Esme smiled encouragingly.
“Perhaps when your book is published,” Jemima said, her expressionless face leaving Esme no clue as to whether she was being facetious or not, “you could come and talk about it.”
The waiter delivered Esme her French 75, which she snatched with a nervousness that could have looked like greed.
“That would be brilliant,” she said, smiling winningly and gulping back half of the lethal drink. “I’ll let you know closer to the time.”
The people in black started murmuring louder on the other side of the room and Jemima rolled her eyes. “I’d better go,” she said. “Work, work, work!” And she twirled to give Esme a perfect eyeful of her tiny Stairmastered-within-an-inch-of-its-life butt. Not a hint of baboon-bum gum in sight. Esme gulped down the rest of her cocktail in one second flat.
“Do keep in touch,” Jemima said, over her shoulder, before accepting a cigarette from one of her adoring crowd and getting down to business.
Esme stood, ever so slightly unsteadily on her feet, collected her bag and her thoughts and teetered across the room.
“Thanks for the drink,” she said timidly to the group of backs and slid out the door.
“We paid for her drink?” she heard one of the men in black say, and her embarrassment was so acute that she forgot until she was at the bottom of the steps that the scab of her unrequited love for Louis Lapoine had not two hours ago been ripped off and left open and sore and bleeding.
She looked at her watch. She was just, as she stood there, missing the 2:30 to Ipswich and would have to ring Henry to get Rory from Mrs. McArthur, which he would count against her all week if not all month.
It was too hideous a prospect to contemplate.
Chapter 12
Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Granny Mac said, impressed, the next morning, when Esme slid into her room smelling so strongly of fresh bread that the stale cigarette stench hardly got a look in. “If there’s not more than the merest hint of young Louis Lapoine in the air I’ll eat my hat!”
Her hat sat on top of her wardrobe and looked extremely unappetizing. She had bought it in 1949 when it looked like an enormous pink hydrangea, and age had not improved it.
Esme had not breathed a word to anybody about her lunch the day before and as far as she knew only Charlie and a handful of waiters knew anything about it.
“What do you know about Louis Lapoine?” she asked briskly, pulling the bedclothes straight and whistling unwittingly to the inevitable Rod Stewart.
“I know as much as you do,” her grandmother said. “And I know that no matter how much you might try to love again, Esme, the first cut is the deepest.”
Esme thought about closing down, disagreeing, arguing, but it seemed pointless. “I had lunch with him yesterday,” she said evenly instead, taking up her position on her grandmother’s bed.
“I knew it!” roared Granny Mac. “I bloody well knew it! And????”
“And he had hardly changed a bit except that now he wears a posh suit and travels the world spreading the good word about sourdough.”
“And????”
“And we had a very civilized and delicious meal and I missed the two-thirty train and Henry had to get Rory from Mrs. McArthur so I am up there with Adolf Hitler in his books today and even though I’ve done nothing wrong I feel sick about Pog and I’ve found a roll of fat I am sure I didn’t have a month ago and—”
“Oh, please, enough,” Granny Mac demanded in her usual straightforward manner. “Cut to the chase, why don’t you? Tell me more about the Frenchman.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Don’t trifle with me, Esme. Is there still something there?”
“What do you mean?” Esme asked in a small voice, knowing it was asking for trouble but stalling for time nonetheless.
“Does he still do for you what Sean Connery still does for your grandmother?”
“What are you on about?” She was pleading innocence but feeling the heat of her grandmother’s disdain.
“Do you have to skip over and dance around everything that’s even slightly tricky, Esme? Let alone the big stuff?”
She sat there, listening to her heartbeat, wondering what was happening to her.
“You have to start somewhere, you know, lassie.” Granny Mac’s voice seemed to soften. “It’s not going to get easier, do you realize that? It is never going to get easier. You have to start letting it go.”
The room fell silent and heavy with words unspoken from either end of the cozy single bed.
