“Louis, you had a wife, a beautiful wife,” hissed Esme. “I met her. I was humiliated by her, and rightly so, too. You turned me into a slut, Louis! And you shrugged at me. After everything we had done together, you shrugged at me!” She knew the shrugging was the least of his wrongdoing but oh how it had hurt.
“That was not the time to tell Diana, Esme. I would do that, I would have done that when the time was right but instead you turn up like that at our house and everything is ruined. If only you had waited.”
Esme’s skin prickled at what she was hearing. If Louis was telling her that they could have had a future together, she did not want to hear it. He was telling her fifteen years too late.
“And then,” Louis said, gaining momentum in her silence, “what was I to do? You knew how to find me, Esme, but how was I to find you?”
Their waiter slid in between them and gently placed their food.
“You could have tried,” Esme continued, amazed that the things she had kept in her head for so long were sliding out so loud and easily. “You could have got it out of Charlie, for God’s sake. All you’d need to do was tickle him. He was there for another two days.”
The calm in Louis’s reflective pool rippled.
“Charlie?” he hissed, although anyone looking from another table would have just seen a beautifully handsome man smile. “Did he not tell you, Esme, about the night I came to find you? About the night you went away?”
Esme’s heart stood still as she shook her head.
“I came to find you and he tells me that you have gone and when I beg him, beg him to tell me where you are he beats the living shit out of me, Esme.” His voice was growing louder although he was trying to control it. He leaned urgently in toward her. “I needed five stitches under my nose, Esme,” and with that he stuck his neck even farther forward, and she leaned in herself and could see the faint scarring from an old wound that had not been there when she had explored every inch of his body in her youth.
She wanted to reach out and touch it but instead tried her soup. It was delicious. Yet what he’d said made her feel ill and uneasy. What if he had tried to find her? What if Charlie had stopped him? What if the last fifteen years of her life had been the wrong ones?
“You could still have come to fetch me back,” she found herself saying.
“But, Esme,” Louis said, calmer now but still clearly agitated, “I did come. I came to St. John’s Wood in London and looked for you for one week”—he shook his head as if unable to believe it himself—“for one whole week but then I ran out of money and have to return to the boulangerie. And then,” he added, his eyes lighting up as he remembered, “I advertised in the Evening Standard for you, but nothing. Nothing.”
Esme felt another stirring deep down below. Louis had come looking for her and failed? As she had lain in a dark room crying with her grandmother, who didn’t believe in evening papers, sitting beside her consoling her, her lover had been combing the streets outside trying to find her? “But that’s terrible,” she whispered, unable to respond in any other way. “That’s terrible, Louis.”
“You are right,” he said, sitting back. “That is terrible. I waited for one month, six months, a year for you to reach me, Esme, but you did not.”
“But why would I, Louis? You had a wife and two little children with another one on the way. I wasn’t the sort of person who would break up a family. I’m still not. You were the one in the wrong, Louis. If it is anybody’s fault, it is yours.”
Louis sighed and his shoulders slumped in a gesture of total desolation. “Is it about who was right and who was wrong, Esme?” he asked her quietly. “Is that what you really think? That it was some sort of a competition and one of us won and the other one lost?”
“How is she?” Esme asked, holding his gaze and slurping back the last of a glass of Sauvignon. “Diana?”
Louis looked wretched.
“Do you think I could have gone back to Diana after you?” he said so quietly she wasn’t sure for a moment if she heard him properly. “For even a moment? I could not live like that, Esme. Do you not know me at all?”
At that moment, something inside Esme unzipped itself and spilled violently out into the no-emotion zone where she required, for her sanity, nothing of the sort. With a clang of cutlery and glassware she rapidly stood, excused herself and dashed to the ladies’ room, where she sat on a lavatory seat lid and shook so violently she thought she was going to throw up. All this honesty was hard for her to handle. The answers she was getting were not necessarily the ones she wanted to hear. She concentrated on her breathing, trying to get air deep into her lungs instead of sucking at it, panicked.
After five minutes she started to feel calmer. She held her hands out in front of her, and though she could see them quivering, she thought she could probably hold a knife and fork without disgracing herself. She left the stall, splashed her face at length with cold water, reapplied her makeup, sponged the last of the gum off her skirt and turned it the right way around, then returned to the table.
Louis half rose out of his chair as she approached, looking tormented.
“I am so sorry,” he said as she sat to find her main course sitting and waiting and, despite her inner turmoil, looking rather gorgeous. “These are old wounds and I have no business opening them again.”
“Shall we eat?” Esme suggested with a calm she got from she didn’t know where. She let the delicacy of her lightly spiced fish fill all the corners in her body that were otherwise buzzing with anger and regret and sadness and guilt. Food was good like that. And when she felt she had control of her emotions enough to speak properly, she did.
“So you are not with Diana, then?” she asked.
“No,” answered Louis emphatically. “She lives in Venolat with Emily and little Marie and Jean, he is eighteen now, but I see them only maybe two or three times a year. I live in Paris,” he added. He returned to his food.
“She was the best friend, wasn’t she?” Esme asked. Louis looked perplexed.
