By Bread Alone

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Love, loss, and the redemptive power of breadmaking are the irresistible ingredients in this warm, witty novel by the author of Blessed Are the Cheesemakers.

Release date: October 15, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 380

Sample

Prologue

The moment Esme’s espadrilles hit the smooth stone floor deep down in the heart of the tiny boulangerie, she knew that up until then she herself had only been half-baked.

The sweet, sharp scent of sourdough bread cooking in an oak-fired oven wended and whirled around her unsuspecting senses and unleashed a hunger inside her she had not known existed. It hit her so hard she could barely breathe.

The air was hot and thick with the promise of life’s simple and not-so-simple pleasures. She could feel that. She could smell it. She could taste it on the tip of her tongue.

Bread. Yes, bread. Pain au levain, to be precise, the specialty of the house. Never mind the baguettes, the croissants, the chocolate or custard pastries after which she had so recently hankered. Compared to just one crumb from the sourdough boules baked not ten feet away from where she stood they were nothing, nothing but sand, dry and gritty, in the memory of her taste buds. No other paltry pretender could ever hope to measure up to the beauty of those fat round loaves with their thick crunchy crusts and shining, soft flesh.

Esme licked her glistening lips, her mouth watering. She had been eating the bread up there in the outside world for a week now and was well past the stage of being addicted to its taste but had only dreamed, literally, of getting this close to the heart of it all. The atmosphere was overwhelming. The air cloaked her in its moist, sweet arms, and soothed the fluttering in her chest. She wanted to lie on that warm, worn floor and stay there forever, sleeping. It felt like home, only better. Like heaven, only closer.

Here, in this ancient overbaked room carved out of golden stone and hidden underground above a lazy kink in the Dordogne River, was where it all began. And the beginning was the key, as she was soon to learn, because the secret to sourdough was its starter, the levain, the living, breathing, bubbling mixture of the past and the present that was added to every batch of flour and water to turn it into the future. For nearly two hundred years the starter in that hot, heavy room had been breathing life into sourdough boules and no other bread in the southwest, the whole of France, the rest of Europe, anywhere in the world, tasted anything like it.

The bulk of each loaf was made from wheat grown in the surrounding fields, freshly stone-ground not a mile away and mixed with water from the river that wandered and wound below, and there was nothing very special about that, anybody could get that. But its soul, its essence, the spirit of its utter delectability was nowhere near so easily captured. That came from the faintly foaming levain and it drew its flavor from the past, from the crusty ancient walls themselves, from the sun that warmed the boulangerie’s yellow-striped awnings, from the faint scent of lavender that meandered down the stairs from the window boxes in the street, from the golden haystacks that sat squat and solid in the surrounding pastures, from the generations of bakers who had borne it, fed it, nurtured it, shared it, loved it.

Later, when Esme knew more, much more, and her hunger was being sated, repeatedly and not entirely by bread, she found herself drawn to the starter where it lay, breathing and vital, in the bottom of an antiquated wooden bin waiting to give life to the next family of boules.

Now that she knew what magic it worked, she was thoroughly spellbound.

For without the starter, pain au levain was not pain au levain at all, just a lifeless, dull and rather mucky mixture.

But add that potent starter to that same limp combination, gently mix in salt from the marshes of Guerande, then give it time, a little warmth, the firm heel of a baker’s hand, more time and, finally, some heat, some real heat, and voilà!

Esme knew what it was to be lifeless and dull, never more so than when she stepped into that hot, salty, sweaty little room. At nineteen years old, lightly freckled and chastely English, she was more keenly aware of her missing ingredient than ever. She was ready to rise. All that was missing was the baker’s magic touch.

Near the end—although of course how near she had not known—she lifted a cool jar of the precious levain close to her face and breathed in its tangy, intoxicating tones.

“To think,” the baker murmured in his deep, low, chocolate-covered voice, “there will be some of you and me in the bread you bake, Esme.”

Sheer joy and sourdough, from that moment on, would be forever tangled in her mind.

Chapter 1

Fifteen years later, seventy feet up in the Suffolk seaside air, Esme was juggling quinces. She’d been carrying an armful of the oversized yellow fruit from the fruit bowl to her kitchen sink when she’d tripped over the dog and the whole lot had gone flying.

