarrassed. The bond between the two women was awe-inspiring.

  Pog, who knew his parents loved him but had spent his lifetime wondering if they liked him, found being at the MacDougall flat in St. John’s Wood unbelievably comforting. Henry and Grace had been adept if aloof parents. Milo and Pog had both been sent to boarding school at seven and neither had lived permanently at home ever since. Visits, short or lengthy, were pleasant but formal affairs. Feelings were never discussed or displayed. Conversation revolved around Henry’s work, Grace’s garden, the boys’ careers, the weather. At Granny Mac’s place, though, emotion ran wild and free and the small, cozy rooms echoed with laughter and Rod Stewart. There, Pog need never wonder how anyone felt, he just knew. It was as plain as day. And as Pog had never been one to poke or pry, just knowing came as a blessed relief.

  He bit into the bread and felt it surrender to his tongue, the sharp tartness of the apricot jam hitting the back of his throat just as the sour crust of the bread met resistance from his teeth. There was such joy in eating, thought Pog. He watched his wife watching him as he ate his lunch. He felt happiness and he felt despair. It was a combination he was used to. He wiped the crumbs from his face and kissed Esme good-bye, then went back to work.

  Esme too felt happiness and despair, for the same and for very different reasons. She was consumed with what Pog had said, what Granny Mac had said and with heart-thumping silent reenactments of the day before’s lunch. Had she really just out and out asked Louis why he had broken her heart? Why had she done that? The damage had long been done and there was nothing to be gained by stirring up the past. The present was enough of a hornet’s nest after all.

  She twice got all the way out to the washing line before remembering that the basketful of laundry was sitting on the kitchen table and then got a run in her favorite tights on the hideous gargoyle that had been at the front door of the house when they bought it and which Pog had been too scared to discard in case it came back to haunt them. Hah! Fat chance, she thought, glowering at the wretched thing. Then, to top it all off, Rory greeted her at nursery school tired and grumpy and full of loathing.

  “I hate those shoes,” was the first thing he said to her when she turned up to collect him. “They stink. I want Granddad.” Esme smiled wanly at Mrs. Monk, who in turn looked indulgently at Rory as though he had just said the cleverest thing in all the world.

  Mrs. Monk’s own shoes where battered brown lace-up Hush Puppies, worn down on the soles and doing nothing for her stumplike ankles. Esme’s, on the other hand, were strappy Louis Vuitton boots bought at a seconds shop in London several winters previously. Esme loved them with all her heart.

  “Well, they’re Mummy’s favorites,” she said more kindly to her son than she felt, flinching internally at the cross little frown that ran across his round baby face. “So I guess that’s what counts.”

  “Other mothers wear proper ladies’ shoes, Esme,” Rory said, turning to his teacher for backup. “Don’t they, Mrs. Monk?” The old dragon’s smirk added another thousand lines to her already wrinkled face.

  “Well, it takes all sorts, Rory, isn’t that what we say?” counseled Mrs. Monk. “And I’m sure Mother has other shoes at home she can perhaps try wearing tomorrow.”

  The cheek of the woman, thought Esme, her emotions running too high to contemplate a retort that might not see her run out of town by good Christian women.

  “Come on, darling,” she said, holding out her hand to her son.

  “Go away. I can walk by myself,” Rory said meanly, and started toward home without her, earning another approving look from his adoring teacher.

  Esme’s skin felt stretched thin. She was sure that if one more piercing arrow was pointed in her direction she would explode, leaving bits of her shattered self hanging from the light fittings like dough mixed too wet and flung out of a mixing bowl.

  Rory, to her great relief, seemed immensely cheered by the sight of the gammy-legged donkey in his backyard. He dropped his bag and his pinched expression and went with his grandfather to examine the creature’s fecal matter for signs, apparently, of worms.

  Chapter 13

  What the hell have you been up to?” Alice barked from the phone on Sunday morning as Esme looked out the window at eye-level clouds. The weather outside was gloomy and dull, which matched just how she felt.

  “Nothing,” she answered her friend. “Except laundry, polishing the stairs, making the beds, stewing apples, polishing more stairs, ministering to the donkey, trying not to strangle my son, polishing more stairs. You get the picture.”

  “It sounds far more exciting the way your friend Jemima puts it,” Alice said crisply, rustling the Sunday Times as loudly as she could manage while holding the telephone under her chin. “I didn’t realize she still had it in for you to quite such a degree. Is there something I should know?”

