Too Much Pepper

"I have never required people to love me well. Only sincerely."

The diary had been open on my lap for twenty minutes and I had written perhaps four sentences, which was not a reflection of how much the day had contained but of how carefully certain things needed to be set down.

I crossed out the fourth sentence and wrote it again.

Outside, the Derwent had gone dark in the way it did in the depths of a Tasmanian winter — not gradually but all at once, as though someone had simply decided the performance was over and drawn a curtain. The lamp on the side table gave the room its evening character — smaller than daylight made it, warmer, the photographs on the shelf retreating into soft shapes I knew without needing to see. Patrick's face among them, as it always was. Pip's, as it always was.

I looked at what I had written.

Luke came this afternoon. He arrived without the key, which I had anticipated. He left with precisely what I intended him to leave with, which was enough to ensure he returns. Thelma was — Thelma was herself, which is to say she was both more and less than the situation required, in the particular combination that has always been true of her and which I have never found a more accurate way to describe.

I considered the next sentence for a long moment.

The thing about diary keeping — and I had been doing it since I was fourteen years old, which made it something approaching a seventy-eight year practice — was that its value lay entirely in honesty. A diary you performed for was simply vanity in a different costume. I had always known this and had occasionally, across those seventy-eight years, performed for it anyway. Tonight I did not feel inclined to.

He has her jaw. Thelma said it first, which was appropriate. I have been noting it privately since his third or fourth visit and have said nothing, because there is nothing useful to be said and because I am not certain, even now, what saying it would cost me.

I paused. Uncapped the pen again.

Heather died in February of last year. I have written this sentence before, in this diary, on the night the letter arrived. I am writing it again because the afternoon has made it present in a way I do not always permit it to be, and because one of the things I have learned across a very long life is that there is a difference between putting something away and pretending it does not exist. I have always been better at the former than the latter, though people who know me would likely dispute this.

From the kitchen, a sound.

I held my pen.

A clatter — metal against metal, the particular ring of a spoon connecting with the side of a pan — followed by a silence that had the quality of someone hoping the noise had not been heard. Then the resumed sound of movement, slightly more cautious than before.

I set my pen down across the open page and considered what I was hearing.

The smell had been present for some minutes already — I had been noting it with the background attention of someone who had spent enough years in a kitchen to read information from scent the way other people read it from text. Tomatoes. Garlic, somewhat aggressively applied. Something underneath that was not quite burning but was conducting itself in a manner that suggested burning was a near-term ambition.

I had said nothing. I had continued writing.

But the clatter had been considerable, and there was a limit to what could be reasonably attributed to competence.

I closed the diary — carefully, a habit of fifty years — and set it on the side table beside my water glass and the photograph of Patrick that lived there. I found my slippers with my feet without looking. I stood with the deliberate unhaste that my hips required these days and that my pride still occasionally resented, and I made my way toward the kitchen.

Sarah had her back to me. She was standing at the stovetop with the posture of someone engaged in a negotiation they were not winning — shoulders slightly forward, one hand gripping the handle of a pot, the other wielding a wooden spoon with the focused intensity of a woman who had decided that vigour might compensate for technique. The counter behind her told its own story: open jars, a cookbook abandoned face-down, flour distributed across one section in a pattern that suggested an earlier incident nobody had mentioned.

I stood in the doorway and took a full inventory.

I had been taking inventories of this kitchen for the better part of a year now. I knew every shelf, every drawer, every pan and its particular temperament. I knew the left burner ran hot and that the oven required fifteen additional minutes beyond whatever any recipe suggested and that the window above the sink rattled in a southerly but was otherwise reliable. This kitchen was mine in the way that places became yours through accumulated attention — through the Sunday mornings and the quiet evenings and the particular smell of it in winter when the heating came on and the old timber of the window frame expanded slightly.

What was happening to it currently could charitably be described as ambitious.

"What are you doing, Sarah?"

She startled — just enough to send the spoon clattering against the side of the pan again, a sound that ricocheted off the tiles with considerable enthusiasm. She turned, and I observed her face conduct a rapid review of how much I had seen and what expression would best serve her current position.

I kept my own expression neutral, which required a degree of effort I did not acknowledge.

"I'm cooking you dinner," she said, with the particular confidence of someone who has decided that conviction might substitute for evidence.

I looked at the stovetop. I looked at the counter. I looked at the pasta, which had passed the point of al dente sometime in the recent past and appeared to be continuing its journey with considerable momentum.

"Looks to me like you're burning it," I said.

The raised eyebrow was involuntary. I permitted it.

Sarah absorbed this with the expression she had been producing since she was approximately twelve years old — the one that was simultaneously defensive and aware that the defence was not entirely warranted. She had never quite managed to remove the self-knowledge from her face when it mattered, which was one of the things I had always loved about her and which she would have found mortifying to know.

I leaned forward and examined the situation more closely. The sauce had developed opinions of its own. The pasta was beyond consultation.

Sarah made a sound.

"Go and sit in your recliner," she told me, with the gentleness of someone managing a situation that had acquired more variables than anticipated. She guided me by the shoulders in the direction of the living room with a firmness that was trying to be subtle and was not quite achieving it. "It won't be long now."

I allowed myself to be guided.

This was a choice, not a concession — there was a distinction, and I was clear on it even if Sarah was not. I had learned across many decades of managing people that there were moments when the most useful thing you could do was permit someone their agency, particularly when that agency was being exercised on your behalf. Sarah needed to do this. The need was written in every tense line of her, in the flour on her sleeve and the abandoned cookbook and the vigour with which she had been attacking that sauce.

She needed to cook me dinner, even if dinner was not going to be the primary outcome of her efforts.

