Lizzie knew that Jacob had loved her ability to bring him down to earth. She’d had, for him, a comforting grasp of a much more commonplace reality—brought up not in a big house in the north as he was, but by a single mother in a boarding house above a shop on the drizzly south coast. Jacob knew he could roam from the cottage because Lizzie was practical—poverty had made her that way, he’d said—and there would always be food on the table, and a bed upstairs with sheets that were clean. Their home, as she’d pointed out one evening by knocking on a wall, wasn’t caving in, and she, his loving wife, was sitting very still at the table with her eyes open and looking straight at him while holding up an oatcake with a slice of Brie, which managed to convey, she felt, that she wasn’t going anywhere, things weren’t running to cheese as he saw them in his mind. They were going to be all right. She did love him. Almost from the word go. Quite soon after he’d taken her in. He knew that. Her loyalty had been as fierce as the Ridgeback’s.
45. Codependents suffer from low self-esteem and make excuses for other people. They are usually women and tend to become the wives of alcoholics, workaholics, manic-depressives, plain depressives and passive-aggressives.
46. Codependents exhaust themselves trying to please.
47. Either one is a fan of labels or one isn’t. They can be useful during the early stages when one is trying to cut loose and press on. Later on, when the healing begins, it will be necessary to detach from the label in order to find out where you actually are. You may have to go through many permutations.
48. Making excuses for his behavior, or lack of, during consumption of his corpse will not do you any favors. None at all.
49. As much as possible, switch off the thinking brain and go through the motions. Eat, shit, sleep. Repeat this mantra to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you go to sleep at night.
50. Eat. Shit. Sleep.
It was late when Lizzie finished her tidying in the kitchen and fished the right foot out of the freezer to thaw. She put some clean water out for Rita and switched the kitchen lights off. Upstairs in the bathroom she washed her face and put her night cream on, and she wasn’t bothered about what anyone else would think, she thought, as she rubbed her fingers in a circular motion on her cheeks and forehead. She’d made a decision: she wasn’t going to prison for killing Jacob Prain. She was living again, on borrowed time, and there was something thrilling about that. A sort of “fuck them all” feeling. It was as if, in the act of killing him, and getting on with what came next, she’d smashed up the old concerns, and now life was coming richly in. She was feeling completely calm. Even when she thought of his body on the lawn and the axe going through the air with that whistling sound, she was able to feel contained. She lay back in bed and rubbed her fingers together and felt the energy fizzing in her fingertips. She was quite still. There was no pain in any part of her. It’s shock, she told herself, and then she switched the bedside lamp off and wriggled down beneath the duvet.
Tom
She had red lipstick on. That was what was different about her. She came and found me—I was unloading compost out the front—and she asked about tongs for the barbecue and rubber gloves. I said I could help her with both, and we went inside.
“My husband left me,” she said, just like that, in front of the drills.
I stopped and turned around. I didn’t say anything. I looked at her. Then I looked back at the drills. I wanted to burp, to release what felt like a blockage, or heartburn, in my chest. I felt a tugging sensation, like there was a thing inside her that would get out if it could and pull on my sleeve. I wanted to say, I think I’d leave you too. I think I’d have to. That was the thought that came to me. I didn’t, though. Of course not. I just stood beside her. Her hands were gripping her cloth bag. I put my hands in my pockets. We looked at the drills. Then I felt the tears. I took a tissue out of my pocket as the tears spilled down my face.
She asked if I wanted to go to the café to get a cup of coffee with her. I nodded and said that I’d go and ask my boss if I could take a break. It was early, around ten. I tried to walk away looking relaxed, with an arm swinging at the side.
I met her back in the café. She was sitting in the window, very upright with that frizz of hair. There were two cups of coffee on the table, and a plate with a slice of carrot cake. She was staring forward, as if there were someone sitting opposite her. She pushed the plate of cake towards me. I sat down and curled over my elbows on the table and said something about being someone who believed in releasing emotion and how that often got in the way of my work. I said something about being a sensual person. I laughed a bit. Lizzie seemed startled by what had happened back at the drills. She didn’t say a word.
“I cry a lot,” I said. “And there isn’t always a reason. It’s fine.”
She turned to look out at the “Pick Your Own” field. There was someone out there, bending down in the rows.
“Won’t be any strawbs,” I said, trying to be cheerful, to make conversation. It was a thick, overcast sky.
“How long were you and your husband together?” I asked.
“Thirty years,” she said.
I nodded. That didn’t mean anything to me. How could it? I was barely an adult. Thirty was a number. I didn’t know anything about being with anyone for any length of time and, anyway, I thought most people probably overdid it and let things go stale.
“How did you meet him?”
“He put an advert up at the art school. He’d broken his leg. He needed someone to help him. Thought it might be a way to meet someone.”
“You mean it wasn’t true?”
