Season to Taste

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Lizzie got into the Volvo and adjusted the seat and the mirror. On the air in the car and from the upholstery she caught the
smell of his buttery skin and the tobacco from him; and she kept that smell in all the way to the lake. With the cold outside
and the heating on and the dog breathing in the boot, she managed to trap them both in a white steaming fug and she kept her
arm moving against the windscreen to clear a view of the road. It was very silly. But opening the window and letting that
smell of her husband go seemed a bit silly too.

She crunched to a halt at the lake and looked at the coins—one and two p's—scattered around the handbrake. There was a piece
of paper with a shopping list written in pencil.

A stub of pencil lay on the floor, with a chewed rubber on the end. At Joanna's house in London he'd experimented with drugs.
He hadn't told Lizzie what, or how; only that he'd tried things, and had “a ball.” “LP” was loo paper. She stared at the writing
and wondered what it meant if a person wrote like that: right up in the corner, taking up so little space, and then leaving
all that white. She lifted the piece of paper right up to her eye and closed the other one while trying to read through the
blur. Then she dropped it in the driver's door pocket and went out into the air.

Lizzie glimpsed her reflection in the lake and pulled her waterproof coat with the thick fleece lining around her neck. An
hour went by and she was still out by the tall trees, and Rita, the enormous Ridgeback, was following on behind her. Lizzie
heard the lolloping gait and she felt the mud on the dog's paws as if it were clinging to her own boots.

Her mother had said: you have to manage expectations and disappointment. And try not to drink.

“Yes,” said Lizzie, behind the wheel, for she was back in the car already, and she was staring through the windscreen, and
the dog was in the boot, waiting, stinking, slumped down.

The rubber gloves at the village shop were a pink foreign kind in a cheap bag, not the lined ones for sensitive hands she
usually got from the supermarket. Twice Lizzie went back to the shelf to return them and then she stood with her neck bent
and a foot pushed out while she read the newspapers on the floor until the woman with the huge rise of brown hair at the counter
turned from her view of the village green and asked if she was going to take the gloves.

Lizzie took handfuls of carrots, garlic, onions, celery and potatoes to the counter. “Including the paper and the gloves,”
she said, “I only want to spend ten pounds.”

She drove home, and parked the car in its usual spot in the lane, a few meters before the house, half in, half out of the
ditch. Then she sat at the wheel for a while longer and looked at the little house behind the hedge, at the redbrick chimney
wall with its huge crack, and the trees still stripped, still bare and dark and wet with
winter
.

The agent would say: “Sweet little house. Looks a bit hemmed in. Cozy, though.”

Jacob had been dead three days. Now he was in the freezer in sixteen bits. Lizzie would start cooking him this afternoon.
She'd known as she bent down to check his pulse on the lawn on Monday that burying him in the woods wasn't an option, and
not just because she lacked the muscle, or the nerve, to dig a sizable hole. It was more to do with what came after: thoughts
of his body coming up once she'd gone, shifting in the ground during a freak storm, during the sudden uprooting of an old
tree and the clearing of leaves in a gully. Then a dog or a walker would find him and that would be the end of it. In the
future, a telephone would be ringing, a mobile lighting up on a kitchen table she'd chosen for herself online. She'd be called
back from wherever it was she'd run to, brought back to the Surrey woods in a police car, forced to confront, sent down.

Lizzie opened the boot and watched the dog pee on the verge and then slither under the yew hedge to the garden. If she had
planned to stay here she might have slipped Jacob's body into the swampy marshland on either side of the lane where nothing
went and it was always dark. She'd have tethered him down among the tufts of elephant grass and known he was rotting close
to home for a decade.

It would have been all right because no one, not the postman nor the grown-up kids from the farm nor the ramblers gone astray
from the South Downs Way, would believe in a rotten old corpse around here. The Surrey Hills, and this part especially, off
the A31 between Guildford and Farnham, was a leafy exclusion on the commuter belt where people put up shiny gates and bombed
up to London in quiet thrusting cars. At the weekends they made trips to the garden center and had supper parties in the kitchen.
They didn't have time to snoop or peer. Even the postman, who came flying over the bumps and puddles, leaving the engine rattling
while he hopped up the steps in his jeans and T, was a man juggling work and a start-up and four small children.

She could have done it. She could have slipped Jacob into the swamp and kept him down, said to those in the post office or
the village pub, to the woman in the village shop, that her husband had gone to Argentina, or Cambodia, to start a new life
with a friend. She wouldn't have needed to say that he'd gone away with a woman from the Pearl in Guildford, for they would
have known from the way she paused and hung her head that something delicate had happened.