I settled into my chair. The familiar compression of it received me in the way it always did — the particular give of something shaped by long occupation, by thousands of evenings and afternoon naps and crossword puzzles, by the accumulated weight of a life conducted in one place long enough to leave an impression. I adjusted the cushion at my lower back. I found the radio controls in the armrest without looking.

The classical music came on low — strings first, then piano settling in underneath, an evening piece, something that suited the quality of the light and the smell of cooking and the knowledge of Sarah moving purposefully through my kitchen in an attempt to demonstrate love through the medium of pasta.

I listened to the sounds from the kitchen. The vigorous stirring. The periodic adjustment of burners. The muffled consultation with the cookbook, which I gathered had been reinstated as a reference following the earlier abandonment. A sound that might generously be described as tasting, followed by a silence that suggested the results of tasting had provided information that required a moment to process.

I closed my eyes and let the music sit with me.

The day arranged itself behind my closed eyelids in the way a long day did when you finally gave it permission — not sequentially, but in the manner of things that had been waiting their turn. Luke's face in the doorway. The weight of the key in my palm. Thelma's hands on the table as she told the story she had been carrying since before either of us had knees worth speaking of. The cold tea that I had drunk to its final undistinguished drop. He has his mother's jaw.

And now Sarah, burning garlic in my kitchen with the absolute sincerity of someone who loves you and has no other available currency.

I had always thought that love expressed itself most honestly not in its successes but in its attempts. Patrick had known this. He had been a man who showed love through the consistent execution of small, reliable things — the cup of tea appearing without being asked for, the garden attended to on Saturday mornings, the hand on the small of my back in rooms full of people. None of it dramatic. All of it legible, to me, as clearly as any declaration.

Sarah showed love through effort. Always had. The effort was frequently spectacular in its misdirection — the cooking being only the most recent example in a decades-long catalogue — but the effort itself was never in question, and I had learned to read it as fluently as I had learned to read Patrick's quieter language.

"Have you heard from Oscar lately?"

I hadn't intended to ask. Or rather, I had been carrying the question for several weeks and had not decided to ask it so much as run out of reasons not to.

"No, I haven't heard from him for a few months," Sarah called back, her voice carrying over the sizzle of the pan with the easy tone of someone for whom this was simply a fact rather than a wound.

"Oh."

I heard my own voice deliver the syllable and recognised everything it contained. The music continued, unhurried.

Oscar. My grandson who existed, these days, primarily as a voice on a telephone line several times a year and the occasional photograph on a social media page I had learned to navigate with the focused determination I had once applied to learning palliative nursing. He was well — I believed that. He was happy, or something that functioned as happiness in a life lived on the other side of the world. But he was distant in a way that had calcified over the years from temporary to structural, and I was ninety-two years old, and I was aware of the arithmetic involved.

I reached for the radio and turned it up, very slightly.

The music filled the gaps that the conversation had left, which was what music was for, which was why I had been keeping it close for seventy-odd years.

From the kitchen, the sounds continued. A pot relocated with emphasis. A renewed assault on the sauce. Something that might have been swearing, conducted very quietly and with considerable feeling.

I kept my eyes closed and let the strings carry me, and I thought about nothing in particular, and I waited for dinner.

The table between us was small — had always been small, sized for one person living without pretension — and Sarah had set it with the care of someone who understood that the gesture mattered more than the execution. Napkins. Water glasses. The sauce jug positioned with an optimism I found quietly affecting.

I looked at the plate she put in front of me and did not say anything.

Sarah sat down opposite and loaded her fork with the focused determination of someone intending to lead by example. She put it in her mouth.

The expression that followed was remarkable in its range and honesty. I watched it travel — from expectation through surprise through something that required the urgent consumption of most of a glass of water before it arrived at a kind of battered composure. She set the glass down. She reached for the sauce jug with both hands.

"I think you might need some more sauce," she said, her voice carrying the particular quality of a woman rebuilding herself from first principles, and applied a quantity to my plate that suggested the sauce was being asked to perform functions well beyond its original brief.

I laughed.

It came out cracked — my laugh had been doing that for some weeks now, the cancer making its presence known in the small announcements of daily life — but it was entirely genuine, and Sarah's face in response to it did something I had been watching it do since she was nine years old, furious and hollow and beginning, very slowly, to find her way back.

It opened.

We ate. The food was, by any objective measure, a considerable achievement in the wrong direction. The pepper alone had been applied with a conviction that suggested a significant misreading of the recipe. But I ate it with the full attention it deserved, which had nothing whatever to do with pepper, and which Sarah, across the table, would not have been able to quantify and did not need to.

The music came through from the living room. Outside, the Derwent had long since concluded its business with the evening. The lamp made the table what small lit tables became in winter — intimate, contained, the world outside receding to a matter of secondary interest.

Sarah was here. The day had been long and had contained, amongst other things, Thelma and Luke and a key and cold tea and the jaw of a woman I had held for three days in 1962. And now it contained this — my granddaughter opposite me, cutting her pasta with the concentration of someone defusing something, having done all of this because she loved me and had nowhere else to put it.

I set down my fork.

"They said they told you about the cancer."

She had been carrying it for a week. I had watched her carry it — the careful way she held herself around me, the conversations conducted a precise distance from the thing neither of us had named. I had authorised Virginia to tell her and then waited, the way you waited when you had set something in motion that couldn't be undone.

The fork left her fingers and hit the plate.

She looked up, and I watched the composure she had been maintaining for days move through its final moments.

"Oh, Jane," she whispered. "What am I going to do without you?"

I had managed rooms my entire life. I had always had something to bring to bear — a word, a gesture, a well-timed piece of patience. I had outplayed a man thirty-four years my junior not four hours ago in this very building.

I had nothing for this.

I reached across the table and took her hand, and I sat with the fact that it was the only thing I had left to offer, and I did not dress it up as anything more than what it was.