“I think it’s all fine,” said Lynn, looking, shrugging, at Steven. “Don’t really see the point in our sitting here asking you all kinds of questions which aren’t really relevant to whether you’re going to be doing this job, and how. We’ve had a run of young ones and they’ve got restless and bored. Need someone who doesn’t mind routine, who wants the job, you know?” She looked at Steven. “Yvonne wanted to travel and Vicky just sat here at the desk looking at the clock all day and reading her Facebook page. The hotel’s not so busy in the week. We do conferences and weddings at the weekends. We need someone solid, reliable. And it seems to me that the best thing to do is just offer you the chance to come in for a few days sometime. We’re doing refurbs. So it won’t be till May.”
She looked at Steven. “Sound all right?”
“Fine by me,” said Steven, and he smacked his thigh quite gently with his fist. He’d drunk his coffee and seemed to be enjoying himself. “Thing is, it’s a jungle out there,” he went on, pointing a long white finger in the direction of the sliding doors and the main road.
Lizzie looked at him.
He looked back at her, and smiled. “Ah,” he said. “I thought that would surprise you.” He winked then, and Lizzie felt sure he’d started to tease. She didn’t mind it though. She almost felt like she could tease back.
“Carrie will be working with you on the desk,” said Lynn. “She’s got a dog. She lives in Farnham with her Steven.”
“Not me,” said Steven. “He’s a ‘ph,’ I believe.” Then he spelled it out for her. Lizzie smiled. In ordinary circumstances she might well have found by now that she was having difficulty breathing. She looked at the light coming through the high windows and imagined herself in a church with some silent people sitting in the pews. Out on the main road life was hurtling by. Down in the woods there was a Volvo parked by her house with her husband’s smell trapped in the upholstery. There was a freezer full of pieces of him. In here, though, up at the hotel, she was all right; and even though her heart was thumping underneath her interview shirt, she was quite safe, and the temperature was just right.
“Do you have a bike?” asked Steven, grinning as he bit into his biscuit.
Lizzie looked at the two of them.
“Steven comes by bike,” said Lynn. “Like most people these days. Which is nice, isn’t it? My son works in a bike shop in Farnham. Been there seven years now. Went to university and studied engineering. Ended up working in a bike shop. Quite happy, though. Loves it.”
“Same with my mate Tom,” said Steven. “He works at the garden center now. Studied for a degree in biology or something, I think. But you know that because he put us in touch with you, Lizzie. Said his neighbor was out of work and looking for a job.”
“Yes. I know the neighbors,” she said quietly.
“Tom’s become a nice-looking young man,” said Steven to Lynn in a way that made him sound like an uncle. “He didn’t finish the degree.”
“It was horticulture and garden design,” said Lizzie.
“He didn’t finish,” said Steven.
“So working at the garden center to get some experience isn’t such a bad idea,” Lynn said.
“Yes, I know him,” Lizzie said, leaning forward. She wasn’t going to take the job. She was hot sitting here with the clot of anxiety in her chest. In a fortnight, or less, she’d be on a train to Scotland.
If she hadn’t married a man like the one she did, she might have made better friends. She took a sip of her coffee. People leaned into life when it felt safe to do so. When life felt warm and inviting people came in to be there. Otherwise they hung back, waiting, growing pale. Had things been different, she might have gone up to the farm more regularly. Barbara was an odd woman, but she might have become a friend.
“Good coffee, isn’t it?” said Lynn, resting her cup on her breast. She used her free hand to wipe around her face as if it were a flannel. Then she let out a huge sigh, as if, in almost offering Lizzie the job, she’d tired herself out. “Busy morning we’ve had so far, haven’t we, Steven?”
“Very,” he said, and nodded vigorously. Lizzie looked at their trainers. They were wearing the same ones: shiny white with a pale blue stripe running down the side.
“Is there a uniform?” she asked.
Lynn tilted her head over towards the reception desk where a girl was sitting with a headset on.
