The Flavours of Love (30 page)

I’m searching for the perfect punnet of blueberries.

I spent a lot of time in bed last night going through my notebook and writing things down, making notes of recipe ideas, foods I could combine, to find that perfect blend.

My scrawlings – manic and wild, many, many crossed-out words, many underlined, lots of bad doodles – were my way of suppressing the photo in my head. I had to stop myself from seeing that picture. I’d hidden it less than two feet away from me, but it still felt as if it was in my hand. I could still see the captured lines of my husband’s face in his final few hours. I was still experiencing Phoebe’s mollified smile, a smile I haven’t seen since before
that day
. Every time the image became clearer in my head, the faster, harder, I would write.

What I came up with was something with blueberries. They’re about to come into season, so the ones on sale will be imported meaning they’re either firm and tangy or soft and oozing with subtle sweetness – either way, the right ingredients can wash it away or enhance it. That something else will be soft apricots.

I was convinced by the time I fell asleep, anxious because I’d managed to resist silencing what was macerating me inside in the usual, familiar way, that this flavour combination would be it. It would be the flavour that I could put in my mouth and would remind me of what life tasted like before I lost Joel.

After dropping Phoebe at school – with firm instructions that if she wants to keep her phone, computer and ability to live in our house not under lock and key she’s to wait for me to pick her up tonight – I’ve done a bit of a haphazard shop. I went for the jars first – small, squat jars each with a bright orange rubber airtight ring and
wire-hinged lid – that I will have to sterilise either on the stove or in the dishwasher. Then I had to hunt around to find some fair-trade vanilla pods, and then I went for sugar. I’m going to make blueberry and apricot jam without pectin so it was a toss-up between sugar and honey but the sugar won. I picked up butter on the way back to the fruit and veg aisles (virtually at the entrance to the store, where I probably should have started), searching for the blueberries. I’ve got lemons, and the apricots, which are soft and furry-skinned but not enough to set my teeth on edge like peaches do. I’ve seen some blueberries but they’re not organic. The ones I need for my jam have to be organic. They just have to be.

‘I thought it was you!’ Imogen says behind me. ‘I kept looking over and thinking it must be you! But then it couldn’t because you should be at work! But it is! It is you!’

Imogen often speaks in exclamation marks. In short, should-bescreamed sentences. It’s actually quite irritating. Or is it that since the announcement of Phoebe’s pregnancy, I’ve stopped being the numb woman who dropped the blackberries and I can feel again? The mute button has been lifted and I am experiencing life again. And life is painful. Since the photo last night, when I’ve had to make a gargantuan effort to be normal for the children, the world also seems to be loud and full of exclaiming people like the woman behind me.

‘Imogen! Hi!’ I say as I revolve to face her. I am doing it too, I am sending shards of pain into my ears, scraping agony across my skin.

‘So! What are you doing here during the day?’

‘Working from home, apparently!’ I continue in my masochistic falsetto and hold aloft my wire basket. (Frankly, Kevin can swivel. I almost told him that, but instead said I’d get more done at home and if he wanted this urgent report – that his assistant director of operations should have done but didn’t because it was beyond his capabilities – it was best I wasn’t in the office.) ‘Cooking from home would be more accurate, though! I need to do something calming before I knuckle down to work!’

Imogen nods sagely. ‘I know what you mean! I’d imagine the hormone levels in your house are pretty high at the moment!’

Did I always have so much Imogen in my life?
I wonder idly. She was at my house, then dinner, then the phone call, then showing up at my work and now this. I’ve had contact with her at least five times these past seven days. In the last eighteen months it hasn’t been a problem, she’s been such a help, but at what price? Since Saturday, I’ve been asking myself if I actually like her that much.

‘I can’t believe you’re going to be a grandmother!’ she says suddenly, excitement infused in every word.

Do I like you at all, let alone ‘that much’?
It’s nothing personal to her, I am questioning everything.

‘I only have to pick up a few bits,’ she says to my ‘not engaging’ silence, ‘do you fancy accompanying me and then we can go for a coffee or something?’

‘I can’t, I really do need to get some work done.’

‘OK, spoilsport, walk around with me then. It won’t take long.’

‘Fine,’ I say.