She lunged forward, grappling with the air, and caught a couple, but in the process kicked one that had fallen to the ground so hard that it bounced off the baseboard and hurtled down the stairs.

In a house that was six stories high, with the kitchen at the top, this was far from ideal.

“Bugger,” she said as the remaining quinces wibbled and wobbled around her ankles, making Brown jump and skitter as Esme danced her way over to the stairwell. The runaway quince, she could hear, had made it down the first eight steps, hit the landing wall, then bounced down the next eight. It was large and not quite ripe and made something of a hullabaloo.

“For God’s sake, Brown,” she complained as the dog scrambled behind her on the polished floorboards, panicking and spreading the quinces further. She headed down the stairs, the stomp of her no longer fashionable clunky clogs adding to the din.

Slowing on Rory’s level to take the next flight of stairs, she felt the unexpected sensation of Brown’s nose slamming into her rear end and all but knocking her down them.

“Do you mind,” she admonished. “If you’re not under my feet you’re up my arse, you annoying bloody creature!”

“I beg your pardon?” the voice of her father-in-law harrumphed from below. For a man with two artificial hips and a wonky walking stick, he could move surprisingly quietly, Esme thought, sort of like a panther crossed with a snail. But gray.

“Henry!” she replied, her features fighting a grimace. Henry occupied the first floor of the House in the Clouds and rarely ventured up this far. He had his own bathroom and kitchenette down below and shared a sitting room on the next floor up with the rest of the family, although the younger Stacks hardly ever used it.

“Sorry about the racket,” she apologized, descending toward his voice, “but I tripped over Brown and dropped a quince, then the silly creature rear-ended me. You don’t have it down there, do you? The quince, I mean?”

She rounded the corner and saw that the bruised and battered fruit was indeed lying at Henry’s feet, leaking slightly.

“You wouldn’t think they would travel so far, would you?” she chirruped, stopping a few steps above him. “Or so fast for that matter. Perhaps we got it all wrong about the wheel. Perhaps it should have been quince-shaped.”

Henry looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. It was a look she quite often noticed on him, but before she could even wish that she had shut up earlier and saved him the bother of being annoyed, Brown pushed right past her, scuttled down to the quince, sniffed it, turned, lifted his leg and peed on it. Esme gaped wordlessly as splatters ricocheted off the wall and onto Henry’s brogues which, it being Friday and Henry being a creature of habit, would have been cleaned approximately one hour and nine minutes earlier.

Henry, understandably surprised, temporarily lost control of his walking stick and staggered slightly, stumbling into the wall and knocking a portrait of his late wife off its moorings.

“For goodness’ sake,” he rasped, puce with irritation, still leaning into the wall but attempting to right himself. “Don’t just stand there, do something.”

Brown backed slowly toward the next flight of stairs, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his eyes on Esme as he waited to see what the something might be.

“Well?” Henry asked again, flicking dog urine off his foot with as much vigor as any seventy-four-year-old with barely a real bone left in his pelvic region could. “Well?”

In the blink of an eye the House in the Clouds was alive with the clatter and bang of six legs crashing down many wooden stairs as Esme lunged past her teetering father-in-law and gave chase. Onward she lurched and downward, Brown’s fat shiny rump always just out of reach as she skidded through her and Pog’s story, slid past the sitting room, leaped down to Henry’s level, then took the last flight to the ground floor two steps at a time.

For an animal that could spend an entire day slumped in front of the fire staring at a plate of shortbread, he could move pretty damn quickly when he had to. Cornering, however, was not his strong point, and in the tiny entrance hall his chubby, brown body skidded and smashed into the occasional table, sending it and a vase of glorious red roses crashing to the ground. Still steaming ahead, he aimed his bulk squarely at the cat door and dived through it, the tip of his tail disappearing just as Esme reached out to grab it and pull it clear off his wretched body.

The cat door rattled shut and the house was once again silent. For a moment. Then Henry’s stick tap tapped across the floor above.

“Well done,” he called stiffly. “I’ll get a mop.”

