Season to Taste (14 page)

“You could have the shed for free. It's big enough to live in. And you could make the garden your own.”

Tom put a hand under his T-shirt and rubbed his stomach till a small, polite burp came up. He was restless and larky, trying
to show he didn't care one way or another, but Lizzie could see that something else was going on, something under the surface
was turning, lifting a forlorn little face towards her smile.

In the lane he kissed her cheek. He squeezed her shoulder and said, “Thank you.” It sounded as if it was coming from the bottom
of his heart. She squinted in the sunlight.

“Thanks for the lift and the cake,” he said.

“No problem!”

“You're feeling scared,” he said. “Aren't you?”

Lizzie stepped back. He was leaving, and grinning, and telling her what she felt, with his gums exposed. She saw that his
ears were an odd sort of shape; that the lobes were barely there, and the ear just slid inwards straight to his head. She
tried to recall Jacob's lobes.

“Can I come again?” he said.

Lizzie looked down at her feet. She smiled and tilted her head to one side because she didn't know how to reply. Then she
turned and went inside to boil water for the spaghetti. She could soften a shallot and some garlic in a little butter and
chop the cooked beefy heart in to flash-fry in the pan. With a few forkfuls of spaghetti, she thought, it would go down fine.

Lynn from the hotel made a call to her mobile.

Driving with the phone on the front seat of the car, Lizzie saw the screen light up blue. She put her indicator on, and pulled
onto the verge. She was near the lake, and water dripped from the trees onto the windscreen of the Volvo.

“We like you,” said Lynn. “We think you'll be a perfect fit.”

Lizzie sat very still, like a mouse, her nose twitching in the hood of her raincoat. Her feet were on the pedals still, resting
there in Wellingtons, ready to drive on.

“We'd like to offer you the job. Starting as soon as we can get the paperwork done. Give us a few weeks. We're thinking of
a little bonus structure to add to the equation. You get lunch here, and use of all the facilities, of course. Pool, sauna,
Jacuzzi, health club, car park.”

There was a breath. Lizzie clung to the phone.

“Steven is saying well done, Liz!”

Lizzie felt anxiety ripple through her stomach, and a tingling in her hands. They all called her Liz now. Even Tom Vickory
had said it.

“Bye, Liz. See you.”

Lizzie sat back in the driver's seat.

More drops of rain plopped onto the windscreen. In the garden the soil was mulched and wet and rich with worms from rain in
the night. The garden was churned up; and the house was clean. In the back of the car, the dog barked. For a moment she had
it all. She had her health, and she had a home with a garden. She had a car she could get about in, a correspondent, a neighbor.
And she had something to do. She clutched hold of the phone still and pressed it into her ear.

“It's all mine,” he'd said about the house and garden. His face had crinkled as he smiled. He'd taken a cigarette out from
behind his ear.

Upstairs, the bed for her had been made up with soft blankets. It was a small, narrow room, and dark. It had a window overlooking
the back of the house with its huge, unkempt garden which gave way, eventually, to trees. She'd stood at the window, looking
out into the wet, dark woods. He'd called her down, offered her whiskey for her throat.

“Think breasts,” he'd said, and got some paper out to show her what the lane was like. “Two breasts, and both are covered
in sandy soil. Conifer on one,” to which he added diagonal lines, “and then a mixture,” scribbled, “of oak and broadleaf on
the other.

“We're in the middle, in the cleavage,” he'd said, pointing to hers. “It's dark and damp and the woods down here are mostly
alder.” Then he'd drawn two wiggly roughly parallel lines from the cleavage up to the head, which was where the farm was.

“I don't really know them,” he'd said. “But they might be looking for someone to help out. And I was thinking maybe I'd get
a dog at some point.”

There was an opportunity here then. They might be looking for someone up at the farm. The man in the house on the bend might
get a puppy. Maybe she'd warm up, Lizzie had thought. Maybe she'd be safe. Maybe here she'd become less numb.

She'd left the key for me under the mat. There was a note on the kitchen table with instructions. Nic hadn't come back and
things were grim and snappy up at the farm. I was glad to be out of there. I told them I'd do what I could to help if I was
needed, and that they could get hold of me at the house on the bend. My grandfather had a chest infection. He'd been up all
night coughing in the kitchen. Something wrong with that place, he said. He was dying. Something wrong with ours too, I replied.

I was excited, nervous, determined; I felt like a kid who'd come across a hideout and was going to make it his camp. I felt
like the world could just go on and I was going to be all right because I had this thing to think about, to fully occupy my
mind. I went in. It was cold in there. I put the lights on. Lizzie had kept the electricity running. I switched them off again
to save it. Rita was sitting on her bed in the kitchen, waiting for me to come.

Lizzie had burned or dumped almost everything else in the house—out of revenge, I think—and I loved that sense of emptiness
and space. It was like walking into a brand-new studio and crouching down to plan a life. I looked around to see if she'd
left anything for me. There was a vase of tulips on the table, and a note. Otherwise, there was nothing. I jumped up and down.
I threw my arms in the air. I went into the garden and shouted at the trees.

