The Flavours of Love (16 page)

‘I think it’s great,’ he grins. His smile, which changes the shape of his face, makes me suck in air and avert my eyes. ‘The idea of finishing the cookbook and the talking. I especially like the talking.’

‘Charmer.’

‘Do you have a name for the book?’

‘We came up with a title together. The Flavours of …’ The word hitches itself in my throat, hooked into place by embarrassment. Lewis Bromsgrove waits patiently for me to complete my sentence. The word love shouldn’t be uttered in front of one such as him. It’s indecent, wrong.

‘The Flavours of …?’ he encourages.

‘Ah, nothing. Don’t know why I even brought it up. And it’s not
as if I’ve got much time on my hands at the moment, what with my aunt, well, Joel’s aunt, moving in and Zane and Phoebe and work. Nah, it’s not going to happen.’

I haven’t talked about Joel so much in an age. I am using my husband, right now. I am building a barricade around myself; a barrier between me and this man who kept invading my thoughts last night in between the replays in my head of the letter.

Ding-dong
of the doorbell brings a new relief. I almost run to the door, throwing it open, hoping for someone trying to sell me something so I will not be alone with this man.

Fynn.

It couldn’t be someone from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, it couldn’t be someone offering to wash my car, it couldn’t be the postman with a delivery – all of whom I would have dragged in for a chat – it has to be Joel’s best friend. Who saw me out last night with the man in my kitchen.

‘Hi.’ He grins at me as he usually does.

‘Hi,’ I reply. My heart’s staccato beat is erratic now, it’s also deafening in my ears.

‘Am I coming in?’ he asks.

‘Oh yes, of course, of course. I was just in the kitchen.’ Although he’s texted almost every day asking how Phoebe is and how I am coping, I haven’t updated him on finding out who the father is.

Well trained in entering what is practically his second home, he kicks off his black leather Converse shoes, hangs up his grey hooded jacket.

‘So, I’m at a bit of a loose end for dinner tonight and wondered what you were up to?’ he says with a sideways grin.

‘Would you like to stay for dinner, Fynn?’ I ask.

‘
Really?
’ he says in an exaggerated manner. ‘That’s so kind of you. I hope I won’t be imposing too much.’

‘You’ve the cheek of a baboon,’ I say. This joviality is going to last until the end of my corridor, until we step over the threshold of the kitchen.

‘Aww, but all the charm of a … Actually, what is the most charming animal?’ he asks as he crosses from the honey-gold wood of the corridor into the white-tiled kitchen. He doesn’t get very far into the room, doesn’t even make it as far as the stain before he stops when he sees who is standing there.

‘Snake?’ Lewis Bromsgrove offers, as though he’s been a part of our conversation. ‘Or are they the animals that need charming?’

‘Snakes are reptiles,’ Fynn states, staring Lewis down with the sort of disdainful correction Zane would make.

‘True enough.’

‘Fynn, this is Lewis Bromsgrove – the father of the boy responsible for, well, what’s going on with Phoebe. Lewis, this is Fynn McStone, he was my husband’s best friend since they were eighteen and obviously became mine as well.’

Their handshake is firm, short, unfriendly, as if they’d rather punch each other instead. Fynn has always been protective of me, but in the last eighteen months he’s been shielding me as much as he can from what can and does go wrong. Without him and Imogen, I would have completely broken down, unable to function because I was frozen with shock; stupefied into inertia. When I needed him to, Fynn stepped in and did what needed doing.

Lewis’s problem is that he fancies me. It’s arrogant to think that, but it’s not a simple case of fancying me because he thinks I’m beautiful or amazing, nor has he fallen in love at first sight; he believes I’m fragile. He fancies me as a delicate little flower, partially crushed by the loss of her husband who needs help and nurturing to reanimate her petals. He fancies himself as the reanimator, the person who will help me get over this. Fynn’s appearance, his familiarity and ease with me has Lewis on the back foot – I am not alone, I am not isolated, I have adult support … in the shape of a rather good-looking man, too.

‘I’ll get off,’ Lewis says, pushing himself upright so he is no longer leaning back against the worktop. They’re the same height and that seems to perturb the pair of them – one of them was hoping they’d
be physically superior to the other. ‘I’ll call you about the appointments,’ Lewis says to me.

‘Yes, yes, do that,’ I say, eager for this to end.

