Jeanie screws up her face, shakes her head, she doesn’t want a coffin.
And as though he thinks she’s shaking her head about the type of wood, he says: “Or I could get you an oak one, if that’d be better. It’ll be a bit more expensive than pine but it has a lovely finish.”
“Oak?” she says.
“Although, of course, there’s some outstanding already.”
“Some of what outstanding?”
“The money your mum borrowed.”
“Mum borrowed some money?” The animal in her chest thumps its shoulders against her ribs. Stu stares at her and is about to speak. “Oh, that,” she says. “Of course.” The pulse is in her throat, her bile rising. She wants to ask if he knows why Dot borrowed it, whether she was going to give it to the Rawsons for the overdue rent.
“I can add the cost of the coffin on to what’s outstanding if you like,” Stu says gently. “You don’t want to be worrying about money at a time like this. Ed says it’s a fine piece of oak.” Stu has always been a salesman. “Well seasoned, it’s not going to warp or split open.” He clears his throat, disconcerted perhaps by the image he’s conjured. “Of course, it’s harder to work than pine, but it’s quality wood.”
Jeanie goes into the scullery and fills a glass with water. She can’t believe that her mother borrowed money from Stu. Dot, who always told them never to accept or borrow anything from anyone, whether it was the government, charity, or neighbours. Getting the cottage rent-free from Rawson didn’t count after what he did. Stu follows her in, crowding her in the narrow room. She can smell the fabric conditioner which Bridget must use for their clothes, floral and artificial.
“How much will the coffin be?” She drinks some water.
“Normally, Ed would charge two hundred and fifty for a handmade coffin, but I know he’ll be happy with two hundred, on account of the fact that your mother was a good woman. A very good and honest woman, Dot Seeder. I can give you some time to have a chat with Julius if it’s your brother who needs to decide. When’s the funeral arranged for?”
“No,” Jeanie says. “I can decide.”
“If anyone sees that oak, they’re going to snap it up. It’s not going to hang around for long.”
“Okay, oak,” Jeanie says firmly. He’s too close, she needs him out of the house. Julius will just have to dig a bigger hole.
“There’ll be a bit extra to take her to the church or the crematorium. Ed and I can put on suits, you know, make it a bit fancy.”
“We won’t be needing that.” Jeanie sets her glass down and Stu raises his eyebrows. “Julius is sorting something out,” she says.
“I didn’t think Julius liked going in vehicles.” He pronounces it vee-hic-culs. “Don’t they make him sick?”
She folds her arms. Stu knows very well that going in anything with an engine makes Julius throw up after fifteen minutes and he damn well knows why too. “I said he’ll sort something out.”
“Okey-dokes,” Stu says, backing out of the scullery and putting his baseball cap on, tugging the peak down. She walks behind him like she’s herding an animal towards the front door. “What about beer for the wake? I can get you a few crates for a lot less than the Plough would charge.”
“We’re not having a wake,” Jeanie says firmly.
At the front door, when he is out on the threshold, she says, “I’ve forgotten how much Mum borrowed. Can you remind me?”
Stu narrows his eyes and she wonders whether he’s trying to work out if she knows the amount or not. “Eight hundred pounds,” he says.
After he’s gone, Jeanie searches the house for the money. Stu can be unscrupulous, she can imagine him upping the amount Dot borrowed by fifty pounds, or a hundred, but not even Stu would completely invent the debt. Perhaps she should argue that this isn’t in fact her and Julius’s debt, why should they take it on. But she knows this will never wash with Stu or Bridget. She leafs through postcards and articles and pictures cut from magazines stuffed into the dresser’s drawers, she opens the storage tins in the scullery and looks inside, searches through the clutter under her and Dot’s shared bed, and stuffs her hand under the mattress and claws about. She sits at the kitchen table and thinks of the places her mother could have hidden an amount of cash. If she borrowed the money to pay the Rawsons and it never reached them, then her mother, this good and honest woman, must have hidden money in a place she thought Jeanie would never look. The old dairy is full of broken objects and ancient gardening equipment, baskets and boxes, there is Julius’s bedroom and the gaps beneath every wonky floorboard in the house. There are too many places.
