“Oh, for goodness’ sake, shut up,” chided Esme, heading up the stairs. “He thinks nothing of the sort. Pog’s just not like that. He’s far too nice. Jesus, but there are a lot of stairs in this house. Come on, Charlie. The kitchen is a bomb site. I’d better go and tidy it up before Pog comes back and decides to start being like that.” They clattered together up the stairs and into the kitchen, where Charlie collapsed onto a chair and Esme surveyed the devastation she had created making Rory a chocolate cake for his tea.
“Blimey, what a hovel,” she said as she started clearing the bench. “Did I do this?” The dishwasher gaped meanly at her, its freshly cleaned innards glinting and reminding her what a slovenly housewife she was for not emptying it earlier. Slowly and carefully, so as not to break anything in her partially inebriated state, she removed its contents, before filling it up again with the trashy remains of her earlier baking.
After wiping the counter clean, she started excavating in the freezer for something to feed her family the following night.
“Hurrah!” she crowed, finally finding a leg of lamb underneath a spilled open bag of frozen peas and a box of half-melted ice lollies.
“There’s homemade mint sauce in here somewhere, too,” she muttered, pulling a bit of ice out of one of her curls and diving into the freezer again. “You should have seen my mint, Charlie, how it grew! I think NASA astronauts could see it from space.” Shuffling old margarine containers around she finally found the right one, plucking it out with a triumphant look and holding it up for Charlie to see.
He was staring at her with an unreadable expression.
“What is it?” she asked, wiping imaginary fluff off her nose and checking her hair with her hand to make sure nothing jellied or minced or past its use-by date was stuck there. “Don’t look at me like that!”
Charlie shook himself out of his thoughts. “I wasn’t looking at you like anything,” he protested.
“Yes, you were,” argued Esme, suddenly remembering she hadn’t fed her sourdough starter its evening meal of flour and water and reaching into the pantry for the jar. “You were looking at me as though you’d never seen me before.”
Charlie laughed. “No, I was just thinking, that’s all.”
“Thinking what?” Esme insisted, hugging the starter to her chest, one hand on the lid.
“Thinking how amazing you are,” Charlie said softly, “that’s what.”
“Amazing?” Esme repeated. “Me?” It was not what she had been expecting him to say. She started to slowly twist the lid off the starter.
“Yes, you silly girl, you,” Charlie said. “After everything you’ve been through, you still seem so, I don’t know, happy.”
“Happy?” The top of the jar popped off at just that moment and the pungent sweet and sour tartness of the ancient mixture hit Esme square in the face. Happy? In that instant, the mists of the past fifteen years fell away and she saw herself, clearly, standing in that little French bakery, wrapped in a soft sheet of cocoa-colored linen, cherishing every drop of the baker’s sweat as it mingled with hers and quivering with the joy of being loved.
That was happy.
She dropped the jar on the kitchen counter and the memory vanished, leaving her breathless and terrified.
“Esme?” Charlie said, alarmed. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“Happy?” she gasped at him. “You think I’m happy?”
Charlie was confused. “Well, yes, in a Nigella Lawson sort of way, out here in your country birdhouse defrosting dead animals and growing the world’s rudest pumpkins despite, you know, everything that’s happened.”
An ache so deep she could not tell where it came from rose through Esme’s chest and erupted in the form of a violent sob. She threw herself down on the kitchen counter and to her own and Charlie’s horror, started to weep.
“Oh, Lord.” Charlie leaped from his chair. “Esme, what’s the matter? Should I get someone? Esme, please. Are you all right? Shit, shit, shit. Should I get Pog? Oh, Esme.”
“I’m a bad mother,” sobbed Esme, “and an awful wife and a horrible daughter-in-law. And then there’s Granny Mac, oooh, Granny Mac . . .” She wept loud, rare tears, heartbroken, into her arms, only vaguely aware of Charlie’s awkward attempts to comfort her.
