By Bread Alone Read online

  “God knows how often he’d have hit the bottle without the treatment,” Granny Mac would say for years afterward. “Men! It’s a wonder the lot of us aren’t lesbians.”

  She had loved Jerry O’Brien deeply, however. He was the best of all her husbands, she often told Esme, when he wasn’t rat-arse pissed. Her first two husbands she had hardly missed at all but by the time she lost Jerry O’Brien she could not keep melancholy at bay because by then she was also minus a daughter, Beth, Esme’s mother and a perfect example of why misery and MacDougall women made such bad company.

  Beth, never a sturdy creature, had found marriage, motherhood, adultery, divorce, life in general far too heartbreaking a business to continue contemplating and so had slipped away one wet London lunchtime, sung softly to sleep by a pharmaceutical lullaby. And so, as per clearly written instructions, her estranged mother was sent for and cried rare silent tears all the way from the bleak windswept shores of Gairloch to the hustle and bustle of St. John’s Wood, where she was introduced, for the first time, to her five-year-old granddaughter.

  Esme, sitting on the floor of a neighbor’s flat, her flame red hair impossibly jolly as she ate cold baked beans out of a can, had looked at her and smiled. And so began their life together.

  Despite its grim beginnings, it had been a good arrangement. Beth knew this. Granny Mac knew this. Esme’s father, long since emigrated to New Zealand and remarried with twin daughters, knew it. Even Esme knew it.

  Very quickly Granny Mac and her charge, who somewhere along the line adopted the family name, became as thick as thieves. Esme, for the most part, delighted in having a guardian who thought homework a sick joke and after-dinner mints the perfect sandwich filling. Their lives were full and happy and they were both better off than they had been before.

  And then Esme, aged ten, had come bursting through the door bearing Jerry O’Brien, sheepish and shy, saying she had found him at the bus stop having watched him narrowly miss the alleged 11:07 to Camden and he seemed in dire need of a cup of tea. Granny Mac thought all her Christmases had come at once.

  How she loved that silly old man, with his badly dyed hair, ridiculous foibles and utter devotion to the two of them. He was her reward, she had assumed, for having a mother and a daughter who had chosen to desert her. Oh yes, misery was a curse, all right.

  Granny Mac had been abandoned as a child herself by a mother unable to keep waking up to a world she judged too harsh for her own gentle soul. Granny Mac carried with her this fear of such sorrow but never came close to feeling it herself until she lost Jerry O’Brien. After just one short year of happiness, it had seemed too cruel to bear. And for the first time in her life, she had let down her guard and watched from outside herself as the family hex crept in and filled her pockets of happiness with black, sticky ooze.

  It did not last long.

  Esme rescued her.

  Even at the age of twelve she had known that with a bottle of whisky, a lot of dark chocolate and all the Rod Stewart hits of the late 1970s, they would pull through. And they had.

  So now Granny Mac’s sole purpose on earth was to concoct a mixture that could similarly rescue Esme. And she would.

  “You had better be bloody kidding me,” Esme breathed into the phone later that evening, quinces pasted, windows washed, stairs gleaming, son in bed, large glass of Chardonnay in one hand, phone in the other. “Jemima Jones is getting her own column?” she asked Alice incredulously. “In the Sunday Times? The Jemima Jones. Our Jemima Jones?”

  “Oh, Es,” moaned Alice, nestled in her threadbare armchair in her run-down Shepherd’s Bush flat. “I knew you’d be upset but I’ve been dying to call you all day. There’s a sort of build-up story about her in the paper today.”

  “They gave her a column!” Esme squawked again. “In the Sunday Times! But why?”

  “Because she has reinvented herself as a society superwoman, that’s why,” Alice answered. “I have the paper right here. Can you bear to hear it? It is appalling, Es, honestly, you’d better get a bucket because you will be sick, I promise you.”

  “Read it to me,” Esme commanded. “Is it really bad?”

  “Repellent.”

  “Get on with it, then!”