‘Fynn, good to meet you.’

‘Yeah, right.’ At the front door, Lewis lingers, reluctant to actually do the leaving part. ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘You, too,’ I reply.

He openly examines my face, his brown-black eyes almost hypnotic as he does so. ‘When I first met you, I assumed you didn’t have a clue about anything, despite knowing what had happened with your husband,’ he says. ‘I secretly thought I was so much more enlightened than you but the same thing’s happened to me. Guess I got a reality check, didn’t I?’

I nod. I’m supposed to make him feel better, to tell him that I had been a lesser parent, and he had done the best by his son and it was unfortunate, that’s all, that we’d both ended up in the same place. I’m supposed to add that we’d work together to make this right. Unfortunately for Lewis’s sensibilities, that isn’t going to happen.

‘Bye then,’ he says, disappointed I haven’t slipped my fingers into the hand he has been holding out, I haven’t committed myself to him because of the circumstances we find ourselves in.

‘Bye.’ I grin at him and shut the door, pushing him away and out.

*

‘What was that?’ Fynn asks the moment I re-enter the kitchen.

‘What was what?’ I say.

‘You and
him
.’ He spits out the word that refers to Lewis Bromsgrove like it is dark, yellowy-green infected phlegm. ‘He was holding your hand last night and today … What’s going on, Saff?’

‘Phoebe is pregnant. She will not speak to me. For some reason, she speaks to him and she speaks to his son, the boy who got her pregnant. I am trying to find out what I can in any way that I can. That is what is going on.’
Did I decide what I’d make for dinner? Carrots? Maybe I’ll make something with carrots. I have two bags of them in the fridge. Maybe I’ll add butternut squash, ginger and apple, and make a soup.
Joel liked soup. He loved that soup
. ‘And he wasn’t holding my hand last night, he touched me for some reason and I’m sure you saw that I took my hand away.’
Do I have ginger?
I move towards the fridge and, without seeing the photos I’m staring right at, I open the door, pull out the clear plastic drawer to the salad crisper. I went shopping on Monday, when I didn’t realise until I was making pesto how low I was on olive oil, so the vegetable drawer is quite full with various coloured items, some in plastic wrappers, others in brown paper bags, others au naturel, and it takes a couple of goes to open it fully.

‘There is obviously tension between the two of you, beyond all this Phoebe stuff,’ Fynn persists.

‘If you say so, Fynn. But I can’t help but wonder if you’d be like this about any man I talk to because he’s not Joel.’

‘You were not just talking to him.’

Celery … tomatoes … carrots … cucumber … rocket … carrots again … three-pack of peppers … lemons … ginger. I have ginger. But no butternut squash.
When did I use butternut squash?
I’m ignoring Fynn. It’s the only way sometimes. When he gets a bee in his bonnet about something, I ignore him, allow him to ramble on until he runs out of steam.

I remove chicken pieces from the meat drawer, then remove a full head of garlic from the bottom shelf.
No, I don’t know what to make with that
. I return them to their places in the fridge.
I’ll think of something
. I take them out again. I do this several times and when I shut the fridge, without the chicken or garlic, Fynn is standing right behind it, close enough to make me start.

He’s let his hair grow in the past year or so, and it falls in dark, haphazard curls all over his head and around his face. It’s his face I focus on now. He has a straight nose, defined cheekbones, gentle eyes, and a beautiful mouth. I know what that mouth is going to say and I wish more than anything it wouldn’t. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish he would let it go.

‘Are we ever going to talk about what happened between us?’ is what he says.

I knew this day would come, it had to, of course. But, sometimes I manage to convince myself that it didn’t happen so there’ll never be a need to have this conversation. Sometimes it seems like the most ludicrous idea that I –
we
 – could ever have done such a thing. Sometimes I remember it all and I think I’m going to die of shame.

‘I never ever want to talk about that,’ is what I say to him.

His navy blue eyes stay linked to mine. ‘We’re going to have to, though, aren’t we?’

Yes
, I think at him as I slowly nod my head,
we are
.

Sometimes, I wish I could go back and unmake all the mistakes I’ve made since
that day
 – this would be the first one I erase.

‘I don’t know what to do with myself any more,’ I said to Fynn. ‘I’ve been so focused on getting through the last months with the admin, budgeting for every penny, the funeral, the inquest, and making sure Phoebe and Zane are as OK as they can be, that I haven’t had a chance to stop and think.

