Season to Taste (20 page)

In my mind, I go back and it's like the last time.

I am cycling fast in a thick fog in the dark. I swerve onto the verge above the cycle path, sit back on the bike and release
the handlebar. The bike skates down the hill towards a valley.

I push hard, head down, past damp thatched cottages in the village, past the primary school, past the post office, and a steamed-up
mirror on the bend. Past the Dog and Duck with the climbing frame in the garden, a horse lifting its head by a fence, a trough
with twigs frozen in the ice, and water on the field, a dip and a mud-caked road.

I spin at the turning for Tubford Lane, and I am in the woods. Alder trees with skinny catkins. I bike past the faded blue
Volvo, and come to a dark, stifled house on the bend.

I know her story now. I have known it for twenty-four hours. During that time I have not slept. I have been to work and tripped
around.

I throw the bike at the yew hedge and stumble on the stone steps, through an unlocked door, not stopping to stretch or breathe,
or take the helmet off. I am in my cycling gear. I switch the lights on to signs of life having moved on. I see a note on
the kitchen table. And an envelope with a letter inside it.

She'd left the hostel straightaway that morning and got on a train from Glasgow.

Once she was on the train, there was nothing to do but sit there hoping.

“I just had to sit and hope,” she says, “that people would tolerate it, not feel so oppressed that they would be forced to
make inquiries or a complaint to the ticket inspector.

“Every time he came to check my ticket,” she says, “I thought it was going to be time. I sat there watching him wrinkle his
nose; and I could see that the carriage I was in was virtually empty. People had had to evacuate the carriage. I didn't blame
them. So sinister,” she says. “A smell like that. The way it creeps up on you and stops your heart.”

I am exhausted.

“I can't imagine your being able to stay here now that you know.”

I have nothing to say.

We sit in silence.

I go into the kitchen to try to make a cup of tea. It has come like a bomb in the night, ripping the nipple out of the mouth.

I am flailing, in panic. Tomorrow I will go to work.

I make the tea and stare at it. She is quiet.

“I didn't know what to do with the body,” she says. “I remembered something someone had said at work once. About how if it
came to it, and she found herself with a dead body in her house and had to get rid of it in order to not get caught, she would
most likely—”

“From something someone said at work?”

“Yes,” she says. Her hands are shaking around her teacup.

“What would you like me to do, Tom?”

“What would I like you to do?”

“What shall I do?”

We stand in the kitchen together. I drink from the cup and try to think about something else.

I turn my face towards the garden and think of the lawn, how emerald green it is in spring with the light coming through the
trees.

It doesn't have to have anything to do with me.

“I don't expect you to stay here, Tom. I'm so grateful for what we've had.”

Lizzie opens up her handbag. I think for a moment that she is about to get her checkbook out and write me a check. I close
my eyes. I try to breathe.

“Talk to me, Tom?” she says, in a small, trembling voice.

“I had a girlfriend at university,” I say.

I look up at Lizzie. I feel it is important to carry on talking, to try and keep saying something.

Funny how all that stuff about being in the moment falls away.

She is holding on to the sideboard and she has gone very pale.

I try to imagine what she did with his feet.

“I did not know what else to do,” she says.

“You should have turned yourself in.”

“I did not want to.”

“You what?”

“I did not want to, Tom. I want to live. I want to have a life!”

I'm not sure I have fully taken in what she has said.

Denial. Then anger. She says that she had the same reaction. That he was in the freezer for days.

Now I understand the worry about the freezer men coming in the lorry to take it away.

I cannot imagine how a person is able to eat another person's hand. Happily, I do not have that imagination.

I know instantly, and I understand, what has driven her to do it. I just can't imagine how. I can't believe it possible for
a human being to endure having to live through that—the days of waking and knowing and cutting and forcing it down.

What could I do? she says.

“You should have turned yourself in. You need to.”

I keep looking out at the trees. It is dark, but they are out there. I remember how we have both been standing looking out
at the trees. Trying to find a path in the woods. I can't bear to be near here.

“Yes, of course,” she says.

“It's not love, Lizzie.”

“What, Tom? What isn't?”

“Why did nothing stop you? It's love that stops a person from doing that. Where is the love that should have come and stopped
you? Where is love, Lizzie?”

“Nothing could stop me,” she says. “Once I'd made the decision.”

I say it again: “Where is love?”

