By Bread Alone Page 4

  “Jolly good,” Pog enthused, rubbing his hands together and sitting at the table again. “So, how was your day?”

  “Well, if you have a chance later tonight,” his wife replied as she spooned wine-rich gravy onto his plate, “you might like to talk to your father about how your charming dog demonstrated his pent-up emotions on his shoes this morning.”

  “Oh,” he said, sliding down in his chair. “It’s been one of those days.”

  Esme put a steaming plate of food down in front of him and ran her fingers through his messy brown hair. It was lusciously thick and grew in a hundred crazy directions, which she loved, especially when it was collar length as it was now. At six feet three he towered above her, so when he sat she loved to fiddle with him. He had the loveliest face of any man she had ever known. Not rugged or classically handsome, necessarily. Just lovely. He had big brown eyes and smooth long cheeks and the sort of teddy bear good looks and gentle soul that made all women want to be married to him.

  “Hugo Stack,” she said using his given name, not the nickname no one could remember how he came by, “every day is one of those days. But if peed-on quince is as bad as it gets, then I suppose I should think myself lucky.”

  “Peed-on quince?” Pog asked her, bewildered. “Is that French?”

  Esme laughed and her husband let the sound he loved chase the tension and trauma of a long day’s work and worry out of his bones. She poured him some wine and they clinked glasses, each thinking their separate thoughts but both smiling at the shared triumph of making it through another day.

  I can do it, Pog thought, as he watched her lick a fat drop of rich, red juice from the corner of her mouth. I can do it, as long as I have her. So what if he had to spend the rest of his life designing Tuscan loggias for persnickety pensioners instead of award-winning skyscrapers for international conglomerates. It was just work. And in fact, he liked it more than he thought he would. Business was good. The phone had rung off the hook ever since the day Mrs. Murphy had hung the Architect sign up outside the office in Seabury’s main street.

  Whoever would have guessed that this particular pocket of Suffolk was in such dire need of so many renovations? It seemed every second house needed a solarium or a spa room or a new kitchen or a second story. And his clients were actually a breath of fresh air compared to the suits he had dealt with in London. Here, nobody shouted, few changed their minds, they all paid their bills and without exception made a good cup of tea. It was different but it was good. He could do it. As long as he had her. As long as that light kept flickering.

  When the alarm went off at six the next morning, Esme’s eyes sprang open. Her heart was beating too quickly and her wrung out, squashed and dangerous nugget was expanding inside her, crushing the breath from her lungs. Bread, she forced herself to think, bread. She lay there and waited for the word to soothe her and it did. Bread. She closed her eyes again and thought about that jar of starter, panting in her pantry. How could she have denied herself its comfort these past weeks? What had she been thinking? The nugget started to shrink again. Her fingers rippled as if already working the dough. She took a deep breath and slipped out of bed, shivering.

  Pog rolled over into the warm place she had left and smiled to himself. In the bathroom Esme slipped on the purple fluffy slippers that everyone but she hated and swapped her white linen nightie for a tank top and faded pink cotton cardigan and her old faithful jeans with the ripped knee and the soft denim that curved in all her favorite places.

  She stuck her hair up in a haphazard arrangement on her head—the chic chignon would have to wait yet another day—and scuffed quietly up to the kitchen, eschewing the light switches and instead rummaging for the matches and lighting her strategically placed collection of candles in a dozen different points around the room.

  She stood for a moment in the quiet predawn just to take in the mood her kitchen took on with its sexy, subtle lighting. How dark it had been without her candlelit mornings. Out the window the Seabury lights twinkled below her, the sea beyond shimmering virtuously in what was left of the moonlight. She pulled open the pantry door and dragged out her bin of bread flour, stone-ground especially for her at the watermill in nearby Pakenham, then reached for her scales and favorite jug, all sitting, ready and waiting, as though she had never abandoned them. She mea-sured the flour, breathing in that wheaty smell of almost nothing, almost everything, then poured it into a big caramel-colored ceramic bowl and added good old Suffolk tap water.