“I miss him,” Esme finally whispered into the darkness.
“I know you do,” her grandmother said. A tiny crevice of candor infiltrated the black air between them, and Esme realized with something that could have been a gasp, could have been a sob, that she felt like a woman whose very tight corset had just been loosened the tiniest bit, letting her breathe easily for the first time in a long, long while.
At just that moment the doorbell rang and she instantly felt the black boot in the small of her back of someone tying her corset tighter again. She straightened up. “The door,” she said. “I’d better . . .”
Moments later she was staring aghast at Jam-jar standing on her doorstep and holding a scabby-looking donkey with what seemed to be a broken and badly splinted back leg. She wished fervently she had ignored the doorbell and stayed on her grandmother’s bed, with perhaps her grandmother’s pillow over her face, permanently.
“Well, I’m really not quite sure what to do with a donkey,” she said to her neighbor, whose enormous eyes googled out at her, terrifyingly oversized, from behind his ancient Coke-bottle lenses.
“It’s a he,” said Jam-jar and to back him up the donkey chose that moment to drop his organ, also terrifyingly oversized, from wherever he had been keeping it up to that point and, appearing to stand on tiptoes, if donkeys even had them, urinated gushingly on Esme’s doorstep.
Jam-jar seemed not altogether surprised and stepped niftily aside, missing the worst of it, but Esme got such a fright she shrieked and jumped backward. As she did the poor donkey also took fright and reared clumsily sideways, managing to spray huge jets of donkey pee through the open door and directly into Henry’s brand-new Wellington boots. He had gone to Stonyborough three days before, on the bus, to get them. He would not be happy.
“Oh, no! Not again,” she cried as Jam-jar grabbed at the donkey’s halter and it retracted its enormous protuberance, steam still rising enthusiastically from the puddles on the ground and in her hallway.
The tap-tap-clomp that always preceded Henry heralded his imminent arrival, and Esme, panic-stricken, grabbed the Wellingtons and slung them inside Granny Mac’s room just seconds before her father-in-law hove into view.
“What on earth is going on?” he demanded, taking in Esme’s flushed face, the elderly neighbor and the lame donkey. At least he seemed oblivious, Esme thought thankfully, to what she was pretty sure was Granny Mac’s version of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” leaking out from her bedroom door.
“For God’s sake, don’t give the poor thing to her,” Henry said over Esme’s shoulder to Jam-jar.
Esme felt a little catch at the back of her throat which she recognized as hurt. “Don’t be silly, Henry,” she said as kindly as she could before turning to Jam-jar. “The Goat was really not my fault. Apparently they go blind quite often without anything to do with spades.”
Jam-jar looked at her as though she was speaking a foreign language, and Esme realized that perhaps he hadn’t known about the goat-blinding incident.
“I wasn’t aware I was being silly,” Henry harrumphed. “Have you seen my Wellingtons?”
Oh God, thought Esme. Does it really always have to be like this?
“She put them in the—” Jam-jar started to say before Esme leaped outside, shutting the door and Henry behind her.
“He’s only just gotten over Brown peeing on his brogues,” she hissed. “Please, I need time to explain the boot
s.”
Jam-jar started to look scared and glanced nervously back to the safety of his windmill. “Gladys from the bookshop in Seabury brought us the donkey,” he said in his usual expressionless tone. “It’s been hit by a van, I should think, or perhaps a small lorry and patched up by the receptionist at the vet but no one’s claimed it and we can’t keep it at ours as we’ve no fencing.”
The donkey looked so gloomy Esme couldn’t bear it. She didn’t need another handicapped creature on her hands, but then again, who else would take care of the poor thing? Besides, despite telling herself she didn’t care what Henry thought, she did care what Henry thought and she wanted to show him that she could do more with animals than repeatedly diminish their capacities.