  “‘Married with three young children,’” Alice started, “‘Jemima works tirelessly—’”

  “‘Works tirelessly’?” Esme was appalled. “There’s been some sort of a mistake. It’s definitely not the Jemima we know.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Alice. “Get a load of this. ‘Jemima works tirelessly as a volunteer for Princess Diana’s landmine charity and is a permanent fixture on guest lists at London’s most salubrious society events.’”

  “‘A permanent fixture’?” Carpet is a permanent fixture. She’s just a cocktail-guzzling leech,” cried Esme. “She’s probably screwing all the husbands!”

  “And sons, by now, I should imagine,” Alice added, “but that’s not all. ‘An accomplished equestrienne and exhibited painter, Jemima devotes—’”

  “‘Accomplished equestrienne’? Oh, bring me that bucket!”

  “Esme, you’re going to have to stop interrupting me because there is another whole paragraph of puke-making bilge still to go.”

  Esme bit her lip.

  “‘Jemima devotes,’” Alice continued, “‘what little spare time she has to promoting a revolutionary Harley Street clinic specializing in removing disfiguring scars from children injured in war-torn hot spots throughout the world. She is heralded among the fashionistas as the Woman Most Wanted to Wear Their Clothes, which is why all eyes are on her new column, which starts this weekend in our Style section.’”

  Esme was flabbergasted. “I just don’t know where to start,” she said. “That woman! Removing disfiguring scars from children in war-torn hot spots? Only if she gave them the scars in the first place, the horrible witch. Is it definitely her?”

  “It’s Jemima all right. There are photos to prove it. She’s dressed up like there’s no tomorrow, Es, Botoxed for Africa and so thin you can almost see right through her. It’s disgusting.”

  “In other words,” Esme said between gritted teeth, “she looks a million dollars.”

  “Well, it could be the airbrushing.” Alice sounded unconvinced.

  “Oh, I can’t bear it. It’s so unfair,” Esme erupted. “Just when my life turns to complete and utter horseshit, up pops Jemima sodding Jones being extra sodding fabulous for the ninety-ninth sodding time in a row. It’s intolerable!”

  Once upon a time, Jemima Jones had worked for her. Years before, in her career days, Esme had plucked her from nearly a hundred interviewees, all in various degrees of desperation, to be her assistant on TV Now! magazine. Jemima had been totally inexperienced and lacked even the slightest academic achievement (if you didn’t count winning the Leggatt Cup for kindness to guinea pigs in her final year at school) but had been bright and funny and clearly willing to learn. Esme, her editor, had fostered and mentored the young and seemingly naïve newcomer until she happened upon her one night at a champagne bar in Soho smiling coquettishly and whispering into the ear of the witless group publisher.

  Jemima had giggled girlishly at work the next day that he was an old family friend and Esme had nothing to worry about, but a week later Esme had been notified, by memo, that Jemima was being promoted to group publishing assistant, effectively becoming her boss.

  Alice Watson had been the TV Now! receptionist at the time. It was where she and Esme had met.

  “Can you believe the snake-hipped little slattern?” Esme had hissed over a sneaky chocolate bar in the photocopying room as she waved the memo in her friend’s face. “What a bitch!”

  “Now, now,” Alice had counseled. “Be nice, Esme. She’s just getting on like the rest of us. Good luck to her, I say.”

  She was not to say it for much longer. Alice had been thrilled with the TV Now! job, her first since leaving school after falling pregnant to an Afro-Caribbean DJ who had ne-glec
ted to mention the perfectly nice wife and two children he kept just at the end of her street.

  She’d been sidelined by her middle-class parents and had struggled alone to bring up her son, Ridgeley, but her fortunes had changed, in more ways than one, when she found work. Suddenly, she not only had money to spend but had broken a fairly substantial sex drought with a bicycle courier called Fred. He was six feet tall and made of muscle, didn’t mind that she had a son, that he was called Ridgeley, that she couldn’t afford babysitters. In other words, he was perfect. Or so she thought until one morning not long after Jemima’s promotion when she opened the stationery store in search of staples and instead found Fred’s bare buttocks jiggling furiously as he shafted the new group publishing assistant, legs akimbo, atop a stack of pink photocopying paper.

  “That snake-hipped little slattern,” she blubbed to Esme, spraying half-chewed KitKat over the copier. “I hope she gets hit by a bus and dies.”

