Season to Taste (6 page)

She walked around the garden table sizing up his thigh. She felt a sudden searing pain in her own thigh and kept putting a
hand to it, rubbing around the hip. The front of her apron was dusted with flour from the potato croquettes she'd been making
first thing.

It was almost seven o'clock. If she was firm enough with herself—if she applied all she had to herself as she might have done
to a child—there was a chance she would be all right. The trick was to breathe slowly, and go with each moment as it presented
itself.

She would hack through the femur with an axe and cook it in slices on the barbecue. Some of it she would be able to nestle
down in the charcoal and it could cook away until she was ready to add the bones to another stockpot. She threw back the last
few drops of wine.

She selected some spice jars from the kitchen and brought them out into the garden on a tray. She lit a cigarette and set
the tray down beside the five slices of thigh and bent down on her knees using a fresh bin liner to keep herself dry. In the
torchlight she opened up the spice jars, using first a teaspoon, then her fingers, to sprinkle cumin and coriander, nutmeg
and cinnamon, fennel, basil, ginger. She really went for it this time, opening up the jars and letting the contents just fall
on. Saffron, celery salt. What did it matter? She was leaving here—she'd be gone soon: she could tip the whole lot on his
thigh and on the grass and let it all mix in.

It was as if she had stepped out of her own trajectory, and everything that had happened up to this point now seemed not irrelevant,
but far less important; and all the old resentments had finally lost their cling. That they hadn't had a baby and had never
got to the bottom of whose problem it was or why, that they'd stopped even talking about it after a while so that it just
began to hang around her when she was out on her own in town looking at other people's kids, was no longer an issue. Children
wouldn't be looked at. She'd left that need behind and stepped into a new realm. The territory was marked for her by avoidance
and denial now. Survival and absolute simplicity was all there was left for her and suddenly she was at ease. She understood
the boundaries. It was this, or nothing.

The barbecue was flaming; it was quite a party, she thought, standing back from the sparks.

Vitamins and nourishment; the goodness in Jacob, if there had been any at the end, was giving her the strength to get through
this.

Life could be appreciated in individual moments. One could simply cut—with a sharp mental axe—impressions, thoughts, feelings,
and trim off the bad bits, discard the fat.

She left the barbecue and walked towards the herbaceous border. She shone the torch right at it. The leaves on the rhododendron
were a perfect deep green. She looked down at her neat white trainers and saw that there were little flecks of blood. But
the trainers could be bleached, and washed; or they could be burned. If she decided the blood was a problem, if taking the
trainers with her to Scotland with splashes of blood on the toes made her feel nervous, then the thing to do was simply to
put them onto a bonfire of sticks on the lawn and burn them. While she was at it, she could burn the bedding and the actual
bed. She could chop it up with the axe and use it for firewood. She could burn the trainers, burn the clothes and towels,
and go to Scotland in her Wellington boots. That was it. She looked at her watch. Things were clear.

She used an oven glove and the tongs from the kitchen to lift a piece of thigh. She would need better gloves and proper tongs
and she added these to her mental list while placing the slice down on a plate to cool. She glanced at her watch. Then she
wrapped the slice in kitchen roll.

After the first bite, it was absolutely delicious. Like a hot piece of really flavorsome chicken, slightly char-coaled on
the outside. She went into the kitchen for the ketchup and another bit of kitchen roll—he'd not been a good husband—and then
she stepped back out to the garden. She would eat all the way through like this, she thought: all the pieces, wandering, moonlit
and a little drunk, around the garden.

Lizzie agreed to give me a lift home. I realized as we got there that I didn't have my key. I knew that my grandfather would
be at the farmhouse, but I didn't want to be there. I was happy talking to Lizzie on the way home in the car. I just wanted
to stay like that. The heaviness had gone. In her car, she was more herself, and it felt like she was in control. I had no
plans. But I didn't want to go to the farm. I pleaded with her. She was adamant that I couldn't come in. She said she was
busy, that I couldn't even sit in the garden.