“I’ll take him,” she said, and Jam-jar turned immediately and without a word started to shuffle away. “Come on, Eeyore,” said Esme, using barely a sliver of imagination to christen the donkey. His big dark eyes looked at her glumly and she led him slowly past the house and through the willow fence into what had once been a grass tennis court, where she untethered him and watched him hobble toward a patch of dandelions.
God knew what donkeys ate, she thought. Or drank. And the poor thing was probably gasping for a drink after emptying his bladder so spectacularly. She headed back to the house, thinking she would get a bucket, but as she approached the front door, it flew open, and there stood Henry with a face like thunder holding up his dripping gum boots.
“I suppose you find this amusing,” he challenged her.
“Of course not,” Esme tried to reason. “I just put them in there because I thought I could clean them up before you found them.”
Henry quivered with rage. “I am perfectly capable of cleaning them myself.”
“Well, I’m sure you are but I just thought I could save you the bother since it was me who opened the door to the donkey.”
“Oh, so it should have been me opening the door, then?” Henry fumed, catching the wrong cog yet again.
“For goodness’ sake, Henry,” Esme sighed, exasperated. Her father-in-law was acting as if she’d peed on his boots herself. She held out her hand. “Give them to me. I’ll use the hose to clean them.”
Henry snatched them away. “Your grandmother’s room smells revolting,” he said. “And you shouldn’t be spending so much time in there.”
Esme blushed. “That’s none of your business,” she said quietly.
“My son is my business,” Henry said. “And your son is my business. And they both need you out here.”
Esme gasped at the hardness in his eyes and Henry instantly tried to recant.
“Esme,” he said, his old, craggy face collapsed with regret. He had not meant it to sound cruel but saw that it had. He held out a pleading hand to her but she whirled around and disappeared into Granny Mac’s room again, slamming the door behind her, throwing herself on the bed and howling tears of rage and misery that had been pent up so long they barely knew what they were there for.
“Och,” Granny Mac said soothingly, “there, there.” She made no attempt to stop her granddaughter’s tears. She was glad to see them.
“Henry hates me,” Esme sobbed. “Things keep weeing on him. It’s not my fault. Everything’s too hard. And Jemima’s got my life.”
“Oh, Esme,” her grandmother sighed. “How can you be so blind?”
“I’ve had to be blind,” wept Esme. “If I open my eyes and start seeing everything, I will die.”
“Well, if you keep your eyes closed, you can hardly consider it living,” Granny Mac said. “Say his name, Esme. Just say the wee boy’s name.”
“I can’t,” wept Esme. “I just can’t. I can’t think about him or hear about him or talk about him. I just can’t. Oh, Granny Mac, what shall I do? Everything’s such a mess. Of all the times to meet Louis, now just seems so wrong. What’s to become of me? And Pog? And Rory? What’s to become of all of us?”
“Oh, now’s not such a bad time,” Granny Mac said soothingly.
“How can you say that?”
“Well, has seeing the Frenchman again made you feel better or worse?” Granny Mac asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just answer me, Esme. Better or worse?”
Esme closed her eyes and tried to take control of her sobs and think about the true answer to that question.
“It felt good yesterday,” she said honestly. “But it feels bad today.”
“And why did it feel good, do you think?” her grandmother inquired politely.
“Because,” answered Esme, “he made me feel like the girl I used to be.”
“Well,” Granny Mac said softly. “Maybe, finally, we are getting somewhere.”
Upstairs, the phone rang. Esme wiped her eyes and leaped up the stairs, grateful, in a way, to be safe from having the blatantly unhealed wounds of her distant and not-so-distant past poked at by the interfering specter of her grandmother.
It was Charlie on the phone, wanting to do a bit of poking of his own.
“Was he still gorgeous?” he pestered her. “Was he still sexy? Did he make you horny, baby?”
“What is it with everyone?” Esme grumbled. “Why do you all want to know about that?”
Charlie was surprised. “Who else wants to know? Did you tell Pog?” he asked. “I thought you might have kept your little tryst to yourself, Es.”
