The Flavours of Love

  ‘Fynn?’ I say, as unsuspiciously as possible while every single hackle is raised. ‘Why Fynn?’

  ‘Don’t you think he’s well hench?’ she asks, obviously forgetting who she’s talking to and about.

  ‘Hench?’

  ‘You know, hench.’

  ‘He’s old enough and close enough to be your father,’ I say.

  Shrug. ‘Still hench.’

  If it was him, she wouldn’t be talking so openly about him and his looks, would she? She would keep it quiet, as she has been from before all this came out. She wouldn’t say all that, knowing it could make me guess about them. It sounds to me that I am trying to convince myself that it couldn’t be him. But it couldn’t. He is not that man.

  Her phone beeps in her pocket and after hesitating for a few moments she takes it out. All social media has been deleted from her phone, but there were still texts. Messages from people who must have been her friends to get her number. Phoebe braces herself before looking at the screen.

  UNCLE F

  She heaves a sigh of relief and repockets the phone. It’s a coincidence, of course. He said he couldn’t be around me, not that he couldn’t be around the kids. I’m sure he’s texted Zane, now that he knows he’s not here. And he wouldn’t be who he was if he didn’t contact Phoebe today after the drama of last night.

  Another icicle slides down my spine. It can’t be him. He’s not that person. Phoebe is like a daughter to him, she’ll be like a sister to any children he goes on to have, he wouldn’t do that to her.

  ‘Phoebe,’ I say, seriously. I need to step away from those thoughts as they will not only drive me crazy, they will distract me from what I need to do. I brought us here with a specific purpose, I needed to be away from the house and from the potential of being overheard for a reason. I have been looking around while talking to Phoebe and I can’t see anyone here that seems to be lurking, I can’t see anyone who is near enough to eavesdrop. The man who is working on the beach hut is too far away, too engrossed in his task to pay us any mind.

  ‘Yes?’ she replies cautiously.

  ‘I have to tell the police what we know.’ Quick, clean, precise.

  Until this moment, when she grows still and fearful against me, I haven’t noted how free, mobile and unburdened she has been since she cried. She is now like a lump of rock in my arms. ‘Why?’ she eventually mumbles.

  ‘It’s not the best timing with everything else that’s going on, but it needs to be done. We can’t live with this indefinitely.’ Now I know how far she will go to hurt me – spreading rumours about Phoebe being worse than anything she can write or any violence she can visit upon my car – I have to end this. To do that, I have to take away the power she has by confessing all our secrets. ‘Also, Phoebe, people like Zane, your grandparents, Aunty Betty and Uncle Fynn, they deserve to know who did this and to have the person who did it brought to justice. This limbo they’re living in is horrible. We – I – have to put an end to that.’

  She remains silent, stays still.

  ‘You’re not a young girl any more, you’re much stronger, and I know the timing could be better, but the police won’t tear you to pieces, I’ll be with you every step of the way to protect you and to stop them if they upset you. But, we need to tell them so they can catch her.’

  ‘What if they don’t? What if they can’t prove it? If they arrest her and let her go, she might get really angry and she’ll know it was me, so she might come after me.’

  ‘You told me earlier that you have to stand up to bullies, and you’re right. And, you’ll hate me saying this, but I really have got your back. We have to do everything we can.’

  ‘It was her who tried to break into our house, isn’t it?’ Phoebe says.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I ask, horrified that in the midst of the pregnancy and all the troubles surrounding it, she has made the connection.

  Shrug. ‘I just think it was. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘And she let down your tyres, didn’t she?’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  Another one-shouldered shrug. ‘You let Zane go away. You hate Granny and Grandpa but you let him go stay with them. You wouldn’t ever let either of us go away unless you were really scared.’

  ‘I don’t hate your grandparents,’ I offer lamely. ‘We simply don’t get on. Why didn’t you say anything if that’s what you thought?’

  ‘Cos this is all my fault. Everything that happened is because of me.’

  ‘No, it’s not. The only person at fault here is the person who did this to your dad.’ And me.

