“And the rest of it? Flowers, whatever else it is we have to do.”
“The wake.”
“Why does everyone keep going on about a wake?” Jeanie snaps. “The Rawsons were here earlier, acting all weird, asking about a wake.”
“I used their phone this morning.”
“So I gather. Anyway, we don’t need a wake.”
“We’ve got to have a few drinks after.”
“Who says?”
“It’s the right thing.”
“We don’t need anyone else. Traipsing in here, smoking, pitying us.”
“I’ve already told people.” Julius is leaning against the dresser. His feet are incredibly white and bony. The way he’s standing, what he’s saying, is irritating her like it’s never done before.
“Who? Who have you told?”
He comes forwards and now takes his fiddle from the top of the piano. “Aren’t we going to play?” He tunes the instrument quickly, and with his bow starts the accompaniment to the piece Jeanie played earlier. “Bridget will want to come,” he says.
Jeanie’s blood pulses in her neck. She breathes long and deep through her nose. “Who else?”
“I shall tell of a hunter whose life was undone . . .” Julius restarts the words to “Polly Vaughn” and plays the long sad notes on his fiddle. “By the cruel hand of evil at the setting of the sun.”
“Shelley Swift?” She tries to sound casual.
“Shelley Swift? Why’d I invite her?” He continues to bow the fiddle, slowly. “I barely know her. I’m going round tomorrow to do her window.”
“And it went well with Craig today?”
Julius removes the fiddle from under his chin and holds it by the neck, the bow in his other hand. “He docked seventy-five quid because I threw up in his van.”
“Oh, Julius.” She goes to him, but he takes a step backwards, won’t look at her. It’s been a long while since he was sick in a car or a van, but then it must be a long while since he’s been in one for any length of time.
“I had no choice but to go in the van. I couldn’t cycle in the snow. It’s too far to walk and Craig was kicking off about lifting that bloody cast-iron bath.”
“You told him about Mum?”
“Of course I told him. And he started going on about how the job was booked in with the customer, and how I’d be letting down the other guys, all his usual crap. I had no choice. And anyway, didn’t you tell me I had to go to work?” The tendons in Julius’s neck are standing proud. “He picked me up outside the Plough. I managed just about on the way there, got him to stop the van. Chucked up by the side of the road.” For the first time since their mother died Jeanie feels tears come to her eyes, but not for Dot; for Julius and what he saw—what they both saw—when they were twelve. “On the way back, I don’t know. It took me by surprise, I suppose. Happened quicker than normal. All over the door and the edge of the seat and down the side. Hardly touched me.” He gives a sour laugh. “Craig reckoned the van will need an industrial clean and he’s probably right. They’ll have to take the passenger seat out.” Holding the bow and fiddle with one hand, he fishes in his back pocket. “I should go and change, but here’s the money. He had to stand me lunch too, because I didn’t take any with me.” Julius puts a twenty-pound note on the table. Twenty pounds for a day’s work.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage.” Jeanie knows that neither of them believe it. They look at the money.
“Nothing is going to change,” he says.
“Really?”
He puts his fiddle to his jaw and runs the bow across the strings. “It’s always been the three of us, here. Hasn’t it? Now it’ll be the two of us.”
She sits, crosses her legs, settles the guitar, and plays.
6
The half-acre garden is bounded on three sides by scruffy hedging with assorted pieces of salvaged wood—planks, panels, another old door—filling the gaps. Behind the compost heaps, the polytunnel, and the large greenhouse, rabbits are digging, and here the ground and the perimeter are continually threatened with collapse. On the fourth side, facing the cottage, the picket fence built to keep the chickens out of the vegetable garden is better maintained. A central gate opens to a long strip of paving, mostly brick, interspersed with the odd piece of concrete or flint where the bricks have crumbled. Heavy-duty scaffolding planks lie in between each bed, coming off the central path at an angle, positioned like ribs extending from a spine. The garden slopes gradually uphill so that it is possible to sit on the bench at the top and look out over the rich brown beds and the plants, to the apple and cherry trees behind the old dairy, and onwards to the track and the beech wood beyond. Rosemary and thyme grow close to the house, lovage and angelica, and in the summer, basil and tarragon. Up against the western boundary is the fruit cage, filled with raspberry canes, blackcurrant bushes, and gooseberries. The garden is south-facing and sheltered, and the plants, which have never seen chemical fertilizers or insecticide, thrive in the loamy soil. Julius often tried to persuade Dot and Jeanie to consolidate and grow just two or three crops over the whole garden. He would say that the opportunities for better sales outweighed the risk of a whole crop failing because of some pest, but the women always grew many different vegetables and fruits, and never let Julius grub any of it up.
