Season to Taste (4 page)

She had red lipstick on. That was what was different about her. She came and found me—I was unloading compost out the front—and
she asked about tongs for the barbecue and rubber gloves. I said I could help her with both, and we went inside.

“My husband left me,” she said, just like that, in front of the drills.

I stopped and turned around. I didn't say anything. I looked at her. Then I looked back at the drills. I wanted to burp, to
release what felt like a blockage, or heartburn, in my chest. I felt a tugging sensation, like there was a thing inside her
that would get out if it could and pull on my sleeve. I wanted to say,
I think I'd leave you too. I think I'd have to.
That was the thought that came to me. I didn't, though. Of course not. I just stood beside her. Her hands were gripping her
cloth bag. I put my hands in my pockets. We looked at the drills. Then I felt the tears. I took a tissue out of my pocket
as the tears spilled down my face.

She asked if I wanted to go to the café to get a cup of coffee with her. I nodded and said that I'd go and ask my boss if
I could take a break. It was early, around ten. I tried to walk away looking relaxed, with an arm swinging at the side.

I met her back in the café. She was sitting in the window, very upright with that frizz of hair. There were two cups of coffee
on the table, and a plate with a slice of carrot cake. She was staring forward, as if there were someone sitting opposite
her. She pushed the plate of cake towards me. I sat down and curled over my elbows on the table and said something about being
someone who believed in releasing emotion and how that often got in the way of my work. I said something about being a sensual
person. I laughed a bit. Lizzie seemed startled by what had happened back at the drills. She didn't say a word.

“I cry a lot,” I said. “And there isn't always a reason. It's fine.”

She turned to look out at the “Pick Your Own” field. There was someone out there, bending down in the rows.

“Won't be any strawbs,” I said, trying to be cheerful, to make conversation. It was a thick, overcast sky.

“How long were you and your husband together?” I asked.

“Thirty years,” she said.

I nodded. That didn't mean anything to me. How could it? I was barely an adult. Thirty was a number. I didn't know anything
about being with anyone for any length of time and, anyway, I thought most people probably overdid it and let things go stale.

“How did you meet him?”

“He put an advert up at the art school. He'd broken his leg. He needed someone to help him. Thought it might be a way to meet
someone.”

“You mean it wasn't true?”

“No,” she said. “It was true. He had broken his leg, and it was a slow recovery thing, and he did need some help. As you know,
there isn't a shop or anything that you can get to easily from ours with a broken leg. But he did think it would be a way
to meet someone.”

“Nice,” I said, and grinned. “Kill two birds.”

Lizzie tried to smile. It was more a wince.

“It's March,” she said, suddenly, which was when I noticed the redness—a rash—at the corners of her mouth. I understood that
the last weeks had been difficult for her, and I felt bad for making the scene with the tears.

“It is possible that I'm feeling this for you,” I said, and I looked up through the top of my eyes. Lizzie looked back at
me. After a while, she said: “You barely know me.”

“No.”

I went back to staring at the redness at the corners of her mouth.

We drank our coffee. She closed her eyes when she drank. She didn't touch the cake.

We sat there feeling awkward. Then she said she'd get the things she came for.

“Nothing lasts,” Lizzie whispered, standing in the garden on Friday night with a small brandy, and a pile of burning curtains
in a bonfire on the lawn.

His foot had been lying salted and sideways in a roasting tray for two and a half hours, but on a lower heat than the hand
had been, so the skin was more coffee-colored than black, and the meat was softer. She'd taken the pink gloves off and wedged
them between her knees while she scraped tiny slivers of flesh off the ankle bone and the bridge, and from the heel, and added
them to a hot ginger stir-fry with rice noodles, the rest of the
mange-tout,
sweet chili sauce and half a red cabbage.

It had started to rain now and Lizzie was pleased. The rain would fill up the hole and give the grass a really good dousing.
The
Farnham Herald
was still there for reading, and she was feeling well. In general, she had been fine all week. Her wits had been about her.
Right from the moment she'd gone down on the grass to check his pulse. Ten minutes earlier she'd been standing in the bedroom
window upstairs, still in her dressing gown, watching him dig. Oak, he'd wanted. For its longevity and rotund glory. She'd
got dressed. Ten seconds to drop the dressing gown on the floor, reach for her jeans from the cupboard. Over the nightie.
Less than a minute. Through to the kitchen, out the back door and into the garden. Bringing the spade down on the top of his
head. Then the small mental adjustment. Doing it again. Nothing from him. He was fifty-five. She'd expected a reaction; she'd
wanted a fight. Nothing had come. He was down. She'd sniffed and touched his hair.

