Season to Taste (8 page)

Lizzie thought of the stick and the barrel chest and the wave of white hair. It would be hard to lift him onto a shoulder.
Even a strong shoulder like Mike's. A year ago there had been a
MISSING
poster on a tree in the lane with a photograph of Emmett. It had been up high on the trunk, but Jacob reckoned the old man
had pinned the poster to the tree himself. “Has to be him. Who else?” he'd said. In the picture Emmett had been younger than
he was by about a decade, smiling into the camera with eyes that had been whited out by Tipp-Ex.

“You all right with that lot? Need a tray?”

Lizzie shook her head and grinned at Mike and then carried her wine and crisps out to the garden. There were ducks on the
wet grass and the leaves from a weeping willow clogged up the surface of the stream. It was almost sunny. Lizzie sat on a
bench at one of the wooden tables, using her mac to keep her bottom dry. She took little puffs on a cigarette. Emmett should
have been put in a home by now. He wasn't a danger to others, or to himself; he wasn't someone who should be isolated from
the community, but he wasn't right. He was old and his mind had gone. They should have taken him in, she reflected. She took
a deep puff and tried to lift her shoulders. She hadn't smoked much in the last twenty years, but she always enjoyed it when
she did. She and Jacob had tried to give up, as a couple, a number of times. Whoever had given in first had been bashful,
relieved, defiant out in the garden.

He'd smoked with his left hand, holding the tip right up close to his palm like a good-looking actor he'd seen in a film.
She'd barbecued that left hand on Sunday evening in a treacle marinade, wrapped it in foil and let it cook for twenty-five
minutes only. She'd broken it up while it was still in the foil with the carving knife, and she'd been able to suck the meat,
which was wet around the wrist and the fatty bit above the thumb. Jacob had told her that a quarter of the brain's motor cortex
was devoted to working the muscles of the hand. At the kitchen table, with a glass of wine, and the radio on, she'd tasted
blood and skin and winced into a forkful of fluffy mashed potato, and she'd crunched the ice-cool slices of cucumber carefully,
and spooned on a little minted yogurt. She'd started flossing again now, too.

Now she teased her hair a bit with her smoking hand. She looked at her nails. It was possible that she'd been offered a job.
Determination. As if she were missing a piece, he'd said. “Ego, Lizzie, and determination, to do things for yourself.” Two
fat ducks scrambled out of the water and waddled towards where she was sitting hunched on the edge of the bench. They stopped
a few feet away, and then put their beaks to the ground. But she could do things for herself. Good or bad, she'd always, in
a sense, been doing things for herself.

Emmett had come to the barbecue they'd had once—the only social occasion—and he'd done nothing but sit forward on one of the
chairs, staring into the trees. He was mad and old and decrepit, and he did nothing, and that gave him time to smell the air
and notice things. Of all the people around here, he was the one she feared most.

She took the glass back inside and put it on the edge of the bar so that Mike wouldn't have to wade outside in the watery
grass to get to it.

“Cold out,” he said, and then he began to whistle as he took the glass through to the kitchen. He came back to the bar with
a packet of cigarettes. “Here,” he said. “Someone left a pack on the bar last night. I've given up, my girlfriend hates it.
If you take them, you'll be doing me a favor.”

Coming home, walking up the steps with the ache of tiredness in her legs and her shoes in a plastic bag, Lizzie saw the ceramic
bowl on the sill that he'd put there for loose change. And a book his mother had given him for addresses and telephone numbers.
He'd not had friends. He'd explained that it wasn't clear to him the exact reason why. He'd made a few at the prep school
he'd been sent to, and then some at the boys' public school in the Midlands. Sporty place, he'd said, drawing on a cigarette,
and she'd seen something then in the tension around his eyes. She'd felt that she understood his isolation.

“Were you always going to be an artist?” Lizzie asked him once, after they'd managed sex and were lying together in his room
listening to the sound of the rain. She'd been at the house for months; he hadn't tried to sculpt a thing. The cast was off
his leg, but the three bags of clay were still in the shed. He had brought in a huge branch from the woods, and she had teased
him about that. They'd put it on the kitchen floor. She had taken photographs and felt like the kooky girl in the weird tights.
Jacob had been at ease, his face looking young and calm. Lizzie had taken the tights off. He'd gone to get the wine. She hadn't
had much sex in her life—a few unmemorable encounters at art school, and the virginity she'd lost on the beach at sixteen.
She'd been very surprised, in the kitchen with him, by how much she'd enjoyed the feelings in her body. Then they'd gone upstairs
and done it again, slowly this time, while looking at each other.