“No,” she said. “It was true. He had broken his leg, and it was a slow recovery thing, and he did need some help. As you know, there isn’t a shop or anything that you can get to easily from ours with a broken leg. But he did think it would be a way to meet someone.”
“Nice,” I said, and grinned. “Kill two birds.”
Lizzie tried to smile. It was more a wince.
“It’s March,” she said, suddenly, which was when I noticed the redness—a rash—at the corners of her mouth. I understood that the last weeks had been difficult for her, and I felt bad for making the scene with the tears.
“It is possible that I’m feeling this for you,” I said, and I looked up through the top of my eyes. Lizzie looked back at me. After a while, she said: “You barely know me.”
“No.”
I went back to staring at the redness at the corners of her mouth.
We drank our coffee. She closed her eyes when she drank. She didn’t touch the cake.
We sat there feeling awkward. Then she said she’d get the things she came for.
4
51. Lean meat is mostly water, so try to switch the fan on your oven off, if possible, to avoid evaporation. Even the best joints can become tough and dry if cooked beneath a whirring fan.
52. Take the meat out of the fridge and let it stand on a sideboard, to get to room temperature before you start. Don’t be afraid to open the oven, once it’s in, to see how it’s doing. Press the meat with a finger to see if it is soft, springy or hard. With chicken, a knife should be slid in between the thigh and body to see if the juices run clear. With a man’s foot, you might like to do the same just above the ankle bone, or between his big toe and the next one along.
53. Let the meat rest under foil for at least ten minutes before carving.
“Nothing lasts,” Lizzie whispered, standing in the garden on Friday night with a small brandy, and a pile of burning curtains in a bonfire on the lawn.
His foot had been lying salted and sideways in a roasting tray for two and a half hours, but on a lower heat than the hand had been, so the skin was more coffee-colored than black, and the meat was softer. She’d taken the pink gloves off and wedged them between her knees while she scraped tiny slivers of flesh off the ankle bone and the bridge, and from the heel, and added them to a hot ginger stir-fry with rice noodles, the rest of t
he mange-tout, sweet chili sauce and half a red cabbage.
It had started to rain now and Lizzie was pleased. The rain would fill up the hole and give the grass a really good dousing. The Farnham Herald was still there for reading, and she was feeling well. In general, she had been fine all week. Her wits had been about her. Right from the moment she’d gone down on the grass to check his pulse. Ten minutes earlier she’d been standing in the bedroom window upstairs, still in her dressing gown, watching him dig. Oak, he’d wanted. For its longevity and rotund glory. She’d got dressed. Ten seconds to drop the dressing gown on the floor, reach for her jeans from the cupboard. Over the nightie. Less than a minute. Through to the kitchen, out the back door and into the garden. Bringing the spade down on the top of his head. Then the small mental adjustment. Doing it again. Nothing from him. He was fifty-five. She’d expected a reaction; she’d wanted a fight. Nothing had come. He was down. She’d sniffed and touched his hair.
Like the girl she was before she’d got caught up with him, and her brain had started to cleave to his, Lizzie had stood up then and looked about her. Like the girl who might have done other things, the girl who’d walked instead into the garden on the first day and felt that she could probably manage to be here while she figured out what else there was, she’d taken in the details. The garden was hidden from the lane by the house, and completely surrounded by tall dark trees. She was the same person, it was the same garden, and the two views bookended everything in between. With the body on the lawn she’d looked quickly at the garden chairs. Then up at the trees.
Now she was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of his left foot, the skin of which was thick and tough, the skin on the sole so thick she hadn’t been able to score it, and had left it sitting in the pan like an inner sole from an old shoe. There was a slick of yellow-white fat under the heel and under the toe. While she ate the stir-fry she glanced at the paper and studied the schoolchildren lined up in a photograph on the front.
She went back to the roasting tin on the sideboard, and peered at the crunchy bones like a bracelet in the arch. She scraped a little meat from his toes with her knife and fork and held the pieces in her mouth; there was a porky taste, which was all right. So she scraped another bit of toe and held it out in her fingers for the dog, who devoured it gratefully and licked her lips and wagged her tail for more. Rita liked the little bits of meat that could be flaked away from the bones, but she wasn’t going for the sole either. She simply sniffed it on the plate put down, and let her tongue go out towards it, then withdrew, sucking ruefully back into her lips.
“Like rubber?” whispered Lizzie, and she bent down to remove the plate, giving Rita a handful of dry biscuits from the bag she’d taken out of the bin in the garage and brought into the kitchen.
She and Rita did what they could with the foot, and then Lizzie hammered up the bones on the chopping board and put the shards and the fat that was left over in the stockpot with bouquet garni and celery. She added two pints of water. She would need the clothes peg on again while it boiled and simmered and this she would have to do with candles burning before she went to bed; then reduce with wine, blend again in the mixer and reduce for an hour more till she got a fine golden stock which could be stored in a Tupperware.