Like the girl she was before she'd got caught up with him, and her brain had started to cleave to his, Lizzie had stood up
then and looked about her. Like the girl who might have done other things, the girl who'd walked instead into the garden on
the first day and felt that she could probably manage to be here while she figured out what else there was, she'd taken in
the details. The garden was hidden from the lane by the house, and completely surrounded by tall dark trees. She was the same
person, it was the same garden, and the two views bookended everything in between. With the body on the lawn she'd looked
quickly at the garden chairs. Then up at the trees.

Now she was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of his left foot, the skin of which was thick and tough, the skin on
the sole so thick she hadn't been able to score it, and had left it sitting in the pan like an inner sole from an old shoe.
There was a slick of yellow-white fat under the heel and under the toe. While she ate the stir-fry she glanced at the paper
and studied the schoolchildren lined up in a photograph on the front.

She went back to the roasting tin on the sideboard, and peered at the crunchy bones like a bracelet in the arch. She scraped
a little meat from his toes with her knife and fork and held the pieces in her mouth; there was a porky taste, which was all
right. So she scraped another bit of toe and held it out in her fingers for the dog, who devoured it gratefully and licked
her lips and wagged her tail for more. Rita liked the little bits of meat that could be flaked away from the bones, but she
wasn't going for the sole either. She simply sniffed it on the plate put down, and let her tongue go out towards it, then
withdrew, sucking ruefully back into her lips.

“Like rubber?” whispered Lizzie, and she bent down to remove the plate, giving Rita a handful of dry biscuits from the bag
she'd taken out of the bin in the garage and brought into the kitchen.

She and Rita did what they could with the foot, and then Lizzie hammered up the bones on the chopping board and put the shards
and the fat that was left over in the stockpot with bouquet garni and celery. She added two pints of water. She would need
the clothes peg on again while it boiled and simmered and this she would have to do with candles burning before she went to
bed; then reduce with wine, blend again in the mixer and reduce for an hour more till she got a fine golden stock which could
be stored in a Tupperware.

In the garage on Saturday morning, Lizzie put her finger to the light switch and waited in darkness while the overhead light
came on.

Several months ago she had tried to clear the garage and the shed. She got some of the old sculptures out to take to the dump.
There was a foot he'd made of plaster. It was sitting on the old TV, close to the door. She'd carried it to the bottom of
the garden. He was sitting in a deckchair, watching her.

“Ah,” he said. “I've thought about doing that.”

She walked past him with the cast in the air.

“I'm going to convert the shed into an office.”

He could have done it. It was big enough; it was a double-sized shed, like an Alpine cabin, with a step up.

“Cakes,” he said, watching her bend over the oven to take one out about a month after the shop closed down. Jacob's Antiques,
in Guildford, hadn't been
his
antiques but Tim Smith's, and Tim had given it Jacob's name because he felt it was a good one, stronger, warmer. Jacob worked
there five days a week. “A good job for a budding sculptor,” he used to say, sort of joking, though it wasn't the most unlikely.
He worked there for many years. Then the shop closed down and Tim went to France.

“Cakes?” she'd said, putting the fruit sponge on the table in the bread tin.

He'd been making suggestions about what he could do, since he didn't like going to the job center to collect his benefits.
Three years ago now to the very week, and she'd cut him a slice of fruit cake then and said she'd think about it. She'd not
been working either and things at home were disastrous with both of them being around. Both in their late forties. Inertia
had come into the house as if it were being belched and yawned from a mouth under the floorboards.

“What with our brilliant oven!” he said, showing his yellow teeth.

“It is a great oven,” she said, and he put his arms around her then. She felt the hope rise in her like sap. You needed something,
one thing of your own to do, however small; and Lizzie had known that she could cook, and bake, and that she could do these
things with love.

PRAIN CAKES

or

WOODLAND CAKES

At the Dog and Duck, they said: Great! The message spread. It could be lucrative. And Jacob and Lizzie went to the pub a few
times and tried to fit in. Up at the bar, some of the local folk were talking as if they'd all known each other for years.

“The Prains are going to make cakes, love.”

“Got a van?”

“We'll use the car,” Lizzie said, climbing onto the bar stool in a pair of tight brown trousers.

