“Bloody hell, Essie, you’ll do yourself a mischief!”
The sound of her husband’s voice gave her such a fright that for a moment she was completely lost. She felt so utterly, embarrassingly caught in flagrante delicto that she could barely believe it was only bread she was making.
Pog came up behind her and wriggled into her.
“You’re going at it hammer and tongs, Esme,” he said. “What’s all that flour and water done to deserve that?”
He kissed her neck and she felt ill with artifice. She turned in his arms and kissed him, pushing all thoughts of Louis deep down inside.
“Delicious,” Pog said, pulling away and looking at her. “It’s not right that anyone should look as good as you at this ungodly hour.” He scratched his stomach. “Couldn’t go back to sleep,” he added, yawning. “Anything I can do to help?”
Esme shook her head and went back to her bread, listening to him scrabble around in the pantry for his breakfast cereal.
“I have to spend another twenty-six hours talking to Ernie about his ‘loggia,’ as it’s now called,” he said as he mooched about the kitchen. “And I think I have a meeting today with an Ipswich developer who might be keen on that Stonyborough pub. Shady-sounding bloke, though. Shouldn’t imagine it will come to much. Not that it needs to with all the work Mrs. Murphy has piling up for me. What about you? Anything exciting planned for today?”
Esme tried not to stop the rhythm of her kneading.
“Actually, I thought I might go down to London for a spot of shopping and to meet Alice for a drink. She’s got the dimwit blues,” she said lightly.
“Oh, that’s right,” Pog said. “Henry mentioned you’d asked him to look after Rory. Good on you, darling, say hello to Alice from me.”
“Anything you need?” she asked. “Anything I can get for you? Books? Magazines? Little tidbits from Fortnum and Mason?”
Pog’s spoon stopped clanging against his bowl and she turned around to see him looking at her.
“What?” she asked him.
“You are amazing,” he answered. “That’s all. Simply amazing. Whatever did I do to deserve you?”
All the way to London she thought about his adoring face and what he had said and she kept thinking about it as she sat at the same table in the Orrery, fidgeting with her table napkin and waiting for Louis.
She had a wonderful husband, a healthy child, a lovely home. Why the hell was she risking all that for some duplicitous little French baker who had broken her heart a hundred years ago and without whom she would happily have kept on living had not fate brought them together over a bubble gum disaster next door?
But when Louis walked into the room and saw her, all her doubts disappeared, to be instantly replaced by nothing but the certainty of chemistry. His effect on her was pure and physical and no amount of debating the appropriateness of the situation could change that. He walked across the room, late but not rattled, then leaned in and kissed her on each cheek. They burned. He looked into her eyes. They swam. He reached across the table and took her hand in his. She let him.
The bread came and went, their appetizers were demolished; their main courses sat in front of them tantalizing their taste buds with their rich, delicious smells. She could not remember, afterward, what they talked about over the scallops and wild mushrooms and crispy skinned duck. All she knew was that right there and then she felt an overwhelming hunger that she knew food would not sate. She felt empty from the nails on her toes to the hair on her head and as her eyes feasted on Louis, she knew that somehow he held the key to filling her up.
She could see nothing but the dark intense features of his face in front of her, the hustle and bustle of the busy restaurant moving behind him, blurred and out of focus like a modern-day cooking show. She was not really even listening to what he said, what she said, just transfixed by the barely perceptible hook in his nose, the smoothness of his cheeks, the roll of his wrist bone, the arc of his eyebrows, the length of his lashes, the little lines under his eyes that were new to her.
But the things she was keeping to herself were groaning and growing inside her. And there were a lot of them. And they were in desperate need of escape.
A silence grew between them.
I want you, she wanted to say to him. I want you now. Over there. On that banquette. But even as she opened her mouth to speak she knew she wouldn’t. She shut her mouth again. Instead, it was Louis who spoke.
“Tell me about your children,” he said quietly.