“Oh, will you ever lighten up,” Esme heard Granny Mac call caustically from behind her closed bedroom door in her fifty-a-day Glaswegian dockworker lilt. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack with all your pissing and moaning, you silly old goat.”

Esme froze. She looked at the door of her grandmother’s room, then up at the ceiling. She had heard, clear as day, she was sure she had, but had Henry? The house seethed for a moment as nobody moved and nothing more was said, and then Henry’s slow tap-shuffle tango heralded his retreat to the broom closet for cleaning equipment.

Esme blew out a lungful of air and decided to ignore what she had just heard. She could not afford to lose it this morning. She had quinces (two dozen) to paste, windows (twenty-eight) to wash, stairs (seventy-eight) to vacuum and a feverish son (four and a half) who was a worry at the best of times but never more so than when he’d had a bad night’s sleep. He was passed out now on a beanbag in front of a Bob the Builder video but that would not last forever.

Turning to confront the destruction, Esme caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. Her reflection told a story she did not want to hear. Clear green eyes stared back at her with a fraught expression. She had done an awful job, if a job at all, of taking off her makeup the night before and so had black blobby lashes with smudges below them. The chic chignon she had imagined she had constructed atop her head earlier that morning was neither chic nor a chignon. In fact, her mad copper-colored ringlets looked like a large ball of ginger wool that had been ravaged by angry kittens. She had lipstick on her chin, something crusty on her nose and only one earring. She gave the impression of having been very recently caught in a hurricane.

Her shoulders sagged as she took in her reflection. Was every life as chaotic as hers? she wondered. Did she invite more disorder than the next person? More catastrophe? The slapstick comedy of the peed-on quince rolled away to expose the dangerous slick that lurked just below Esme’s surface. At this, her mind snapped shut, her eyes slid off their mirror image. Today was not the day to contemplate the heartache that would swallow every second if she let it. Now was not the hour to confront the tragedy that had ripped her family to shreds then so heartlessly reshaped it.

Instead she would just take that relentless pain, that torturous memory and wring it out, squash it down, suppress it the way she had every day for the past two years until it no longer consumed her but just hid inside her, deep and dark, small and hard.

That way, she could keep going. That way she could continue to put one foot in front of the other, to breathe in and out, to cook and clean and laugh and smile as though her worst nightmare had stayed just that instead of coming true and chasing her to a new life in a different place, a place where every nook and cranny was not haunted by the consequences of that dreadful day.

And by and large it had worked, these past two years, that wringing and squashing. She had survived. Pog, her husband, had survived. Rory, their son, had survived. Separately, they had all survived.

Esme stifled a hiccup of grief. Wring it out, she urged herself. Squash it down. Hide it. Put one foot in front of the other. Keep going.

But this past month had been hard. Even she could see it in those clear green eyes. And it was getting harder.

Her husband, Pog, at that same moment, was sitting at his desk three leafy, curly streets away thinking exactly the same thing.

It was now thirty-three days since Esme had baked a loaf of bread and he didn’t know how to get her started again. His lips were dry, his stomach churning as he contemplated the store-bought sandwich sitting bleakly in front of him. He poked it with a freshly sharpened pencil. It was yesterday’s bread. No question. It had no bounce. No allure. No joie de vivre. It was not begging to be eaten. It was just sitting there quietly suffocating its own sweating stuffing of overcooked eggs and undercooked bacon.

Of course he had tried to talk to Esme about the baking; it worried him beyond comprehension. He knew what sourdough meant to her. But the day Dr. Gribblehurst came out of Granny Mac’s room casting his gloomy forecast Esme had stopped. And at Pog’s first attempt to confront this, he had seen the panic in her eyes, and backed away. How, he asked himself, could he talk to her about bread, about Granny Mac, when there was so much more that needed talking about? Over the past two years the unspoken words between them had been covered up and buried and a thick comfortable quilt had grown across the top of their lives, concealing the chasm that beneath the covers grew deeper and deeper.

He should have been stronger from the beginning, he knew that now. He should have forced the issue, no matter how painful, but the truth was that he did not want to be the one to scratch the scab off Esme’s wounds because he was afraid he would never be able to staunch the resulting flow.