9
Jeanie is making a rabbit pie from a recipe she knows by heart. Julius shot the animals on the meadow yesterday, this time in anger, after she told him that their mother borrowed money from Stu. When Julius asked how much it was, she lied and said it was a thousand pounds, adding that Stu was including the coffin for free. She isn’t sure that Julius believes her, but he raved about the amount and where it could be, pulling out the drawers and looking in cupboards which Jeanie had already searched. He didn’t understand why she had ordered a coffin—now he’d have to dig a bigger hole. She tried to calm him but he took two creased envelopes from his coat pocket and slammed them on the table, his big thumbs pinning them down. The crinkle of the see-through address windows as he flattened them worried her.
“What are they?” she asked.
“This” —he picked one up and waggled it at her— “is a notice to say that our electricity is being disconnected. Dated more than a week ago. And this” —he picked up the other— “is a letter from the council to say that our latest council tax bill is late. I paid some of it at the post office counter with the money from the guttering job, but there’s still loads owing.”
“You paid the council tax bill but not the electricity? And here I am cooking by sodding lamplight on a range that hasn’t been used in thirty years.”
“You weren’t there. I had to decide. There’s a reconnection fee to get the electricity back on. Admin charges or something, and that’s before you start paying off the bill. I had to make a choice.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Julius leaned forwards, shaking his head. “Christ, Jeanie. These debts. I’m out of ideas. What are we going to do?”
Julius has always been the one with ideas, hare-brained, ridiculous—building an oven in the garden and starting a business delivering cakes, leasing the meadow from the Rawsons and turning it over to asparagus, or putting a yurt on it and renting it out as an Airbnb. Schemes that failed before they started because he needed a computer, the internet, a website, so he could send emails to those beardy types in London. Julius has never stuck with any of his schemes. But this brother without an escape plan frightened her.
“Craig will give you more work,” she said.
“Craig isn’t going to give me any work, ever again,” Julius shouted. He fished in his trouser pockets, brought out his loose change, and slammed it on the table. Three pound coins and three pennies. “This is it.”
“We can contact the electricity company. Pay in instalments or something.”
“What with? How will we pay the next instalment and the one after that? How will we do that, Jeanie? And what about Stu? How are we going to pay Stu back?” His hands became fists, the knuckles white. “Fuck.” He picked up a kitchen chair and thumped all four legs on the ground. “What was she thinking?” Neither mentioned the Rawsons’ debt, and Jeanie hadn’t asked where he had been all afternoon and evening because she had been able to smell the beer on his breath and the perfume on his coat.
Now, in the kitchen, Jeanie guts, skins, and joints the rabbits, checking for any gun pellets. Julius is usually a good shot, getting them in the head and killing them instantly. But this time the pellets have gone into the meat and she has to poke at the holes with a pair of old tweezers to remove the lead. She stews the rabbit pieces with an onion and a wrinkled apple which
she unwraps from last year’s newspaper. At the kitchen table she makes the pastry, bringing the flour and suet together with tablespoons of water, all the time aware of her mother’s book of recipes behind her on the dresser. For years she’s seen Dot’s finger move under each ingredient and instruction as she read them out, hesitating over her own cramped letters. Without needing to think about what she is doing, Jeanie shreds the cooked rabbit meat from the bones in the way she would have done if she and Dot were working beside each other, speaking about everyday things while conscious of the other’s economical movements as they reached for bowl or spoon or knife. Jeanie rolls out the pastry, lays the lid on the pie, and cuts out rabbit shapes from the scraps. As she works, she thinks about another rabbit pie she ate, years ago.
