Season to Taste (12 page)

She ate what she could that night and then went through the house to the porch. She stood for an hour in the porch but Mike
didn't come with the money for the cake. She kept thinking she heard the sound of his wheels in the lane, but it was only
the wind in the trees and the cars up on the hill.

In the kitchen she put the light on and opened up the laptop. She had a tea towel wrapped around her neck, and the towel was
covered in sauce. On the table was a cup of Earl Grey tea with milk.

On the piece of paper beside her she wrote:

Lizzie breathed.

Oh good,
she wrote.
Thank God.

She deleted “God” and put “you” instead. She wrote
Thank you
twice more. And then deleted that too. How silly that writing words down and sending them out to someone made her feel so
foolish.

There was a pause.

Lizzie waited. She took a sip of tea.

There was a pause. Lizzie waited, staring at the screen.

He was right,
wrote Lizzie.
I don't care. I don't give a damn!!

He came anyway, I know,
Lizzie wrote. She took a sip of tea. She still had the cloth with the sauce around her neck.

Another pause.

Lizzie smiled. She turned to the window and stared at the dark.

A pause.

Lizzie flicked a tear from the corner of her eye and ripped the tea towel off her neck.

In the morning, she rang the gas board. The woman said she could do what she liked with the gas and electricity supply to
her own home. She didn't have to sound so apologetic. Yes, of course she could settle her bill now if she wanted to, or leave
it till she was ready to go.

The same happened with the water. The water man was nice. And the woman at the council was on her last day before leaving
to have a baby. No probs, she said. No probs at all.

“I'll be gone by the end of the month,” said Lizzie. “I can't say for sure when the new people will be moving in.”

Monday was bright. It felt like starting again. Lizzie put red lipstick on in the bathroom and drove like the wind to the
Wild Oaks garden center. Jacob's heart was in a glass bowl of water, in the fridge.

She saw Tom as soon as she arrived. He was standing outside the entrance moving bags of compost. Tom had been eight, his sisters
ten, when she'd done the babysitting for them up at the farm. She had tried to be a proper neighbor and had made herself useful—tidying,
washing, doing the laundry; more useful, perhaps, than she'd needed to be. She'd made a real effort with Barbara, using all
sorts of helpful hand gestures to illustrate the words coming from her mouth. She hadn't realized that Barbara was only partially
deaf, and they hadn't thought to stop her and explain this.

“You've been nice, Liz,” Erik had said, blocking her exit. “Ever so nice,” he'd said, and then he'd asked her to join them
for a meal.

She'd run back down the lane in the dark on her long legs, clutching her cake tin.

A few days later Tom had appeared—a beautiful, dark-haired little boy—and asked if there were any more cakes. She'd bent down
on the steps outside and given him some bread and jam that he'd devoured while she'd walked him back up the lane.

There had been one occasion when the family had come to the bend in the lane with three teenagers for a barbecue. The wasps
had clung to the ketchup bottle. Jacob had come in and out of the house all day with that long look on his face. And Lizzie
had darted in and out of the kitchen behind him, unable to say anything at all.

It had only happened once. She'd slapped him the night before. She hadn't meant to hurt him. Of course she hadn't. It had
come out of nowhere, a reaction to something long gone, she'd thought. Something he'd said about her not needing more, not
having the imagination to know what more there was in life. What more there was of what? she'd asked him, though he'd chosen
not to reply.

Had he meant of love? Had he meant there was more love out there, like the love that came from a person like Joanna? Had Joanna
become, in his imagination, a richer source of love?

Years later, when Lizzie had come to the garden center for the barbecue, she'd told the nice young man how she was getting
on with her cake business.

He'd bent down and reached underneath the barbecue, showing her what to do with the gas pipe. She'd seen the skin on his back.

Days like that with the wasps and the faces and the light in the woods stuck out like a broken bone when you looked back,
and Tom would have known that something was wrong with the marriage between the two people in the lane.

Now she sat in her car and watched him across the car park. His shoulders were big and round like knuckles, his arms dangling.

The best thing about not having too much imagination, Lizzie's mother had said to her when she was a girl, was not having
to take the extra disappointments. It had never been clear, then, whether she felt her daughter did have imagination. Lizzie
had brought the issue into the marriage with her. She'd talked about it with Jacob. He'd not said that it was absurd, and
wrong, and plain rude and “Who in their right mind could dream of saying that to another person? Who would have the gumption?”
He'd shrugged instead. And when he started wandering off, Lizzie had the feeling that he was going off to imagine things,
to be away from her so that his own wild figuring wasn't stunted, or stifled, or crushed, by the great absence of hers.

It was weird. The way people behaved.

What people did to each other.

She reached into the back of her bag for her lipstick and reapplied.

Then she got out of the car and walked towards the entrance.

Tom Vickory saw her coming, and shook a hand in the air, smiling. Her heart thumped.

“Hi,” he said, and he held out his hand. There was a flash of plaster on his finger.

“Blimey,” he said, and looked away. He jiggled his shoulders as if trying to shake something off them. He bent over, then
straightened up and back, and took such a huge breath it looked like he was drowning. Lizzie looked back into the empty car
park.

“Stuff will come up,” he said, as if he was reading out of a book. “When you least expect it.”

“Is there something wrong?” she asked him.

“No,” said Tom. He smiled. “How are you?”

“I'm fine,” said Lizzie, frowning.

“Are you here for something in particular?” he asked her.

“I've come for barbecue tongs and rubber gloves. And firelighters, and a gas cylinder.” She also needed bin liners, dishcloths,
steel to sharpen a knife.

Lizzie followed Tom through the shop, her eye on the desert boots he was wearing. He stopped in front of the drills.

“How is your sister?” Lizzie said. “How is Nic?”

“We think she might have freaked out a bit. She's sort of gone. We don't know where. She's got her phone, but we can't get
hold of her. Mike took her to see a mate of hers. She took off from there, without the friend.”

Tom seemed to be in some sort of pain. He grimaced and put a hand up to his chest, and fiddled with a small white button on
his Aertex.

“Man!” he said, and he made a little burping sound as if trying to release something from his throat. “Powerful energy,” he
said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just energy, man.”

“Is it coming from me?”

“Nah,” he said, and he smiled, and put a hand on her shoulder, which made Lizzie jump.

“It probably is,” she said, feeling hot. She remembered the red lipstick she was wearing. It was an effort towards strengthening
her resolve, towards self-love: it was a way of saying to the world, “I know what I am doing.”