  Then she picked up her jar of starter and slowly lifted its lid, unleashing, bit by bit, its sharp, tangy perfume. Granny Mac was right. Now was not the time to let go of what was dear to her. Now was the time to cling to it. She drank in the smell—oh, how she had missed it!

  She weighed out what she needed of the foamy elixir, added it to her bowl of flour and water and plunged her hands into the mixture. It was cold and her hands reddened as they worked their way through the separate ingredients, swirling them around the bowl, rubbing them between her fingers, getting them slowly started on their journey to being something much better.

  For five silent minutes she mixed the flour and water and starter in her hands. The effort chased away the early-morning chill and she felt her body start to warm. Other bakers used a mixer or electric dough hook but not Esme. She wanted her hands on that concoction, she wanted to feel every particle transform.

  Finally, when the mixture had stopped being separate ingredients and become a solid, silky mass, moving around the inside of the bowl in one single smooth ball, she lifted it out onto her wooden counter and let it sit while she fed the jar of starter. She added equal parts flour and water to replace what she had taken from it and to nourish it for the next day. Clearly Pog had been doing this in her absence, for the starter was alive and kicking despite her having abandoned it. How had he known she would come back to it when she herself had not been sure? This past month of mornings she had woken up and felt nothing but desolation . . . the pull of sourdough bleak in its absence, her reason for getting up dearly departed.

  And then Granny Mac from out of her Embassy Regal ether had barked her instructions and here she was back where she belonged, elbow deep in sourdough and thanking God that she had so often bored Pog with sermons on her starter. Thanks to them, he knew what a voracious appetite it had. Forget to feed it and it would shrink and discolor, she had often told him, meting out its punishment by baking nothing more than a flat, dull biscuit. But cherish and nurture it and it would grow and flourish, rewarding all and sundry with the resulting riches: fat, happy loaves, well risen and delectable.

  She put the jar back in the pantry, almost sorry to lose sight of it, then threw a handful of sea salt flakes into her mortar and ground it with a heavy pestle, releasing the faraway scent of seashore violets from the marshes of Brittany as she did so. She could always smell them, even if no one else could. And this morning they smelled more heavenly than ever.

  It was not a quick process, making her own sourdough. Once she had mixed the dough to her satisfaction, she would leave it sitting for two hours to rise, then she would knock it back, shape it into a loaf and coddle it into the linen-lined willow basket where it would gently rise for another three hours before she baked it to eat for lunch.

  In the meantime there was work to be done. This second working of the dough was what made the difference between the ordinary and the sublime. It was Esme’s favorite bit. She lost herself to the familiar rhythm of her breadmaking.

  She added the salt to the plump ball sitting roundly in front of her and started rolling it slowly with one hand on the well-worn bench. Around and around she pushed it, gently but firmly, the palm of her hand pressing down and sweeping it around in the same wide circle each time. She felt the crunch of the salt tickling her palm and worked her hand hard down on the mixture, sweeping and circling, sweeping and circling, until it started to feel less moist, less sticky, less crunchy and more satiny and elastic to her touch. Inexperienced baker
s would probably have added flour by now, finding the dough too clingy and wet to work with, but Esme knew that moisture was the way to make her bread dance on the tongue. Her fingers tingled at being back in their natural habitat. She swept and circled, swept and circled, feeling the texture change under her fingers. Around and around on the counter, she worked the dough, around and around.

  How it comforted her. How it calmed the turmoil within. How it rolled back the years, sliding back over the hills and dales of time, flattening the pain and clearing the way to her sweet, seductive past.

  Chapter 3

  She had been nineteen and ripe for the plucking when she and her best friend Charlie Edmonds had skipped the inevitable disappointment of a London summer for the tiny village of Venolat perched above a horseshoe loop in the Dordogne River in southwest France.