Everybody thought she was so carefree, so happy, so strong, so resilient—why, she even thought that herself—but Pog knew otherwise. And he wanted to help her, God knew he wanted nothing more, but he did not want to push her, to break her, to open the fine, delicate cracks he knew had invaded her hardened outer shell ever since that terrible, terrible day. He could not, would not, do anything to risk losing her, his gorgeous, garrulous, glutinous wife. She was all that had kept him going since then. She was all that kept any of them going.

His stomach gurgled hungrily but the pasty preservative-laden offering in front of him held all the allure of a Wellington boot. Listlessly, he poked a straight line of holes clear through the sad little sandwich and tried not to hear Mrs. Murphy making appointments for him out in the reception area.

He needed Esme to bake, was desperate for it. Esme’s bread not only begged to be eaten, but demanded it. You simply could not be in the same room as her sourdough without licking your lips and instantly realizing it was exactly what you felt like eating. No, more than that. It was exactly what you had been missing.

Pog tried to remember the exact smell. But thirty-three days without it and already it was a fading memory. The saltiness he could get, the sharp apple and vinegar tang he could recapture. But that sweet, warm indescribably delicious mouthwatering element that stamped it as made every step of the way by Esme’s soft and supple hands? Gone. Unbelievably gone. Just like the delectable, crusty, fleshy loaves themselves.

Esme’s soft and supple hands at that very moment were back in the House in the Clouds reaching up and wrangling her wild, red curls. “Snap out of it,” she commanded herself, leaning in toward the mirror and rubbing at her eyes to clear the black rings. She moistened her lips to give them some gloss, wiped the slash of pink from her chin, scratched at the whatever-it-was on her nose and smiled. It was a well practiced and convincing enough performance to spur her on to the job at hand, which was cleaning the mess on the floor. Pushing the jagged pieces of the spindly broken table aside with her foot, she crouched down gingerly in a puddle of smelly vase water to start picking up the shattered pieces of crockery. The vase had been a wedding present from her brother-in-law Milo, the son who’d chosen a proper wife and then cleverly vacated to New York City. Breaking it would no doubt be another black mark against her as far as Henry was concerned. She knew he found her flighty and unsuitable and it must stick in his craw something wicked, she thought, trawling halfheartedly through the muck on the floor, that he was stuck under her roof through no fault of his own, other than badly investing his life’s savings and ending up near penniless, to all intents homeless and without hips in good working order.

She reminded herself that he had every right to be in a permanently bad mood and felt a twinge of guilt for owning a dog that would urinate on such newly cleaned brogues.

“Hello-o!” She heard her grandmother’s musical burr ring, as clear as a bell, from behind the closed bedroom door. “I said, hello-o-o!”

Esme stood up, pushed the remaining jumble on the floor toward the wall, and cocked her head to one side. Rod Stewart seemed to be softly rasping about some seventeen-year-old knocking on his door.

The singing was definitely on the outside of her head, and seemed to be leaking out from Granny Mac’s room. She moved over and pressed her ear against the door. Her grandmother’s favorite singer was crooning that the young strumpet could love him tonight if she wanted, but in the morning she had better be gone.

Gingerly, Esme opened the door and slipped into the room. It was dark, just the way Granny Mac had always liked it. She shook her head to rid herself of Rod and shuffled in the dim light toward the window, reaching out as she approached it to pull back the curtains.

“Hey, you, Hot Legs!” the voice of her grandmother suddenly filled the room. Esme spun around and found the old woman’s eyes twinkling at her beadily from the end of her bed. The room smelled suddenly and strongly of cigarettes. Cheap ones. Embassy Regal. Granny Mac’s favorites.

The hair stood up on the back of Esme’s neck. “Granny Mac!” she breathed with disbelief as her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and sought out the unwavering, challenging gaze of her grandmother.

“Aye,” answered Granny Mac, “amazing, isn’t it, at my stage in life?”

Esme blinked, said nothing for a moment, then blinked again. Feelings tumbled inside her, searching for a slot. Disbelief, fear, anger, delight: All clamored for space. “Granny Mac,” she said again, on the spur of that moment deciding to suspend her disbelief in favor of embracing her delight. “You’ve been smoking!”

