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  For

  Jackie Coventry and Mercy Hooper

  Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation.

  Louise Bourgeois

  1

  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.

  Sug

  Flo

  Egg

  Butt

  LP

  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.

  1. It doesn’t matter to anyone—least of all him—which bit you go for. Start with the extremities if that feels more comfortable, but don’t be under any illusion about things being easier further from his heart.

  2. Take each piece as it comes. Take whatever is there. It is only what it is.

  3. Be glad that you’re alone to do this. With only the dog to witness what you’re doing.

  4. IGNORE THE SMELL that will inevitably arise. Bowls of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda can be strategically placed around the house. We’ll come on to it later. A clothes peg might be useful for wearing on the nose, with a plaster underneath the peg to prevent skin irritation. If you keep the peg on your nose while eating you will find that it takes the taste of flesh away. Strong coffee, and cinnamon rubbed into the tongue will have the same effect.

  5. You can still wear earrings. Some simple turquoise studs might be nice. Or gold? The point is, no one is expecting you to do this with a cloth on your head.

  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?”

  6. Any particularly hateful expressions of his can be jotted down as you go about this. Marriage is rich with pitiful gestures. Expressions, hand movements, mannerisms in general.

  7. Don’t analyze, or waste time trying to work out why. Write them down as you go past the kitchen table. In time these jottings will become your little army. Be liberal. Watch the lines harden into soldiers and spin upright. Guilt is a vast country that spreads, changing shape. It will grow and attack your borders. Don’t let it. Keep your army strong.

  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.

  8. Once thawed, each piece will seem a little whiter, maybe a little yellow. That’s completely normal. Some blotchiness may have occurred during the chopping up. If it looks a bit purple in places, don’t be alarmed.

  9. Like rivers of blood, rigor mortis and really terrible blemishing are the stuff of fantasy and television programs. Actual preparation of a dead body is practicalities and residing in the mundane.

  10. A simple massage once the piece has been defrosted should even out the skin tone.

  Out on the patio, in the dark, Lizzie stood in her coat with the rubber gloves and the apron still on, and she looked at the trees.

  She’d had the oven on its highest setting for half an hour before she put the hand in. It was much too hot, but searing the first bit of him beyond recognition seemed the right way to begin. She had scorched herself enough times in the garden to know what it was to be heated at 25 to 30 degrees centigrade. It was immense dehydration. As with a hangover, but worse. He was in at 250. His blood would have reached boiling point in a few minutes. It was much too hot. She should turn it down a notch. Except there was something to be said for taking it beyond the look of a human hand. She had no idea, yet, how she would react to actually having to eat it. Better, then, to go for the crisp, at this stage: better to keep it high.

  Lizzie shivered. The damp had fully permeated the little woodcutter’s house this week. She’d had several windows open and candles burning on saucers to take away the smell. During Monday’s dismemberment, the intestines slipped out onto the lawn like a heap of dead fish, and the smell that came straight after that, as the bacteria went into a breeding frenzy, seeped into her nose. The stench followed her around as she did her chores, going up and down the stairs, in and out of the bathroom. She knew that its tenacity, its terrible cling, was to be expected after the horrors on the lawn, and she cleaned the cottage with as much disinfectant as she was able to find in the store cupboard under the stairs, and as many buckets of boiling water as Rita had ever witnessed moving back and forth from her bed on the kitchen floor. Sheets, rugs, blankets and towels: everything was washed, and given an airing; and Lizzie wasn’t wearing the peg now—her hair was pinned up and freshly washed—and she wore the tiny pearl earrings. She knew; it was one of the things to watch out for, after getting too drunk on white wine, that the smell was a flight signal direct from her brain: there was death in the house, in the freezer; she should be on that train to Scotland now, looking for a hostel somewhere to bed down.

  She breathed, and crossed her arms, lifting her loose breasts under the coat.

  It was the beginning of March. By April, certainly, she would be finished, and then her life would be hers. The new life would be structured around avoiding emotional experience at all costs: animated women, news of devastation, kissing couples, feature films, small children, dogs with soupy eyes would be skirted, and walks would be walks for air in the lungs and exercise, not ways of finding a view to alter one’s perception of things. Butcher’s shops would be dealt with as and when they cropped up, and Lizzie was going to prepare for that. She would be a vegetarian, a fugitive, on the run; holding on to life against all probability, and likely therefore to experience sudden surges of exhilarating relief, though pleasure would be held in check by all that had gone before and the need to keep alert. She would strive for control. Her movements would be measured, interaction minimal.

  That was as far as she’d thought
about the future—that and leaving Surrey for Scotland. She would use what there was in the house and try not to shop for more until she got there. There wasn’t much money in her bank account—there never had been. They owned the house, but she was down to two hundred and forty pounds in her account, and a little more in the joint account. There was a cupboard full of oatcakes, a box of cornflakes, a few tins of soup, some duck fat, vegetables in the box in the garage and in the fridge, four bottles of white wine, and sufficient protein in the freezer to keep her muscles in working order. She would walk the dog, run to keep up an appetite, and to keep her head clear. She would sleep with the help of a little brandy at night, and thereby pursue this chance of a new life.

  “Carry on, Lizzie, friend,” she’d been whispering to herself since she woke this morning, though she knew it wasn’t so much encouragement as an attempt to soothe and soften the tension she could feel on her face. It was there in her jaw; it was in the eyes—enlarged a little and fixed open on the ceiling at night.

  It had been a terrible, shocking Monday morning incident. Instead of killing him, she could have taken the dog for a walk, or ventured out in the car to do the shop at the supermarket off the A31. She could have made raisin bread, or looked online. She could have used that desperate feeling to run up the lane with some biscuits and ask Erik and Barbara if they had any work in the house or on the farm. She could have driven to the garden center and waited for them to open so that she could have a wander round inside and look at nice Tom Vickory with his big brown eyes and his face full of feelings. Instead she had chosen to kill her husband on the lawn at 8:15 a.m. with the garden spade. He’d been out in a thin woolen jumper, down by the flower bed, trying to enlarge a hole he’d dug in the autumn for saplings.