By Bread Alone Page 6

  Sitting there in the shadows, staring, she felt a shivery tingle start in her groin and swarm up to her heart, which greeted it with big, pounding pulses, as though it had never properly beaten before. It ached. Truly ached. And then it sent the shivery tingle on its way through every ventricle, every vein, every tiny capillary, to Esme’s cheeks, where they branded her with the mark of someone in the first stage of a very dangerous desire.

  The man (or was he a boy?) languidly lifted the rolled cigarette to his lips, the tendons in the arm she could see rippling under his smooth brown skin. Then he slowly ran his tongue along the line of glue on the top edge of the cigarette paper and when he got to the end, he lifted his gaze and shifted it to Esme.

  Already frozen, she tried to stop her blood from flowing. Surely he could not see her. And if he could, what was she supposed to do? Suddenly move and act like she wasn’t spying on him or stay stock-still in case it was the fountain he was looking at and not her? Why, oh why did she not know what to do?

  A floury black curl, she noticed, despite her panic, had sprung forward from his left temple and dipped over his forehead, tickling, it seemed, the corner of his eye. He shifted his gaze back to his cigarette, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, brought the roll-your-own to his lips and lit it, her heart missing a beat as she watched his whole beautiful face bathed momentarily in the light from the flame. He inhaled deeply, enjoying every moment, then slowly removed the cigarette from his lips and dropped it to his side. He shrugged, she was sure—it must have been to himself—and then lifted his head and slowly, slowly, slowly, smiled a smile so deep and dark and dazzling that for a moment Esme felt dizzy and thought she was going to swoon.

  And up until that point she had been quite skeptical about the whole business of swooning, believing that it was an imaginary condition applying only to fainthearted Barbara Cartland characters with their corsets done up too tightly.

  But sitting there on that still-warm smooth stone lip of that trickling fountain outside that beautiful bakery with the rich, dark eyes of this completely delicious stranger burning a hole right clear through her, Esme felt on the verge of collapse. She felt like she had been emptied of every feeling she had ever had to make room for something entirely wonderful and new. Something very powerful. Something passionate.

  It was the moment she had been waiting for all her life.

  And it was so ridiculously romantic and unbelievably Mills & Boon that for a moment she doubted herself and him and it, and the swooning feeling evaporated. In its place, though, remained that strange emptiness, a bit of nausea and a hard little gem of certainty that something special was indeed happening.

  The man, boy, vision, whatever he was, looked away from her, took another drag from his cigarette and slipped his free hand into the pocket of his low-slung pale linen pants. He was bare-chested and she could make out the ridges of his ribs and the beginnings of his hip bones. The harp in her nether regions strummed itself again. Then, to her delight, he started to whistle, softly at first, the volume slowly building. Esme didn’t recognize the tune, didn’t need to. The smell of the bread, the look of this man, the tune on his lips . . . Esme’s sensory perception reached overload and a buzzer went off in her head. This is not a dream, she thought. This is really happening.

  Quietly, she stood up and stepped out of the shadows. The man of her dreams looked up again, saw her, and the whistle died away on his lips as his eyes feasted on her and slowly gave way to that dazzling, dizzying smile again. He lifted one hand in what could have been a casual hello, could have been beckoning her to him. And Esme, who suddenly recognized within herself the most excruciating longing—couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before—took one small step in his direction, the moonlight dancing off her ringlets as she did so.

  The moment was so magical she thought that she, who like her grandmother so rarely shed a tear, was going to dissolve into them.

  But then, the moment was shattered.

  “Bloody hell,” Charlie’s voice rang out from behind her. “The Dutch are a forward bunch, aren’t they? Three in a bed I can handle, but five? I’m English for God’s sake.”

  He hiccupped noisily, the sound of his boots unevenly scuffing the cobbles heralding his unwieldy condition. “What the fuck is pastis, anyway? I don’t know. Bloody disgusting. Es? What are you doing?”