“The best friend who moved to Venolat when you were both thirteen? Who taught you English? Who you taught French? ‘It’s good to share’?”
Comprehension dawned on Louis’s handsome face.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, she was once my best friend but truly we never should have married. When my father fought with my uncle and moved with my mother to Paris, well, I made my own way. Diana was my family just as much as Marie and Louis. And when she fell pregnant with Jean . . . I was just seventeen. We were too young.”
“So, did you marry again?” Esme asked casually.
He stopped, a forkful of food halfway to his mouth and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I never married again. Never, never. There have been others of course but nothing, nobody . . .”
“What do you do in Paris, then?” she asked, amazing herself at how normal the conversation was sounding. They could be any two old friends catching up, not a heartbreaker and his heartbroken. “Don’t tell me you went to work for your father?”
“But no, of course not,” Louis said, disgusted at the suggestion. “Although you might like to know that his fleet of tankers has increased a hundredfold and delivers tubes of baguette dough all over France now.” He shook his head as he chewed his food. “I am still not in communication with him,” he said. “I work for the federation of master bakers. I travel around the world teaching people how to bake pain au levain, you know, the old-fashioned way, just like I taught you, Esme. The tradition is almost completely lost in this world of supermarches and fast food. Even in France I am teaching the art of baking sourdough bread. It seems silly, no?”
“It would seem silly to do anything else,” Esme answered with fervor. How she had always loved that passion of his. “Your uncle must be so proud of you, Louis. How is he?”
Louis stopped eating and let his knife and fork collapse on his plate as his eyes dulled and fell on a spot in the middle of the table between them.
&nbs
p; “My uncle died,” he said quietly, “six weeks ago today.”
Esme felt a sharp pain, like a spear or a long knife being thrust somewhere near her heart. Six weeks ago? She looked at Louis across the table as he lifted his melancholy face to look back at her, and in that moment Esme realized that the years might have passed and their lives might have gone on without one another but she and Louis were inextricably linked and always would be.
His sadness at losing his uncle would have coincided with her own black, breadless hole. The loss of his uncle with the slow shake of Dr. Gribblehurst’s jowls and all that followed.
A glimmer of possibility floated into Esme’s future. Maybe it would not be poisoned by what had happened to her in Notting Hill. Maybe it would be saved by a past much sweeter. Despite what had happened back in Venolat, despite what had occurred in the intervening years, perhaps Louis really was her destiny. She realized, suddenly, that what she felt for him now, sitting across the table in a smart London restaurant, was exactly what she felt all those years ago on the unforgiving sacks of unbleached wheat flour from the pastures of Dordogne.
And if Louis were to stand up now and reach for her, she knew that she would go. In fact, parts of her were tingling in anticipation of that very possibility. Parts that should know better. Parts that should be reserved for the attentions of her husband, Pog.
His name clunked in her brain. Pog. His kind, dear, uncomplicated face hovered into her consciousness, despite the chasm the past two years had dug between them, and grinned at her. She closed her eyes for a second and cleared her head. What had happened in Notting Hill had not just happened to her. It had happened to him. It had happened to all of them. She could not escape it alone.
“I am so sorry,” she said to Louis, “about your uncle. I really am. I know what it feels like and you must be devastated, Louis, especially as you were so close. It must be like losing a limb.” She pushed her plate away from her and moved her chair back, as if to stand and leave. “The thing is that I really have to get going.”
Louis was looking at her, confused. “But why?” he said. “Esme, please.”
But Esme was flailing around on the ground in search of her bag. “I have to fly, Louis. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you what it has been like to see you again—”
“Yes, you can,” Louis said, leaning forward in the same urgent fashion as he had before. “You can stay here and tell me. We can have cheese. They have beautiful French cheese here, Esme. All your favorites.”
Esme shook her head and wondered for a moment if the rest of her body was shaking with it. She was becoming transfixed with the way his lips moved, with the moistness of them, the color, the texture, the memory of their feel.
“The thing is,” she said, finding her bag and plonking it on her knee to form a comforting extra barrier between herself and him, “I just feel extremely sort of thrown by bumping into you today. I mean I have thought about it for years of course but I never thought it would be like this. I always imagined that I would yell at you and call you a bastard and tip crème brûlée on your head or something.”
Louis stared at her. “Esme,” he said, “I cannot believe you have changed so much you would waste a crème brûlée.”
It was a joke, but not entirely funny.
“That’s what I mean,” said Esme. “I feel as though I haven’t changed a bit. I feel like that same silly young girl who fell in love with the village baker and just assumed she was the woman of his dreams as much as she assumed he was the man of hers. And it’s ridiculous because I am really not that person anymore.”
Louis’s smile had spread across his face once more.
“You were the woman of my dreams, Esme,” he said. “You still are.”
Esme cleared her throat and pushed away thoughts of lying naked with him.
“Louis,” she said, “I am not. I am happily married. I am a mother. I live in the country and grow rude vegetables. I dye my hair. I am nearly fifteen pounds heavier.”
His smile spread even further. “I like you better with more roundness,” he said. “It suits you.”
