Esme had a good excuse—she had only learned it for a year before giving it up in favor of sewing classes. Charlie, however, could not say the same. He had studied the language for five years and claimed to have even passed exams in it yet seemed restricted in his vocabulary outside the subjects of food and drink. This, though, they agreed, would probably not be a problem in any event.
They arrived in the village one sweltering July afternoon after the tortuous drive from the airport in a car that had all the buttons for air-conditioning but not the temperament-protecting feature itself.
Charlie, who was a horrible driver at the best of times, was even worse thanks to a terrible hangover courtesy of a very late and eventful night out in the West End. He was tired and cranky and Esme was frazzled, too, being somewhat racked with guilt and anguish at leaving Granny Mac alone for so long. The two had never been separated for more than a week and she knew it was silly but she felt wretched nonetheless.
“What say she gets savaged by wild geese or attacked by an ax murderer?” she wailed to Charlie, who was short on sympathy for anybody other than himself.
“For God’s sake, Es. She’s probably desperate for you to get out of her hair so she can go on a shagfest at the local Sainsbury’s. Stop worrying and open the back windows, will you, I am boiling.”
This was not exactly what Esme wanted to hear and anyway, as she pointed out, there was nothing in Granny Mac’s historical behavior that would lead one to think she would hide her shagfests from her granddaughter.
“I’ve lived through three successful courtships, a very happy marriage and half a dozen lesser suitors,” she pointed out. “I know what very old people having sex sounds like and, as you well know, on one occasion, what it looks like.”
“Oooh,” cooed Charlie, cheering up instantly. “Tell me about Sailor Bill, go on!” But Esme refused to be drawn into repeating the story of catching her granny at it with a “visitor from abroad” whom she had met, apparently, in the St. John’s Wood library at the Scottish Cuisine section, which was small but attracted a dedicated, as it turned out, following.
By the time they found the signs to Venolat they had stopped saying much and Esme was looking dreamily out the window, entranced by the luscious greens and golds and burnt oranges of the countryside as they whisked through it.
It all looked vaguely unreal, as though a clever painter had hijacked her dreams and was racing ahead of her, wildly repainting the landscape from whatever it truly looked like to the exact tints and textures of her imagination.
She sighed. If only everything she dreamed of could come to life in such a way. Everyone.
“Hurrah!” trilled Charlie. “We’re nearly there.” A sign to Venolat pointed them upward, away from the rolling green pastures and onto a narrow leafy lane that clung to the side of a substantial hill as it wound its way sneakily heavenward.
“One more corner and I swear I am going to be sick,” he groaned five minutes later, looking pale, but Esme shushed him quiet as the car rounded a corner shaded by a canopy of ancient trees and emerged into one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen.
The road they had driven up had been partly carved into rock that had hung over them, shielding the village from their eyes as they approached. Now, though, the town sat prettily and proudly in front of them, as if pleased with the secret of itself, and allowed them—but only just—entry via a road that was barely wider than their steaming Renault.
“Charlie,” breathed Esme, “it’s gorgeous!”
To their left stood a church, pale yellow and majestic in the afternoon sun, while on the other side of a sunny square a sad bronze soldier stood in front of a stone memorial to men the village had lost. Farther up, on either side of the narrow road, two-storied houses leaned over them, their milky sea-green shutters framing window boxes heaving with flowers.
Esme wound down her window and drank in the smell—lavender, definitely, and jasmine, she was sure, plus the smell of plain hot summer and maybe coffee, too.
“Where did he say it was?” Charlie asked, his bad mood dissolving.
“He said turn left at the fountain and ask at the auberge, whatever that is,” replied Esme, repeating what Mr. Edmonds had told her.
“I think it’s like an aubergine,” said Charlie, “but bigger.”
At that point the road widened and they found themselves in a tiny square with a fountain bathed in sunlight and serenely trickling water. To their right the lane took them through an arch and obviously out of the village again; straight ahead, the road on the other side of the fountain—even narrower than it had been before—wound farther up the hill, and to the left was another lane with, perched on its corner, quite the prettiest bakery Esme had ever seen.