“Child,” said Esme. “Child. I have a son. Rory. He’s four-and-a-half.”
Louis looked at her, slightly quizzically, as though he somehow knew otherwise. He did not speak, just kept looking straight at her, a funny wriggle in his eyebrows.
She felt suddenly icy cold and boiling hot at the same time and her chest started to rise and fall too quickly. The toxic fumes of her inner demons were dancing close to a naked flame and she could feel it so dangerously it took her breath away.
Something deadly was trying to escape the constraints of her heart and for less than a split second Esme pictured, just glimmeringly, the relief of letting it go, and in that fraction of a second it bolted for freedom.
“I have one son,” she said again before she could taste the words on her lips, “but he had a twin brother.”
It was out now, floating in the space between them.
“Ted,” she said. “Teddy.” How strange the feel of his name was on her tongue. How lonely and lost. How long had it been since she had said it out loud?
Actually, she knew.
It had been two years, two months, thirteen days, twenty hours and forty-seven minutes.
Esme floated up to the ceiling of the restaurant and looked down at herself about to tell this heart-stoppingly handsome, perfect almost-stranger about the day, the hour, the minute, the second she stopped being herself and became a mother of one.
And the tears that she had found so difficult, so impossible, to shed for her poor little Rory-Pog clone suddenly presented themselves for the inspection of Louis Lapoine, her long-lost lover, and the waiting staff and patrons of the Orrery restaurant.
Oh, but they had been such a long time coming.
Chapter 14
Life had been going well for Esme and Pog until that cruel spring day in Notting Hill. Their prospective careers, in which they had both managed to spend quite some time up until then floundering, had finally clicked into place and they were both charging full-steam ahead.
The previous year, through an old college friend, Pog had won a modest contract to refurbish a small investment brokerage in the City and had done such a good job that when the company had been bought out by a big German firm, they engaged him to do a similar job, only ten times bigger, in another empty shell near St. Paul’s. More recently his company had been contracted to design a new thirty-story building, and after years of scratching away virtually unnoticed by his employers, Pog had been asked to manage the project. It was the stuff of which major awards were made, and while being a daunting task of quite some proportion, Pog reveled in the responsibility. He wasn’t the sort to push himself forward but once out front, had all it took and more. He had blossomed.
Esme’s career, too, had finally stopped hitting potholes and seemed to be running along smoothly. When she had been deposed by Jemima and lost her job at TV Now!, the road back from ruin had been bumpy, to say the least. Humiliated by her ousting and—typically for a London girl in her mid-twenties—short on anything so helpful as savings, she’d accepted a job running an old men’s smoking magazine published by a company that made pipes and cigarette papers.
Vogue, it wasn’t. But Sebastian Goodhart, the elderly publisher/pipemaker, was an old-fashioned gentleman who adored Esme from the moment she whirled into his office with her ginger curls and slash of red lipstick, and under his gentle and bemused patronage, she and the funny little magazine flourished. In less than a year it doubled in circulation, partly du
e to Esme’s hard work and sheer dedication and partly due to the newly fashionable trend toward cigar-smoking: a bandwagon on which she had been quick to jump.
Sebastian Goodhart, naturally, was delighted and, on the strength of her success with Smoke, picked up an industry title much ignored by the rag trade called Apparel, which Esme similarly turned around for the better.
Both magazines, however, were subscription only, and Esme’s dream was to find herself as editor of a successful newsstand magazine. Sebastian, who had recently given up smoking so had little interest in his first magazine and only ever wore the same tweed suit so clearly had even less in his second, was with her all the way.
The one she had her eye on was a little-read tome called Baker, which languished, its edges usually ripped and curling, in small amounts at the back of the magazine racks behind the glossies at all good and many extremely average bookstores.
Soon she was the editor of three magazines and her feet barely touched the ground as she flew between her home in Notting Hill and her expanding office off Oxford Street.