“Carrie’s in,” said Lynn. “See the shirt?”
Lizzie looked. It was a white shirt, with a soft frilly collar.
“What are the hours?” she said. Steven checked his clipboard.
“Varies,” he said. “It’s done on a rota. Eight-hour standard, though. Six till two. Eight till four. Ten till six. And so on.”
“Well,” said Lynn. “Not really ‘so on.’ We don’t go beyond two in the afternoon till ten at night.”
“No,” said Steven.
They wondered if she’d like to have a think.
“How about we speak again Monday week?” he said.
Lizzie looked at them both and frowned. She was almost being offered a job. They stood up. Lizzie put her coffee cup down on the table and gathered her things.
“I’ll show you over to the desk,” said Lynn, “and you can meet Carrie.”
80. You are well in there and on your way. It’s time to take a little breather, and understand that there is no going back. Check into the body, and see how it is feeling.
81. Your husband’s flesh will now be in your mouth and esophagus, your gullet, stomach and intestines.
82. If you have managed to go to the loo yet, he will have also come out already as waste. Take a pause here. The more you take in, emotionally, at this point, the cleaner your bill of health is likely to be in the future.
83. Look at the poo.
84. What you have done this weekend is remarkable.
85. Don’t suppress. If you need to run into the woods and scream into the trunk of a tree, then do that. Once. Do it. Do it quickly. Move on.
It was remarkable. On Sunday morning, she’d cooked the right foot. With pumpkin. She ate at the table using the fruit knife to take strips off the bone. She sat perfectly still and upright, not needing to read the newspaper or listen to the radio. The workings of her mouth, brain and jaw had been in perfect unison. No need for thought. Open. Close. Chew. Swallow. Then the toenails, the knuckles and the smaller bones had been crushed in a blender with salt, turmeric and cumin. She’d eaten the mush heaped on a plate with herbs from the garden; she had all sorts, and rosemary gave it character. The ankle she put in the stockpot and reduced, as before. Then blended again. Reduced, reduced. Then she’d put the stock in a Tupperware container in the fridge.
At the Dog and Duck on the way back from the hotel, Lizzie ordered a glass of white wine and a packet of crisps. Mike, behind the bar, had a ponytail of dread-locked hair and a black ring in his eyebrow. He said there was a bowl round the back, by the door to the garden, if Rita needed a drink.
“It’s OK,” Lizzie said, catching sight of her face in the mirror behind the bar. Despite her efforts at makeup—enough to cover the marks and sags—she still looked pale. “What a fright,” she whispered, as her mother would have done, fingering the coins in her purse.
“It’s not busy,” he said. “For a Monday.”
Lizzie gave him a five-pound note. Already this morning she had spoken more words than she’d usually done in a week. It wasn’t hard to find a few more.
“Was it busy at the weekend?”
“Had a guitarist here Saturday night. He was all right. Old Emmett from the farm got stuck at that table in the corner. Had to give him a fireman’s lift to the car and take him home.”
Lizzie thought of the stick and the barrel chest and the wave of white hair. It would be hard to lift him onto a shoulder. Even a strong shoulder like Mike’s. A year ago there had been a MISSING poster on a tree in the lane with a photograph of Emmett. It had been up high on the trunk, but Jacob reckoned t
he old man had pinned the poster to the tree himself. “Has to be him. Who else?” he’d said. In the picture Emmett had been younger than he was by about a decade, smiling into the camera with eyes that had been whited out by Tipp-Ex.
“You all right with that lot? Need a tray?”
Lizzie shook her head and grinned at Mike and then carried her wine and crisps out to the garden. There were ducks on the wet grass and the leaves from a weeping willow clogged up the surface of the stream. It was almost sunny. Lizzie sat on a bench at one of the wooden tables, using her mac to keep her bottom dry. She took little puffs on a cigarette. Emmett should have been put in a home by now. He wasn’t a danger to others, or to himself; he wasn’t someone who should be isolated from the community, but he wasn’t right. He was old and his mind had gone. They should have taken him in, she reflected. She took a deep puff and tried to lift her shoulders. She hadn’t smoked much in the last twenty years, but she always enjoyed it when she did. She and Jacob had tried to give up, as a couple, a number of times. Whoever had given in first had been bashful, relieved, defiant out in the garden.
