Season to Taste (3 page)

Lizzie tipped the hand bones that were left on her plate into the stock—she was using the old casserole dish—and then she
stacked the plates on the side. The stock was a bit smelly, so she opened the back door to let air into the kitchen, and she
waited there, in the doorway, while the food inside her went down.

After the sorbet, she sat for a while at the table, looking at the tiny ceramic geese with their heads bent forward over the
sill. They'd come in a set from her shipbroker boss before she'd got made redundant from the office in Guildford, and she'd
painted the scarves with a tiny brush from some pots of ceramic paint. Twenty years on from art school, and she'd felt like
a fool doing that, and Jacob had sniggered when he'd come in to see what she was doing.

Lizzie climbed up onto the sink in her slippers and shoved the little geese to the side with her foot. She reached up for
the curtain pole and pulled the end off, stepping back into the basin and letting the curtains slide to the floor. The curtains
had come from his parents' house. Like so much else here they were old and musty and unloved.

LP was short for loo paper. It was also Lizzie Prain. Not that it mattered. But had he meant to include her on his list? Had
he been thinking of something to buy for her, some little trinket perhaps to show her he'd been thinking of her and wanted
to reconnect? More likely it was loo paper. Or because he had something to say. “Tell LP I'm going to London this afternoon
to see Joanna,” for example. Not that he'd have bothered to say anything if that was the case. He never had. He just went
and thought nothing of it. There was nothing left. There had barely been anything there at all. Beyond their mutual need for
someone, something, to cling to.

You could see from the fridge how things had been: empty, pretty much, and the shelves smeary and old. They'd not been gregarious.
Or had people round. The ceilings were low, and the house, on its dripping bend in the lane, was too small, they'd felt, for
entertaining. And it wasn't signposted well. It wasn't his fault, of course. He'd been given the house by his aunt Jane, who'd
left it to him in her will. Happily, he'd come down from the north of England, with a box full of punk records and some old
curtains, to take it on.

Lizzie took the old jars from the fridge, rinsed them at the sink, gave each a good wash with her fingers, and then placed
them in the recycling box by the back door. The rubber gloves came off with a snap. Being practical was paramount. First thing
in the morning, she thought, she would go round the house adding things to the box.

She wouldn't actually say that she'd done him a favor. His depression had brought him closer to death on several occasions
than she'd ever been in her own life, but it wasn't clear if he'd ever really meant to do himself in.

There was the time she'd found him trying to hang himself from a tree by standing on paint cans he'd put on the wall at the
bottom of the garden. Possibly he'd been doing it for attention. He'd looked back at the house to see her standing in the
kitchen window. Then, after a while, he'd given up. He'd let his neck out of the noose and come back in, smiling, to put the
kettle on.

He'd not been able to understand his own moods. He'd pushed the downs into weird crazed little ups with a vicious smile and
eyes bright and hard as buttons. An instantaneous walling-off. And one of the things Lizzie felt she might get on eating him
was insight into his character. When the freezer was emptied she thought she might be able to write down at least one thing
Jacob had learned about life through living with her. Patience wasn't one of them. Not the sort that was revealed in conversation
when people stopped thinking and speaking about themselves and simply sat there listening. Or nodding, as Lizzie had often
done while Jacob talked. Patience, like generosity, came as much from an ability to feel love for a person as it did from
a need to be loved in return, and she wasn't sure that, once they'd moved in together and settled—she in a house that gave
her shelter from the bewildering world, he to a routine of meals made on time and a person to help him out—they had really
needed to
feel
each other's love. In the beginning, of course, it hadn't been like that. They'd needed to feel the love to know they were
doing the right thing in being together. They'd both been fierce: he in his misanthropy, she in her pragmatism. But then,
like most people, they'd taken whatever it was that had brought them together for granted. Or stopped, for all the inexplicable
reasons others did, being able to show it. Lizzie hadn't been particularly patient or generous with him either. She'd rarely
commented on his pieces. When he'd not liked something she'd cooked, she'd put it in the fridge and served it up the next
night—exactly the same format—just to make it known that fussy eating wasn't an option in her kitchen. If he didn't appreciate
her efforts to experiment then he might as well go hungry. She hadn't been patient, either, with the trips to London in the
car.

They didn't have children, and even though they'd agreed on their wedding night, face to face, under the covers, that they
now had a duty of care to one another, he had later reneged on that, and said that leaving at any point, if one felt trapped,
was absolutely essential, and that they should both just feel able to go. Up until the redundancies and the thing with the
noose and the paint cans and the fetching in of the punk records from the shed, Lizzie had felt that she loved Jacob, if not
intensely, then quite fairly. He'd given her shelter and opened up his home, and if things had gone a bit weird from time
to time in the first two decades, the rest of the time they'd been all right—not talkative, but not despairing either. She'd
watched a lot of television; and he'd fiddled about in his shed. There had been the occasional disappearance: his “walkabout”
wandering off into the night with a rucksack of supplies. It wasn't exactly testing terrain, but toughing it out in the cold
beyond the wall at the bottom of the garden had nonetheless stirred something in him. The first time he'd gone off into the
woods for two nights, he'd come back excited to see her, and had come up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.
That was rare. She'd stepped back on his toes, and then hung her apron up and gone alone to the Dog and Duck in the village,
sitting up at the bar, where she'd ordered a bottle of wine and read a magazine with her raincoat tied around her waist. She'd
not been able to express herself. It wasn't just him. And she had wanted to have sex that night. Out of relief that he had
come back and the twinge of pleasure she'd got when he wrapped his arms around her waist. They must have been young, in their
thirties then, and she'd gone instead to the pub in a huff and listened to Teri behind the bar talk some rubbish about Spain.

Lizzie knew that Jacob had loved her ability to bring him down to earth. She'd had, for him, a comforting grasp of a much
more commonplace reality—brought up not in a big house in the north as he was, but by a single mother in a boarding house
above a shop on the drizzly south coast. Jacob knew he could roam from the cottage because Lizzie was practical—poverty had
made her that way, he'd said—and there would always be food on the table, and a bed upstairs with sheets that were clean.
Their home, as she'd pointed out one evening by knocking on a wall, wasn't caving in, and she, his loving wife, was sitting
very still at the table with her eyes open and looking straight at him while holding up an oatcake with a slice of Brie, which
managed to convey, she felt, that she wasn't going anywhere, things weren't running to cheese as he saw them in his mind.
They were going to be all right. She did love him. Almost from the word go. Quite soon after he'd taken her in. He knew that.
Her loyalty had been as fierce as the Ridgeback's.

It was late when Lizzie finished her tidying in the kitchen and fished the right foot out of the freezer to thaw. She put
some clean water out for Rita and switched the kitchen lights off. Upstairs in the bathroom she washed her face and put her
night cream on, and she wasn't bothered about what anyone else would think, she thought, as she rubbed her fingers in a circular
motion on her cheeks and forehead. She'd made a decision: she wasn't going to prison for killing Jacob Prain. She was living
again, on borrowed time, and there was something thrilling about that. A sort of  “fuck them all” feeling. It was as if, in
the act of killing him, and getting on with what came next, she'd smashed up the old concerns, and now life was coming richly
in. She was feeling completely calm. Even when she thought of his body on the lawn and the axe going through the air with
that whistling sound, she was able to feel contained. She lay back in bed and rubbed her fingers together and felt the energy
fizzing in her fingertips. She was quite still. There was no pain in any part of her. It's shock, she told herself, and then
she switched the bedside lamp off and wriggled down beneath the duvet.