Esme was suddenly aware of every extra inch of her roundness and felt supremely uncomfortable with it. Not for the first time, she silently resolved to join the Seabury yoga group even if they were twenty years older than she yet still, no doubt, twice as bendy. The thought of Seabury brought a lump to her throat and she stood up.
“I am taking my roundness back home to the country now,” she said, fishing in her bag for her sunglasses and finding, well, how could she miss it, the loaf of bread she had brought for Charlie. Her heart skipped a beat and she pulled it out of the bag and handed it to Louis.
He took it, delighted, lifted it to his nose and sniffed it, then tapped the base with his finger, his eyebrows rising (how she wished they wouldn’t do that!) at the wonderful hollow sound.
“Perfect pain au levain,” he breathed. “Well, a little overcooked perhaps but still, you bake bread!”
“Every day, nearly,” she said, “since back then. With your great-great-great-great-grandfather’s starter. I took it with me, you know.”
Louis raised the loaf to his face again and closed his eyes, pressing it to his cheek, inhaling deeply. His smile appealed to her hormones in a way she could not fathom and she tried as hard as she could to not wish herself in the pain au levain’s place. Louis opened his eyes again and must have read something like this on her face because he put the boule on the table and stood up, moving in so close to her that she could have leaned into him and put her lips on the smooth brown skin of his neck.
“Esme,” he urged into her ear. “This cannot be coincidence, you and me, the pain au levain, today after all this time.” He pulled back a bit. “Someone,” he said, raising his eyes skyward, “is trying to tell us something.”
Esme pulled back slightly. “Yes,” she said, “and that someone is me. I am trying to tell you that I have to go.” She put her sunglasses on her head and turned toward the door, but not before she saw Louis’s smile crawl across his lips.
“You are trying to tell me something, yes,” he said, “but it is not that.”
She turned back to him for one last look.
“I will be here next Thursday at one o’clock,” Louis said. “And I would like to see you here, too, Esme.”
The way he said her name, lingered on it, savored it, nearly brought her to her knees there and then, but instead Esme smiled what she hoped was a smile that said she would not be there the following week—although in truth she did not know that for a fact. She did not, at that particular point, know very much at all. She floated out of the restaurant, smiling and thanking the Orrery staff. In a cloud of bewilderment, bedazzlement and deep, dark thought, she turned to go down the stairs, but was halted in her tracks by a high-pitched tinkering laugh that came around the corner well before its owner, who by the click-clack that echoed in the stairwell was wearing a pair of exceptionally high heels.
Because of the sort of day it had been so far and because she recognized those two sounds, especially together, Esme knew she was about to come face-to-face with none other than Jemima Jones. But of course! Why wouldn’t she? Clearly, there had not been enough surprises in the day. With astonishing speed she veered into the Orrery’s tiny bar, at the top of the stairs just opposite the entrance to the restaurant, and plonked herself into a big wingbacked chair.
Unfortunately for her, Jemima Jones came through the door not long after. She was dressed in white and surrounded by a collection of twenty-something men and women all wearing black and elbowing each other out of her wake.
Jemima did a theatrical double take when she saw Esme sitting in her thronelike seat on her own trying to pretend she hadn’t been in the throes of shoveling down a handful of salted almonds.
“Esme MacDougall?” she trilled across the small room. “Is that you, Esme MacDougall?”
“Stack,” said Esme, to her great embarrassment spitting out little bits of che
wed up nut as she did so. “It’s Stack.”
“What did she say?” asked a whippet-thin girl criminally negligent in the hip department.
Esme’s blush ate up the city of London all over again.
“Esme Stack,” she said, croakily. “My name is Esme Stack.”
After a moment’s silence the people in black all turned away and started as one to rearrange the furniture away from her so they could sit together without having her in their sights.
Jemima, however, seemed entranced.
“Stack, of course,” she said, laughing. “I heard you got married and things.”
Esme said nothing. She wondered which “things” Jemima had heard.
“You’ve moved to the country, haven’t you?” Jemima continued, flicking her long golden hair over her shoulder. “So what brings you to a place like this, darling? It’s media types and business boys from floor to ceiling as a rule.”
She turned and shone a dazzling smile at the barman. “Champagne, darling,” she ordered him. “All round.” She looked at Esme. “You’ll have some, of course,” she said.
“A French 75,” Esme said with an authority she was delighted to find roaming around free for the taking.
The tiny golden arch that was Jemima’s eyebrow raised itself minimally, given the restraint it was under by virtue of, as Alice had so correctly put it, being “Botoxed for Africa.”
Her face was beautiful, as it always had been, but as animated as your average Louis Vuitton steamer trunk, Esme thought. Her eyes moved inside their sockets, and her mouth opened to speak, but her face remained glassily smooth, like the rest of her.
She stood in front of Esme’s chair looking as long and silky as Esme felt short and frumpy.
“I’m writing a book,” lied Esme suddenly, “about hair-clips.” It had been such a strange day.
Jemima seemed to barely listen. “I’m having a meeting,” she said, throwing her hair again in the direction this time of the people in black, who were murmuring among themselves, “about getting my own talk show on television. Can you believe it?”