Season to Taste (18 page)

When I go back to that house and roam around it in my mind, I see her sitting out by the shed on a Sunday afternoon with her
trainers crossed at the end of her spindly long legs. I see her with her head thrown back against the shed wall and her eyes
closed in the sun. She is peaceful. “Aren't we lucky?” she says. She sniffs the air. I sit beside her and smile.

She asks how long I think my grandfather has left to live. I don't answer her. It doesn't seem to matter now. I am strangely
happy. We like each other, we make each other laugh.

“Have you seen the flowers, Tom?”

“It's a lovely garden. So green under the trees.”

“I think we're very lucky,” she says, and I can sense an urgency, a kind of protest in her voice. “I didn't used to be like
this. I didn't used to feel this way about life. It doesn't matter what happened or didn't. Or what went wrong. Things were
and they weren't. I can't compare it to anything.”

I close my eyes and tilt my face into the sun. As I've said before, I tell her, she can say what she likes about herself.
I'm not interested in the stories.

“I think a shrink would be,” she says bluntly.

I shrug. “Great!” I say, and then I grin, and get up to go for a run.

The freezer men come, and the lorry makes it under the branches in the lane. It is a Saturday afternoon and I am there for
her. Up above, the branches scrape and scratch as it comes down the lane. Lizzie has been bending down inside the freezer
all morning with hot water and the green rubber gardening gloves. I don't bother to ask why. But I feel that she needs something
from me when the men come into the house and walk through the kitchen to the garage. I feel the heaviness when I am standing
beside her. That little thing inside again trying to jump out and tug on my sleeve. I make a joke that the men don't get.
It doesn't matter. Lizzie laughs. We laugh at each other, at ourselves. I'm a Funny One, she's a Funny One.

We look like tramps. And when the freezer is finally lifted into the back of the lorry, we are standing together in the lane
in old loose clothes, and she takes a deep breath.

“It's just a feeling,” I tell her. “It'll go.” We lock the house up. We take Rita with us and go for a walk in the woods.

I see her waking up in a summery shirt and cotton trousers. She stands with that nest of hair on her head and lifts her arms
up to the ceiling. She stands for a long time at the windows watching the woods. She asks about my grandfather. She wants
to talk about the sign he taped to her car. She wants to know who he is, where he came from.

We are often looking out of the windows, or sitting in the garden looking at the trees. We are waiting for something to happen.

I bring a radio. It goes on with the news, and then it goes off again. She wanders around and sniffs things. I find it funny.
I sniff with her. I wonder what she is looking for. I've heard about the five stages of grief at the end of a relationship.
I start to see that she is moving between them, drifting back and forth, and trying to move on.

“Do you want to learn how to cook, Tom?”

“Will you teach me?”

She goes into the garden, to the sparkling spring morning, and picks a bunch of daffodils. She puts them in water on the sill
in the kitchen. Then she opens the drawer with the knives in it.

“Probably best to have five knives to start with. And a good steel for sharpening. The vegetable knife needs to be razor sharp—keep
it for carrots, onions, garlic, leeks. Then a medium-sized knife, a filleter, for trimming meat and fish, and a large one
for cutting up meat and poultry. I like a long, thin-bladed ham knife for cold meat and anything that needs to be thinly sliced.
Then a bread knife. But try to keep it for bread only.”

I sit at the kitchen table and listen to her. I have enough money to buy a good set of knives. I know where to get them.

“I can manage fine,” I say.

“I know that,” she snaps back.

“And I know that I have to make a life for myself. I know you're trying to help me move on.”

“I'm not trying anything of the sort. Who am I to help anyone?”

“Well, you are,” I say. “You just are.”

I go up to see my family at the farm.

I think they are going to ask me what I am doing there. They don't ask. Everyone is tired, and trying to get on, get by. Nic
is on her way back. Mike has moved in. He's waiting for her. She calls and throws him off. He makes her laugh, and waits.
My mother sits at the kitchen table drinking white wine. Erik's out shouting at the cows. Claire says she's fine. And Grandfather's
fine. He wants to come for a visit, she says. There's nothing to see, I tell her. “There's nothing there.”