Lizzie agreed with Jacob's opinion that there were some things missing in her: she wasn't very bright, and it was true that
she lacked imagination; but she was practical, and she wasn't going to prison for this. There had been more missing from their
thirty-year marriage than was just missing in her, and if one of them was now unfortunately dead, then the one remaining had
a chance to move on and live.

Really live, thought Lizzie as she unlocked the front door to her house and carefully pocketed the key.

She would take a train to Scotland. There would be a room in the city of Glasgow with rooftops to look at and a bed and chair.
There would be bustle outside, a place to have coffee, and people going about first thing. She would be an early bird, tossing
back the covers and up with the worm. She would not be waking to the twittering of birds or the rustle and snap of one more
blessed tree. Woodland life had been appealing once, but it had left her with dark bruisy eyes and no friends. It had given
her these long bandy legs anxiously lifting up over things.

She would rent a room and work in an office. She would cycle to the library and live frugally and consciously, needing nothing
from anyone.

In the porch Lizzie turned and wiped her cheeks. She called softly to the dog crawling back under the yew hedge, and went
inside, striding bravely in her jeans through the kitchen, where she put her shopping on the sideboard, and stepped through
the interconnecting door to the garage.

She opened up the freezer. His right hand, wrapped in a bin liner and labeled in marker pen, was at the top, in one of the
removable wire baskets attached to the rim. It was resting on the bag that contained the left hand. The other parts were underneath
the baskets, piled up and labeled in black bags, and mixed in with the frozen vegetables.

Holding on to the rim of the freezer, Lizzie pulled back and stared at the concrete floor. Her mouth was dry. Her watch said
eleven thirty-two, which meant she'd lost another hour since her trip to the lake in thin, meandering thought. She listened
to the tick of her watch and looked at the ground for blood spots—blood that might have come in on her boots or on the wheel
of the wheelbarrow. There hadn't been much. Even out on the grass where she'd bludgeoned him to death.

In the kitchen, in the pink gloves, Lizzie took his right hand out of the bag and put the wire twisty back in the drawer.
She rinsed the hand in the sink, used the brush to scrub some of the dried blood off, and steamed it clean under the hot tap.
She placed a tea towel over the sink, and left the hand to thaw there, out of sight. She put a bowl of vinegar on the window
ledge and went to light the fire in the living room. It was where they'd spent most of the marriage, doing the crossword,
watching TV. They'd had many rows about money in there, and Jacob had reared up behind the sofa once with that letter-box
smile and tried to smother her in the sofa cushions.

“God help us,” he'd say, from deep in his throat where his mother was, stuck like a fish bone, tiny and furious.

“You having tea?” he'd say.

“Tea?”

“Cup of tea?”

“I'm sorry, Jacob,” she whispered now.

She was still in shock. She sat by the fire in her apron with her knees up and looked at her slippers. She broke a few little
white matches in her fingers.

“I'll put the kettle on,” he'd say. He'd tried to convert the shed. He'd gone in and out and spent an awful lot of time cleaning
the smear from his glasses.

“Tea?”

“Fuck's sake, tea?”

“Tea?”

“You having tea?”

Lizzie took the bottle of white from the fridge and poured some into a long-stemmed glass her husband had picked up cheap,
in a set of four, from the supermarket. She had decided that the wine would come with the meal, so as to combine first reviving
sip with first mouthful of food as part of a reward scheme she was revising in her head, but her pulse was up now, and refraining
from a glass at this stage was going to take an act of will she hadn't counted among her challenges this evening. The goal
was consumption, and if that meant having a drink before the meal to calm the nerves, or after, to reward herself, she would
go with whatever impulse was less significant than the desire to forsake the project entirely. It was a job like any other;
the return was in accomplishment, if not the satisfaction, however it was done. A little wine, she felt, was going to be all
right.

It wasn't helpful to look at the severed end where the bone emerged with flesh attached and shiny bits of cartilage. So she
covered it up with the tea towel and focused on the knuckle area and fingers. She cleaned the nails with a nailbrush, rinsing
in the sink; and then she brushed the skin with an oil brush to give it a good crisp. She rubbed all over the hand with olive
oil and salt and then twisted the pepper grinder; and she laid his hand on a nonstick roasting tray, carefully straightening
the fingers out.