He’d smoked with his left hand, holding the tip right up close to his palm like a good-looking actor he’d seen in a film. She’d barbecued that left hand on Sunday evening in a treacle marinade, wrapped it in foil and let it cook for twenty-five minutes only. She’d broken it up while it was still in the foil with the carving knife, and she’d been able to suck the meat, which was wet around the wrist and the fatty bit above the thumb. Jacob had told her that a quarter of the brain’s motor cortex was devoted to working the muscles of the hand. At the kitchen table, with a glass of wine, and the radio on, she’d tasted blood and skin and winced into a forkful of fluffy mashed potato, and she’d crunched the ice-cool slices of cucumber carefully, and spooned on a little minted yogurt. She’d started flossing again now, too.
Now she teased her hair a bit with her smoking hand. She looked at her nails. It was possible that she’d been offered a job. Determination. As if she were missing a piece, he’d said. “Ego, Lizzie, and determination, to do things for yourself.” Two fat ducks scrambled out of the water and waddled towards where she was sitting hunched on the edge of the bench. They stopped a few feet away, and then put their beaks to the ground. But she could do things for herself. Good or bad, she’d always, in a sense, been doing things for herself.
Emmett had come to the barbecue they’d had once—the only social occasion—and he’d done nothing but sit forward on one of the chairs, staring into the trees. He was mad and old and decrepit, and he did nothing, and that gave him time to smell the air and notice things. Of all the people around here, he was the one she feared most.
She took the glass back inside and put it on the edge of the bar so that Mike wouldn’t have to wade outside in the watery grass to get to it.
“Cold out,” he said, and then he began to whistle as he took the glass through to the kitchen. He came back to the bar with a packet of cigarettes. “Here,” he said. “Someone left a pack on the bar last night. I’ve given up, my girlfriend hates it. If you take them, you’ll be doing me a favor.”
86. You may feel that nothing is the same as it was before your husband died. There may be a strange feeling of stillness, as if everything is on pause. It may seem that the old thoughts and preoccupations have gone away. You may feel as if you are looking at the world through a different person’s eyes. Is there a new sense of light? Is there humor? Kindness?
87. Write down your name. If you want to. And your age. Don’t bother if it doesn’t make sense to you. Write down a few things that you like.
Coming home, walking up the steps with the ache of tiredness in her legs and her shoes in a plastic bag, Lizzie saw the ceramic bowl on the sill that he’d put there for loose change. And a book his mother had given him for addresses and telephone numbers. He’d not had friends. He’d explained that it wasn’t clear to him the exact reason why. He’d made a few at the prep school he’d been sent to, and then some at the boys’ public school in the Midlands. Sporty place, he’d said, drawing on a cigarette, and she’d seen something then in the tension around his eyes. She’d felt that she understood his isolation.
“Were you always going to be an artist?” Lizzie asked him once, after they’d managed sex and were lying together in his room listening to the sound of the rain. She’d been at the house for months; he hadn’t tried to sculpt a thing. The cast was off his leg, but the three bags of clay were still in the shed. He had brought in a huge branch from the woods, and she had teased him about that. They’d put it on the kitchen floor. She had taken photographs and felt like the kooky girl in the weird tights. Jacob had been at ease, his face looking young and calm. Lizzie had taken the tights off. He’d gone to get the wine. She hadn’t had much sex in her life—a few unmemorable encounters at art school, and the virginity she’d lost on the beach at sixteen. She’d been very surprised, in the kitchen with him, by how much she’d enjoyed the feelings in her body. Then they’d gone upstairs and done it again, slowly this time, while looking at each other.
