Season to Taste (17 page)

I hadn't done anything about the three little sculptures she found at the back of the shed. She was so tense and tired when
she came in from the garden that first night that she didn't even notice them. She'd given me the number of a woman in London
to call, but I didn't think there was any rush so they were still there on the kitchen table.

I don't know much about art, but even I could see that they were nice—and that they'd been made by someone who'd been “present”
in himself and with his gifts at the time of creation. There was definitely an energy in each of the little sculptures, but
I never imagined that they would make as much money as Joanna went on to get for them. It was Joanna who got in touch with
me by email, months afterwards, to let me know that they had sold. No one would have thought it would work out like that.
Not of this guy who just lived out in the woods and made the odd piece from time to time. I'd moved up north by then and I'd
lost touch with everyone. In her email Joanna said that she would try to track Jacob down to let him know about the sale.
“I think Lizzie really underestimated his talent,” she said. Of course I would never reply.

“You're a funny one, Tom,” Lizzie said when she woke up next to me on the first morning back from Scotland, and stretched
her arms out. We were lying on the mattress on the floor. She stretched her arms back and looked at the trees.

“I could say the same for you,” I said. “You're still in all your clothes from the train.”

“Funny One Tom,” she said.

We were both a little awkward, and being friendly, cheery, polite.

“Today I'm going to plant a tree in the flower bed,” she said. “And then I'm going to go and get a job.”

“Why?”

“Because it's possible I'll be all right here. If I like the job then I will stay.”

She was speaking very matter-of-factly, and there was this strange sense of excitement about her. I mentioned the figurines,
and that I hadn't done anything with them, and then I reminded her about the freezer.

I took up my book and pretended to read a little more. I was too bewildered by her return and her excitement. I remember feeling
really hot. And then suddenly really cold. I closed my eyes again and let all the feelings of warmth and confusion and cold
and comfort and loss move through me until Lizzie got up in her jumper and jeans and went through to the bathroom. Then I
sat bolt upright and went to the window to open it for some air.

We had breakfast, but not together. We were both used to having toast and coffee standing up, while fiddling around in the
kitchen, and that's what we did the first morning. Even though it was still quite cold we both preferred to have the back
door open and to stand there in jumpers letting in the fresh air. I stood at the kitchen window and looked at the shed; I
knew it was only a matter of days before she would ask me to move in there, whatever she had said the night before about me
being free to stay or go. This was her home. It had been her home for decades. She wasn't just going to start sharing it with
a total stranger, I thought. Even if she was a woman feeling alone.

“I cleared the shed out, and I swept it,” I said to her.

Lizzie looked at the pieces standing on the table.

“I'm going to invite the woman who wants them. In a few days I'll ask her to come here. You can meet her, Tom. I think we'll
both find her glamorous. And you'll be able to help me work out if she genuinely wants to be my friend or if she's only interested
in getting her hands on these.”

“It's one of life's lessons,” I said, and Lizzie squinted at me.

“What is?”

“Knowing who you can trust,” I said, and swallowed the toast. She was still on edge. Blimey, she was on edge. I felt a bit
weird again. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to stand it.

She said she'd come with me to the garden center when I went for the early shift. I wanted to go on my bike, because I really
needed the fresh air. To start with she drove behind me, going really slowly on the main road. Then I pulled over onto the
verge and waved her on. I saw the driver's window come down and a hand come out with a thumb pointing upwards, and it made
me laugh.

When I got there, Lizzie was waiting for me, just standing in the fog at the entrance with her bag.

She bought a tiny oak tree. I helped her to put the tree in the back of the car with the pot on its side and the back seats
down. It went very easily into the boot—and Lizzie drove it home while I stayed behind to work.

She said she spent all day digging the hole, digging as far down into the flower bed as it was possible to go. She hadn't
put the tree in yet. I looked down into the hole. She had certainly made it bigger. She had been working on it for six hours.
There was fresh earth and compost from the flower bed in the bottom of it.

