Season to Taste (2 page)

Out on the patio, in the dark, Lizzie stood in her coat with the rubber gloves and the apron still on, and she looked at the
trees.

She'd had the oven on its highest setting for half an hour before she put the hand in. It was much too hot, but searing the
first bit of him beyond recognition seemed the right way to begin. She had scorched herself enough times in the garden to
know what it was to be heated at 25 to 30 degrees centigrade. It was immense dehydration. As with a hangover, but worse. He
was in at 250. His blood would have reached boiling point in a few minutes. It was much too hot. She should turn it down a
notch. Except there was something to be said for taking it beyond the look of a human hand. She had no idea, yet, how she
would react to actually having to eat it. Better, then, to go for the crisp, at this stage: better to keep it high.

Lizzie shivered. The damp had fully permeated the little woodcutter's house this week. She'd had several windows open and
candles burning on saucers to take away the smell. During Monday's dismemberment, the intestines slipped out onto the lawn
like a heap of dead fish, and the smell that came straight after that, as the bacteria went into a breeding frenzy, seeped
into her nose. The stench followed her around as she did her chores, going up and down the stairs, in and out of the bathroom.
She knew that its tenacity, its terrible cling, was to be expected after the horrors on the lawn, and she cleaned the cottage
with as much disinfectant as she was able to find in the store cupboard under the stairs, and as many buckets of boiling water
as Rita had ever witnessed moving back and forth from her bed on the kitchen floor. Sheets, rugs, blankets and towels: everything
was washed, and given an airing; and Lizzie wasn't wearing the peg now—her hair was pinned up and freshly washed—and she wore
the tiny pearl earrings. She knew; it was one of the things to watch out for, after getting too drunk on white wine, that
the smell was a flight signal direct from her brain: there was death in the house, in the freezer; she should be on that train
to Scotland now, looking for a hostel somewhere to bed down.

She breathed, and crossed her arms, lifting her loose breasts under the coat.

It was the beginning of March. By April, certainly, she would be finished, and then her life would be hers. The new life would
be structured around avoiding emotional experience at all costs: animated women, news of devastation, kissing couples, feature
films, small children, dogs with soupy eyes would be skirted, and walks would be walks for air in the lungs and exercise,
not ways of finding a view to alter one's perception of things. Butcher's shops would be dealt with as and when they cropped
up, and Lizzie was going to prepare for that. She would be a vegetarian, a fugitive, on the run; holding on to life against
all probability, and likely therefore to experience sudden surges of exhilarating relief, though pleasure would be held in
check by all that had gone before and the need to keep alert. She would strive for control. Her movements would be measured,
interaction minimal.

That was as far as she'd thought about the future—that and leaving Surrey for Scotland. She would use what there was in the
house and try not to shop for more until she got there. There wasn't much money in her bank account—there never had been.
They owned the house, but she was down to two hundred and forty pounds in her account, and a little more in the joint account.
There was a cupboard full of oatcakes, a box of cornflakes, a few tins of soup, some duck fat, vegetables in the box in the
garage and in the fridge, four bottles of white wine, and sufficient protein in the freezer to keep her muscles in working
order. She would walk the dog, run to keep up an appetite, and to keep her head clear. She would sleep with the help of a
little brandy at night, and thereby pursue this chance of a new life.

“Carry on, Lizzie, friend,” she'd been whispering to herself since she woke this morning, though she knew it wasn't so much
encouragement as an attempt to soothe and soften the tension she could feel on her face. It was there in her jaw; it was in
the eyes—enlarged a little and fixed open on the ceiling at night.

It had been a terrible, shocking Monday morning incident. Instead of killing him, she could have taken the dog for a walk,
or ventured out in the car to do the shop at the supermarket off the A31. She could have made raisin bread, or looked online.
She could have used that desperate feeling to run up the lane with some biscuits and ask Erik and Barbara if they had any
work in the house or on the farm. She could have driven to the garden center and waited for them to open so that she could
have a wander round inside and look at nice Tom Vickory with his big brown eyes and his face full of feelings. Instead she
had chosen to kill her husband on the lawn at 8:15 a.m. with the garden spade. He'd been out in a thin woolen jumper, down
by the flower bed, trying to enlarge a hole he'd dug in the autumn for saplings.

Since Monday, then, Lizzie had worn the peg and sniffed menthol and eucalyptus. She had taken to standing in the shed where
whiffs of her living husband were still in the air. There were three or four moments of pure denial this week when all senses
agreed Jacob was still alive. She smelled him that same afternoon in the shed, and then felt him as a breath at her neck at
the kitchen table on Monday and Tuesday night. She even thought she'd seen him, briefly, in the garden, first thing on Wednesday
morning, crouching over his hole.

Lizzie knew these were phantoms, but the trickery was enough, so far, to keep her from the paralysis of shock. She had gone
up to the bedroom, once, on Tuesday afternoon, to pack a bag. She'd gone to the mirror and saw a tired woman of fifty-three,
but her face bore no obvious trace of what she had done. Instead she saw a woman looking headstrong for once in a wispy enclosure
of light hair. There was nothing to admire in the mirror, there was absolutely nothing to like; but the face was a face like
any other, and altering her perception of it out of self-pity was an indulgence she'd never pursued either. The body of her
husband would be consumed, the house cleaned and rented out, and life continued, without sensibility, in Scotland.