“I’m so sorry,” Charlie said as soothingly as he knew how. “I should never have said anything. You’re not at all amazing. Of course you’re not. I’m so sorry, Esme, it’s the pot or the booze or something. You’re not happy, I can see that now. How could you be? Bloody stupid of me to suggest it. God, what an oaf. What a pig. An insensitive pig. I could just kick myself, really I could. Lord! What’s the matter with me? Could be jet lag, I suppose, although I have been back five days, or is it four, and I did have a cold last month that took a bit of getting over—”
Esme lifted her tearstained face and turned to look at him. “Are you quite finished?” she asked, her voice gluey with grief but her tears drying.
“Oh hell, yes.” Charlie jumped back and wrung his hands uselessly. “Yes. Totally finished. Completely. Utterly. Oh, Esme. What can I do?”
“You can give me a hankie,” Esme sniffed. “And stop fluffing.” Charlie pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket with lightning speed and thrust it at her.
“Here,” he said. “And consider all fluffing as of this moment one hundred percent stopped. Finito. Kaput.”
Esme laughed and blew her nose.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” she said, so sadly that Charlie stepped closer and took her in his arms, holding her tightly, wishing he knew what he could do to make her feel better and swearing to himself that if he knew what that was, he would do it.
“You’re a good mother,” he said, her ringlets tickling his chin. “And a good wife. You really are. You and Pog are the perfect couple.”
“I’m not,” Esme said, pulling away and handing Charlie back his handkerchief. “We’re not. I mean, we were, and I do love him, I love him with all my heart, I really, really do, but I just don’t know if we can bounce back to where we were, Charlie. There’s just so much water gone under the bridge.”
Her sinuses clear again, she caught a whiff left lingering in her kitchen of her sharp, tart starter and felt another pang of longing for the simplicity of the past.
“But of all the people I know, Esme, you deserve the most happiness.”
“Yes, well,” she said, as tears threatened to fall again, “I’m starting to think that maybe I had my chance at happiness, Charlie. And maybe I’m not going to get another one.”
“Of course you will, Es. You must see that.”
“I don’t know what I see these days,” she said. “The only things I’m sure of seem locked in the past where I can’t get to them. I mean, what say my big chance at happiness is back there somewhere. You know, in Venolat.”
“In Venolat?” Charlie asked incredulously.
“Yes, Venolat,” Esme answered in a whisper.
“Oh, Esme. Not Louis. Not still Louis? After all these years?”
“Yes, Charlie. Still Louis. After all these years.”
Chapter 6
When morning came to Venolat and woke Esme by sending a shaft of burning light through the shutters to hit her square in the right eye, she woke with a start and thought instantly of breakfast.
She took a shower and went downstairs, trying to ignore her throbbing headache. Charlie was sitting outside on the terrace sunning himself and drinking orange juice out of a plastic bottle. He looked gorgeous. Not at all like someone whose liver was shrunken and black and whose lungs were tarred and sooty.
“Good morning,” he said chirpily. “Caught up on your beauty sleep, then?”
Esme smiled and ran her fingers through her hair, as if there was even the remotest possibility that anything other than the strongest, most foul-smelling chemicals could ever straighten out its wayward kinks.
“I thought I might go to the bakery,” she said, “and get us some breakfast. What do y
ou fancy?”
Charlie sat up excitedly in his wrought iron seat. “Oh, yes please, mistress,” he said in his best public-schoolboy voice. “Something with custard and something with icing, if you’d be ever so kind.”
“Charlie, we are in France, not a Merchant Ivory film,” she said, grabbing the juice from the table and drinking out of the container herself. “And unless I am mistaken I don’t think France is especially known for its icing and custard. I think it is better know for its . . .” She looked at him encouragingly.
“Dressing?” Charlie proffered.
“Apart from that.”
He looked blank. “Don’t tease me, Esme, I’m not feeling very bright this morning.”
“Bread,” said Esme. “French bread. And croissants. And brioche and—”
“Fine, fine, fine, yes of course,” Charlie interrupted. “Anything you like as long as it’s food. I’m starving.”