  Actually, Charlie would have preferred to holiday in more popular Provence or, even better, on the glitzy Riviera where, he told Esme, they could both probably find aging overtanned husbands with more money than sense and live the life of Riley for the next who-knew-how-long.

  The only down side, Esme often thought, of having a gay best friend was that they were often in competition for the same boyfriends and she always, but always, came off second best. Charlie seemed completely irresistible while Esme considered herself more of an acquired taste.

  Anyway, she and her light smattering of cornflake-colored freckles were not on the lookout for a leathery octogenarian and so were pleased to be headed for the slightly less glitzy side of France. Granny Mac had taken her to the Dordogne three years before on the proceeds of a major Bingo win despite having said her whole life that she could never visit a country where the women carried dogs in their handbags.

  Granny Mac was very old-fashioned when it came to handbags. She had seven of them, all in different shades of 100 percent vinyl but the exact same style, and she never left the house without one slung over her forearm just like the Queen.

  Inside her bag was always the same collection of essentials: her change purse, two handkerchiefs, her glasses case, a lipstick—always worn away to the same alarming point no matter what its age—a packet of barley sugars, her bus pass and a signed copy of a photo of David Hasselhoff, the American actor from Baywatch, whom she had bumped into at Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street in 1987.

  What had inspired Granny Mac to book plane tickets to Bordeaux Esme had never asked, but delighted with the outcome they both had been. They’d taken a mind-numbingly expensive taxi ride to the charming falling down Château de Roques near the beautiful wine-growing region of St. Emilion and promptly fell head over heels in love with the area: Granny Mac because it rained the whole time, which made her feel at home, and Esme because its lush green elegance and slow-moving river appealed to her fairy-tale sensibilities. It looked, she had believed, like rural France ought to look. Ancient towering bridges over looking-glass waterways; rolling green plains and happily oversized hay bales; silent sand-colored villages with washed-out sea-colored shutters. She had loved every inch of it.

  And Granny Mac, a meat and three-veg stalwart from centuries back, had astounded them both by developing a robust appetite for snails and foie gras. They had promised faithfully that they would go back every year but, according to Granny Mac, Nancy Bowden from Swiss Cottage had invented a swindling system that had kept anyone other than the evil wench herself from enjoying any success on the Bingo cards. There’d be no more trips abroad, Granny Mac had said, until Nancy’s varicose veins and nonfilter cigarettes combined to get the better of her.

  “The overbronzed old-timers will just have to wait,” Charlie said gloomily as he and Esme sped through the narrow country lanes of the southwest three years later. “Trust the Old Boy to have a house in the bit of France no red-blooded young man would be seen dead in.”

  “You bloody well will be seen dead here if you don’t stick to the right-hand side of the road,” Esme said, her knuckles clenched and white from clinging to the dashboard. “Your driving is giving me piles! And shut up, anyway. You’re lucky to have a father with spare houses.”

  Charlie’s father was “something in finance” and wore a smart suit, spoke in a posh accent and seemed to be in possession of a never-ending supply of things that had only just recently “fallen off the back of a truck.”

  In the time Esme had known Charlie, these included a white Volkswagen Golf, four state-of-the-art dishwashers, two racehorses and a sixty-foot yacht called Demelza.

  She had driven at least 2,000 miles in the Golf, had watched one of the dishwashers be installed in her grandmother’s apartment, won three pounds forty-seven on the chestnut and burned her nose sailing one rare fine day aboard Demelza.

  She never quizzed Charlie too vigorously on the subject of what in finance his father exactly was because she knew for a fact that Charlie didn’t really know. As he was a decent bloke with his own unique but unbending set of morals, if he found out what it was his father exactly was and it wasn’t good, his abuse of the benefits thereof would be severely stymied.

  Their trip to France fell off the back of a truck like everything else after the subject of their summer vacation came up one night over drinks with Charlie’s father and his new girlfriend, a six-foot-two-inch lingerie model aged somewhere around twenty and going by the name of K’Lee.