  Esme had swung around just for an instant at the sound of Charlie’s voice only to find that when she turned back to the boulangerie, her vision was gone, the sound of timber on timber ringing sadly in the still night air. The dream had melted in front of her, like a watercolor lying in the rain: one moment a landscape of staggering beauty, the next a gaudy puddle fast disappearing down a black, bleak drain.

  The light in the bakery’s back room seemed dimmer. The moonlight had lost its oomph. She had to struggle to recall the smells that only moments ago had filled her head, leaving little room for anything else.

  Charlie staggered up to his friend, who was standing palely riveted to the ground, her green eyes huge in her lightly freckled face as she turned to stare at him with barely disguised horror. Even in his drunken stupor he could tell that all was not well.

  “I say, Es,” he said. “Are you okay? Whatever’s the matter?”

  Esme turned and looked toward the bakery door but the vision was definitely gone. The black, bleak drain had claimed him.

  “Bread,” she said feebly, willing the vision to come back. “Look.” She pointed gormlessly toward the boulangerie. “They’re baking it. Can’t you smell it?”

  Charlie, unsteady on his feet, sniffed the air. “God, don’t talk to me about food, I feel sick as a dog,” he said. “What’s pastis, anyway? Revolting. Come on, Essie, let’s go home.”

  Esme wanted to stay where she was and wait for the boy in the bakery to come back out again. But it all seemed so quiet. So still. Maybe she had been dreaming. It all felt very strange. Charlie staggered and hiccupped again and she realized that perhaps home was the best direction in which to go after all.

  Lying in her bed some time later, though, her head still buzzing with red wine and blue cheese and the events of the night just passed, Esme could not get the baker boy out of her mind. It was silly, she knew, to lie in one’s bed and warm oneself up with the memory of one look—no, she told herself, two—and a couple of smiles from a total stranger, if it had even been she he was smiling at.

  But what a guilty pleasure it was to assume the smiles were intended for her.

  And such a smile! Esme stifled a groan as she rolled over in the big fairy-tale bed and thought about that one black lock of hair licking the corner of the baker boy’s eye. She imagined reaching out and tucking that slick of dark hair back behind his ear. She imagined leaning in toward him and kissing the space where the curl had been. She thought about her warm, moist lips, brushing the end of his eyebrow and tracing a trail with her tongue down his cheek to his mouth.

  She tasted his tongue, for a moment, in her dreams, then let her unconscious mind turn to the promise of his hands in places no one but herself had ever been.

  Chapter 4

  Six boyfriends, one husband and ten pounds, mostly around her middle, later, Esme sat at her kitchen table high in the clouds quivering with repugnance as she ogled Jemima Jones’s inaugural Diary.

  It was Sunday morning and she had sent Pog to the Meare Tea Shop to get the paper as soon as he had awoken even though the last thing in the world she wanted to do was read it. It had sat first on the end of her bed, then in the clothing hamper, then on the kitchen table, then in the rubbish bin, then on the kitchen table again.

  Pog, witnessing all this and weighing up what it meant, had quickly vacated to the garden shed, leaving Esme seated at the table, glaring at the Style section. Finally, she snatched it up and shook it open only to see Jemima smiling enigmatically out at her, looking blond, wrinkle-free, girlish and gorgeous. She had never felt more like punching anyone in her whole entire life.


  As I kissed my darling boy Cosmo good-night on Friday, she read, he looked up at me and said, adorably: “Are all the other mummies as beautiful as you?”

  Esme tossed the paper down on the table again. Her hands itched to do something. She checked the kitchen clock; she had knocked back her bread nearly an hour before. She could start the second rising a few minutes early.

  Pog, although not saying anything, had clearly been delighted at the appearance of a freshly baked boule at lunch the previous day. He had eaten it as though he had never eaten anything before, and Esme herself had woken that morning with a flutter of something that wasn’t, as had become the norm, dread. It was good to be back at the kitchen bench.

  She poked her tongue out at Jemima and moved to where her dough was sitting plumply in its bowl, glistening with the olive oil she used to keep it from sticking to the sides. She picked the warm smooth ball up in her hands and laid it carefully on the counter, then, using both hands, gently massaged it into the right shape and let it sit while she sprinkled a handful of flour on the surface next to it.