Her grandmother, her wrinkles in the drab light dissolving and blurring on her crinkled cheeks, simply cackled.

“I don’t understand,” Esme said. “I thought that . . . Well, how could you? I mean, for goodness’ sake. You really ought not to . . . It’s just that, well . . . I thought you had, you know, you were definitely . . . Oh shit,” she said suddenly. “I am having such a strange day.” She sniffed the room again. There was definitely cigarette smoke in the air. And Rod Stewart.

“Well, turns out there is a quick way to give up smoking,” her grandmother said, “but I don’t know that I can entirely recommend it.”

Esme stood and contemplated the bed. She should not allow this, she knew that, of course she knew that, but how she adored her Granny Mac. And how she needed her! How she had always needed her. Without Granny Mac all the wringing and squashing in the world would not have kept one foot in front of the other since their move from London to the House in the Clouds. She was Esme’s savior. She always had been. And perhaps she always would be. Who was Esme to argue with that?

She threw her hands in the air and plonked herself down on the end of the bed, wriggling backward until her back met the wall. She looked in her grandmother’s direction and willed the blackness to stop smudging that much loved face, to snap it into focus. “You know, I was just thinking about where I wanted to live,” she said, ignoring just about everything, “and I wonder if perhaps it is in here with you, maybe just for a few days. I could smoke cigarettes and read Hello! magazines and spy on Gaga and Jam-jar next door. It would be just like the old days.”

Gaga and Jam-jar were the ancient neighbors who despite rather oddly living in a windmill were perhaps the straightest two people in Christendom and loathed Esme and her eccentric tower of relatives with a passion. The appropriately named assortment of Stacks, according to Gaga and Jam-jar, lowered the tone.

“You’d have to go out and get the Hello! magazines for a start,” Granny Mac said. “I’m dying for want of fresh dirt on poor Fergie.”

Esme felt a hot flush of devotion sweep through her. “I thought you could never forgive her,” she said, “for wearing that shocking hat to the Queen Mother’s funeral.”

“Och, did you have to remind me about the Queen Mother? It upsets me greatly these days to hear about dead people, Esme. Spare a thought for them, will you?”

“Well, I think it was the Queen Mother.” Esme tumbled forward. “But you never know with those Royals, do you? I mean, I never saw the body. It could have been anyone. Did you know that Princess Diana has been seen working as a showgirl in Vegas? They might have carried the real Queen Mother out of Clarence House in a bedpan for all we know. She might be living the high life in Blackpool spending all our hard-earned taxes on slot machines and horses.”

Granny Mac seemed thrilled with the possibility. “It wouldn’t be such a bad life,” she said. “I might try it myself.”

“Oh no, Granny Mac, I need you here,” Esme said, a little too desperately, because even though the chances of her grandmother actually moving to Blackpool were close to nil, stranger things had happened, were happening. “I really, really do. You can’t possibly know how much.”

She felt Granny Mac’s eyes boring into her in a way she knew meant she wanted to know how much. She sighed.

“I’m losing it,” she said, simply, with a shrug of her shoulders. “I’m bloody losing it. I mean, look at me!” A ringlet, as if to back up what she was saying, suddenly sprang out of her hairclip and bounced in front of her face.

“This past month, Granny Mac, you know, since”—she struggled for words that would not upset her grandmother—“since Dr. Gribblehurst and everything . . .” She was silent for a moment, searching for the right approach.

“Nothing feels right anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know anything. It all feels dark and fuzzy and strange. I feel like I’m starting to unravel and I don’t know why and it’s bloody terrifying.”

“You do know why, you soft lass,” her grandmother said. “You just don’t want to face it.”

Esme felt fear clutch at her heart. Was this what she wanted to hear?

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t. It’s too soon.”

“But if you wait much longer,” her grandmother argued, “it will be too late. And maybe not just for you.”

“Don’t,” Esme pleaded. “Just don’t.” The room, apart from the barely audible lamenting of Rod Stewart, fell silent.