Esme picked up her purse and trotted down the stairs, stopping to inspect herself without admitting that was what she was doing in the hall mirror by the front doors.
She had on an antique white slip dress she had bought at Portobello market especially for the holiday. Its thin lacy straps sat daintily on her shoulders, showing off her long neck and passable collarbones (mole included) and containing beneath its fine filmy cotton her braless nineteen-year-old bosoms, which sat pertly but not brazenly and were really only obvious if you were particularly looking for them.
The gentle film of freckles across her pale shoulders suited the dress, as did her loud, long mass of spiraling hair. Because she had always had pre-Raphaelite looks, she had never wanted them. Because she had always had pre-Raphaelite looks she had always wanted to look like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons or the girl with the black shiny bob in the Swing Out Sister video. This was perfectly normal, she knew that. Everybody with straight hair wanted curls and everybody with curls wanted straight hair and no one, but no one liked their own legs, although Esme secretly was very fond of her own feet. She had straight medium-length toes with good nails and nice bones, and serious shoe salespeople adored her.
This morning, though, Esme was amazed to find, as she surreptitiously glossed her lips before heading out the door, that she suited herself from head to toe. She couldn’t remember when or if she had ever felt that way before.
Being ginger and freckly had not always been considered a winning combination, but Esme had to admit that the older she got the less she minded it. In fact, every now and then she even let herself be pleased that she didn’t have mousy brown hair and a peaches and cream complexion because they were a dime a dozen. As a little girl, being different—in so many ways—had been painful, but as she approached adulthood she found herself appreciating her uniqueness, embracing it even. Her looks, she thought, were perhaps, finally, coming into their own. Her own.
She slipped outside into the burning morning sunshine and headed toward the boulangerie, her stomach quivering with something she thought must have been the results of too much foie gras—although a voice inside her head kept whispering to her that it could be something far more serious than that. Something appetizing but not edible. Something mouthwatering but hard to digest. Something deliciously, delectably hopeful.
As the whisper got louder and the bread shop got nearer, however, her footsteps slowed. What was hope doing filling her head on an innocent trip to the bakery anyway? she thought. It was ridiculous. Childish. And this was only a routine visit to the local boulangerie, wasn’t it? She was hungry, for God’s sake. But for what? “Oh, get a grip,” she said loudly to herself, frightening a little old woman tottering toward her with a large paper parcel, bigger than her head, smelling strongly of bread.
“Oh,” Esme said, smiling apologetically when she saw the woman’s expression. “Je suis, um—” but the word for sorry, having been on the tip of her tongue, decided it was happy to stay there and so she finished off instead with a limp, “Bonjour,” and the ancient matron sped up to a near scurry and shuffled past without further eye contact.
“Je suis désolée,” Esme called after her, suddenly remembering the wonderfully apologetic term and putting all the effort she could into shouting it at the bent old lady’s back. “Je suis désolée!” The object of her apology disappeared around the corner and Esme was left outside the boulangerie door.
It was silly not to go in, she told herself. She needed to get breakfast. That was it. Simple as anything. This was real life, after all, and not a fairy tale. She was going to the bakery to buy some bread. End of story.
She pushed open the door of the boulangerie and almost swooned again at the smell. It was so, she couldn’t put her finger on it—inviting, maybe? Comforting? Satisfying? No. Enticing? Perhaps. She closed her eyes and sniffed. There was yeast and warmth, a soupçon of something spicy like cinnamon, a sweetness she couldn’t place and the inevitable tartness of salt; in fact she could have sworn that the heady aroma bore telltale traces of the coast.
Behind the counter, which was currently unmanned, row upon row of big, brown, round loaves sat side by side on wooden racks, staring out at her like smiling faces. There was no other bread in sight, not a baguette to be seen, just the fat round loaves, a basket of croissants and a bell. Esme felt herself shiver as she picked it up and gingerly rang it, the small sound seeming deafening to her, given what she thought she could well be soliciting by ringing it.
She stood there for a minute but nothing happened, so she picked the bell up and rang it again, more robustly this time.