  ‘Zane and Granny and Grandpa and everyone are going to hate me, aren’t they?’ she sobs.

  ‘They won’t. Because they’ll know it’s not your fault. You didn’t do this and they’ll understand why you were too scared to tell anyone. I promise you, no one is going to blame you.’

  ‘I’m scared, Mum,’ she sobs.

  ‘I know, Sweetheart,’ I say. I hug her close, kiss her head. ‘I know you are. And so am I.’

  Thursday, 16 May

  (For Friday, 17th)

  Saffron.

  How about we make a deal? You open the blinds and I’ll find a less harsh lesson to teach you next?

  I only want you to open the blinds because I want you to show you can trust me again. You can trust me.

  What I’ve done in the past is just frustration, me lashing out because I feel so powerless about what happened to him. Do you understand?

  I think we can help each other. This deal would be a good way to start, don’t you think?

  I never wanted it to be like this. I hope you realise that.

  A

  LI

  ‘Saff-aron, what are you doing?’

  My heart goes through the roof, as she’s done it again – managed to come all the way through the house from the attic without making a sound.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ she says. She hasn’t noticed, clearly, that her appearance has caused me to lean on the worktop, clutching at my chest.

  ‘About two o’clock?’ I gasp.

  ‘Yes, why are you up?’

  Because I don’t sleep any more.

  ‘And why are you cooking?’

  Because if I don’t cook, I’ll binge on all the food in the house and then I’ll purge it. Then, because I am so anxious, I’ll probably drive out to the twenty-four-hour supermarket at the marina to not only buy more food to replace what I binged on, but to get more stuff to binge on and then purge. If I cook, I can concentrate on something else, I can concentrate on the measuring, the weighing, the mixing, the method. I can wash up and clean up afterwards, I can possibly sit myself down when it is cooked and maybe even eat it. Maybe taste it in the eating process. See if it is that perfect blend of flavours that will bring Joel back to me.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I say to Aunty Betty. ‘Cooking helps me to think. I have a lot of thinking to do.’ If I’m bingeing and purging, I can’t think. And I need to think. I have to work out how to screw up my courage to talk to the police. I have to put aside all the worry I have about them. And I have to be careful, the killer, the letter writer, can’t know. She’s been clear about that, if I go to the police, she’ll know and she’ll disappear, but not before she’s hurt one of us. I could probably stand to be hurt if Zane and Phoebe still had their dad, I couldn’t stand for any of the others to be hurt. I can’t sacrifice one of them to get justice.

  ‘What are you making?’

  ‘Galette des rois. It’s a pastry dish that Nathalie, a French friend, taught to me many years ago. It’s ground almonds, eggs, sugar, rum and pastry. I’m experimenting, adding fruit to the mix. Trying different shapes with the pastry.’

  She moves to the large pantry cupboard at the end of the kitchen and opens it, peers in. Her entire arm disappears into the opening as she reaches for the very back of the top shelf. Without her heels, she has to push up slightly onto her toes t
o reach past the tins and packets of pasta, lentils and rice, until she gets what she wants. Her arm reappears, clutching onto the dark glass bottle of Late Bottle Vintage port. She’s been drinking it – only the good quality stuff – since the holiday where Joel and I met and he brought her back two bottles from Portugal. Ah, yes, now it’s all clear: she’s trained herself to walk silently because she sneaks down here in the middle of the night for a tipple. The simple option, of course, would be to have a bottle in her room, but when has Aunty Betty ever done anything the simple way?

  She settles herself at the table with her bottle of port and a squat, ribbed glass that she always seeks out to the exclusion of all the other glasses in the cupboard (including the actual port glasses).

  ‘What is it that you’re thinking about?’ Aunty Betty asks.

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘Like?’ she replies, accompanied by the subtle ‘pop’ of the cork coming out of the bottle.

  ‘Like … stuff.’

  ‘Like you “hooking up” with young Fynn?’ she asks.

  My head whips round. ‘Pardon me?’

  She delivers that Aunty Betty Grin at me above the three-quarter-filled glass and throws in a hitch of her eyebrow for good measure. ‘I’ve seen the tings between you two.’