Its corner door faced out toward the fountain and was sheltered from the sun by a yellow and white striped awning above which read the simple word Boulangerie. The window boxes on either side of the building were painted the same shade of daffodil yellow and bulged with red geraniums and miniature lavender bushes.
The shop was closed, yet Esme could swear she smelled the sweet yeasty aroma of fresh bread being baked still lingering in the air.
“Coming up, one auberge,” Charlie said, lurching to a halt just past the bakery at a small hotel covered in vines and discreetly signposted.
“An auberge is a hotel?” Esme asked, getting out of the car and looking at it. If Mr. Edmonds’s flat turned out to be a pigsty, it certainly looked like somewhere nice to stay as an alternative.
“One that sells aubergines, I think you will find,” Charlie said with authority, striding inside.
The two of them emerged five minutes later with the key to the apartment, which was apparently just around the corner, and a table for that night booked at the auberge, which, it turned out, was a restaurant that served a fixed menu, perfect for a linguistically challenged pair such as themselves.
They wedged the car in a three-point maneuver into a tiny parking space, pointed out to them by the auberge proprietor, and unloaded their excessive baggage from the trunk.
“Follow me,” Charlie said, leading Esme back up the lane and turning through a stone archway, which emerged into the private courtyard of a three-story building with dark varnished shutters.
Stopping at double-shuttered doors, Charlie dumped his bags and unlocked them, then unlocked the French doors behind and entered a cool, white hallway. To the left were old, worn stone stairs leading upward and straight ahead was a sort of living room with a cavernous double bedroom going off to one side. It was simply but sweetly furnished and deliciously cool.
“My room,” said Charlie. “It will be getting most of the traffic so it might as well be on the ground level.”
Esme slapped him on the arm. “How do you know?” she said. “I might turn out to be the biggest strumpet Venolat has ever seen, bringing home a swag of Frenchmen every night myself.”
“Es,” said Charlie patiently, “if you brought home one it would be a bloody miracle.”
Charlie never tired of the subject of Esme’s chasteness. He had done more than his bit, he felt, over the five years they had known each other, to help her in her efforts at being deflowered, but at nineteen, she remained deeply embarrassed by her virginal status yet too much of a romantic, in the absence of a suitable knight in shining armor, to do anything about it.
“I’m waiting for the right one,” Esme reminded him grumpily. “I’m special, remember?”
“Special, all right,” Charlie said, heading up the stairs. “Hark, is that a National Geographic photographer I see ahead? They’ll be writing a story about you next, Esme. You’re an endangered species.”
They arrived on the first floor, which housed a long dark oak table and eight chairs and overlooked at one end the little lane through which they had just driven. At the other end was a kitchen so rich in appliances they doubted they would use even a fifth of them, and to one side shuttered doors led to a terrace. From there Esme look
ed back down to the glorious green valley below and the lazy loop of the river that meandered through it.
“We’re in heaven,” she said happily. “God bless the Old Boy, Charlie! It doesn’t need a thing done to it. Look—it’s glorious! We can just swan around and eat cheese and drink wine for the whole lovely summer.”
Charlie shrugged and picked up her bags, then continued up more stone stairs to the top floor, which led them to an attic bedroom complete with an enormous armoire, en suite bathroom and a four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting.
“Well, if you can’t get lucky with a room like this,” he said, “there’s no hope for you.”
He dropped her bags on the floor and they both flopped on the enormous bed, staring in silence at the ancient wooden fan rattling gently above them.
“Charlie,” Esme said, turning to him. “I’ve got a feeling that this is going to be the best holiday ever.”
“I thought I had that feeling, too,” said Charlie, “but it turned out to be gas. Bloody champagne cocktails, I tell you.”
