Season to Taste by Natalie Young

elastics. In the bathroom they kept their toothbrushes,
     toothpaste, shampoo and soap. They’d go and get books from the library, and cook downstairs in the Becketts’ kitchen. Anne
     made good bread.
    Anne did her chores in the house, and in the Becketts’ shop, and Lizzie, as a small child, would watch her. On Fridays the
     whole house ate fish and chips on the promenade, and this was where Anne first met Ian. For a long time they kept one of the
     pictures he took with the camera. Late spring, and the photograph showed them soaking up the first rays of sun, squinting
     on the benches in front of the house. Mr. Beckett was in shorts and sandals, Mrs. B in her powder-blue dress, then Anne in
     a mustard-yellow roll-neck jumper. Then Lizzie, tall and frizzy, in a dress and cardigan, red tights, ankle boots.
    Ian Harper was walking up the shingle beach towards them when he stopped to take their picture. He ended up taking a whole
     roll before Mr. Beckett went down there to ask what he was doing.

    101.  Think vegetarian thoughts. In case the meat is getting to you.
    102.  Nut rissoles remain popular. And goat’s cheese phyllo parcels.
    103.  All those things you can do with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts.
    104.  You have all this to look forward to.
    105.  Ratatouille?
    106.  You probably won’t feel like eating chicken ever again. No matter.
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    Jacob hadn’t really been listening to the story. But she’d wanted to tell him—especially since he’d said there were things
     missing in her, about her childhood—and prove to him and to herself that she could remember it all.
    She’d said: “Ian Harper didn’t come that night. He didn’t come the next night either. He turned up three days later. He had
     a large brown suitcase and that camera hanging round his neck. Like I have,” she said, pointing to her own.
    â€œHe was wearing a crinkled light-colored suit, and a bowler hat. He was handsome, and he came in first to the shop on the
     ground floor. He said that he’d been to London. He apologized for not having let everyone know. He was polite and softly spoken.
     I liked him.
    â€œHe and Mum must have been the tallest pair on the south coast of England. We knew it wouldn’t last. It didn’t last. He was
     brokenhearted; she was impulsive.
    â€œ ‘Disappointment is the main thing to get your head around, Lizzie,’ she told me, Jacob. ‘And really try not to drink,’ she
     said.”
    â€œNothing lasts,” Jacob had said.
    Lizzie had smiled, and nodded, and looked around her kitchen. Then she said how, even though her mother got so maudlin about
     it, she’d known that Anne was more interested in Ian Harper than she’d said she was.
    â€œYou just can’t tell with love,” Lizzie had said to her new husband. “When he came down to our room, she stopped moving jaggedly,
     with her lips collapsed and her chin pushing up, which was how she looked when she was concentrating and tired. When Ian came
     down she spoke more softly and tried to walk sexily around the room, like she was in a bikini and wading into the sea. He
     took her out to the pub at the end of the road, and she wore her flares and her see-through top and put rose oil on her wrists
     and behind her ears.
    â€œThey’d wander up and down the beach like a pair of wading birds, up the shingle, over the pelican crossing and into the Becketts’
     house. A few times we went out for fish and chips. Twice he took her out for dinner, which I picture as a somber and mournful
     affair, with both of them bending over a low pub table, her trying to help him with his sadness. Ian’s wife had left him and
     gone to America, Mr. Beckett told me. Broke the bugger’s heart in two, he said.
    â€œMum was pregnant when Ian Harper left, but she didn’t expect him to come back so she had the pregnancy terminated.