Jeanie spends the morning resowing the gaps where the snow killed off some of the tender plants, but most have survived, and where the garlic has pushed up its green spikes, flowers are already forming, spearheaded and trapped in their paper cocoons. Her knees ache from the crouched position she has been in for an hour and from the cold. Her joints are getting stiffer, prone to pain in the mornings; she’s noticed it more in the past year. As she works, she wonders again why Dot didn’t tell her and Julius that she’d been ill. She was stubborn and proud, it was true. She’d taught them not to take anything from anyone, because as night turns to day, they—especially if they were the government—would come knocking and asking for it back, or more. Jeanie isn’t surprised that her mother hadn’t claimed her free prescription, neither is she too shocked that there’s so little money in the tin, but still she can’t help calculating expenses in her head: the funeral or cremation, a coffin, funeral directors, a hearse, and flowers. What are you supposed to do if you can’t afford any of it—bury your mother in the garden?
Beside the back door she snips off four rosemary twigs and rubs them to release the scent. The bush has become leggy and will need to be replaced soon and she reminds herself to take some cuttings. She holds the twigs under her nose and inhales.
In the parlour she places the rosemary around her mother’s body and another piece she tucks into the neck of her own dress. She’s kept the door closed so Maude can’t get in and the window closed too because she’s worried about flies entering and about what would happen next. Her breath steams with the cold and it isn’t so much that there is a smell but more that she’s afraid of smelling something. She cuts up the middle and sleeves of her mother’s nightdress with the same scissors she used to snip the rosemary. The body is the colour of newly picked mushrooms and she washes it with care, warm water in a bowl which she places on the small chest in the corner. She starts with Dot’s face, and then her breasts and belly where the skin is soft and loose. The limbs are already stiff and unwieldy. When she’s finished, she goes out to the front garden and tosses the water onto the flower bed. Upstairs, she chooses one of Dot’s dresses, an everyday summer dress but pretty, of pale yellow with a pattern of ivy. At some point she knows she will have to go through it all—her mother’s clothes, her belongings.
In the year following the death of her father, Jeanie had been given the task of removing her father’s things from the bedroom he’d shared with his wife for thirteen years. Dot wasn’t up to it, wasn’t capable of much that year besides sitting in the kitchen or following her daughter around. Any suitable clothes had already been passed to Julius, trouser bottoms taken up, cuffs shortened, Frank’s
good suit and his coat mothballed for when Julius was older. Other clothes, Jeanie gave to the Salvation Army, the shoes too—though he was twelve, Julius’s feet were already half a size larger than his father’s. Only the chest of drawers on Frank’s side of the bed remained to be cleared. When Jeanie opened the top drawer the spicy smell of his favourite boiled sweets wafted out, mixed with something oily, male. All sorts of things had been shoved in the top drawer: the newspaper he must have been reading in bed the night before he died, nail clippers, his razor and spare blades in a paper packet. In a copper bowl were pennies from his pockets heaped together with screws, a piece of flint with a sharp edge, fasteners and washers. Dot wanted Jeanie to throw it all out and move her own clothes over from the room she shared with Julius. She lied and told her mother that she’d got rid of Frank’s stuff, but instead she placed her vests and jumpers over the top of the last of her father’s things, so that for a while—a few months at least—her clothes smelled of Winter Mixture and the nuts and bolts of her father.