  An enemy was born, but her star had continued to rise and its brilliance had outshone the both of them. She had gone on to launch a string of women’s magazines, some with moderate success, others less so. Whatever she did was done with a great hiss and a roar and a lot of media coverage, but the industry was full of lesser mortals who bitterly bore the imprint of Jemima’s stiletto heels on their backs and shoulders, and Alice and Esme were two such pincushions. Within six months of Jemima’s promotion, TV Now! had folded, leaving the two of them gob-smacked and jobless. For Esme it was a blow, but her CV still stacked up well enough. For Alice, however, the market proved flooded already with single mothers short on skills and the ability to do overtime.

  She’d been in the same dreary job—answering phones for an overbearing tax consultant only ever referred to as Nose Hair—ever since. Her son was now a recalcitrant teenager, her Visa card permanently blown out, her diets always a di-saster and her search for the perfect man constantly turning up ones someone else had thrown away earlier, and for good reason.

  They had been through a lot together, Esme and Alice, and while ninety miles of choked highway and tangled country lanes now separated them, they talked nearly every day for at least half an hour and continued to be each other’s lifeline.

  “I should be over Jemima by now,” Esme said, worried.

  “You are over her,” Alice replied. “She’s still on the same old merry-go-round that you stepped off, after all. And she can have it and stick it up her arse, if there’s any room, given that she already must have to carry most of her internal organs in her handbag because there certainly isn’t any space inside her body.”

  Esme laughed, or tried to, but news of her old rival had thrown her, and Alice could tell.

  “Look, Esme, I know you are going through a rough patch and it’s hardly surprising. But don’t go getting cold feet about where you are and what you are doing just because it’s hard. Everywhere is hard. Everything is hard. You know that.”

  “Dashing out a society column once a week doesn’t sound hard,” Esme pointed out ruefully.

  “Yes, but imagine removing disfiguring scars from children injured in war-torn hot spots throughout the world? You think that’s easy?”

  “The way Jemima does it, by mobile phone while she suns herself on a yacht in the Mediterranean, I’m sure it is.”

  “Oh, Esme,” sighed Alice. “Do you really think you want Jemima’s life? Just getting your hair that straight would kill you. Life in the city is hell and full of bitches just like her. You should be happy with what you’ve got—a madhouse in the middle of nowhere teeming with people and complemented, I think you’ll find, by a dysfunctional goat, a rum bunch of chickens and some very angry bees.”

  Esme grimaced. She hadn’t the heart to tell Alice that the chickens were no longer rum. The chickens were no longer, period. One had been eaten by a neighboring something or other (never fully determined, initially suspected to be Jam-jar although he turned out not to have his own teeth) and the other four had seemed to die of natural causes shortly afterward—and she wasn’t ruling out fatal bee stings. Her animal husbandry was already the topic of much mirth as far as Alice was concerned. Things that she didn’t want to live proved to have extraordinary survival skills (rabbits, tadpoles), and things that she desperately needed (chickens, goats) either died or refused to produce what she’d initially got them for.

  “You’ll come right, Esme,” Alice was saying. “Just give it time. And I don’t know why I am trying to make you feel better about living in the country because I would far prefer if you were back here in London with me. We could go out and get totally bladdered on ridiculously overupholstered cocktails and sing Wham! songs all the way home in the cab.” She sighed, perhaps at the memory of doing just that, many times over. “Anyway, why did the dog pee on the quince? You never got around to telling me.”

  Esme moved toward the refrigerator, tucked the phone under her chin and poured herself another glass of Chardonnay. She took a deep gulp and felt the wine’s buttery warmth slide all the way down to the pit of her stomach and nestle there, happy. Perhaps she should be drinking more, she thought.

  “I don’t know,” she answered out loud, thinking about Brown’s bad behavior. “It’s been tricky lately, what with one thing and the other. Rory’s, well, just Rory. You know. Poor darling boy. It’s not been easy for him and Henry’s as crotchety as hell. Oh, hello, darling!”

  She smiled as Pog’s footsteps finally turned into Pog himself. “Hello, beautiful,” he mouthed as he collapsed into a kitchen chair on the other side of the table.