Apples

Milk

Eggs

50-50 bread

Cucumber

Butter

Sausages

Imogen’s handwriting is completely different to the one of the letter writer. Hers is over-the-top curly, her ‘e’s look like they are trying to have a nice little rest, her ‘l’s look like they are stretching out their tips to the letters above, the bellies of the ‘b’s are filled with an additional ink swirl.

‘I think you’ll make a fantastic grandmother!’ she says, chancing
her arm again. ‘You’ll be young enough to enjoy your grandchild! That’s such a bonus!’

I want her to stop acting as if there is only one choice in this. She did it outside my work yesterday and now twice in less than ten minutes. I want her to stop it. ‘Phoebe hasn’t decided what she’s going to do yet,’ I say, simply. My voice is now kinder on my ears, the falseness has been replaced by a monotone.

Imogen, my friend from the school gates, who was friendlier than the other mothers right from the off, stops in the middle of the meat aisle, in front of the rows of chicken, and regards me at length. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows are knitted together like the seam of a cardigan, her lips are pursed like a closed-up zip but open to ask: ‘What do you mean?’ before instantly zipping themselves up again.

‘I mean …
I mean
my daughter is fourteen years old and nothing has been decided yet.’

She parts her tightened mouth to speak again: ‘What is there to decide?’

When I don’t say anything, she speaks again: ‘Are you really going to make her do
that?
’

I don’t like you
, I decide.
Even though you were there and you helped to keep me going when the world fell apart, I don’t like you. I’m not sure I’m allowed to think like that, that I’m allowed to ‘not like’ anyone who has helped me after I was bereaved, but I can’t help this. I simply don’t like you
.

Aunty Betty was right, Imogen is an emotional vampire.

‘I’m not going to make her do anything,’ I say. When you stand in front of the fridges for a while you realise how loud they are as they pump out cold air.

‘She’ll regret it for the rest of her life,’ Imogen says, her voice pitched somewhere between hysterical and foreboding, as if she has unique insight into how my daughter will feel for however long she lives.

‘How do you know that then?’ I ask.

Ignoring my question, she says, ‘It’s bad enough she didn’t keep her legs shut, but doing
that?
She’ll never feel the same about
herself. She can’t right a wrong by doing more wrong. And what if she can’t have another baby because of scarring? I can’t believe you’d do this to your daughter.’

‘What about the alternative?’ I reply. I can feel the thrum of the fridges in my veins, they move through me in calming waves. ‘What if my fourteen-year-old daughter has a baby? How will I pay for it? Because, let’s be honest, I
will
be paying for it. How will I be able to work and take care of a baby because Phoebe will legally have to go back to school? I’ll either have to find childcare or give up my job. How will we survive financially? Even with the mortgage paid off by Joel’s life insurance, it is still a struggle to make ends meet. So, what am I supposed to do? Try to get benefits? Even if we managed to get any, your husband made it perfectly clear what he – and I suspect you – think of people who live on benefits. That’s how people all over the place will look at us. Then there’s Zane, why does his life have to be turned upside-down because of someone else’s choices? And what about me? I only wanted two children, I’ve done the newborn and baby and toddler and young child years, I don’t need or want them again. Is that all unimportant because I’m supposed to subscribe to some principle that
you
have?’

Imogen’s mouth remains creased in on itself, a severe line of scrunched-up disapproval.

‘But as I said,
nothing
has been settled upon. If Phoebe decides she wants to continue with the pregnancy, I will do my damnedest to support her and to find a way to make it work. But only if that’s what she decides. And before you say anything, no, I haven’t said all that to her about how it will devastate our lives if she goes ahead with the pregnancy because I want her to make up her own mind and make her own choice.’

‘
That
shouldn’t even be an option, though, can’t you see that, Saffron? It’s just wrong.’

I am getting nowhere here. Nowhere. And why am I even having this argument? What is it to her, anyway? ‘You really believe that abortion is wrong, Imogen?’ I say.

‘Yes, yes I do,’ she says.

‘Well don’t have one then,’ I reply.

I drop my wire basket with my ingredients, and leave her standing in the cold food aisle. Reasoning with her is like trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon: frustrating, impossible and ultimately pointless.