“Och, look out, here comes Rupert Murdoch,” Granny Mac would say rudely when Esme rushed in the door after work, usually just to change and bolt out the door again to some industry function or other.
Granny Mac lived with Esme and Pog in a crumbling Victorian terrace house in probably the least salubrious part of Notting Hill: All Souls Road, famous for its drug dealers, who hung about the street in Rastafarian colors waiting for rich white boys in convertible cars to come and pay large amounts of money for small blocks of what they thought was hashish but was usually licorice.
Granny Mac had moved in with Pog when Esme had. It was inconceivable that she should do anything but, and Pog, bless his heart, had not only never said anything about it, but barely thought about it.
The odd jibe at work made him realize it wasn’t exactly commonplace to live with one’s grandmother-in-law but then his workmates treated Pog as an oddity anyway. He dressed differently—that is to say not in the requisite young-architect-about-town black—but also worked solidly and seemed to like it more than nipping down to the pub at lunchtime for a few swift pints of lager and a look at the latest FHM magazine.
He had bought the house with next to no deposit when he was in his early twenties, which his mates also ribbed him about—homeowning was a mug’s game at his age, they said—but as the years passed the area became more and more populated by people just like him and Esme, the scungy flats and studio apartments converted back into single residences for the well-off or heavily mortgaged.
Following Henry’s financial collapse, Pog convinced his father to invest what little he had left in the top flat of the All Souls Road house and eventually drew up plans to renovate its three poorly conceived separate dwellings back into one house with room for all the generations.
Granny Mac was very skeptical about this. She had not taken kindly to Henry moving into the house but had kept her tongue in her head on the grounds that as long as he had a different front door key from her then he was strictly really nothing more than a neighbor. Upon finding out that he was to be more of a flatmate in the new version of the house, her eyes hardened to tiny dark raisins and her mood plunged into darkness.
“It’s not natural,” was all she would say. “If I wanted to live with another cranky old bastard, I’d send Esme out to find me a husband.”
Esme, however, was in her element. Her magazines were going brilliantly, her publisher loved her and while not a scratcher or clawer in the ambition stakes, she could hold her head up high among her peers and did.
Pog’s rise from blahdom meant the Stacks were also socializing with the Bright Young Things on the architectural scene, and through contacts of her husband’s Esme even had her eye on a flailing design digest that she knew Sebastian would buy at the snap of her fingers if she wanted him to.
She absolutely loved Notting Hill, always had. She’d been shopping at the markets in Portobello Road for as long as she could remember and had on more than one occasion, it had to be said, been in the other side of Charlie’s convertible in the illegal exchange of licorice on the very road where she found herself later living.
She was happy to leave the redesign to her husband, it was his domain, after all, and she trusted him completely. The landscaping, however, she undertook herself.
The house, like every other one in the street, had a long leafy backyard to which you would, when the house was finished, step out from the kitchen or dining room. Pog had pretty much left it alone apart from mowing the lush green lawn occasionally, and its perimeter was clogged with mature trees and overgrown shrubs.
Esme had big plans for this luxurious outdoor space. But its pièce de résistance had come to her in a blinding flash as she worked her sourdough on the scratched stainless steel bench obscenely early one morning, obscenely early being the only time she could squeeze it in. Her mind had drifted while working the dough back to that little village square above the kinky Dordogne with its graceful little fountain trickling water into its bowl and throwing sunlight around the surrounding surfaces like a benevolent emperor dispersing gold coins to his crowds.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Granny Mac breathed when Esme showed her the plans she had drawn up for a tiled courtyard of her own, complete with boxed topiary olive trees and the crowning centerpiece of a two-meter fountain that wept extravagantly into an elaborate circular pond. It was as close as she could get to the one behind which she had hidden when she first saw Louis, given that so many years had passed in between. She had found an artisan stonemason in Cornwall who had been just as enthusiastic as she, if not more, about creating the water feature and was already working on it in his chilly not-quite-converted barn near Padstow. It was costing a small fortune and worth, Esme thought, every penny.