  With one deft movement she turned the dough over, dipped it in flour and gently dropped it into the waiting linen basket. It was not the real thing, not French and not made of willow, but over the years Granny Mac had perfected the art of making pretty good alternatives using breadbaskets and old linen tea towels.

  The dough sat smugly in its mold. It would rise in its own good time. Esme tidied the kitchen, then went back to the table and picked up the paper again.

  I was dressed in gold Calvin Klein with Jimmy Choo heels, she read, ready to go to the Dorchester for one of my charity dos, but at that moment I felt like curling up beside my son and simply lying there in his bed all night, soaking up his adoration. How my heart ached for him as I handed the au pair a story book (Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain—Cosmo is an aspiring cook!) and slipped out the door.

  She slapped the paper back down and got up to make herself a cup of tea. Cosmo? As in the magazine? She tried to quell her irritation. Kitchen Confidential? How old was this child?

  “All right there, darling?” she asked Rory, who was watching Shrek for possibly the hundredth time. Like most mothers, she had sworn no child of hers would ever sit plopped in front of a TV for hour after hour, but her son had woken up in an impossible mood and she could not face the consequences of hiding the remote control.

  Rory didn’t answer her. Did adorable little Cosmo watch videos and ignore his mother? she wondered. Or did Cosmo bring his mother breakfast in bed, then iron her satin robe and throw rose petals on the ground in front of her as she made her way to the bathroom? She sipped her tea, sighed and flopped back into her chair.

  It’s not easy being a superwoman as I am sure many of you appreciate, Jemima chittered. A working mother can be torn in so many different directions that the days just seem to pass in a blur. Why, one day you are sitting there in your Nicole Farhi coat and pony skin ankle boots and the next thing you know it’s spring and you’ve barely darkened the door of Harvey Nichols. I am lucky that my husband, Gregory, who’s in banking, helps out a lot at home by engaging the services of two nannies, a cook, a driver and a gardener. It makes it easy to slip away and meet our social commitments without denying our three delightful children any of the attention they so richly deserve.

  “Bitch!” Esme breathed, dropping the paper again. She could not bear to read another word. “‘Three delightful children,’ my armpit.”

  “You’re not supposed to say bitch unless you’re talking about dogs,” Rory said from his beanbag. “Granddad says so.”

  Esme felt shame add itself to the cocktail of feelings churning inside her.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” she said, getting up and going to the fridge to fix his morning tea, “but sometimes it really is the only word that does the job.”

  Rory stood up, turned off the television and sat at the table, reaching for the packet of cereal Esme had ready for him. He liked toast first thing and cereal later on. Nothing could persuade him to reverse the order. “Who’s a bitch?”

  “Just a woman I used to work for who was once very mean and horrible to Mummy and who is probably going to be the next Prime Minister,” Esme replied sweetly.

  “What happened to Tony Blair?” Rory asked, through a mouthful of food. “The prat.”

  Esme looked at him pouring extra sugar on his breakfast, his carrot-colored hair luminescent against the muted creams and whites and pale blond wood of the top floor.

  “Rory,” she said moving around the table and sitting down next to him, “you do know that grown-ups can do and say things that little children can’t, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Rory. He kept eating, unfazed.

  “So you must also know that you can’t repeat things we say about people, especially if they are mean or horrible things, because you might not understand exactly why we are being mean and horrible in the first place.”

  Rory shot her a look of withering proportions.

  “Mrs. Monk says people who are mean are usually sad inside and you should feel sorry for them,” he said, wiping his chubby little hand across his mouth. Mrs. Monk was Rory’s nursery teacher and a self-righteous old battle-ax if ever there was one, but Rory liked her and Esme tried very hard never to say anything mean about her.

  “Is Mrs. Monk wearing her brown wig this week,” she asked her son, “or the red one?”

  Rory thought about it for a moment. “It’s a new one,” he said. “It’s sort of silver. It’s nice.”