When I get back, Lizzie has her yellow apron on. She is busy washing potatoes in the sink. She wants to talk more about the
things I'm going to need.

“I'd get a clock for the kitchen, Tom. Once you've cleaned everything out and painted the walls. We'll assume you're starting
from scratch, and the room has nothing in it but oven with hob, fridge, freezer, cupboards, work surfaces, sink. Modern ovens
have built-in timers, but a wall clock, or a small one for the windowsill or the sideboard.”

“I'm not taking notes now, Lizzie,” I say. But she doesn't seem to hear me. She keeps scrubbing away at the sink in her apron
and staring out of the window at the garden while she speaks.

“Who doesn't love the peace of their own kitchen, Tom? There's something so special about it, isn't there? After all that
noise and activity during the day. To just come in at night and find it still, and the floor cold, and the clock ticking away.

“When I'm cooking, I try to think that the person I'm cooking for is a little sad. Not especially hungry, not to the point
where food is simply matter that must be ingested at once, but someone who might have temporarily lost their sense of taste,
someone in mourning, perhaps, or sad for no particular reason, detached from themselves by worry or doubt, and trying their
best to press on regardless. Imagine him, or her—hangdog, and old-feeling—and imagine yourself very carefully trying to liven
them, have them blinking in gentle disbelief at the small pot of mayonnaise and prawns that you have set down before them
at two o'clock on a bleak Sunday afternoon. Picture this person, and their need for summer pudding, perhaps, and hold him
or her in your mind, while you crack, and mix and stir. Take it slowly, do it with the utmost care. And have a little faith.
You can do this, Tom. Say it again: mayonnaise won't be made at all if you begin with the thought that it is going to separate.”

She doesn't talk about Jacob. I don't ask. I think: she is making the best of this. One day they will get a divorce.

“I'd get a good pair of scales, Tom. A measuring jug, palette knife, perforated slicer, pepper and salt mill, three wooden
spoons of varying sizes, a spatula, a pair of kitchen scissors, a small sieve, a colander. I'd get these things first, Tom,
before you do anything else. And an apron, if you fancy it; several tea towels, a dishcloth, scourer, washing-up liquid and
brush. As for boards, I like to have a wooden chopping board, about twelve by eighteen inches; a board for slicing and serving
bread and cheese, and a smaller plastic board for garlic and onions. I'd buy a couple of mixing bowls, glass or plastic, and
also some airtight boxes for storing vegetables, salads and fresh herbs in the fridge. I like to keep a couple of muslin squares
for draining cheese or straining fruits, plus a plate rack for saucepan lids, some ovenproof plates and serving dishes, glass
jars for storing rice, pasta, flour, sugar, coffee, et cetera; tin foil, greaseproof paper, cling film.”

We walk in the woods together. Lizzie rides my bike. She climbs onto it and is like a child, laughing. She takes it up to
work on her first morning.

Joanna writes a letter. She hasn't been able to get through on email. Lizzie took the laptop to the dump. Lizzie picks the
post up from the mat when we get back from work. It is a short, handwritten letter. Joanna wants to come and look at the figurines.
Lizzie goes to stand in the garden in her coat.

I follow her out. I ask her how her day at work was. She doesn't answer. I go back inside. She follows me and asks if I will
drive the sculptures to London for her. I ask why the woman can't come to collect them.

“Because, Tom,” she flashes back, and then stands there, eyes blazing, lips pinched. I can see the anger. She doesn't know
what to do with it. She is trying to smile.

“If you're angry,” I say, “then for fuck's sake just be angry.”

“Yes,” she says, and goes upstairs.

“How do you know she'll like them?” I ask the following morning when we are packing them into a box for me to take to the
car.

“She thinks he was good. I didn't.”

“How can you say these are rubbish?” I ask her, holding one of the little leaping boys in my hand. I wrap it in pages of the
local newspaper.

“I don't.”

“They're so delicate. So beautiful.”

“Yes,” she says. “There's something innocent about them.”

“I guess it takes an artist to know another.”

“I'm not an artist. I never was.”