“Let go,” I said to myself. It sounds easy. But try living in my head. Same old shit as everyone else. Same old clichés. And
sooner or later we have to let go of the stories, because they make everything worse. It doesn't matter, all that shit. Stay
with what's here, what is. All that green, and the feel of my naked feet on the tarmac, the muscles in my legs, and the smell
of trees.

I wanted to be away from all that crap we tell ourselves. Up at the farm they were all quietly rotting, being pulled down
by something no one could explain. “Let go,” I said, over and over.

It was my day off. I moved around her house, opening drawers and shutting things. There wasn't much there—she'd left kitchen
utensils, knives, tin opener, saucepans, a single vase, an apron out drying on the line.

I spent most of the first day in the garden. I raked over the ashes from the bonfire, and spread them out through the grass.
In the week I'd be laying down new turf and putting compost under the azaleas and the rhododendron. Lizzie had said to spend
a little money on some new tools for the garden, so I put some hooks on the back of the shed door in preparation for the rake,
and the spade and trimmer and a nice new broom that I'd get for her. The shed was mostly clear. I took the last bits out and
filled a couple of bin liners, and I found the figures and put them on the table as she'd asked me to do, and then I gave
the shed floor a good sweep. I didn't really think it would make a proper room, but I hadn't seen it yet with a bed, a lamp
and chair. For the moment I slept upstairs in her room. She'd left a mattress, and a sheet, a duvet, two pillows.

In the sink were the liver, spleen, kidneys and lungs, fully defrosted and ready to go into sausages. Some she would have
for breakfast. The rest would go in the cassoulet with fat from the buttocks defrosting now on the garage floor.

His crown jewels were going in the cassoulet too. Boiled, then chopped.

She felt the sneer on her face; there was a muscle by her left nostril that seemed permanently stiffened, as if it had been
on recoil now for thirteen days.

She put the liver, spleen, kidneys and lungs in a glass dish organizer she had used for crisps and dips.

The spleen was dark and bloody, and small. In her mind, his organs had been larger than this, lurking around inside him like
dark fish. But here they all were: little ordinary lumps spinning round in the microwave.

She took them carefully out of the dish and laid them on the sideboard. Each piece would be cut, seasoned, and blended with
shallot, sage, breadcrumbs and plenty of salt and pepper.

Lizzie peeled and chopped five shallots. The back door was open, and she could hear the rustling of a fresh, early morning
wind in the leaves, the twittering of birds. She hadn't slept much, but it didn't matter. It was a new day.

The dog sniffed around her feet. Lizzie promised a walk.

“Just as soon as this is done, Rita,” she crooned. “Just as soon as this is done.”

She sliced the organs on the chopping board and mixed them in a large glass bowl with the sage, shallot and seasoning. It
was too lumpy for sausages. The mixture went into the blender in three stages. She rolled and shaped the sausages, plopped
four in the frying pan, to be eaten with a piece of white bread. The rest went in the fridge.

Accomplishing things, Lizzie was starting to realize, meant putting yourself in the right state of mind. “I thought I could
do it,” she whispered, “and then I found that I could.”

From the cupboard she took a tin of duck confit and warmed it through. She'd looked on the Internet for a good recipe using
up lots of offal. In Italy and Spain, to make ends meet, people had started eating shoulder, blood and lung of pig.

The hip section had fully defrosted in the shed overnight and was now on the kitchen floor, on newspaper. Kneeling beside
him with the carving knife, Lizzie sliced four large fillets out of his buttocks. There was dimpling on the skin and a thick
layer of white-yellow smelly fat beneath, then flesh—pale pink, like the color underneath an eye. She put the pieces on the
sideboard, cubed them like
lardons;
then she sliced five cloves of garlic, two more shallots, and seasoned the mixture in a glass bowl.

She took a small onion from the box in the garage and pierced it with a clove; then she took a stick of celery and three carrots
from the fridge. The wind was picking up; she shut the back door. The carrots were washed, peeled and quartered; the celery
rinsed. Lizzie wiped her hands on her apron and filled a large saucepan to boil the beans. She waited, tapping her fingernails
on the sideboard, and then decided to get to work on the rest of him, cutting more slices of fat from above his hips. She
stopped humming and straightened the newspaper under him. The dog was out in the garden, running in circles and barking at
trees.

Lizzie got two pristine white tea towels out of the drawer to lay over the wounds on Jacob's hip area. The willy was still
to come. Then the testicles, and knowing people ate them made her feel better. She could do them like dumplings, in a quick
slick of hot oil. Then add to the cassoulet, or eat as they were. In, out, chew.

She drained the beans. She took the two Tupperware containers of feet and hand stock out of the fridge, and boiled the stock
in the casserole dish, adding the beans, garlic, buttock fat, shallots, carrots, onion and celery, with one and a half tablespoons
of good tomato purée and bouquet garni: everything except the duck fat, salt and meat. She brought the casserole back up to
the boil, then turned the heat down and left it to simmer.