  “Jemima?” Esme was bewildered. “What does she have to do with anything?”

  “You only feature in her column this morning, Esme. In startling Technicolor.”

  In the hurricane of thoughts that had whirled around her head in the aftermath of her lunch with Louis, Esme had quite forgotten she had seen Jemima.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” she asked Alice, but as she did her bewilderment curdled and turned to dread, the contents of her stomach appearing to slither down six flights of stairs and land on the cold flagstones of the bottom floor far below her.

  “‘Which slightly disheveled-looking former fag mag editor,’” Alice read out, “‘was spotted during the week sucking back champagne cocktails all on her lonesome in the bar of posh Marylebone High Street eatery the Orrery?’”

  “Oh, my God!” whispered Esme.

  “That’s nothing,” said Alice, reading on. “‘The sad little Ginger-No-Friends has been hiding away deep in the Suffolk countryside for the past few years but obviously needs to pop her head up for air and a sip of Taittinger every now and then and who could blame her?’”

  She paused to gauge Esme’s response but there was none. Shock had rendered her speechless.

  “You didn’t know this was coming?” Alice asked. “Blimey. You’d better brace yourself for the next bit, Es.” She had started out the conversation piqued at being left out of the lunchtime cocktail-loop but was now having second thoughts. Trying to end up in the Sunday papers was one thing, but being there unexpectedly was another.

  “‘All those warm lagers and porkpies down at her local pub,’” Alice read out as quickly as she could, “‘can obviously play merry hell with a girl’s waistband. No wonder this once-rising star of the London publishing scene needs to escape back to the big city every now and then. And for the one or two of you who may have been wondering what project the rumpled little creature is working on now? It’s a book about hairclips.’ My God, where does she get this drivel from? ‘And I don’t know where she’s doing her research but it’s certainly not on her own head. I guess the perm is still alive and well and living in the countryside!’ And in case you weren’t sure about how sarcastic that is supposed to be, Es, there’s an exclamation mark.”

  Alice, finally, was silent. “Are you still there, Es?”

  Esme felt too anesthetized with humiliation to speak. How could that unspeakable woman embarrass her this way? Whatever had she done to Jemima?

  “She called me a Ginger-No-Friends?” was all she could finally manage.

  “Well, were you sitting there all on your own swilling champagne or not?” Alice demanded. “And if so, why wasn’t I invited?”

&nb
sp; “I was supposed to be having lunch with Charlie,” Esme said, her lips white with dismay. “But he never turned up. Is she saying I looked fat? Is the bit about the porkpies meant to say I looked fat? Because if she’s saying I looked fat I think I might seriously have to kill her.”

  “You think that’s worse than calling you a once-rising star?” Alice wanted to know. “When after all it was she who shot your rising star down in the first place. You’re right, though. She is evil and she must be destroyed. And I think she is saying you looked fat but you don’t.”

  Esme collapsed into a chair and tried to sort out in her mind what was the worst thing about appearing in Jemima’s column. For a start, neither her husband nor her best friend had known she was out for lunch that day. She should have told Pog, she knew that, but she hadn’t and then it had been too late. She’d been unable to come up with a way to make her meeting with Louis seem innocent, even though it was, and so had fudged the details of what she’d done with her day. As for Alice, if she’d told her she had met Louis, she would have also told her that he wanted to see her again and Alice would have insisted she stop being so bloody stupid. She supposed she had been avoiding that.

  “Oh, Alice,” she said. “What am I going to do? Pog doesn’t know I went down to London for the day, nor does—oh my God—Henry! They will jump to all the wrong conclusions and how dare she call me sad and little. Did she really call me sad and little? And rumpled? And a creature? Oh, it’s too hideous for words.”

  A slight frostiness chilled the phone line. “You didn’t tell Pog? What’s going on? Is there a wrong conclusion to jump to?”

  “No. Nothing. No,” Esme said hastily. “There’s absolutely nothing going on. I just stupidly, for no reason, didn’t tell him. You know how he is about Charlie. He’s probably the person Pog likes least in the world, which is not really saying much because he still likes him and everything but, oh shit, I’m all over the place at the moment, Alice, you know that. It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t mean it. And now to be ridiculed publicly by that long streak of, of, of—” She struggled to come up with an apt description.