In the garage on Saturday morning, Lizzie put her finger to the light switch and waited in darkness while the overhead light came on.
Several months ago she had tried to clear the garage and the shed. She got some of the old sculptures out to take to the dump. There was a foot he’d made of plaster. It was sitting on the old TV, close to the door. She’d carried it to the bottom of the garden. He was sitting in a deckchair, watching her.
“Ah,” he said. “I’ve thought about doing that.”
She walked past him with the cast in the air.
“I’m going to convert the shed into an office.”
He could have done it. It was big enough; it was a double-sized shed, like an Alpine cabin, with a step up.
“Cakes,” he said, watching her bend over the oven to take one out about a month after the shop closed down. Jacob’s Antiques, in Guildford, hadn’t been his antiques but Tim Smith’s, and Tim had given it Jacob’s name because he felt it was a good one, stronger, warmer. Jacob worked there five days a week. “A good job for a budding sculptor,” he used to say, sort of joking, though it wasn’t the most unlikely. He worked there for many years. Then the shop closed down and Tim went to France.
“Cakes?” she’d said, putting the fruit sponge on the table in the bread tin.
He’d been making suggestions about what he could do, since he didn’t like going to the job center to collect his benefits. Three years ago now to the very week, and she’d cut him a slice of fruit cake then and said she’d think about it. She’d not been working either and things at home were disastrous with both of them being around. Both in their late forties. Inertia had come into the house as if it were being belched and yawned from a mouth under the floorboards.
“What with our brilliant oven!” he said, showing his yellow teeth.
“It is a great oven,” she said, and he put his arms around her then. She felt the hope rise in her like sap. You needed something, one thing of your own to do, however small; and Lizzie had known that she could cook, and bake, and that she could do these things with love.
PRAIN CAKES
or
WOODLAND CAKES
At the Dog and Duck, they said: Great! The message spread. It could be lucrative. And Jacob and Lizzie went to the pub a few times and tried to fit in. Up at the bar, some of the local folk were talking as if they’d all known each other for years.
“The Prains are going to make cakes, love.”
“Got a van?”
“We’ll use the car,” Lizzie said, climbing onto the bar stool in a pair of tight brown trousers.
“Be good to be working again,” she whispered to her husband, who was standing beside her, nodding into his beer. For a moment there it had felt warm and loving around him, and spacious.
“Long time off now.”
“No one wants to be out of work, do they?”
“Not now.”
“No one wants to be scratching around.”
“Thing is, no one says you’re going to get depressed, do they?”
“That’s right.”
“No one says what’s coming.”
“How can they know?”
“That’s right.”
They even heard about it up at the farm. She took some fairy cakes with her one evening in a tin. To confirm it was happening, and ask them to spread the word around. It wasn’t a great meeting. Not ideal for someone starting out on a venture. Lizzie was met at the door and not welcomed in. Later, she imagined the cakes flying through the air on the back of Erik’s fist. “He’s just the sort of man to do things like that,” she said to Jacob, who disagreed and said, “That’s a bit unfair.”
But Lizzie had known from before, from the way Erik shouted at the dog and the cows when she’d done the babysitting, that things were hard up at the farm. As with last time, she came away feeling tight in the chest and hurried past the same shiny saloon car parked black and silent in the drive. With the front seats pushed right back. Erik at the door and Barbara behind him with her huge face and a small purple nose. Half of her coming forward and the other half held back in the corridor, a wry, secretive, disastrous smile keeping them all, one felt, from a harm she couldn’t articulate.
But Tom said Lizzie’s cakes were really good. He’d appeared in the doorway, squeezed past his parents, tall and pretty, and put an arm out to get one from the tin.
“Wow!” he said, chewing and licking and smiling at her. “Wowwow!”
So people knew she could do it.
Someone at the pub said: “Always knew there was something creative about you.”
“Who? Me?”
“Yeah, you. Always knew you were a bright spark.”
People drank to her
health.
“There’s that lovely picture of yours they sell in the craft center in Seale. The goose one.”
“The partridge.”
“Yeah, the partridge.”
Jacob said: “A real beauty, that one.” It had been a beauty. When she’d first come to the house she’d wandered up and down the lane taking photographs. She had loved the way, when she went out at night with the head torch on, the elephant grass had stood out so white and shocking, like images from a real swamp in Florida or somewhere. She’d tried hard to capture the light peeking through the leaves in the lane, the briefness of it, how it would wink and chase the car. In the early days, when his leg was better and he’d taken up driving again, she’d sat in the front with her head back on the headrest and gazed up at the trees. There had been a sense of the numinous then. She’d felt the love inside her, and all around her in the lane, and she’d taken some pictures to capture that.
Season to Taste Page 3