Lizzie hadn’t known if Jacob was any good at sculpture. Certainly she’d not been able to say anything to him about his work. No wonder he’d skipped about on Joanna’s encouragement. Joanna thought he was curious, that his work was “moving.” At her house in London she would have said so.
“I just need to go to the shed. I need to do something,” he’d say.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“It’s after dark. It’s dinnertime.”
He’d reach for the wine and agree that she had a point.
“I can go after dinner. That’s what I’ll do.”
“Yes, that’s an idea.”
Somehow the two of them were sucking up all the air.
In the afternoon, she stood in the garden in her boots and coat and looked at the lawn. It had rained in the night. Not a great downpour, and certainly not the deluge she’d hoped for on the first day when the blood and clots had been about. She looked over to the spot where his body had been. There wasn’t much to see now, apart from a brownish stain by the hole he’d been digging. The sun had gone in.
Still in her black interview suit with her skirt stiff around her knees, she took the spade from its hook on the back of the shed door. She put her foot against the blade and began to pull the turf up. She heard the high shriek of a bird in the trees behind her and felt the air on her cheeks. The tears were there and that was a relief. Under the anxiety was a person trying to get on. There wasn’t much one could do with devastation but try to find a thread of hope. There was hope of getting through this and to a small room in Scotland. She drove the spade into the grass with her foot and the dog ran around, sniffing the soil.
88. Have you thought about the axe and spade? Is there somewhere nearby where you might like to bury them?
89. You could dig a big hole in the flower bed and put them there.
90. Or drop them off at the dump?
91. Or leave them at the garden center, perhaps. What about out round the back where the pots are. You could slide them under one of those giant trolleys on which they stack the pots. Who would notice? Wouldn’t they just be there, gathering dust and spiders, for months?
Overnight, his right lower leg and knee had been out on the kitchen windowsill in its bag. Lying stiff with the cover tucked around her in bed on Tuesday morning, Lizzie thought about what might have come in the night and sniffed it. She would be cutting away the tender flesh from the calf, which could be eaten as fillet, with brown rice and vegetables. It would be plump, and cut in two, the size of chicken breasts.
She didn’t know what she’d be doing with the rest of the leg. After the calf she would have only the long central bone and the knee, neither of which could be eaten easily.
In the shower she washed her hair and then stood hunched on the mat and rubbed it dry. She caught sight of her white shoulders in the mirror and chose not to look up from there or down at the
sagging breasts. Dry and dressed, she came downstairs, stepping tentatively into the kitchen with Jacob’s shaving cream and razor in hand and had a quick glance around. She put the tools on a tray, and made herself a coffee with milk. She filled a glass mixing bowl with hot water. In the garage, she put the lights on. She took the left lower leg and knee piece out of the freezer and left it to defrost in its bag on the lid. Then she knelt down beside the bin liner, using one of the cushions from the garden chairs to rest her knees; and she punctured the bin liner with a knife, ripping the plastic open.
Keeping it steady on the plastic, Lizzie shaved his right leg, rinsing the razor after each stroke in the glass bowl. She worked slowly. She’d got used to careful preparation. It was going to take most of the afternoon. The joint was cold but had thawed nicely. She put her hand on the wound. In her mind she saw the leg in shorts, or white under his dressing gown and creaking up the stairs at bedtime. She held on to the kneecap, and moved it a little beneath her hand. She lifted the leg in its bin liner and went through to the kitchen.
The meat came away easily from the back of the leg. She rinsed it at the sink, cut it into two fillets, and then laid them in a baking tray with olive oil, black pepper and salt. The leg meat went into the oven for half an hour, just as it was.
Out on the patio the barbecue was cleaned up and ready. Carrying the remainder of his lower right leg and knee under her arm, she went to the shed for the axe, then put the leg on the ground and made a clean break through the smooth-shaven shin. Now it was in two manageable pieces, each a bit longer than her own hand. Lizzie wrapped them securely in foil, and then lifted the pieces onto the barbecue. They nestled in among the coals. Black pepper, she thought. And lemon juice.
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