“The sun came through in the end,” she said, and there was mud on her face. “It turned into a nice day. Thanks for the new
tools,” she added. She had her foot resting on her spade. “Great spade, Tom.”

“I've still got the receipt,” I said, fishing my wallet out from my back pocket. “I got a discount on them but they were still
quite a lot.”

“Will you help me put the oak tree in, please, Tom?”

We lifted it up and we nestled it down into the hole. I felt it press onto the pile of new earth she had put down there and
I imagined the roots growing into the soft dark earth.

I asked her why she had gone so deep into the ground. A tree sapling didn't need to go nearly that far down.

“I realized that,” she said, taking a deep breath. Then she said she'd had a lovely afternoon.

“I think it's nice that you're here, Tom. Everything feels lighter. And sunnier.”

I shrugged and asked if I could smoke one of her cigarettes as we went back inside. That wasn't like me. I was off kilter.
We were trying too hard.

“I've made us some supper,” she said, and she lifted the lid of the saucepan so that I could smell the cinnamon and cloves.

It was the nicest rice and vegetable dish that I have ever tasted. I sat down with her at the kitchen table, and I ate the
food and we didn't say much to each other, but soon we were both feeling a bit more relaxed.

“I rang the freezer men,” she said. “They're going to come tomorrow.”

“Be nice to have it clear,” I said. “Shame Mike and Nic haven't come back to you. I thought they were keen.”

“It's quite all right,” she said, in a way that made me realize it wasn't.

“It'll work out,” I said.

“Who will take it on, Tom? What will they be like?”

I laughed and messed around, pretending to hold a crystal ball.

“I see man and woman. Funny man with long hair. Skeeny woman. They want to have child. Child will bring healing to sad hearts.”

I looked at her and could see the emotion she was struggling with in her face. I told her that I thought turning the garage
into a games room for kids was a good idea.

“A family with young kids would be great,” she said. “See what the house wants.” She was teasing me, and raising her eyes
in a way that suggested she'd said something spooky. She didn't want to be spooky. She didn't want to freak me out. She wanted
to go to Scotland. And she wanted to be all right in her own home. She wanted to be liked by me. I'm still not sure I fully
understand why. So I changed the subject.

“Are you going to move to Scotland permanently?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “When I am ready.”

“How long do you think that will be?”

“I don't know, Funny One,” she said. “I'm going to wait and see.”

Everything about that house spoke to me of surrender. From the roof slightly giving in around the chimney to the way the windows
didn't quite meet in the bedroom. Things had bent and warped and got damp and I'd started to love that, and to feel myself
settling into the softness of it, letting everything breathe.

We ate in silence for the rest of the meal. I tried to make jokes from time to time, which then needed explaining. It wasn't
the end of the world.

The most important thing, I felt, was trying not to worry about what I was doing there. Sometimes it came up.

“Do you want me to stay here with you, Lizzie?” I asked her the following morning when we were standing together washing up
at the sink.

“I want you to do what you want to do,” she said. And then she went up for a bath.

Lizzie went back to the hotel to ask if the job was still available. I encouraged her to do that. She said how grateful she
was that I had put her in touch with them. She said that maybe it might just work.

“Shall I go as I am, Tom?” she said, and she smiled in a way that scrunched her cheeks right up to her eyes.

“As you are,” I said.

She simply took the dog, walked up the hill, and walked into the hotel lobby.

She told me that the people she'd seen before, Lynn and Steven, were sitting in the tub chairs by the entrance and that they
were having coffee, as if they hadn't moved in the three weeks since her interview. “Hi,” they both said in unison. “Come
to work for us after all?”

They all stood up to shake hands.

Inexplicably, she said, they just seemed to really like her. She told them she was really sorry she hadn't been in touch.
Something had happened that she hadn't foreseen and there was nothing she could have done about it. It wasn't a problem, they
said. They were still doing interviews. They asked if she would like to give it a go for a week or two, on a trial basis,
and see how they got on.

“They were so nice to me, Tom. They were just so very kind.”

“People are nice,” I said. “They really can be.” Which was when she took the packet of cigarettes and went to stand in the
garden for an hour.