She last saw Nick when they were eleven and now of course he must be her age—fifty-one. As she brushes the pastry with beaten egg, she laughs at the idea of him as a middle-aged man, grown up. Where might he be? Nick arrived in her class at the very end of the last year of junior school, without the right uniform, his shirt grubby and his knuckles grazed. He slouched sullenly in the seat next to hers at the back of the room. Jeanie didn’t see the point in that final month of school—the teachers weren’t bothered about teaching and the pupils brought in games from home. If they weren’t sitting around the classroom chatting, they were playing sports out on the field. She didn’t go in to school often, but one day when she and Nick were loitering at the back of a group hoping not to get selected for rounders, he said, “Bugger this, I’m going home. Wanna come?” and they moved quietly away without being seen. He lived in one of the four caravans which were parked in an old chalk pit outside the village. Jeanie knew about them because she’d heard Bridget complaining about the mess, how things went missing from sheds when gypsies were about, how it wasn’t normal to always be moving—disruptive for the children’s schooling for starters. Dot had replied that travellers had always been scapegoats, and travelling was their way of life, like living in houses was ours. Bridget didn’t answer.
Jeanie and Nick threw sticks for the dogs and rummaged through the rubbish that lay in the nettles at the bottom of the white cliff. Most of it seemed to have been there for years. Nick’s mother brought them slices of cold rabbit pie, the meat set in a savoury jelly—Jeanie wasn’t invited into their caravan although she would have liked to see how a family of three people and four dogs fitted. They sat on a chalk rock and ate the pieces of pie—better than her mother’s—and then drew white stickmen on the side of a rusting tank. She went back several times to the caravan site, and she and Nick pulled things out of the undergrowth, messed around, ate whatever his mother gave them sitting outside, although never the rabbit pie again.
The last time she went in to school after a few days away, something in the classroom had changed. Nick had been made to sit at the front of the class and wouldn’t catch her eye. A girl on the next table leaned on her chair, tipping on the two back legs, and announced to all who could hear that Jeanie was “Nicko the gypo’s girlfriend.”
“I am not,” Jeanie said, knowing that the denial in some way was a betrayal of her and Nick’s friendship, even while she didn’t want a boyfriend, didn’t understand what they were for. The next day school was over, and when she finally went back to the travellers’ site, the caravans and the dogs were gone.
The front door bangs open before Jeanie is finished preparing her own rabbit pie—Stu and Ed with the coffin, oak, as she’d agreed. Ed is a small man, heavy bags under his eyes and a lipless mouth which draws back in a leering smile. Jeanie thinks she’s seen him about the village, but she’s never spoken to him before. “All right?” he says to her. “In here, is it?” Stu, Ed, and Julius carry the coffin between them into the parlour, tipping it up to get it through the narrow doorways and around the corners. It’s much bigger than Jeanie expected, and as they manoeuvre it past her, she sees four tiny holes in the lid where a plaque was screwed to it and removed. A cancelled order. They have bought a second-hand coffin.
Ed says, “Put it on the floor, lads. Careful, careful.” The man’s tongue sounds thick, too big for his mouth, so that every word is lisped. Stu’s eyes slide away from the shrouded body on the makeshift table. But Jeanie has grown used to it being here in the house with them. Since Dot has been in the parlour, the feel of the cottage is different, the air denser, her and her brother’s actions slower, as though they were moving through smoke, feeling their way with their hands outstretched in a house that once was familiar. They are quieter when they’re in opposite ends of the cottage: neither of them call to the other from a different room or let a door slam. She knows that Ed and Stu will think they are odd, keeping their mother at home, but she doesn’t care. She is used to people considering them odd, it’s pity she hates. She starts to complain about the coffin and to tell Stu and Ed to take it away, but Stu says, with his back to the body, “Bridget was asking about when and where the service will be.”
Julius, behind the two men, shakes his head at Jeanie. “Monday,” he says. “But we’ve decided it’ll be just the two of us. Mum wouldn’t have wanted a lot of fuss. Tell Bridget thank you, though.” Julius raises his eyebrows and jerks his head at Jeanie, like when they were children and she was supposed to back him up on some minor lie.