  Charlie liked to have Esme around when his father’s girlfriend du jour was exhibited because he swore that in the past when he had met them without a witness on hand nobody afterward believed his true accounts.

  K’Lee was a good example of the girlfriend a stout, balding, wealthy fifty-something would invent for himself had she not saved him the bother by being a cocktail waitress at his club. The night she was introduced to Charlie and Esme, she arrived wearing three-inch heels that had her towering and teetering over the lot of them and a dress (more of a dishcloth, really, as Charlie pointed out later) made of what looked like a bunch of fishnet tights clinging tenaciously to each other over the rise and fall of her remarkable curves. Her shoes and the length of her legs seemed to put her crotch at eye level to everyone in the room, but then she did not appear to be wearing underwear so most eyes were on that area anyway.

  Esme, who had been wearing her traditional black with black and lots of it, was mesmerized. Charlie was, too. Mr. Edmonds himself acted as though she was a perfectly normal specimen.

  “Get K’Lee a Campari with Diet Coke and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, will you, Charles,” he instructed at one stage. Esme had hooted with laughter, assuming this was a joke, but when no one else joined in she scurried into the kitchen and there was Charlie, hunting out the ingredients.

  “This is nothing,” he had said, shaking his head as he plopped the ball of white ice cream into a glass. “He had one that only drank retsina with freshly squeezed carrot juice. You should have seen her, Es. She was bright orange. And very hairy.”

  Charlie loved dissecting these meetings afterward but never showed anything at the time other than gallons of his customary politeness and charm, poured on liberally in equal amounts.

  “Do you think that is the problem?” Esme had quizzed him after one particularly memorable night out with Mr. Edmonds and a very tired and emotional Croatian opera singer. “Maybe he’s trying to shock you or something.”

  “Good Lord, no,” Charlie said with great confidence. “He doesn’t give a toss what I think. He just thinks they’re all perfectly normal.”

  “But compared to your mother they are anything but,” Esme argued. She knew from photos that Charlie’s mother was exactly the sort of woman you would expect to be married to a stout, balding, successful fifty-something whereas the rotating door introducing her replacements produced a cast of most unlikely possibilities.

  “Oh, Mummy was normal on the outside,” Charlie had said. “But inside she was completely wacko.”

  “Please don’t call her Mummy,” Esme had said. “You know that makes me think you are going to grow into one of those men
who gets dressed up like a giant baby and has some dominatrix dressed like a nanny feed you whisky out of a bottle.”

  “I say!” Charlie had said. “They do that? Now that sounds like fun!”

  This particular night Esme had to agree that Mr. Edmonds was certainly not acting as though K’Lee was anything but run of the mill.

  “Esme and I are just trying to decide what to do with our summer hols,” Charlie said, handing the girl her drink. “What are you up to, then?”

  “I’ve got a modeling contract in Germany, actually,” K’Lee answered, “and I’m hoping to get into a summer school in Koln. I have a degree in German but I’ve spent bugger all time there so . . .” She poked at the blob of melting ice cream in her glass with one long bloodred nail and smiled at them.

  Esme was busy quietly choking on her dry white wine but Charlie as usual was seamlessly smooth.

  “Well, we need to brush up on our French,” he said with a guilty grimace, “so Esme and I are thinking of France, ourselves.”

  “Is that right?” said Mr. Edmonds. He had spent most of the evening on the phone and nobody had noticed that he had joined them again except perhaps K’Lee, whose left buttock Esme noticed his hand now grasped. “We’ve just come into a property in France, as it happens,” he said. “Some little town I’ve never heard of on the Dordogne.”

  Esme thought briefly about asking for a definition of “just come into” but decided against it.

  “You two could always go and check it out for me,” Mr. Edmonds said. “Tidy it up, get it ready for resale, something like that.”

  And so fibbing to save face in front of a far-brainier-than-she-looked model produced for Charlie and Esme the perfect plan for an ideal summer, the only problem being that neither of them really spoke French.