Season to Taste (10 page)

“Yes,” she said, thinking of the beret on her head. Her new, fresh start. In the shed she'd brushed it and whacked it to get
the dust off. “Yes, I can make a cake.”

It was a tiny act of faith.

Jacob had said, after he'd been to London once, “We've got to learn to swim upstream, Lizzie.”

Joanna had taught him how to try to make a life on little acts of faith. One after the other. Even if there wasn't a baby.
Or a career path.

“We still have to live as
if,
Lizzie,” he'd said, raising his hands to her. “Otherwise we are swimming in a vortex and life has no meaning.”

She hadn't known how to reply, and she hadn't really understood what he meant by a vortex with water in it. He had always
come back like that: all uppity and full of bright ideas. He'd bounced around like a pup for a few days. And she'd not known
how to be. Not knowing what she was feeling about his trips to London, she'd gone around saying nothing. She'd gone to work
and forgotten it. When she'd lost her job she'd not been able to do that. She'd got clumsy instead. The anger had come out
sideways. All around her things had slipped, got broken or lost.

It was getting cold in the lane.

“I can do that. Yes,” she said. “I can make a cake.”

“Cool,” he said. “My budget's forty-five quid. And she likes chocolate.”

“Does she like anything else? I can do a chocolate cake but it needs to be in the shape of something.”

“Shoes,” he said, smiling.

Lizzie said, “Shoes.” And she thought of some red ones with a high heel. She looked down and peered over her stomach at her
big muddy boots. She'd worn awful shoes to the interview. It didn't matter. In Scotland she would buy anew.

“She's got so many shoes,” said Mike, flexing the brakes with his fingers. He laughed.

“I'll bring it to the pub tonight,” she said. “What time will she be there?”

“Midnight,” he said, “knowing her. Though I said to get there round eight.”

Lizzie thought of the black car pulling out of the farm. Dad driving, twins all thin and bright, Mum sitting squashed in the
front, Emmett in the back, staring, tiny, out at the lane.

No one would love Lizzie Prain now.

Perhaps it didn't matter.

“Seven thirty?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “great!”

He held out a hand to shake. Lizzie looked at it and offered her own. In the warmth of his, her hand felt small and cold.
She needed badly to sleep.

“Great,” he said again.

Then he whipped the handlebars round and cycled away.

Lizzie watched him cycle up the lane towards Puttenham, and then she went back to the house.

It was freezing cold inside and she couldn't get warm. In the kitchen she wrote:
I can't do it anymore.
Then she tore the paper into small pieces and put each piece in her mouth. She let them melt on her tongue. She pushed her
tongue through the pieces of paper. She swallowed them. The agent would say, about the kitchen and garage: “It's clean here,
and simple. A good place to start.” She made a cup of coffee, and went out into the sunlight.

Lizzie had been fifteen when her mother had dumped Ian Harper. He'd been a primary school teacher in Brighton. They'd run
on the beach together at weekends. Afterwards Anne said that the only way to get over a man you loved was to imagine the pair
of you in a car crash and him walking away in shock leaving you bleeding in the car.

Lizzie stood now with her cup of coffee and stared at the lawn and the ash patch where she'd burned almost everything in the
last few days. She thought of Jacob walking away. He'd be looking down, she felt, at something in his hands. She could see
herself, watching him, upside down in the crash. She wouldn't be feeling her own pain, but his lack of it: “Poor bugger can't
feel,” she'd be thinking, with blood pouring from her nose and into her hair. “Poor man can't handle his own feelings,” she'd
be thinking, first, and her heart, close to the gearstick, would be going out to him, to his back as he walked away.

“For God's sake, don't feel sorry for me,” Anne had said when Lizzie was fifteen, and the two of them were sitting up at the
table in the window of the boarding house in Hove.

The Becketts' was a good place to live, especially after some of the scum houses they'd been in when Lizzie was small. It
was warm and clean and well lit, and they slept in a double bed beneath a huge pink eiderdown. Lizzie was by the wall, and
Anne was next to the oversized wicker table so that she could reach for things in the night. The room had a high ceiling.
It was extremely spacious, Lizzie told Jacob. A double room with sea views and a substantial bathroom. The room had been furnished
with a bed, wooden table, wardrobe and two chairs. There had been a fireplace, but they didn't use it, because the house had
central heating. There was a cast-iron radiator that their feet could touch if they poked them out of the end of the bed.
They could also hang their socks, tights, pants and thermal vests on the radiator, which meant they were warm when they went
in the morning to put them on. The wardrobe was French, she told Jacob, and the tallest part was level with her mother's ear.
On the ledge above the fireplace they kept their hairbrushes and hair elastics. In the bathroom they kept their toothbrushes,
toothpaste, shampoo and soap. They'd go and get books from the library, and cook downstairs in the Becketts' kitchen. Anne
made good bread.