Then I told her what my grandfather had said about her husband disappearing, and her face began to change. Something passed
across her brow and she became quite brisk and efficient. She said that I could come in. She said she was busy in the kitchen
but that I could come in and see for myself that her husband had left her and that she was in the process of clearing out
the house.

The house was really, weirdly empty. Much more than I thought it would have been. Even if the guy had done a runner I wouldn't
have expected someone married for thirty years to clear their stuff out quite so fast. There was a patch of ash on the lawn
out the back and I thought she'd probably been burning his things.

I thought she was brave. She showed me this receipt from an escort place in Guildford. She urged me to keep it, to show it
to my grandfather so that he might stop his crazy imaginings. I told her that I wasn't going to take it and that she shouldn't
feel she had anything to prove. “He's a mad old man,” I told her. And she seemed happier after that.

I had a rest at her place and she went to make a cake. When I woke up she asked me if I would consider looking after the dog
while she went to Scotland. She was glad that I'd come in after all because it had given her the idea. When it was done, she
said, when it was fully cleaned up, I could stay there, and I could use the place as my own for a while. She said to bring
my own bedding and towels. As we talked, she made these deliberate shrugging movements, as if it was all quite a casual arrangement,
and I felt like she was someone who wasn't used to living like that at all, that by nature she was a much more cautious person
who'd decided, since her husband had gone, to throw it all in the air and see what came back.

Lizzie stood in the dark lane and waited. It was Sunday morning. The feeling of heaviness in her chest had been there when
she woke, and it was still there, a pushing sensation, insisting on something. She wanted to walk on up the lane towards the
farm, but her legs felt stiff and heavy in her boots and she didn't know, all of a sudden, whether she would be seen. There
was light coming through the trees. There would be air and light up on the common.

In a Saturday night feeding frenzy she had eaten her husband's whole thigh. She had not known a person could press so much
meat in. Then she had gone to the fridge for more wine to wash down lump after lump of meat. She had been sick. Even so, she
could feel the food as if it were in her throat; and even her head and cheeks were bloated.

The agent would say when she showed the house to people: “There's a lovely walk. You just go to the bottom of the garden,
through the gate and you're out into the woods…”

Lizzie pulled her scarf around her neck, and turned through the woods. She went up the hill path, up towards the heath, her
boots either side of the sandy ravine, and the dog disappeared into the bushes.

Up on the heath, Lizzie pulled a branch from the tree at the viewpoint, climbed down from the bench, and used the branch to
whack the mud, lifting it up over her head and bringing it down with all her strength. The wind was blowing over the woods
in the valley beneath, bringing the sound of the cars on the A31.

She heard a voice.

“Your dog's missing!”

It wasn't a question, but a madman out on surveillance. The voice was raspy. She knew who it was; and her heart thumped.

Lizzie looked back over the bracken to the little hand quivering near a white mouth. Her eyes dried quickly in the cold wind.
He tried to shout to her again, but only a noise came out.

“Hello,” she called, but the sound didn't seem to reach him. He didn't move. A wave of white hair was blowing across his head.

“I think at my place he's the only one sane,” Tom Vickory had said. Lizzie looked at old Emmett. They were neighbors across
hectares of woodland. In thirty years they'd had one lunch together.

“Your dog gone?” he shouted, and bounced on his heels.

“No,” Lizzie called. “I brought her for a walk. She's over there!”

She forced a smile up into her cheeks. Old Emmett lifted his stick towards the oak tree with giant octopus arms that had been
up here since the time of Henry VIII. “Over there!” she repeated. She made a waving gesture with a flat palm, and tramped
away from the bench.

It wasn't clear how Emmett had got himself up onto the common, and there was no knowing how he would get down. He'd stand
for a bit on his stick, she thought, let time pass on the sand by the oak tree. She would have helped him to get back down—on
another day—or offered to walk with him, but she thought of the thigh and closed her eyes and walked on.