“Well, what about that miserable old stoat upstairs, then, eh?” Granny Mac switched the subject to one of her favorites: Henry. “Is he still getting up your nose?”

“No more than I deserve, I’m sure,” answered Esme, relieved at the change in direction. “I mean he’s a bit septic and I don’t seem to be able to do anything right but that’s nothing new.”

“Have you considered a London telephone directory to the back of the head?” offered Granny Mac. “Or a frozen leg of lamb, which you then proceed to serve up for dinner, or a bottle of wine?”

“I’ve thought about the wine,” Esme admitted, “but only drinking it. I hadn’t really considered the murder weapon potential.”

“Och,” her grandmother said, disgusted. “You’re not trying hard enough, Esme.”

Esme poked her errant curl back into her topknot. She was trying as hard as she could.

“Esme!” The sound of Rory’s anxious cry filtered through from the top floor of the house to the bottom. Waking up was not Rory’s best time. He suffered terrible nightmares, poor lamb, and the thought of what he dreamed about to wake up so angry and lost and lonely chilled her to the bone.

“Esme-e-e-e-e,” he called again, his voice sifting through the layers of the house to find her. No matter how hard she had tried to get him to call her Mummy, he only ever referred to her by her name. Gaga and Jam-jar found it criminal.

“Is the wee boy okay?” Granny Mac asked gently.

“He’s fine,” Esme said, heaving herself off the bed, loath to leave the coziness of Granny Mac’s company. And in truth, he was doing pretty well. The psychologist he saw every couple of months in London seemed pleased with his progress and his speech was truly astonishing. For a boy who had not spoken a single word until the day after his fourth birthday, at which point he debuted with “I’d rather have a chocolate biscuit, if it’s all the same to you,” his command of the English language would put most grown-ups to shame. “Truly, Gran,” she said. “He’s just tired, that’s all. Honestly, he’s fine. You don’t need to worry about him.”

“So, it’s just you, then,” Granny Mac said. “That I need to worry about.”

Esme smiled into the darkness of the foul-smelling room. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said softly. “I’m feeling better already.”

“Is that so? Well, may I be so bold as to ask if that was a quince making its way down the stairs with such enthusiasm just before?”

“How could you possibly know that?” Esme was stunned.

“Es-meeeeeee,” Rory howled from above.

“A quince, Esme, of the quince variety? At this hour of the morning when you would normally, I am sure, be putting a loaf of your delicious sourdough bread in the oven?”

“Blame Doctor bloody Gribblehurst,” Esme burst out. “It’s all his fault.”

“Well, it’s you who bakes the bread Esme. Or not, as the case may be. And now is not the time to let go of what is dear to you. Now more than ever you should be clinging to it.”

“I just haven’t had it in me,” Esme said despairingly. “I just couldn’t . . . I just can’t . . . It just went.”

“Well, just get it back, lassie. Just get it back.”

And with that Rory roared so loudly that Esme could bear it no longer, and to the retreating strains of Rod Stewart, she slipped out of the room and headed up the stairs.

As she clumped past Henry’s room she saw that all signs of the recent quince-flavored disaster had disappeared. He would be cleaning his brogues again, no doubt, his schedule thrown out most inconveniently. She clenched her buttocks, not because she was thinking of her father-in-law, but because her friend Alice, who was addicted to personal trainers, had told her that combined with climbing the stairs ten times a day, it constituted proper exercise.

By the time she clattered up the last set of steps to where Rory lay pink and flushed under his favorite blanket in a corner of the kitchen, she was puffing and wheezing like an old steam engine and wishing he was old enough to know CPR so he could practice it on her.

And her bum hurt. These were the ramifications of living in a house with seventy-eight internal stairs, but every time Esme looked out the window of the top floor in her nutty tower she remembered why it was all worthwhile.

She scooped up her small, sticky, sobbing son and held him tight against her chest as she looked out across the scattered rooftops of Seabury village, over the tips of the leafy green oaks, across the lake—or the Meare as the locals knew it—to the waters of the cool North Sea lapping at the pebbly shore and trying moodily not to glisten in the watery sunshine.

She rocked Rory, quietly shushing him. . .