“Be good to be working again,” she whispered to her husband, who was standing beside her, nodding into his beer. For a moment
there it had felt warm and loving around him, and spacious.

“Long time off now.”

“No one wants to be out of work, do they?”

“Not now.”

“No one wants to be scratching around.”

“Thing is, no one says you're going to get depressed, do they?”

“That's right.”

“No one says what's coming.”

“How can they know?”

“That's right.”

They even heard about it up at the farm. She took some fairy cakes with her one evening in a tin. To confirm it was happening,
and ask them to spread the word around. It wasn't a great meeting. Not ideal for someone starting out on a venture. Lizzie
was met at the door and not welcomed in. Later, she imagined the cakes flying through the air on the back of Erik's fist.
“He's just the sort of man to do things like that,” she said to Jacob, who disagreed and said, “That's a bit unfair.”

But Lizzie had known from before, from the way Erik shouted at the dog and the cows when she'd done the babysitting, that
things were hard up at the farm. As with last time, she came away feeling tight in the chest and hurried past the same shiny
saloon car parked black and silent in the drive. With the front seats pushed right back. Erik at the door and Barbara behind
him with her huge face and a small purple nose. Half of her coming forward and the other half held back in the corridor, a
wry, secretive, disastrous smile keeping them all, one felt, from a harm she couldn't articulate.

But Tom said Lizzie's cakes were really good. He'd appeared in the doorway, squeezed past his parents, tall and pretty, and
put an arm out to get one from the tin.

“Wow!” he said, chewing and licking and smiling at her. “Wowwow!”

So people knew she could do it.

Someone at the pub said: “Always knew there was something creative about you.”

“Who? Me?”

“Yeah, you. Always knew you were a bright spark.”

People drank to her health.

“There's that lovely picture of yours they sell in the craft center in Seale. The goose one.”

“The partridge.”

“Yeah, the partridge.”

Jacob said: “A real beauty, that one.” It had been a beauty. When she'd first come to the house she'd wandered up and down
the lane taking photographs. She had loved the way, when she went out at night with the head torch on, the elephant grass
had stood out so white and shocking, like images from a real swamp in Florida or somewhere. She'd tried hard to capture the
light peeking through the leaves in the lane, the briefness of it, how it would wink and chase the car. In the early days,
when his leg was better and he'd taken up driving again, she'd sat in the front with her head back on the headrest and gazed
up at the trees. There had been a sense of the numinous then. She'd felt the love inside her, and all around her in the lane,
and she'd taken some pictures to capture that.

Some people had said it might be hard. Just the two of them out in the woods like that, going into business together. They
might not make it in this market.

But how hard could it be? Wedding cakes, birthday cakes, anniversaries, funerals.

Easy-peasy.

She made them. Sleeves rolled up in the kitchen, flowers in a jug on the sill. Jacob took orders on the telephone. He washed
up, and then he delivered the cakes in the Volvo. He got lost, a second time. A fortieth birthday in Weybridge. Just up the
A3. A pub not far from the exit. He didn't know why.

“Don't know,” he said when she asked the next morning. She was trying to find the right time to inquire.

“How could you have got lost, Jacob? The directions were so clear.”

“Shitty map, though.”

Lizzie went back to weeding the garden. Then the customer rang and said how much they'd be charging for the inconvenience
of all those phone calls from the party and someone having to buy chocolate cake from the supermarket right in the middle
of the speech.

Meanwhile, for supper in the kitchen it was shepherd's pie, and the salmon thing in a pastry roll, the leek and potato soup
he'd always given a thumbs-up. Cottage pie. A good roast. Pork, chicken, beef. They'd never had much lamb, except on a special
occasion. More as a treat. But British in the main: food enjoyed in childhood was food enjoyed always. He'd liked things the
same. He'd worn his boots till the soles flapped off, then they'd got replaced at Clarks in Guildford; and every Easter, for
five years, he'd hired a van, and driven a sculpture of his own creation up to a woman called Joanna for her pleasure garden
in London.

“Three hundred and fifty quid,” he said, coming back from the first time, striding in. His jeans had holes in the knees.

At the antiques shop in Guildford he told his striking customer that sculpture was really his thing. It was what he would
have done, he said.

They smoked outside on the street, Lizzie imagined, and laughed.

Joanna said, “Will you bring me something?”

That was what he reported.

Lizzie asked: “What did she wear?”

“What do you mean, what did she wear?”

“What kind of thing?”