“I've got nothing left,” he shouted after her. Lizzie heard him, and felt a trembling in her legs. She broke into a run and
kept going. She wouldn't come up here again. That was the way to manage the encounter. She could leave him up here, and she
wouldn't come this way again.

Inside, there were soaps in the cupboard under the stairs. Value packs, multiple Doves piled on the shelf. With the Hoover
that hadn't broken yet. And the old ice-cream carton of clothes pegs that she'd spilled across the kitchen table to choose
one for her nose. And the spare scrubbing brush. Once a year it was changed. Silly objects she'd picked up on her shopping
trips, to try to furnish and feather things; and the cooking utensils and the food was hers. And the small ceramic geese on
the sill that she'd hand-painted. Things were cleaned but they always got dusty again with the dirt that came in from the
woods as he walked in and out from the driveway and from the car. In the beginning, it was him who'd brought in all the dirt.
He'd never been careful with the doors, never seen her efforts to wash the floor. Then she'd mentioned it to him and he had
tried very hard to wipe his shoes and keep the floors clean. He'd taken it on as his job and done it very well. Which had
made him a good man—a kind man—and good enough to marry at the Guildford registry office. He'd said they would probably have
kids in time. Tim Smith had come. Lizzie's mother had come up from Hove. Jacob had given her a sculpture of his hand as a
wedding present. Then they'd gone to the Italian restaurant in Guildford. That had been wonderful. A really special day.

No one would have thought, back then, that they'd end up in business together. She thought of the red lipstick and the red
jumper and white skirt she'd been wearing on the wedding day. A white pencil skirt to the knee. It had been fabulous. Holding
up a glass of champagne. With a little white beret and a rose pinned to the side of her head.

Twenty-five years later she'd tried to leave him. The summer before that he'd tried to leave her. He'd got as far as the Dog
and Duck where he'd had some supper and taken a room for the night.

She'd got as far as the Cornstack Inn at Elstead. It had been a warm August evening and she'd driven with the windows open,
smelling the heat in the fields.

She'd parked the Volvo on the green, outside the pub, and taken the only room that was available. Sixty quid for bed and breakfast.
A pale room. Smooth sheets.

She'd slept well and woken knowing she was going to keep going.

They'd talked about a holiday to Spain, and she'd hoped they might have gone by now. It hadn't happened, but if she went back
home after breakfast and opened up the laptop, she'd be able to book the trip with the savings she had in her own account.
She would do it, she'd decided, straight after breakfast. Just for her. She had yogurt and fruit and coffee in the dining
room. She paid the bill, dropped her napkin on the table and decided to book the flight. Going back home seemed a bit better
then. There wouldn't be need for discussion, or any sort of disappointment if he'd changed his mind about the holiday because
of her being a bad girl and leaving, or trying to leave.

She'd sat in the dining room looking out of the window at the bright patch of village green gone a little brown and dry after
the summer. Then she'd driven the five miles home and gone straight through to the kitchen. She'd seen the dog stretching
on her bed by the wall, yawning with a yelp to see her, white as fish, coming back in.

He'd come down much later than usual, as if he'd been waiting upstairs in bed for the sound of her car. Saturday morning.
He'd said nothing, not even that he'd overslept or had trouble dropping off in the night. He'd stood at the sink eating a
bun and watched the garden. The backs of his legs were tanned, freckled, and covered in that blondish down. He'd been talking
about planting some trees; oak, he wanted, though the woods were mostly alder. He'd surprised her by asking about Spain then,
and whether she still wanted to go.

“I'm going to go by myself,” she'd said, in her coat still, her bag on the table. Tension had settled into her body over the
years as they'd argued. A sort of survival tension: every nerve tight and ready to spring.

“That's such a shame,” he'd said. “Because I'd like to go walking in Ronda with you.”