The freezer men were due to come with the lorry the following day. Everything was going well, Lizzie said, climbing onto the
mattress that night, again in all her clothes. I told her I could easily get another mattress from up at the farm, and that
we really didn't have to lie side by side in all our clothes.

Lizzie said it was fine, and for the whole of our week together we slept like that.

Lizzie parked the car up behind the old cinema and walked with her basket down North Street. The dog had been walked and fed,
and the freezer was empty now apart from the head without a brain in its bag, and the two packets of frozen vegetables. She
had thought to put the head out with the rubbish—double-bound in a refuse sack and in among the vegetable peelings and the
contents of old jars she'd cleaned out of the kitchen cupboards—and leave it for the bin men when they came up the lane in
their truck on Wednesday morning. But the image of his head being crushed in the teeth of the truck changed her mind. She
went out to the garden and stood for a long time looking at the flower bed by the shed.

Tom was going to take care of things when Lizzie was gone. She couldn't leave anything for him to find, not a speck. And since
she couldn't find a way to eat or burn Jacob's lips and cheeks and the eyes that had looked at her for thirty years, it remained
her responsibility, and therefore the best thing to do, she felt, was to take the head with her in a cool bag, with ice inside,
to keep it frozen on the train. She would need to find a place to rent straightaway; and it wasn't going to be easy. She would
have to be alone, not sharing a flat as she might have wanted to, and a bed and breakfast, as a stopgap, wasn't going to be
an option. It was an unexpected turn, but one she was going to have to live with. And so she forced herself to accept that,
and she made herself sleep with her body lying flat and her hands folded on her chest.

The house was clean. The trainers with blood on them had been through the wash. Everything had been washed, and rinsed, and
bleached. She had lit a candle on the kitchen table first thing this morning and it burned as she got changed, switching the
thick woolen jumper for a clean shirt and the interview suit she was wearing to go out.

In Guildford, she started with a cappuccino, and sat outside a café where the sun was out on the pavement. It wasn't at all
warm; there was an icy wind coming in from somewhere, but Lizzie felt good to be out in the world, and she took her jotter
out of her basket and looked through her list.

All that was left for her to do was call the hotel and turn down the job. “I'm so sorry,” she rehearsed. “It's just that I've
decided to leave the area and start my life again somewhere else.”

Then she would clear the last bits from the shed, leave a note for Tom, and send a final email to Joanna, explaining that
she was quite all right now, that she felt she was through the turbulence of the past weeks, and was happy to be moving on.

Life did go on. She finished her coffee, took pleasure in the tinkling sound of the spoon on the saucer outside the café on
the pavement, and she left some money on the table. She walked into the bank and asked to withdraw five hundred pounds from
the joint account.

The first thing she bought was an extra-large cool bag from the camping shop.

“How much would you expect to pay,” she asked the woman in the flower shop, “to rent a two-bedroom cottage with a big garden
in the woods?”

“All year round?” the woman asked. She pulled some pearls out from the gap in her starched collar and squeezed round behind
the desk. “Round here? Detached? Garden? Two grand. You'd be surprised,” said the woman, “what people will pay round here
for a detached house and bit of land.”

Lizzie said nothing. She knew people wouldn't pay that much, not for a damp little place on the bend under the trees.

“I think half that,” Lizzie said.

“You just never know,” said the woman, as if reading her mind. “People don't see it the way you do.”

Lizzie frowned.

“I can see you're thinking you'll never get that much and it'll never rent out, because right now you don't like living there
much—why would you? We don't if we're miserable. But things change and you'll look on it differently in time. You'll look
back,” she said, tugging on her pearls, “and you won't think, ‘Golly, what a dump, it'll never sell and never rent.' You'll
just think, it is what it is: a cottage, two bedrooms, with a garden in the woods. Sounds lovely.”

Lizzie looked at the woman and clutched hold of her bag.

“Sounds like the sort of place an artist would want to live. Or a young couple with a family. Sounds ideal. All that space
they can run around in undisturbed. Bet you have an open fire, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“See?”