“You and your emissions! Honestly. Is that all you ever think about? I’m talking about, you know, the big deal. I’m just so ready for it.”
“Gagging for it is the expression, I believe,” said Charlie. “Do you think he’s going to be big and black and hung like a farmyard animal?”
“No!” Esme answered. “Although maybe. That would be pretty good, wouldn’t it? But I don’t know. I won’t know until I see him.”
Charlie sighed and closed his eyes as the throbbing in his head fell into perfect time with the fan above. “Esme, you are such a sap,” he said. “You’re never going to find him if you’re going to wait until he rides up on his white charger and asks you to oil his armpits. You should just scrape the bottom of the barrel, like the rest of us.”
“No, no, no,” protested Esme. “I want him to be sulky and moody and dark like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.”
“Marion Brando now, I can imagine,” Charlie said rudely. Esme whacked him.
“Or a young Paul Newman,” she sighed. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Too right,” he agreed. “If a young Paul Newman turns up, I may just have to fight you for him.”
“Not fair,” said Esme firmly. “You can get anyone you want. You know perfectly well that a young Paul Newman, hetty or not, wouldn’t choose me if you were an option.”
“That’s not true, Es. It’s not people choosing you that is the problem. It is you choosing them. You’re too fussy by far. You’re waiting for the fireworks and whistles and bangs and it’s not like that, really it isn’t.”
Charlie did not have a romantic bone in his body. To him, love and sex were the same thing and it was all about location. If you could get it wherever you were, you did; otherwise, who cared?
“It’s not like that for you,” Esme corrected him, “but I am different. I don’t want to do it jammed up against the cigarette machine with a head full of E in some poxy nightclub that smells of wees.”
Charlie, his eyes still closed, smiled at the thought of such a thing.
“But who says that some silly Frog is going to be more special than that anyone else, Es? That chap from the bank I fixed you up with, for example, Gordon?”
Gordon had been the latest in a succession of highly improbable friends with whom Charlie had tried, unsuccessfully, to pair Esme off.
“That horrible toff?” Esme squealed. “He wore a cravat, Charlie! And he was scared of touching doorknobs. He probably would have run away screaming if I had tried to hold his hand, let alone sleep with him.”
“I always thought there was something funny about him,” Charlie agreed. “I mean the cravat on its own was a worry but together with the doorknob thing . . .”
Esme laughed. “It’s not funny, Charlie,” she said, although it was. “I mean it’s one thing to be young and as pure as the driven snow but I am nineteen now. It’s going to start getting sad soon.”
Charlie opened his eyes and turned to her on the bed. “Well, if it gets really bad,” he said, in all seriousness, “I’ll give you one to save you from embarrassment, but I’ve only done it once with a woman and I’m not sure I know the ropes.”
“You did it once with a woman?” Esme asked, amazed that this had not come out sooner. “I thought you’ve been gay since you were two.”
“I have been,” Charlie assured her, “but this bloke I went to school with had a sister, Phoebe, who I swear was the most delightful fourteen-year-old you ever saw in your whole life.” He smiled dreamily at the memory.
“Fourteen?” squealed Esme. “With a girl? You randy little toad.”
“She was fourteen,” Charlie said. “I was only thirteen. We got off together one weekend when I was staying at their house and I must say I liked all the bosomy bits—just not much else. Strange, really. Anyway, I mean it, Es. If it’s just something you want to get over and done with so you can get on with the job of being a normal girl, then I will do it for you, although I will probably have to drink a lot and possibly have a picture of the young Paul Newman in front of me as well.”
Esme leaned over and kissed him in a sisterly way on the cheek. “You really are a true gentleman,” she said, “in a creepy and perverted way, but still, I thank you for your kind offer and the Paul Newman thing would probably help me, too. However”—she sat up and started to untangle one side of her mad head of hair—“I am going to wait for the real thing.”
Charlie sighed. “If that’s the case,” he said, “we’d better start drinking now.”