“No one,” she said. “I didn’t. It wasn’t a tryst.”
“Well, whatever it was I bet it spiced up your life, eh?” Charlie plowed on, hounding her for details. “Did it take you back to the sweltering bakery days of yore?”
“He told me he came to find me the night I left Venolat, Charlie,” Esme told him. “You never mentioned that.”
A small silence traveled uncomfortably down the phone line. “Well, why would I have told you that, Es? And what difference would it have made, anyway? It didn’t make him unmarried.”
“No, but it means that I wouldn’t have spent the last fifteen years thinking he was a complete and utter shit who never gave a toss about me when it turns out that actually he did.”
“Steady on, old girl.”
“Did you know he came to St. John’s Wood to find me and he stayed for a week looking but then gave up?”
“Really?” asked Charlie with a cough. “Do you suppose that’s true?”
“Why wouldn’t it be true?” Esme asked incredulously. “What would be the point in lying after all this time?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Charlie said awkwardly. “He wasn’t exactly the most trustworthy fellow in the world, was he?”
“You are so bloody cynical, Charlie,” Esme said angrily. “He’s got stronger principles than you or I. He is still turning his back on his family fortune and teaching people how to bake sourdough. I mean you could hardly say the same about our careers, could you? You don’t give a tinker’s cuss about yours and I don’t even have one.”
“Calm down, Esme.” Charlie was rattled now, too. “It was just a chance meeting. It’s not like you are going to up and run off with him.”
The very suggestion gave her a tremor of excitement.
“Actually,” she said, “I could just up and run off if I wanted to. He isn’t married anymore, he doesn’t live with his kids, he travels the globe making the world’s most delicious bread. It certainly seems a pleasant enough alternative to standing ankle-deep in donkey pee worrying about what a crappy mother you are.”
“Essie”—Charlie’s concern was clear—“are you all right? I would have thought lunch with Louis would have been a little surprise pick-me-up not a cat among the pigeons.”
“Yes, well, lunch with you might have been a pick-me-up but with him it has unleashed a whole—”
The feel of someone’s lips on the back of her neck sent a jolt of fear up her spine. She gasped.
“Unleashed a whole what?” Pog asked behind her, before moving over to the stove top to put the kettle on. “Sounds exciting. Is
that Alice?” He must have come home for lunch and she’d not heard his footsteps on the stairs.
“I’d better go,” Esme said into the receiver. She felt guilty and grubby. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Pog slumped down at the kitchen table and smiled at her and Esme’s heart swelled with love and confusion. What the hell was the matter with her? They may not have had the romance of the century, she and Pog, but she had never doubted for a moment how much he adored her. She could see it now in his eyes, despite the baggy black cushions underneath them and the thin veil of things he never told her lurking in front of them.
She sat down opposite him. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” he said with what she thought could have been a slightly forced smile, “although my father seems to be doing something very strange outside with the garden hose and if I’m not mistaken a wounded wildebeest of some description.”
Esme rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask,” she advised, her heart racing inside as she examined her feelings for this gorgeous man and wondered how there could be room left to entertain thoughts of Louis.
“I thought I might go into Stonyborough this afternoon,” Pog said, “and see if I can drum up a bit more work. Something a bit more challenging, perhaps. Mrs. Murphy is clicking her ballpoint pen to the point where I may have to do her some serious bodily harm so I thought I might get out of the office for a bit. Apparently that falling down old pub at the end of the High Street is up for sale so whoever buys it might be looking for an architect of my supremely outstanding skill. What do you think?”
In their old London days the thought of Pog trolling the high streets for renovation work would have had them gurgling derisively into their Chardonnays. Was it worth it? Had they made the right move?
“What about doing up Seabury—when will you hear about that?” she asked helpfully.
Pog looked surprised and she realized that he already had heard. She felt instantly mortified at having been too preoccupied with herself to think about him and got up and went to his side, cuddling him and kissing his head, sniffing his Pog-smelling hair.