  He really could be very sweet, thought Esme, smiling indulgently and catching Jemima’s eyes where they lay on the table.

  “Rory,” she said, “do you think Mummy is beautiful?”

  Rory lifted up his bowl, drank the milk out of the bottom of it and shrugged his shoulders, saying nothing.

  “More beautiful than Mrs. Monk, maybe?”

  “Mrs. Monk has a mustache,” Rory answered her. “Everyone is more beautiful than her. She just has nice wigs.”

  “Well,” continued Esme, “compared to the other mummies then. Am I as beautiful? More beautiful?”

  Rory looked at her as he pushed his chair back. “The other mothers have got shinier hair,” was all he said. He picked up the honey jar and spoon Esme had ready on the bench and held them up at her. She toyed with refusing to move until he gave her the right answer to the question but decided that would be churlish, as would pointing out that curly hair never shined like straight hair. It was a reflection thing.

  “Come on,” Rory said, and they made their way downstairs and out onto the lawn where, joined by Brown, they trekked over to the wicker gate behind the house and stood looking mistrustfully and from a safe distance at the beehive.

  The bees swarmed furiously in an angry cloud around the blue-and-white-striped hive that Pog had paid a fortune for and spent an entire weekend painting so it would match Esme’s garden, which grew rich in blue irises, lavender, roses and hydrangeas. The bees were all part of her dream of serving up a country breakfast with fresh baked bread, farm-laid eggs and lazy spoonfuls of thick, brown honey, fresh from their very own backyard.

  So far, she had only managed the bread. The chickens had refused to lay and then died, and in the six months that they had had the bees, only Pog had got closer than ten yards away from them, and on that spectacular occasion he had been stung sixteen times before retreating almost in tears as Esme had looked on in hysterics from the garden gate. A small amount of research—which they would have been better off doing before buying the bees—revealed they were nowhere near equipped to harvest honey. The routine of coming down with a jar and spoon had been borne out of simple curiosity.

  “Bees, Dad!” Rory shouted this Sunday morning across the lawn in the direction of Pog’s shed. The door opened and Pog’s head poked out.

  “Be careful, you two,” he called, then shut the door again. Esme considered the shed. They had six stories of house, yet Pog, she knew, preferred thi
s drafty little shack. She’d only been in there a handful of times. It was dark and cold and full of boxes and tools and jars of dirty fluid sprouting paintbrushes. Pog had a sort of nest at one end with a chair draped in an old oilskin and a filing cabinet piled high with ancient paperwork. An old apple crate provided a surface for his electric kettle and tea supplies. The whole place smelled funny, decades of garden fertilizer fused into the walls, she supposed. On each occasion she had gone in there Pog had acted peculiarly, as though she was trespassing, so once she’d seen that it wasn’t a den of pornography or a crack house she had left him to it.

  “A man needs a shed,” he said, whenever she complained about the amount of time he spent there. And to be honest, she couldn’t begrudge him his own little space; in most regards he was the perfect husband: handsome, kind, loving, understanding, generous, gentle. She thought fleetingly, as she stood there considering the dark, lonely shed, of the way she rolled away from him under the covers of their bed these days, and guilt scratched at her. There really was something very wrong with her. Here she was with all the ingredients of a perfect life sitting separately on the countertop of her future, yet now, more than ever, she seemed incapable of combining them. Was the past destined to forever poison whatever was to come?

  “What makes them so cross?” Rory asked her, and she turned her attention again to the bees buzzing furiously around their home. Brown, too, still on his best behavior since the quince-peeing incident, turned to Esme for the answer.

  “I’m buggered if I know, actually,” Esme answered them both, forgetting that buggered was another word she didn’t want Rory using in front of Mrs. Monk. Again. “I’ve given them everything bees should want. They’ve got that lovely hive. I’ve seen worse places in Elle Decor, for goodness’ sake. There are flowers blooming everywhere you look and trees drooping with crab apples and quinces so pollen shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know what’s wrong.”