“You don’t like it?” Esme had asked her sour-faced grandmother, dismayed.
“Oh, sure, I like it,” Granny Mac answered sarcastically. “Me and the Count of Monte bloody Cristo.”
“But this is our dream house,” protested her granddaughter.
“More like a bloody nightmare if you ask me,” Granny Mac said. “What in God’s name are we going to do with a fountain?”
“You don’t do anything with them. You look at them and admire them and they add ambience and interest.”
“Oh, well, if it’s ambience and interest you’re after, fine, right, a fountain’s the very thing.”
They agreed to disagree. Well, that is to say, Esme agreed to disagree. Granny Mac agreed to no such thing and ridiculed the fountain at every possible opportunity.
“Perhaps we could have a bubbling brook,” she suggested politely to Pog on one occasion with an evil glint in her eye, “or a waterfall. Had you thought about a waterfall?” Pog, as always, refused to take the bait, just smiling and shrugging his shoulders.
“If Esme wants a fountain . . .” he replied.
“You great jessie,” Granny Mac scolded him. “You let her get away with murder.”
“Come on, Granny Mac,” Pog argued gently. “She works bloody hard, you can’t blame her for wanting somewhere nice to come home to. She deserves it.”
But Granny Mac would not, could not be swayed. Henry agreed with Granny Mac for once, in opposing the fountain. Normally, Granny Mac would have run a country mile rather than have Henry agree with her on anything, and might even have changed her stance just to avoid having anything in common with him. Yet she was so against the fountain that in this one case she welcomed Henry’s agreement. The subject of the fountain stopped being discussed, Esme choosing to whisper her reports on its progress to Pog when her grandmother was in bed.
In the month before the renovations were to begin, however, life in the Notting Hill house was turned on its head.
Esme fell pregnant.
It had been an accident. That is to say, they had always wanted children but had planned on waiting another couple of years. Mother Nature of course put b
abies before fountains and so gave Esme a dose of gastroenteritis, which upset the rhythm of her contraception long enough for the reproductive fairies to do their bit.
The house in All Souls Road fair hummed with happiness when they broke the news to their elders. Henry was actually seen to smile at Granny Mac and not be hissed at in return.
“There may,” Esme joked in bed that night, “even have been voluntary bodily contact.”
Henry and Granny Mac, however, were also joined in horror at the punishing schedule Esme kept up despite her pregnancy.
“But the baby’s smaller than a peanut,” Esme wailed as she packed to go on an overnight press trip to Paris while the two “Crumblies,” as she and Pog called them, loomed over her like the shadow of doom. “What harm can a quick flit across the Channel do?”
“They have cheese over there,” Henry rumbled. “Unpasteurized.”
“Well, I won’t eat it,” said Esme, who loved unpasteurized cheese and thought that actually she probably would.
“They have French people,” Granny Mac glowered. “From France.”
A mean little silence hung in the air between them and Esme felt a hole in her happiness for the first time since she had found out she was pregnant.
“I shall wear a bodice made of kryptonite to protect my unborn child from French infiltration,” she said, and then she looked at her grandmother in a way she only employed once every year or so when she really seriously needed shutting up.
The plans for the house and the garden were shelved in the sideboard in the sitting room while talk turned to all things baby, and after the twelve-week scan, all things babies. At the news they were having twins, the assorted householders could have been shifted into the proverbial cardboard box in the middle of the road and still been delirious with happiness. Esme had thought her husband was going to explode with pride and joy and Granny Mac attempted the Ghillie Calum sword dance, such was her excitement.
Esme, despite having ankles swollen like fence posts, worked like a Trojan to make sure no one could accuse her of abandoning her career in favor of motherhood, stopping work just two weeks before the babies were due.
By Bread Alone Page 22