I would have to go. It gave us something to fight against. It made us stretch out what we had as far as it would go. I wondered
how I could leave her. I thought back to the beginning. Simple things: cups of coffee, morning walks, watching the rain on
the window. When the end is inevitable and coming that fast. She must always have known that the end was coming. She would
always have had a moment in her mind when she would tell me. What I couldn't understand was how quickly I absorbed the knowledge
that Lizzie Prain was not the sort of woman who could turn herself in. She hadn't gone to the police. She had been too frightened,
too determined. She had been in flight from the moment she killed him.

She had taken the hand in her own hands and rubbed it all over with olive oil and salt. She had laid it in a roasting tray
and put it in the oven. Onto the top shelf. A clean tea towel to take it out, to hold it in her hands. She had put his fingers
in her mouth.

These are the things I can't think about.

Or the blow from the axe that pulled his body apart from his head.

“We only see what we want to see, Tom.”

She called me Funny One Tom.

“Don't say that. Please!”

I didn't have the words. I was saying things I'd heard from other people.

“How do we manage to live, Tom?”

She turned her head to look at me and I saw how small and dark her eyes had become. I saw the lines on her face, pinched around
her mouth. I had loved the ray of sun in her, the constant waking up and saying what a wonderful day, how wonderful it was
to be alive.

“You can never tell another person, Tom.”

I, who had never been interested in the stories anyone told me about themselves.

She was useless. I was useless. Ripples of disgust for both of us ran through me.

I had thought him abroad. With someone younger than Lizzie. I had thought that he had gone after thirty years of marriage
to start again.

“I won't tell anyone.”

I wasn't going to imagine more than I needed to.

“Did you manage to get through it all, Lizzie?”

“All of it,” she said, and looked away.

The day after she told me, I came home from work and I found her note.

At the Cornstack in Elstead, lying in a single bed with her hands folded on her stomach, Lizzie remembered her pictures, the
partridge photographs she'd pinned up on the walls of the shed in her twenties. She'd sat in there, in the shed, with all
the tools around her, and she'd been pleased with the photographs. Then she'd wondered what on earth she was doing with her
time. Jacob had liked the pictures. He'd said it was fine to sit in a woodland shed looking at photographs of woods. “What's
the problem with that?” he'd said. So then she'd carried on a bit, taking pictures after dark, and there had been one photograph
of hers that he'd liked. She'd always had a torch in the lane, because night and day, from where the trees had reached across
above and grabbed each other, there had been no light and what had felt like very little air.

Lizzie looked at her watch. She knew that Tom would have returned from work by now. He wouldn't be there in the morning when
she and Rita went back in the car, and she didn't think he'd go back to the farm. There was nothing further that she could
do. Telling him had been an accident, and yet entirely necessary: without it he might never have gone; they would have clung
to each other for a decade.

Lizzie breathed and looked up at the ceiling. She remembered the anxiety she'd felt coming back from Scotland, running through
the house with the awful cool bag to whip the head out and run with it down to the bottom of the garden where she'd tried
to tuck it down in the hole but hadn't had enough room. In a panic, in the dark, she'd used her hands to lift up earth from
the flower bed, and she'd kept it in there, and the dog inside, overnight. All day it had taken her to make that hole big
enough to take his head, and the clods of earth, then the tree. All day she had feared Tom coming back from work early, or
Emmett arriving, coming through the gate at the bottom, crawling mad and decrepit, with mud on his face, under the yew hedge
to find her digging, Jacob's head beside her, stinking, rotting, waiting to go in.

Lizzie placed her hands on her stomach, and breathed in. She had passed the saloon car as she'd driven away in the Volvo.
Erik had been driving, one of his thin daughters staring out of the window in the back. Lizzie hadn't been able to tell which
one of the twins it was, but she wondered now if it was Nic coming back from the station. Emmett hadn't been in the car. In
the quick glance, she'd looked for him. She felt she would always, in a split-second glance, be looking for him.

In her head there was a sense of quickening, what felt like an idea. She liked it here. At the desk downstairs was the same
man who'd seen her last time when she'd tried to leave her husband and then gone back again. She had apologized about leaving
so early.

“I've left something at home,” she'd said, and crept on out to the car. Then she'd driven back to Puttenham, out past the
Dog and Duck, past the climbing frame in the field, and the horse holding its head—half up half down—by the fence, left into
Tubford Lane, then bumpety bump bump to the house.