When Jeanie hears a knock on the front door, she goes to the bedroom window and tries to see who it is, but the visitor is just out of sight. If she opens the window they’ll hear her and look up, and then she’ll have to go down. She sighs, leaves the yellow dress on the bed, and goes down.
Mrs. Rawson is on the doorstep and twice Jeanie has to order Maude to stop barking and go back into the kitchen. Mrs. Rawson is wearing cream leather trousers, a kind of silky top with what looks like drawings of shops on it, a camel-coloured raincoat with a big collar, and sunglasses. She has a large handbag over her arm. “I need to speak to you,” she says, and Jeanie is so taken aback that she opens the door wide and for the second time in two days lets the woman in.
In 1979, at age twenty, Caroline May was crowned Wiltshire Young Farmers’ Dairy Queen, and a few months later married the man who presented the prize. This, Jeanie overheard Bridget tell Dot, and she knows that there were problems early in the Rawsons’ marriage—babies lost or unconceived. Bridget would say this with a slow shake of her head as though not having a child were the worst a woman could suffer. Mrs. Rawson has always been pleasant to Jeanie when they’ve met on the lane or passed each other in the village. Civil, if not friendly, and that has suited her fine. It is her husband whom Jeanie actively dislikes.
Mrs. Rawson doesn’t take off her sunglasses even though the kitchen is lit only with oil lamps and the little natural light that comes in through the low front window and from the scullery at the back.
“I’m sorry to call around again so soon,” Mrs. Rawson says. She smiles and then the smile is gone.
“Would you like to sit down? I’ll put the kettle on.”
“No tea. Thank you. This won’t take long.” She remains standing, the two women in the kitchen with the table between them.
“Unfortunately, I’ve come to talk about an outstanding debt,” Mrs. Rawson says coldly.
“What debt?” Jeanie says.
“On the cottage.”
“What do you mean?”
“An unpaid debt.”
“On the cottage? There can’t be a debt on the cottage. We don’t pay any rent. We have an agreement.” Jeanie doesn’t let her emotion show. She can be as icy as Caroline Rawson if she needs to be, but the animal in her heart is stirring.
“Indeed. An understanding. Which meant that your mother and you and your brother could stay on in the cottage after your father died, and she paid—”
“Was killed,” Jeanie corrects her.
Mrs. Rawson talks over her: “—and she was paying weekly until a few months ago, when I understand from my husband she started slipping into arrears.”
“What?” Jeanie grips the top of a kitchen chair.
“She was finding it difficult to keep up.” Mrs. Rawson speaks as though reciting lines she learned earlier.
“I’m sorry,” Jeanie says, although she isn’t sorry at all. “There’s no rent to pay, and there never was.” Her heart is knocking but she tries to take the same level tone, concentrating on her breathing. If she looks too hard, she can see herself, warped and murky, in Mrs. Rawson’s glasses. “The agreement, the understanding, whatever you want to call it, was that we could stay in the cottage rent-free even after our mother died.” She emphasizes the rent-free.
“Your mother—” Mrs. Rawson says mother as though she is about to complain about Dot letting Maude shit on the Rawsons’ front lawn—“has been paying for the cottage for thirty-eight years. More or less. She started a year after your father passed away. I’m surprised, although of course it’s nothing to do with me that she didn’t tell you.”
Jeanie wants this woman gone. Filling up the kitchen with her perfume. She wants to say that she has more important things to do than to discuss this stupidity. The chickens need gathering in, there are plants in the greenhouse and polytunnel that need watering. She has to work out what to cook for tea. Without electricity, the fridge in the scullery is starting to smell rancid even though it contains only half a packet of butter, half a pint of milk, and a small lump of cheddar. She can make an omelette, bake a couple of the old potatoes. She must finish dressing her mother. Her dead mother. A day or so dead and here they are discussing ridiculous debts which aren’t due.
“That’s just not possible.” Jeanie folds her arms.