“Were you scared?”

“Scared of what?” she says.

“Of him? Of his talent. What he could do.”

Lizzie had been in a car crash at the age of twelve.

Life went on. People died. The sea roared. Dogs ran around and barked.

“You pay your bills and you go to work,” she said, getting in the car one morning, and showing me a bit of leg under her skirt.

I didn't know. I had no idea. I was with a woman twice my age. I could see that it was possible to wake up every morning and
feel happy.

I could see that it was possible to wake up.

“Tom! It's morning!”

Like a child. “It's morning.”

She was trying to start again.

“Children are playful, trusting, happy and alive, Tom.”

Children are bounding up the stairs with the sun.

She tells me about her mother. I picture a tall, independent woman striding along a beach.

Boom, she says, in a way that suggests death bookends everything, curtailing her experience over and over again. She mentions
her father once, says he was from Ireland, and that was all she knew. All she would ever know. There wasn't anything else.

It turns out that we both hated being alone. I was lonely and she was lonely. It didn't matter much what we did when we were
together. Just that we were, in that short time as much as we could be, together.

How could love ever have been a calm, gentle gut feeling like a big growing peony or a happy rock down there? For Lizzie it
was an intermittent stabbing sensation in the heart and lung area so that a desire to give was always associated unconsciously
with a slight inability to breathe. And love came with a sense of loss. All she had lost. That had made her work terribly
hard.

“You need what we all need, Tom,” she says. “You need what we all need.”

Which is love. And the peace of mind to feel it.

“That's part of the problem,” she says. “You can feel love, and know that you love someone deeply. But in your mind you're
going to be quietly unraveling it. So that comfort doesn't come. Because how could you bear it? To latch on, and be pushed
away, with your mouth open and your hands flailing madly?”

Lizzie had found a person willing to learn from her. I'd found someone I could “be” around. I was fascinated. I didn't ask
questions.

“You're so laid-back, Tom,” she says.

Then I tell her that my grandfather wants to visit. She goes quiet. After a while she says it's not possible. No one can come.

On Saturday morning at the end of our week Lizzie comes to the garden center and she walks around with her head tucked down
on her neck. From time to time she looks over at me. She has her hair behind her ears. She comes to the checkout with a jasmine
to plant down by the wall. She wants something to grow up the south-facing side of the shed.

We have an argument about my grandfather coming to visit. I say, “He only wants to pop in! Can't we give anyone a cup of tea?”

I know that the time is coming for me to go.

Lizzie left a note. With instructions for the dog. She left the house keys under the mat. She took the cool bag and she put
Jacob's head inside it. She had removed it from its bin liner and wrapped it in fifteen sheets of newspaper. There were four
ice blocks inside it, and she would stop for bags of ice on the way. She kissed and ruffled and left the dog.

She rang Bob and said that she hadn't made a decision about the car after all. She was going to leave it at home for now.
There were four legs of the journey: a cab to Guildford, train to London Waterloo, across London on the Underground, then
up to Scotland.

She got into the taxi with the black holdall that had been at the top of the stairs for seventeen days, and the cool bag.
She put the holdall in the boot and sat with the cool bag on the seat beside her.

As the taxi turned around and then bumped up the lane, she kept her arm resting on the bag, and her chin tilted up in the
back window.

In her dreams, they had all come to help her; to take over the last bits, the cleaning up. In reality, Tom hadn't come back
to help her with the shed as he'd said he might, and Joanna hadn't come down in her zippy little car and bounced up the steps
to help her either. They'd not found the three beautiful figurines of a boy—leaping, reading, and standing laughing with his
hands in his pockets—and they'd not laid them out on the garden table and had a little cry over the wasted years. Joanna hadn't
taken them away in her zippy little car, and Tom hadn't held Lizzie's hand and promised to turf the lawn and take care of
the dog and the house and the garden. No one had come, and the silence had clung and oppressed her, reminding her through
the cleaning, the sweeping, the closing of doors to each room behind her that we all have to look after ourselves, and things
can't be rushed, and we can't start again.

Except that Lizzie felt she owed it to herself to try.