  ‘Really? And I’ve seen you try to bluff stuff out of people. Even if there’s nothing to bluff.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she replies. She imbibes a delicate sip of her drink. Eventually she concedes, ‘It was worth a try.’

  ‘It surely was. And please, don’t use “hooking up” ever again. It’s bad enough when Phoebe uses it.’

  ‘I can promise you nothing.’ She takes a deep sip of her port. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Phoebe. Zane. You. Joel.’ I say his name because I need to. I need to do it more so that Phoebe and Zane will know it’s all right to talk about him in front of me. That I haven’t forgotten him.

  ‘Why aren’t you thinking about you, too?’

  ‘What’s to think about me?’

  ‘How many times have I told you, Saff-aron, if you don’t look after yourself, you won’t be able to look after anyone else?’

  ‘Erm, you’ve never told me that.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I meant to. Especially since I’ve been here.’

  Slowly, I stir the ground almonds into the melted butter in the stainless steel pan on the stove and it becomes a mass of beige, freckled ripples with the action of the wooden spoon. I turn off the heat and continue to stir until the butter absorbs the ground almonds. In goes the sugar, then the beaten eggs. The spoon coaxes them together before the rum and vanilla join them. It’s hypnotic, stultifying almost, doing this. I know there’s an answer, if I switch off by doing this, I know the answer will present itself to me. I will find my own least worst solution like Phoebe has to find hers.

  ‘Joel constantly told me how blessed he felt to have you,’ Aunty Betty says, and I nearly jump out of my skin again.

  She wants to talk and I am not going to get anywhere with broken shards of conversation puncturing my thinking, so I abandon my pastry filling and go to the table. She has placed a glass on the table for me. She refills hers, then moves onto mine. ‘Enough,’ I say after she has glugged in about a third of a glass.

  She raises a perfectly arched eyebrow at me.

  ‘All right, a little more, then.’ Black-red and giving off heady scents of red grapes, the liquid sounds thick, promises to be satisfying as it pools in the glass.

  Aunty Betty is in her chocolate-brown silk dressing gown and her real hair is hidden under the purple silk sleep scarf on her head. She looks smaller, older, without one of her wigs framing her face.

  Nearly three weeks ago, Aunty Betty sat at this table with Phoebe and my daughter told her what I wasn’t giving her. Nearly three weeks ago, I had a binge so hideous my throat and chest hurt with the lumps of food I barely chewed before I forced them down, and then the purge ripped new havoc through me. The relief afterwards didn’t even feel better, the emptiness and stillness not as fulfilling because my entire torso, jaw and throat throbbed with agony. My face was wet with pain, and with anger at myself for being weak enough to go back to that. And then I was listening to Aunty Betty and Phoebe talk and a new sorrow began as I heard I had let her down. I want to ask Aunty Betty what it was that Phoebe felt I wasn’t giving her. What she thought I could do.

  I open my mouth. Close it again.

  ‘Come on, speak your speak,’ Aunty Betty says, even though she isn’t looking at me. Her eyes, the same liquid-brown mahogany as Joel’s, meet mine. ‘Ask me whatever it is you’ve been aching to ask me since I moved in here.’

  ‘When did Joel find out you’re his birth mother?’

  Her smile is shackled like barbed wire onto her lips as she glugs more port into her glass, filling it to the brim so she has to lower her head and sip it while the glass is still on the table. When she raises her head to look at me, the barbed-wire smile is back, her eyes are like laser beams.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she eventually says. ‘He never asked me about it, and like I agreed with his parents, I wouldn’t say anything unless he asked. How did you find out?’

  ‘I saw his birth certificate after … after he died. It obviously has mother’s maiden name down as Elizabeth Mackleroy. I didn’t even twig until it said under father: “unknown”. Then I realised his mother obviously wasn’t born a Mackleroy.’

  ‘Look at you, Columbo.’ She laughs like punctured old-fashioned bellows being pumped – a small, breathless in-and-out sound with a wheeze that trails in its wake.