Every step should rip at my already ravaged heart, because I thought I loved Imogen. I thought we were good friends and even if we disagreed, we cared enough about each other to take a step back, to let the other make their own mistakes and catch them if they fell.

Obviously, I’ve been blinkered, ignorant,
numbed
to the reality of this friendship so I feel nothing at all. In the reawakening process, it’s one of the first things to go.

‘Did you know she’d been bunking off school?’ Joel was enraged. Pacing the bedroom, trying and failing to keep his voice down.

‘Yes, Joel, I did. In fact, I went out with her a few times myself.’

‘This isn’t funny,’ he snapped.

‘Oh, OK. “Not funny when I’m being sarcastic.” I shall note that down on my CV.’

‘
Ffrony
 …’

‘I’m not the one who bunked off school so I don’t see why I should be getting into trouble. But if you insist on acting as if I am, I will continue to be unfunnily sarcastic. So, can you calm down … and
sit
down so we can talk about this properly?’

‘Her and a couple of other girls have been bunking off and getting the train up to Worthing. Anything could have happened and we’d have never known what she was doing there.’

My head nodded as though that hadn’t occurred to me, that I hadn’t already played through several scenarios that would have ended badly. ‘The problem is, Joel, me and you were two of those children who wouldn’t even think to bunk off. We don’t know her mindset.’

‘I’ll give her mindset,’ he said.

‘Yeah, right. You think it was just your bad luck that the school called you? Your twelve-year-old daughter knows what we all know – she has you wrapped around her little finger. A quick flash of the big eyes and a downturned mouth and “Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry” and you’ll be helping her plan the next excursion.’

‘I’m not that bad.’

‘You are.’

‘All right, I am. What do we do?’

‘We hit her where it hurts. No phone and the pleasure of us accompanying her to and from school every morning for an unspecified amount of time.’

‘Can I at least shout at her?’ he said.

‘You can try. But when you start crying instead of her because of the look on her face, don’t come running to me.’

‘I really am pathetic, aren’t I?’

‘Only when it comes to your children, Sweetheart. Which is why you’ve got me. I have no worries about shouting at her for things like this.’

‘I’ll be there when you do it, to show I back you up. I’ll ask for the phone, too.’

‘Fantastic. Once we’re finished with her, she’ll never even think about bunking off school again.’

The photo is still there.

I shut and lock the bedroom door, drop to my knees and feel for it, inside a clear plastic A4 wallet taped to the underside of my bedside table. My whole body relaxes and then tenses when my fingers brush over the cool plastic, feeling the outline of the shape and bulk of the envelopes.

Rap-rap-rap!
at the door makes me jump. I snatch my fingers away and stumble back from my hiding place.

‘Yes?’ I call.

‘Saff-aron,’ Aunty Betty says. ‘Can I talk to you?’

She is holding onto the wall when I step out of my bedroom. Today she has on a blonde chin-length wig and big pearl earrings. She is wearing her long, black silk kimono and her pink slippers with feathery balls at the front. No make-up, but she doesn’t need it because she has an enduring beauty that is underpinned and fuelled, I think, by her ‘I can do whatever I want’ attitude to life.

‘Of course,’ I say to her. ‘Let’s talk in your room.’ It’ll give her a chance to stay upstairs after our chat. Aunty Betty sometimes walks as if she is being carried by angels and makes no sound, and then at other times, like today, she is slow, stiff, agonised. I’ve never asked her what is wrong, if it’s the previously broken hip playing up or something else, because I suspect she’d curse me out for trying to turn her into someone she’s not – i.e. an older person who talks about their ailments. I haven’t even thought about registering her with a doctor. I need to add that to the list.

‘It’s nothing urgent,’ she says. She uses the flat of her hand against the wall leading up to the loft to move her body, hefting herself from
step to step. Maybe I should have put Zane up here. I didn’t even think about that. The old Saffron, the one I was before I was the woman who dropped the blackberries, would have. She would have given Zane or Phoebe the upstairs room even though it runs the whole length of the house and has its own walk-in wardrobe in the eaves and shower-room with loo. The old Saffron would have booked Aunty Betty in to a doctor and dentist, she would have made sure Aunty Betty had access to everything she needed.