“See what?” said Lizzie.

“It's nicer already, isn't it? Nicer than you thought. Lucky you. Detached house with a big garden in the woods and an open
fire. Sounds like heaven, matter of fact. Sounds like you should be counting your blessings, dear.”

“I'm going to Scotland,” said Lizzie. She turned to pick up a bunch of closed orange tulips. “I'm soon to leave. My husband
died.”

The woman stretched her fingers out towards the bunch.

“Oh, I am sorry,” she said, and tilted her head to the side as if she couldn't quite take it in through both ears. Then she
looked at Lizzie like someone who had been trained in the art of extending sympathy without having to participate in the emotion.
Like a nurse.

Right at that moment the tears sprang into Lizzie's eyes. She made an effort to speak through the blur.

“Many people choose to live round here, don't they?”

“Didn't you?”

“Yes,” said Lizzie. “I came here to study. At the art college in Farnham. Then I met my husband, and stayed.”

“Right you are. I was born in Farnborough,” the woman said, breathing deeply in through her nose while wrapping the tulips
in brown paper and tying them with raffia. Lizzie handed over four pound coins.

“People seem to like their houses painted gray now, don't they? Or just one color throughout. White everywhere. Or gray.”

“I like gray,” said the woman. “Gray walls. White skirting and ceilings and timber. Wood floors. Flowers everywhere. Different
strokes…” she said.

“Yes,” said Lizzie, and carried on standing there, unsure as to whether the conversation was finished and she could go.

“Let me take your number,” said the woman. “In case I hear of anyone wanting to move. Maybe I will find the person who rents
it. Or buys it, should you decide to sell.”

“I hadn't thought of that.”

“It might turn out to be the right thing,” said the woman.

“Thank you,” said Lizzie, and she turned in the shop clutching her flowers and her bag and she stepped out into the sunlight
on the street.

At “Bob's” garage in Elstead, Lizzie got out of the car and walked straight into the lean-to office where Bob was sitting
watching television on a miniature set. She said, in a voice that was deeper than her own:

“How much will you give me for the car, Bob?”

Bob was wearing a boilersuit stained with grease. He stood up at once and folded his hands on his stomach. He looked out of
the window. “Couple a hundred quid,” he said.

“I'll bring it to you tomorrow,” said Lizzie. “And you can have it for one hundred and fifty quid plus a lift to the station.”

“No problem,” he said. “Which one you leaving from?”

“Guildford,” said Lizzie. “And I need to be there by half-nine.”

Lizzie drove home, and looked at herself and her new hair in the rearview mirror. They had left it curly and cut it into a
neat little bob around her ears. Then the girl had run some product through it to make it smooth and shiny. It smelled nice,
and made Lizzie feel different. No one had mentioned the gray. Once home, she whistled to the dog, grabbed a handful of biscuits
from the garage, and off they went to the dump with the axe and spade and two boxes of stuff from the shed.

A cheerful man in a red cardigan was sitting out front, showing people where to put things. Lizzie carried all the items from
the back of the car to the miscellaneous objects area. The axe and the spade had been cleaned. She left them among the garden
tools, and the various items of electrical equipment and dusty old antiques. She stood the spade up at the back, behind an
old lawnmower and leaning up against the giant steel wall of the bottle bank. She put the axe beside it and she walked away
from these things, and over towards where the glass bottles and old picture frames were. In her younger years she would have
lingered here, and looked at the cracked pictures, the ancient sewing machines and typewriters. She would have tried to get
something for herself from among all this junk, and take it home.

“Help yourself,” said the man in the cardigan. He came so close that Lizzie could smell his rancid breath. “Take whatever
you like, love.”

“Thanks,” said Lizzie. “But I don't need anything else. I'm clearing out. I'm moving away.”

“Somewhere nice?”

“Hope so,” she said; and she gave the man a flat-handed wave and said she'd probably be back the next day with more junk.
“My husband was a sculptor,” she said, not to him but to herself, as she got back into the car.