At the sideboard, she removed the sausages in cling film from the fridge. These she quartered and added, with the cuts from
his hips, to the beans. Very quickly she bent down to the floor with the carving knife, flipped his hips over, whipped his
willy off at the base and plopped it on the chopping board. She pulled his balls away from his body, sliced through the scrotum
and tucked these in too. Then she turned him back over and laid the two tea towels over his bits and wounds. She had been
jealous of his visits to London to see Joanna. She had felt something when he came back from the Pearl, too. Jacob had gone
to the place in Guildford where he could get “a little time and companionship” for one hundred and fifty pounds an hour. They'd
not had that kind of money. Not ever. He'd left the card in the glove box of the Volvo and Lizzie had looked online to see
a page of lovely-looking young women glancing backwards at the camera with their shiny, smooth bottoms on show. Every single
one of them had long hair to the waist. She'd wondered how they got that, how they all managed to have that kind of hair.
He'd gone there, once in the first year, then again the next. One hundred and fifty pounds.

“Where've you been?

“Jacob?”

He hadn't said anything, but he hadn't been uppity from it either. He'd slunk back in with his shoulders down, and she had
known that whatever he'd gone and done, it had been grim and desperate, and not something he'd enjoyed very much. She had
gone out to the garden and buried her hands and feet deep in the soil and the smell of the roses and she had felt self-contained
and relieved, in a way, that she'd not had to sink so low, and hadn't ever felt that kind of awful desperation. She'd never
needed to romp around to feel alive. She didn't need to romp with Tom Vickory to feel young and desirable either. She'd never,
in fact, felt desirable to anyone, which, on balance, was probably a good thing. At least she was going to be able to get
away and keep things to herself.

“You're just not feeling it,” Jacob had shouted, once, writhing on top of her, trying to yank her sweater down.

“I am!” she'd said. “Please! I am.”

The following week she'd asked him if they might try again sometime.

He'd said, “Of course we can,” and put an arm around her; then he'd turned the television on.

Yes, Lizzie had been able to feel it; and it wasn't so far from the surface as he might have supposed. But it was buried,
she thought, melting the confit, under not feeling very good about herself.

How quickly love shrank into the tiny space it was given, she thought, as she turned the pieces in the fat with a dessert
spoon. She smoothed her hands on her apron. She took the cling film from the sausages and added these to the heavy-bottomed
pan where the slices of his privates were browning in the duck fat. She opened the back door. She browned, and pushed with
the spoon. Then she tipped the lot into the beans to boil.

Convincing oneself that anything was not just possible but also probable was an excellent way of persuading the conscious
mind that the unconscious was in control. She smoked in the garden while the beans and the meat pieces came to the boil, and
soon the kitchen was filled with steam and the smells of garlic and herbs.

Hell it had been, actually, to love a man who couldn't help himself. How many women all over the world had done it, though,
and not said a word, but carried on smilingly while behind the scenes, in the spaces between conversations, between rooms,
between what was said and what wasn't, a space was growing, like a sad face slowly coming into view on the wall behind the
marital bed.

But what if he hadn't needed saving? What if the problem had been her, and without her he'd just been terribly cheerful? How
well he'd bundled out of bed in the morning and bustled about pretending to do things; how cheerfully he'd gone off to the
supermarket and come back holding aloft a bottle of wine, or the cheese crackers she'd pointed at once before.

Look at how well he was!

It was her, then.

“I think it's you, Lizzie.”

“What is?”

“The problem. To be honest. With drink and everything. And the whole attitude to life. I think it's you.”

“I don't understand.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“What doesn't matter?”

“Nothing.” Smile. “Nothing at all.”

She opened up the laptop and sent an email. It was nearly noon.

She lit a cigarette and placed the lighter upright on the kitchen table. A bead of sweat slid from under her armpit down to
her waist. She waited. Her chest was tight. She tried to breathe.

If she'd come here lost and down on herself and looking for a place to feel at home, she had certainly gained, in addition
to that, a feeling that had outgrown the sadness, like ivy growing in a pot of something else. This had become the dominant
state of mind, and perhaps it was easier to manage that way, to see the state of unease as being like a monkey to carry about
that needed constant soothing. Whereas the sadness was not so easy to feel; it was a constant, colorless thing about being
human and getting hurt and losing; in the end it was too much to take in, too much to be close to. So Lizzie had become the
frizzy wick striding around the woods in jeans, wringing hands sometimes. Other times she had shrunk into the sofa and gone
very quiet. They had picked up each other's moods. It had been impossible not to. Fretfulness had thrived in her from never
having had an honest conversation, never quite knowing the whole story, or being able to trust that the man lying beside her
was who he said he was.

“What do you think the problem is, Jacob?”

“With what, Lizzie? With who?”

“With me, Jacob. With us.”

There wasn't an answer.

There was one person in these woods who'd heard her, who'd seen her, with frustration, years ago, with a big branch she'd
broken off a tree, smashing a patch of earth and the bark of another tree. Then he'd seen her again, the same man, whacking
the earth up on the common a week ago. More frustration. Nasty old meddlesome man. He suspected her: he knew she was up to
something. It was only a matter of days before he came here and knocked on the door.

There was a pause.