Many, many hours later, she was slipping home through the empty streets of early-morning Venolat, breathing in the warm, still air and trying her darnedest to get Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” out of her head.
She and Charlie had started the night quietly with a mouthwateringly delicious three-course meal and a bottle of vin de pays at the auberge, before discovering a tiny bar hidden in the backstreets while exploring their neighborhood on the way home. There they had happened upon a rowdy bunch of Canadians who had then hooked up with an even rowdier bunch of Dutch tourists, and the night had ended at around four with Esme deciding that the very tall accountant from Toronto with thick spectacles and teeth that could eat an apple through the bars of a chair, as Granny Mac would say, was not her knight in shining armor.
By then she felt like she had drunk all the vin in the pays and was ready for her bed. Charlie, though, had other plans and so Esme bade them all farewell and headed home.
The outside air cleared her head and once she had shaken her curls free of the stench of everyone else’s cigarettes, that dreary detritus of the big night out, she felt exhilarated to be out and about in the silence on her own.
On her own. The sound of her slim black plastic-soled designer-look-alike sandals slapping the cobbles beat a solitary tattoo that bounced off the walls on either side of the lane. On her own. It would have been nice, Esme allowed herself to think, to go home and make love until the sun came up with some adoring man who would feed her chocolate Häagen-Dazs in the morning in between stealing kisses of the mole she had and hated just below her left collarbone.
The toothy Toronto bean counter was not that man, of that she was pretty sure. Perhaps she was wrong about being ready. Venolat was quite small, she had come to realize, and it was possible she had already met every single person who lived there. She slipped into the square and walked quietly over to the fountain, perching on the side of it and trailing one hand in its cool clear water.
So, she had been wrong. She stared dreamily into the pool, watching the ripples ebb and flow with the trailing movement of her hand, and all of a sudden the most delicious smell wafted gently around her curls and invaded her senses as though it had been waiting for her to sit down and be still so it could take full advantage.
Esme lifted her face to the moon and breathed in deep and long. Of course, the boulangerie! Bread was being baked as she
sat there and smelled it and for some reason it seemed like a gift, just for her. She turned slightly, hidden by the shadow of the fountain, and looked toward the boulangerie, where now she could detect a faint light coming from a doorway behind the counter.
She closed her eyes and breathed in again, savoring the sweet, sharp, tangy, yeasty fragrance drifting around her. How different from trolling the bread aisle at Waitrose trying to find Granny Mac’s favorite white sliced toast bread with added preservatives! If it couldn’t last ten days without going stale, Granny Mac wasn’t interested.
The squeak of a rusty hinge and the slap of timber on timber tugged Esme out of her reverie and she opened her eyes and leaned forward slightly, peering around the fountain but still hidden by its shadow. At first she thought she was dreaming or that it was the wine, or the moonlight or that sweet, sour smell tricking her somehow so she blinked hard and counted to three but when she opened her eyes again what she saw took her breath clean away.
Leaning against the door, lit from behind by the light sneaking through from the back of the boulangerie and from the front by the glow of the moon, flour graying his black curly head, dark eyes concentrating on rolling a cigarette, one knee out as his foot rested against the wall, was the man of Esme’s dreams.
How she knew this, she could not say. She had known she was ready but even in fairy tales the princess didn’t just happen on her prince in the village square. She had to fight for him, or he for her. Yet Esme knew, just knew, by the trembling in her knees and the butterflies in her stomach and the delicious dry craving in her mouth, that this was the man she had been waiting for. It was a feeling like no other she had ever experienced.
The fat-faced cherubs were nowhere to be seen, arrows were not flying around her head, there was no heavenly chorus trumpeting in the air around her. But harps of a different kind were definitely being strummed. Deep down inside, Esme’s strings were being pulled.
Staying as still as a statue, scared almost to breathe in case the moment dissolved, she rolled her bottom lip between her teeth and was surprised at the saltiness that rushed her mouth. Her senses, it seemed, were on red alert; her taste buds stood at attention.