  “So quince paste then,” Alice was saying into the phone. “That’s great, Es. And so soon after that innnn-teresting zucchini relish.” She paused, uncertain how to proceed. “How’s the baking, then, girl? Ou est le pain?”

  Pog had not been the only one confused and unsettled by Esme’s failure to turn out her famous sourdough boules. There had never been anything magical about sourdough, as far as Alice was concerned. But when Esme stopped baking, something definitely disappeared and it worried her.

  “What do you care?” Esme asked with a rehearsed lightness. “And if you must know, Mrs. Gladstone from down the lane liked my zucchini relish so much she wants me to donate my entire stock to the village fair next month.”

  “They’re probably going to use jars of it for targets on the coconut shy,” Alice teased, relieved at having got this far without upsetting the applecart. “Or have it in the tunnel of horror as the gooey muck you plunge your hands into.” She decided to venture further. “You know you could always, oh I don’t know, bake bread for the fair, Es.”

  Esme balked; she had been unequivocally unapproachable on the subject of her breadlessness, but Granny Mac’s advice had been ringing loudly in her ears all day. She thought of the jar of starter, winking at her. She closed her eyes and willed herself to speak. “Well, it’s just for me, Alice,” she said. “For us. I mean, it’s not for everyone. I couldn’t mass produce it. It’s personal.”

  There was a small silence.

  “It is just for you?” Alice risked.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Or it’s about to be. Again.” Esme glanced over at Pog.

  “Oh, Esme,” Alice spluttered. “I’m so pleased. That’s great news.”

  “Excuuuuse me,” Esme protested. “Is this not the woman who usually says ‘It’s only bread! Get over it! It’s the staff of bleeding life. People put butter and jam on it and eat it’?”

  “I’ll never say that again,” Alice vowed, “I promise. My mocking days are over. I won’t even mention, for as long as I live”—she adopted a phony French accent—“your deescovery of, ’ow shall I say, the joy of bread, with Louis, international man of mystery, deflowerer of young Engleesh girls and possessor of the world’s most enormous—”

  Esme laughed loudly into the phone in a drowning-out sort of a fashion. “You are a horrible, dried up old harridan and I hate you,” she said. “And you really shouldn’t say things like that about my lov
ely husband, Pog, when you know he holds you in such high regard.”

  Pog raised his eyebrows as she had known he would. “Just messing,” Esme mouthed back at him, pointing at the phone. “Anyway,” she continued to Alice, “enough about me, tell me what’s happening with that ungrateful layabout Ridgeley. How’s he getting on?”

  Alice sighed and made an exasperated noise. “Well, his school life is officially over,” she said. “The principal finally invited him to leave and never come back and nothing I can say will change his mind, and anyway, I don’t know if I could get the little shit to go back there even if he was allowed to. He says he’s been out job hunting but there’s no evidence of any, you know, job as a result.”

  Esme laughed. “Give the boy a break, Alice. You remember what it’s like to be sixteen, don’t you? You’d already shagged half of Chiswick by the time you were his age.”

  “Yes, exactly,” said Alice. “And look where it got me. Remind me to repeat this conversation when Rory is a teenager, will you?”

  Pog sat at the kitchen table and watched his wife prattle, aching with relief to see her acting more like her old self. And if his ears had not deceived him, she had been joking about bread. Could this mean . . . ? He dared not believe that something as simple as a few words from Alice could bump her out of this recent frightening new level of unhappiness. But he was sure he could once more see a flicker of the light that had so recently gone out in her and it did his poor heart good. But he would not make a fuss, he resolved. He would say nothing and simply hope that one day soon the house would smell the way it was supposed to, of crust and comfort.

  Once Esme said her good-byes, always a protracted affair, and put down the phone, Pog abandoned his chair and came up behind her, kissing the back of her neck as he sighed into her skin.

  “You smell good enough to eat,” he said, nuzzling her.

  “It’s not me, silly,” she laughed, pulling gently away from his embrace and reaching into the oven for a fragrantly bubbling coq au vin. “It’s your lordship’s favorite supper.”