Anne did her chores in the house, and in the Becketts' shop, and Lizzie, as a small child, would watch her. On Fridays the
whole house ate fish and chips on the promenade, and this was where Anne first met Ian. For a long time they kept one of the
pictures he took with the camera. Late spring, and the photograph showed them soaking up the first rays of sun, squinting
on the benches in front of the house. Mr. Beckett was in shorts and sandals, Mrs. B in her powder-blue dress, then Anne in
a mustard-yellow roll-neck jumper. Then Lizzie, tall and frizzy, in a dress and cardigan, red tights, ankle boots.

Ian Harper was walking up the shingle beach towards them when he stopped to take their picture. He ended up taking a whole
roll before Mr. Beckett went down there to ask what he was doing.

Jacob hadn't really been listening to the story. But she'd wanted to tell him—especially since he'd said there were things
missing in her, about her childhood—and prove to him and to herself that she could remember it all.

She'd said: “Ian Harper didn't come that night. He didn't come the next night either. He turned up three days later. He had
a large brown suitcase and that camera hanging round his neck. Like I have,” she said, pointing to her own.

“He was wearing a crinkled light-colored suit, and a bowler hat. He was handsome, and he came in first to the shop on the
ground floor. He said that he'd been to London. He apologized for not having let everyone know. He was polite and softly spoken.
I liked him.

“He and Mum must have been the tallest pair on the south coast of England. We knew it wouldn't last. It didn't last. He was
brokenhearted; she was impulsive.

“ ‘Disappointment is the main thing to get your head around, Lizzie,' she told me, Jacob. ‘And really try not to drink,' she
said.”

“Nothing lasts,” Jacob had said.

Lizzie had smiled, and nodded, and looked around her kitchen. Then she said how, even though her mother got so maudlin about
it, she'd known that Anne was more interested in Ian Harper than she'd said she was.

“You just can't tell with love,” Lizzie had said to her new husband. “When he came down to our room, she stopped moving jaggedly,
with her lips collapsed and her chin pushing up, which was how she looked when she was concentrating and tired. When Ian came
down she spoke more softly and tried to walk sexily around the room, like she was in a bikini and wading into the sea. He
took her out to the pub at the end of the road, and she wore her flares and her see-through top and put rose oil on her wrists
and behind her ears.

“They'd wander up and down the beach like a pair of wading birds, up the shingle, over the pelican crossing and into the Becketts'
house. A few times we went out for fish and chips. Twice he took her out for dinner, which I picture as a somber and mournful
affair, with both of them bending over a low pub table, her trying to help him with his sadness. Ian's wife had left him and
gone to America, Mr. Beckett told me. Broke the bugger's heart in two, he said.

“Mum was pregnant when Ian Harper left, but she didn't expect him to come back so she had the pregnancy terminated. She'd
been through enough by then. She was forty-one. She wasn't the kind of person who wanted to settle down, and we didn't have
things. She liked to be in a position from which she could spring and run at once; and in the meantime, she needed a bed for
the two of us, and somewhere to store our clothes.

“Another thing you don't know about my childhood, Jacob, is the fact that I had a job. I'd work for the Becketts in their
shop at the weekends and sometimes in the afternoons. I liked doing the pricing, getting things ready for delivery, and weekend
mornings were busy with locals coming in for staples. Then the holidaymakers buying nets and flags to take to the beach. It
was cool in there, the best place to be, I thought.

“Mum found it deathly in the shop. She preferred working with Mrs. Beckett in the guest rooms, dragging rugs out into the
air and beating them, flipping beds, driving the vacuum back and forth. So I sat at the counter when I was home from school,
and I was quiet there, and diligent. I didn't read, or allow my thoughts to wander. I sat on the stool and waited for my customers.
I liked being in the window, close to the sea. I sat and listened and watched. Which was how I got to hear about Ian and how
he hadn't gone to work on an oil rig and he'd never had a wife. He was all anyone talked about for a little while. Who the
hell was he? they said. Wasn't who he said he was. And it gave people the creeps now to think about his long, skinny body
shambling round the town. So sweet, they said. Unassuming. Always are, they said, when they're on the run. Could be Irish,
they said. Come here to keep hush. They talked about it right by the counter, and it didn't matter to me in the end because
I learned that the story about Ian Harper and my mother gave the local people something to take their minds off things.”

Lizzie's mother had come to the wedding and hung back, looking awkward in pastels. Once or twice she'd glanced at her daughter's
stomach, just to check, Lizzie thought, for any accident that might have prompted the decision to wed this rather odd woodland-dwelling
antiques man. Who had been charming on his wedding day. Open-armed and steering everyone about. As if, like Lizzie with the
axe and saw that desperate Monday morning, he'd always known what to do.

At seven it was dark. She drove up to the pub in the car with the cake on the front seat. Mike was waiting for her, standing
in the porch smoking a roll-up. He was wearing a red bow tie, and his dreadlocks were slicked back away from his face.

Lizzie stood in the porch and peeled back the tin foil. The shoes had come out really well. They were black and white striped.

“Man!” he said. Then he showed her how his hand was shaking. He blew on his hands and shifted his weight from one foot to
the other.

Lizzie was quiet. It was dark in the porch, and cold. She looked at the shoes.

“I think they'll be fine,” she said, feeling the heat coming off his body.

“They're really beautiful,” he said.

Lizzie swallowed while she tried to find a response.