Mrs. Rawson laughs as though she is the most good-natured person imaginable. “There’s a receipt book if you’d like to see it, back at the farm, with your mother’s initials beside every payment. She hadn’t paid fully for at least a few months because of her illness, or so my husband tells me.”
“How much is it you think we owe?” Jeanie has picked up, again from overhearing Bridget’s conversations with Dot, that Mrs. Rawson does charity work, organizing fundraisers for a premature baby charity, and has nothing to do with the farm’s finances. Their money—including a large inheritance—is managed by Rawson.
“Two thousand,” she says quickly, as though it is a figure she simply made up that moment.
“Two thousand pounds?” Jeanie can no longer keep the shock out of her voice.
“Yes,” Mrs. Rawson says. “I was surprised too when I found out how behind she’d got. It’s unfortunate, but of course, if you want to stay on in the cottage . . .” She takes her car keys from her bag, jangling them. “I’m sure you can work something out with your brother.”
When Julius gets home, again there is no tea cooking and no hot water on to boil for his wash. Jeanie is sitting in the same chair as yesterday, head down over her guitar, playing. Only Maude looks up to greet him. This time, rather than the surge of sympathy and sorrow he felt yesterday, he has a burning irritation that she hasn’t done anything with her day while he’s been working, earning them money. Why is it she hasn’t ever had a job?
Jeanie says something too quiet for him to hear.
“What?” he says, sitting on the sofa, pushing Maude along roughly. The dog’s eyes widen and Julius bends to put his forehead to Maude’s as an apology.
Jeanie stops playing, looks up, and he sees that her face is flushed. “Caroline Rawson came this morning.”
“Again?” He’s confused.
“She said we owe them rent.”
“What rent?” He rests his elbows on knees.
“You know—rent, rent.” Her voice is rising.
Julius holds his hands up to calm her. “What do you mean?”
“For the cottage.”
“It’s ours. There’s no rent.”
“I said that to her, but she said Mum had been paying rent since the year after Dad died.”
“You must have got it wrong.”
“I haven’t got anything wrong. You weren’t here.” Jeanie is shouting now.
“Well, it’s a lie. What about the agreement? Rawson gave us the cottage in return for . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t understand what Jeanie is saying. Or he understands it, but it doesn’t make any sense.
“Car
oline Rawson knew that Mum had been ill. Just like Bridget and Dr. Holloway. The whole bloody village probably knows our business before we do. She said Mum couldn’t keep up with the payments. She was horrible, Julius. So horrible and frosty. Like a different person.”
“Calm down, Jeanie.” Julius sits on the edge of the sofa and takes off his boots and then his socks. He loves the feel of the cool floor on the soles of his feet after a day’s work. “It’s not good for you. Please. Rawson didn’t say anything about any rent when I used his phone. There’ll be some mistake.” He chucks his balled-up socks at Maude and they bounce off the top of her head. She doesn’t stir.
“I don’t think so. She said we owed two thousand pounds.”
“Two thousand pounds!” Julius shakes his head. “None of this is right. You think Mum’s been paying rent for what, thirty-eight years?” He laughs sarcastically.
“I don’t think it! This is the Rawsons, not me.”
“Well, if Rawson thinks I’m going to give him any money, he’d better think again.”
“Don’t shout,” Jeanie says.
“Sorry, I’m sorry.” He sweeps a hand through his hair and blows out his cheeks.
“You’ll have to go and speak to him,” Jeanie says.
Julius stands. “What?”
“Have a word with him.” She puts her guitar down and lowers her forehead onto the kitchen table. Her voice is muffled. “You’re right. It must be some misunderstanding.”
“Why should I go?”
She snaps her head up, her voice sharp now, impatient. “Because you’re better at these things. Talking to people.”
He sighs. He’s just got in, taken his boots off, he’s not going to go out again now. It’ll just be a stupid mistake.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Jeanie says.
“What?”
“Throw your socks at the dog.”
∙
The electricity is still not working, despite Julius fiddling some more with the fuse board. Jeanie lights two oil lamps and carries them through to the parlour. Maude is again shut in the kitchen.
Unsettled Ground Page 4