  ‘You never talked about it with him?’ I ask.

  ‘Some things are not meant to be talked about.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered why his parents treat you with such disdain but never seem to want to cut you out.’

  ‘They couldn’t have children, and when I “got myself in trouble” they were more than willing to help me out. You wouldn’t think I was mid-twenties, the way they carried on – you’d think I was like Phoebe.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very fair,’ I offer diplomatically.

  ‘They can’t help it,’ Aunty Betty says. ‘A lifetime of disapproval of me wasn’t going to vanish overnight. When it was clear I wasn’t going to disappear and leave them to it, they had to do the best they could while still looking in my big fat face. Elizabeth doesn’t like being reminded that I wasn’t a good girl, I didn’t keep my legs shut waiting for the man who would marry me and I still got “rewarded” with a baby while for her, who did everything right, everything by the book right down to going to church every week, it never happened. She wanted me to leave. I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘You were all right with being so close to him?’

  ‘Of course! I am a natural born aunt. Saff-aron, I could not do what you do. I could not be a mother.’

  ‘Yes, you could.’

  ‘Look at you. You worry about everyone else first all the time. Me, no way. I am the most selfish person on God’s green Earth. You would do anything for your children, probably without a second thought. Me, I think about how something is going to impact upon me – no one else – just me, before I say yes or no. I loved Joel like no one else on this Earth could but that wasn’t enough for me to bring him up. I believe, truly believe, that every child born must be wanted more than anything, and I gave him to the mother who would do anything for him without a second thought. They wanted him, I would have just had him.’

  ‘You’re a strange one, Aunty Betty. Always going on about only caring about yourself first, but that’s not true. You got yourself thrown out of the complex on purpose to come and be here with us. To help take care of the children.’

  ‘I did not—’

  ‘Yes you did. I can understand it, of course, who wouldn’t want to live with a stroppy teenager, a computer-obsessed boy, and a neurotic widow? People are queuing up to live with us.’

  Her hand curls around mine. ‘Oh, Saff-aron. Remember who yo
u are. You’re the woman who stood up to the Mackleroys. I never thought it was possible, but you stayed when others ran away. You made my beautiful Joel so happy, you have brought up two children for the last eighteen months all on your own. And all with your secret.’

  ‘What secret?’ I ask. I can tell by the glint in her eyes and the set of her features she is not bluffing.

  ‘I come down here almost every night, that’s why I don’t get up early in the morning. I know, Saff-aron. I know what you do to handle the pain.’

  I unravel my hand from hers, lay it in my lap next to my other hand. Shame and humiliation fire up in my cheeks and I have to fix my gaze on my scarred hands, to stop myself from shouting at her, from reacting to her like I reacted to Fynn.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The port I sipped suddenly tastes like cheap malt vinegar, sour and disgusting, in my mouth.

  ‘Please, don’t be upset. I understand how much pain there is when you lose someone, how out of control you feel and how it changes who you are. I understand why you do what you do.’ I can tell she wants to reach out to me again. ‘I’m sorry. Truly, I’m sorry. For your loss, and for what I have just said.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Can I say something to you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Please believe in yourself, Saffron.’ I look up at her because, for the first time ever, she’s said my name properly. ‘What I was trying to say before I upset you is that you have all these things going on, and you are coping brilliantly. Please believe that. That is all. You can do this. You can do more than cope, you can do more than get through the day, you can thrive. Please believe that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumble.

  ‘You will believe me one day,’ she says. Suddenly she waves her hand as if to dismiss me. ‘Now go, go, finish your cooking, your thinking, whatever it is you are doing. I want to finish my port in peace.’

  I stand and return to my place in front of the metal saucepan Joel used to make his cement-like porridge in, and where I’ve laid out the pastry sheets to warm up to room temperature. The white-bristled, rubber-wood pastry brush waits to be dipped into the bowl of water to seal the pastry edges, and then into the beaten egg to sweep over the top. I don’t know what I’m doing. These all look like alien items to me and I’m supposed to do stuff with them – I know what that stuff is, but I have no clue how to do it.