Actually she hadn't bludgeoned him to death. She'd hit him once on the top of the head. Then she'd swung the spade with both
arms from the side and hit him on the back of his head so that his brain shot forward in his skull.

He went down on the grass, falling stiffly like a toy soldier. Lizzie watched his body thud. Then she walked across the grass
to get the axe from the back of the shed door. It was easy. She went back into the house and took the rubber gloves and the
bin liners from the cupboard under the sink. She fed the dog, and remembered the white twisty ties in the drawer of miscellaneous
items. She shut the drawer carefully, and walked backwards through the kitchen, into the garage, then closed the garage door
behind her and locked it. It was very quiet out in the frosty garden. The spade and the axe, which were to be her tools, were
lying out there beside him, as if put down for her by an imaginary friend, and the landline phone and the mobile on which
she might have called the police were locked inside, on the table in the hall.

For the first cut she'd kept herself very still and focused. With her fingers she made a gap between his sock and jeans. The
axe whistled through the air as she brought it down on the bit of white above his sock and she heard it clunk against the
bone. She gave it another go, drawing the axe back up through the air and slamming it down this time, slicing through, so
that his foot came away from the body; blood spilled out onto the frost, and she bent down to peel his sock off.

She wrapped his foot very tightly in the bin liner; pressing the foot and ankle into a corner of the bag and pulling the material
flush around it. Then she made a knot very close to the back of the ankle, so that there could be no trapped air.

She left the body bleeding over the hole and took the foot to the house and into the garage. She put it in the freezer, in
between the
petits pois
and the spinach. Then she went one step further in her organization and fetched a white label from the same drawer of miscellaneous
items in the kitchen. She wrote on the label,
RIGHT FOOT
, then pressed it onto the bag and put the freezer lid down.

Straight back outside, and all his clothes came off then, his blue corduroy trousers with the faded knees, his black T-shirt
and thin jumper; even his soft old tartan boxer shorts were carefully folded in a pile. She dragged him with the other leg
so that she could take more of the stump off over the hole. Then the axe came down above the wrinkled right knee, where the
skin had gone soggy. She took the axe up into the air and brought it down again into the bottom of his femur. This time the
bone resisted, grabbed the steel and held. Lizzie felt something in her stomach then, a heave, and a rush of sweat to the
temples and to the upper lip. She felt the panic, and her fear of the panic; so then she straightened up a little, holding
the axe like a golf club while she took a big steadying breath.

She closed her eyes and pulled the axe out of the slit in his thigh, laying it carefully on the grass. Going to the shed for
the saw, she put her gloved wrist to her upper lip knowing she was smearing blood all over her face.

But her legs had been working and she had known how to get the saw from the shed and stride back across the lawn. That was
the strange thing. She had known how to carry on.

Jacob had pointed out quite early on in the marriage that Lizzie had an inability to be present in the moment. He said she
didn't notice things. Not with all of her senses. On the contrary, though, all that oxygen made her feel high and alone out
in the woods—so much so that coming in to curl up with the dog often felt like the sensible thing to do. It was pitiful, he
said, how she never wanted to go to London, or do anything. They never went anywhere. He'd shouted: “Why can't we just throw
the dog in the car and go hiking?”

She placed the ridged blade of the saw in the wound she'd made with the axe. The bone was thick and heavy—he'd not been good
at sports—and she heard it splinter as the saw moved backwards and forward in the wound. She had deliberately not thought
of the fleshy bits or the cutting feeling or the muggy butcher's smell in her nostrils. She knew then—out on the lawn that
morning she really understood—that things could be boxed up in the mind, and there wasn't any pain to be managed but her own.

Back in the kitchen, Lizzie took the hand out of the oven and tipped it straight onto a plate. She breathed and looked, but
she couldn't leave it like that, with the skin all black and blistered, and the fingernails still on. Even with the potatoes
crushed, and gathered nicely around it. Which actually made everything worse; the potatoes so fresh and small, and the hand
charred and risen up, with the fingers flattened at the ends and curling in a bit in a weak, shriveled claw. Even after she'd
sprinkled the
mange-tout
like camouflage, it was still Jacob's right hand. She took the vegetables away, slid his hand off the plate, and put it back
on the chopping board. Then she took the mallet and gave it a big smack, so that the back of the hand burst open revealing
sinews of white meat and sharp, popping veins. Lizzie gagged and reached across for his spinning wedding ring, and then she
leaned back, and closed her eyes.

Lizzie used her knife and fork at first, with a spoon set out for sorbet after, but the cutlery was put down after a minute
or two, and the dog given the odd tidbit under the table. She nibbled her husband's roasted fingers, as if from a rib, and
she cracked the smaller bones of the thumb while frowning hard.

She watched the clock. It was almost nine. The heating had gone off, but the radiator was still warm. Under the table, Rita
was sitting up and alert. From time to time she shifted on her paws, knocking her skull on the wood as if to remind Lizzie
that she was still there.