She heard a door slamming back in the bowels of the bakery and the sound of feet fast approaching. Her heart raced as she felt her cheeks burning and she tried to will them back to their normal color. The footsteps got closer and closer and Esme fought a sudden desire to turn and run, leaving nothing in the shop but the faint scent of Must de Cartier, which had fallen off the back of one of Charlie’s father’s trucks and which she saved for special occasions, wisping invisibly around the well-tanned bread boules.
A figure appeared in a flurry through the mesh screen door behind the counter (that slap of timber on timber again!) and Esme felt herself gasp. Could it be?
It was the same dark hair, similar black eyes, a smile that had threads of the one she had seen the night before but was nowhere near as dazzling. And all this on a face that was considerably older and a body whose circumference was perhaps double that of the one by which she had previously been transfixed.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” the older, wider man said cheerfully. “Qu’est-ce que vous voudrez?”
“Oh,” said Esme, suddenly unable to combine her fragments of schoolgirl French into anything remotely resembling a sentence. “Croissants, please,” she said in her soft, confused British Isles accent. “I mean, s’il-vous plait. Four.” She held up three fingers. “Quatre.”
The man laughed. “English?” he asked as he scooped four fat pastries into a paper bag. Esme nodded. “You are staying here in Venolat?” She nodded again. “Yes,” she said, “it’s lovely. C’est bon.”
He held the bag out to her. “Anything else you would like?”
I would like to know where the younger, slimmer, sexier version of you is, Esme said to herself. To him, she said nothing, as she looked around the shop in a drawn-out overly contemplative fashion given that the shop was small and you could see all it had to offer in less than a second.
“What is your specialty?” she asked. “Qu’est-ce que la spécialité de la maison, de la boulangerie?” She grimaced as she tortured the wide man’s language but his eyes stayed warm and friendly.
“It is plain,” he said, “our specialty, but it is good. And it is certainly special.” He picked up one of the round, brown loaves from the rack behind him and lifted it over to Esme. She looked at it uncertainly.
“Smell,” the wide man said, shoving it under her nose. “Smell!”
Esme closed her eyes and breathed deeply. There was the warm yeasty smell that had enve
loped her when she first came in. And the salt. And something else, too.
“Apple?” she opened her eyes and asked the baker. “Pommes?”
The little man grinned and for a moment there flared a devilish glint that Esme thought she recognized from that similar smile the night before.
“Yes, yes!” he nodded, pleased with her. “Not many guess that. We make this bread, pain au levain, from apple, very old apple. It’s in the starter, the chef. A long time since. Not bad for Anglaise! Good. Good.” He happily wrapped the bread in a sheet of bakery paper and passed it to Esme. “For you,” he said. “For nothing. I mean, for no cost.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said. “You must let me pay.”
“You can pay for the croissants,” said the baker. “Twelve francs, thank you, mademoiselle—but the pain au levain is a gift from me. You can repay me by coming back again, yes?”
Esme fumbled in her purse for the change. What about the boy, she wanted desperately to ask. What about the boy? But the question stayed stuck inside her as she shyly gathered up her bread and pastries and, smiling at the wider, older baker, left the shop.
Every morning Esme repeated the journey. Every morning she convinced herself it had nothing to do with the boy. Every morning the question—where is he?—threatened to burst out of her like a fork of lightning but instead stayed broodily inside her head, hovering around like a dark cloud, furious and threatening.
After a week, the vision by the fountain started to quiver and become unclear in her mind. Details got lost. The beginnings of his hip bones, had she really seen them? she wondered. The glisten of his sharp pink tongue as he licked his cigarette paper—had that not been in a movie she’d gone to in London? Perhaps, she thought gloomily, the moonlight had played a cruel trick on her and nastily presented the chubby middle-aged boulanger as the man of her dreams, the man she was so sure was ready and waiting for her.
Stinking bloody moonlight. Who needed it, she thought crankily, as she lay in her bed yet another night, waiting for sweet sleep to put her out of her torment.