‘Now I’ve stopped, there’s this emptiness inside, and I keep expecting it to be filled up again. For me to roll over in bed and to see him there and realise that it was some terrible mistake. I wouldn’t even mind going through all that stuff if it meant I’d be told it was a mistake at the end of it. Do you understand what I mean?’

In the darkness of my bedroom, Fynn looked over at me from his place kneeling up on the brown leather love seat in the bay window and nodded. ‘I know I said it gets easier, and it does. Not sure when, but … Oh I don’t know what to say,’ he admitted. ‘I talk, I hear words coming out of my mouth, at the funeral, for example, I knew I was talking to people and they weren’t turning their backs on me or trying to punch me, so what I said couldn’t have been terrible, but now, I don’t remember what I said. It was all words to fill the space. Like what I was saying just then, they were words to fill a space where a person used to be. None of them can, though. And none of it is meaningful enough to ease your suffering.’

‘You’re suffering, too.’

‘Please don’t do that,’ he begged. ‘Please don’t diminish what you’re feeling to think about me or anyone else. Unfortunately,
there’s enough grief to go around. Don’t try to comfort someone else at your expense.’

‘You’re not just “someone else”.’

We peered through the wooden slats of the blinds at the outside world. Joel always liked to keep the blinds open, I always liked to shut them. Whenever he wasn’t around or if I went to bed first, I would shut them. Since
that day
, I’d left them open. Just like I’d continued to sleep on my side of the bed, not properly close the lid of the toothpaste (even though it used to drive me disproportionately wild when he did it) and place the TV remotes on the floor by his side of the bed. It’s not been a concerted effort to do it like he did, it’s more a need to keep as many things as possible how they used to be. My life wasn’t bad before so there’s no need to change it.

The dark orange-brick houses opposite were in darkness, but the orange-yellow glow from the street lamp still illuminated them. Light pollution blotted out some of the stars above the houses, washing out the bright pinpricks and casting the night sky as a shimmering navy grey instead of a deep, endless black.

Joel and I used to kneel like this sometimes, staring out into the night, talking. We’d talk in bed, too, but sometimes, even after sex, kneeling in the dark, spying on the outside world felt like we were in a time machine and we’d been sent back to a shared childhood where we snuck out of bed and stared into the night.

When nothing moved or stirred outside, I returned my gaze to Fynn. He looked how I felt: exhausted; like the drip, drip, drip of grief was slowly wearing him away. The last few months had scored deep, grey trenches under his eyes, had ploughed furrows into his forehead and had shed so much of his weight he looked fragile.

‘You look so tired,’ I stated.

‘It’s always nice to get updates from the talking mirror,’ he replied, a grin not far from his lips.

‘Ouch, I deserved that.’

‘Yes, you did. But you’re right, I’m tired, you’re tired, I’ll do the decent thing and go. Or I can stay downstairs on the sofa if you want.’
He used to do that, in the early days. When I was still wandering around the kitchen in circles, unsure what to do, what to think, what to feel. I would wake up every half an hour and come down to the kitchen, searching for something, looking for something, never finding it. I think it was Joel I was looking for and I knew I wouldn’t find him, but that nagging feeling wouldn’t go away. Fynn would let me walk for a few minutes, then would come in from the living room, would take me by the hand and would lead me back to my makeshift bed on the love seat in the bedroom. I’d slept there because I was terrified of losing his smell on the sheets, on his pillow, on the duvet. If I didn’t sleep in the bed all the time, I would be able to climb in whenever I wanted and would be greeted with the smell of Joel, I’d be transported to where he was. At that time, I wasn’t ready to accept he was gone, but I was even less ready to do anything to destroy something precious he had left behind.

‘No, no, those days are over. But it is a good idea if we both get some sleep.’

‘Night,’ he whispered at the bedroom door, about to open it and not wanting to wake Phoebe and Zane.

I went to reply to him, to murmur my own goodnight, but my voice stopped working. Closed over, plugged up with a sudden thick and heavy sadness. I couldn’t get another word out. I could just about breathe, but I could not speak. Fynn turned back to me, concerned. His fingers slipped away from the handle … and I desperately wanted him to stay. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, still whispering.