Lizzie hadn't known if Jacob was any good at sculpture. Certainly she'd not been able to say anything to him about his work.
No wonder he'd skipped about on Joanna's encouragement. Joanna thought he was curious, that his work was “moving.” At her
house in London she would have said so.

“I just need to go to the shed. I need to do something,” he'd say.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“It's after dark. It's dinnertime.”

He'd reach for the wine and agree that she had a point.

“I can go after dinner. That's what I'll do.”

“Yes, that's an idea.”

Somehow the two of them were sucking up all the air.

In the afternoon, she stood in the garden in her boots and coat and looked at the lawn. It had rained in the night. Not a
great downpour, and certainly not the deluge she'd hoped for on the first day when the blood and clots had been about. She
looked over to the spot where his body had been. There wasn't much to see now, apart from a brownish stain by the hole he'd
been digging. The sun had gone in.

Still in her black interview suit with her skirt stiff around her knees, she took the spade from its hook on the back of the
shed door. She put her foot against the blade and began to pull the turf up. She heard the high shriek of a bird in the trees
behind her and felt the air on her cheeks. The tears were there and that was a relief. Under the anxiety was a person trying
to get on. There wasn't much one could do with devastation but try to find a thread of hope. There was hope of getting through
this and to a small room in Scotland. She drove the spade into the grass with her foot and the dog ran around, sniffing the
soil.

Overnight, his right lower leg and knee had been out on the kitchen windowsill in its bag. Lying stiff with the cover tucked
around her in bed on Tuesday morning, Lizzie thought about what might have come in the night and sniffed it. She would be
cutting away the tender flesh from the calf, which could be eaten as fillet, with brown rice and vegetables. It would be plump,
and cut in two, the size of chicken breasts.

She didn't know what she'd be doing with the rest of the leg. After the calf she would have only the long central bone and
the knee, neither of which could be eaten easily.

In the shower she washed her hair and then stood hunched on the mat and rubbed it dry. She caught sight of her white shoulders
in the mirror and chose not to look up from there or down at the sagging breasts. Dry and dressed, she came downstairs, stepping
tentatively into the kitchen with Jacob's shaving cream and razor in hand and had a quick glance around. She put the tools
on a tray, and made herself a coffee with milk. She filled a glass mixing bowl with hot water. In the garage, she put the
lights on. She took the left lower leg and knee piece out of the freezer and left it to defrost in its bag on the lid. Then
she knelt down beside the bin liner, using one of the cushions from the garden chairs to rest her knees; and she punctured
the bin liner with a knife, ripping the plastic open.

Keeping it steady on the plastic, Lizzie shaved his right leg, rinsing the razor after each stroke in the glass bowl. She
worked slowly. She'd got used to careful preparation. It was going to take most of the afternoon. The joint was cold but had
thawed nicely. She put her hand on the wound. In her mind she saw the leg in shorts, or white under his dressing gown and
creaking up the stairs at bedtime. She held on to the kneecap, and moved it a little beneath her hand. She lifted the leg
in its bin liner and went through to the kitchen.

The meat came away easily from the back of the leg. She rinsed it at the sink, cut it into two fillets, and then laid them
in a baking tray with olive oil, black pepper and salt. The leg meat went into the oven for half an hour, just as it was.

Out on the patio the barbecue was cleaned up and ready. Carrying the remainder of his lower right leg and knee under her arm,
she went to the shed for the axe, then put the leg on the ground and made a clean break through the smooth-shaven shin. Now
it was in two manageable pieces, each a bit longer than her own hand. Lizzie wrapped them securely in foil, and then lifted
the pieces onto the barbecue. They nestled in among the coals. Black pepper, she thought. And lemon juice.

She'd found there was a rhythm to this. She was settling in. It was nearly spring. She got some wood from the garage to make
a bonfire on the lawn.

Outside, the dog ran around in the near darkness while Lizzie stood in the kitchen and watched.

She went upstairs to the linen cupboard. She had eaten the tender fillets from the back of his leg, plain, on a plate at the
table. She was keeping busy while she digested. The rest of the lower right leg was cooling in its foil parcels on the shelf
beside the barbecue. Rita sniffed the meat, then turned and whined, then ran back to sniff some more.

The towels were to go on the bonfire, and all the sheets. There were three spare duvet covers, including the one he'd given
her as a present, with the flowers on. This one she threw into the bedroom on her way down the stairs. The rest went out with
her through the back door and onto the pile in the garden.

She looked at the lawn of brown muddy holes from her turfing job, and the bonfire right in the middle with the old towels
and the white crumpled sheets.

Everything from the drawer full of paper clips and batteries, old receipts and other clobber went in the bin. She was left
with an almost empty drawer containing a china bowl of various stationery items including the old stapler Jacob had sworn
they'd lost years before. She also found the Sellotape.