She'd parked the Volvo in the lane, walked into the kitchen and put the apron on as if she'd been there all night, sleeping
beside her husband, or folded downstairs on the sofa with the dog. Radio on, cookery book in its customary place, dog stretching
on its bed, and yawning with a yelp to see her coming back in.

Jacob had been talking about planting some trees. Alder grew well in dark places. It grew to ninety feet. She'd read, in the
Farnham Herald,
that the catkins of some alders, like the red alder in America, for example, were rich in protein, and though they had a
bitter flavor, they were included on the “plants of the future” website, and could be eaten, in extremis, for survival. She'd
wanted to tell him that. She'd opened her mouth to speak about it, but he was already leaving the room.

Oak, he'd said. He'd wanted some booming trees that would one day grow big enough to undermine the wall.

He'd known, she was sure of it, that she'd tried to leave him. He'd known that she'd failed. He hadn't been smug. He'd been
desperate too, and hanging on.

“I'll find more work for us,” he'd said, taking another roll from the baking tray, though it wasn't clear what he was going
to do. He'd been thinking that they might start taking orders for bread. “Something gooey like the cakes women in Guildford
have in cafés in the afternoons,” he'd said, doing an impression of them pressing forkfuls of sweet creamy dough into their
mouths.

“I'll go out,” she'd said.

He'd been holding on to the back of the kitchen chair, smiling, embarrassed, and smiling through that; his eyes working full
tilt to convey the awkwardness and pain. That had been the way to get to her. She'd never seen the effort, only the difficulty
he'd been having with his feelings and whether he should say something at all. So then she'd rush in, try to help. She'd smile—why
spoil it?—and let him know it was all right. They wouldn't need to talk. She had loved him—she had—with empathy and with,
she thought, imagination.

They would do away with nonsense about the marriage, then. There was work to be done. Surely, somewhere, there was work to
be done! And so she'd got back in the Volvo, and reversed up the lane. It had been hot still. No rain. Nothing for a week
or so. And she'd been feeling this giddiness, like a high from having been away for one night at the Cornstack, and she'd
driven very fast, ramming the old thing to full tilt on the motorway to get to the garden center.

She had tried to leave. But she'd gone back. Then they'd got hemmed in again by the clinging trees and the world outside and
all their fear. Their fear of what was out there and of being alone had kept them going round and round in circles for thirty
years.

“We don't have to be afraid!” she said to Tom before he knew.

She was sitting out by the shed, her head tilted up and back in the sun.

“No,” he said and laughed.

She said: “There's not really anything to be afraid of, Tom. Not really. Not nearly as much as we think.”

“Aren't we crazy to worry so much?”

He bounced up and started running on the spot, lifting his knees up to touch his chin, making his arms flap at the sides.
Lizzie watched him in the sunlight, watching his smooth young skin and his hair flying and his arms moving up and down in
the air as he shouted suddenly with desperation and then ran across the garden and leaped over the wall to run into the trees.
She watched him go and she let her eyes close, still seeing in her mind that figure bouncing up and down in the same spot
on the grass, flapping his arms, trying to lift upwards, trying to fly. Which was when it came to her, and it didn't feel
like a decision; it wasn't that heavy, it didn't have weight. It was a feeling of warmth and truth and a knowledge that the
way was clear now, and she was going on alone.

Lizzie slept well at the Cornstack with the dog curled huge and heavy at the foot of the bed. When she woke in the morning,
she had a shower and dressed in a clean shirt and jeans. The man at the desk was there again with his cup of coffee and he
stood up to go and make her breakfast.

“Yogurt and fruit is absolutely fine for me,” said Lizzie, and she went into the dining room with a newspaper in her hand
and Rita waited for her outside the door.

It was a gray morning, and a very gentle rain was falling on the village green.

“Not dashing off quite so early this time,” said the man from the desk when he brought her a pot of tea and poured it slowly
into a cup for her.

Lizzie was surprised that he remembered her from time to time. She had been in such a panic, such a hurry back then. Everything
nice and good and warm in her had been folded in and hidden from the world.

“Not dashing off today,” she said, spreading her napkin on her lap. “Though I will be leaving shortly,” she added, and then
she looked at her watch, reached for her cup of tea and smiled at him.