“Yes,” Jeanie says, folding her arms. “Please thank her. And you, of course.” She directs this to Stu; she would like to shove Ed into his own bloody coffin, made for a person twice the size of their mother, but Jeanie returns to her rabbit pie. She sings to herself about the dead Polly Vaughn being wept over by the lover who killed her, her voice not quite loud enough to hide the sounds of a hammer nailing the coffin closed in the parlour next door.
When Stu and Ed have gone, Jeanie and Julius stand beside the coffin.
“You can’t dig a hole that big,” Jeanie says.
“We won’t even be able to carry it out. I’m not going to let you take one end. I don’t want you dead as well.” She knows these words are his apology for shouting.
Over the weekend Julius finishes digging the hole, and without them discussing it, they decide to bury Dot on Monday morning, as they told Stu they would. It feels to Jeanie that only when they get this momentous task done will they be able to focus on the money. Julius can visit Rawson and sort out the misunderstanding, she can search the cottage thoroughly for the cash Dot borrowed, and she can telephone the electricity company to see what can be done about the overdue bill. In the afternoon she will take some vegetables to Max. Nothing will seem impossible once their mother is in the ground.
In the chest in the parlour there are tablecloths and other linen which have never been used. Folded for so long in the damp, they are sprinkled with rust stains and have creases and wrinkles that no hot iron will ever eradicate. On the old treadle sewing machine, Jeanie stitches them together into a sheet large enough to wrap Dot in several times, while Julius levers off the coffin lid with a crowbar, cursing with the effort. But it is getting the body out of the coffin, when it is so deep and on top of the door on top of the trestles, that is the hardest thing. Jeanie tips and Julius heaves and swears until the body is in his arms. There is definitely a smell now. She follows him out through the yard, moving ahead to open the gate into the garden. Beside the grave he falls to his knees and the body almost rolls in, but he catches himself in time and, nearly lying flat, perpendicular to the grave, he lowers their mother inside. Jeanie lays twigs of apple blossom on the wrapped body, but neither know what to say. They stumble over the words and, in the end, Julius says that Dot always put them first, and Jeanie adds how much she loved this garden and this cottage. Neither of them say that she has gone to a better place.
10
Together, Jeanie and Julius hitch Dot’s small wooden trailer to her old bike. It’s been a long time since Jeanie has cycled—preferring to walk with Maude. She loads a basket into the trailer, filled with boxes of eggs and the vegetables she’s picked. There aren’t many—bundles
of asparagus, bulbs of fresh garlic, and lots of radishes and spring onions from the polytunnel. Max’s customers seem to buy a little of everything, rather than be able to cope with gluts, and he pays only for what he sells, a deal that her mother arranged when he first opened the deli, which Jeanie has always thought unfair.
Julius makes her promise that she will go slowly and won’t exert herself. He has a hatchet in his hand, ready to chop up the coffin for firewood. She cannot allow herself to think about how much this firewood will have cost; instead she enjoys the feeling of the air on her face as she wobbles past Pepperwood Farm and down the lane. The produce that was on the table at the bottom has gone, and the honesty box contains two pounds fifty-one, as well as a farthing—a coin that hasn’t been in use since before she was born. There is no one about in the village; the fish and chip shop is open only in the evenings and no one is sitting at the tables outside the deli. Max is inside wearing his brown apron, doing something on his phone. There aren’t any customers.
“Jeanie,” he says when he finally looks up. He comes out from behind the chiller cabinet where expensive cheeses, pâtés, and tubs of salad are displayed. Behind him on a tall rack are loaves of different shapes. “I heard the news about Dot. I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry.” Max moves his arms about a lot, his hands fly together as though he’s praying. “Is there anything I can do?” He puts his fingertips under his chin.
“I’ve brought some asparagus and other things,” Jeanie says. This job—delivering vegetables to Max—was something Dot did; Jeanie has been in the deli only a few times.
“Today?” he says. “You didn’t need to come today of all days.”
She thinks for a second that he must know they buried Dot in the garden a few hours ago. She frowns. “Well, I’m here now.” She has the basket in her arms, and he looks in it.
Unsettled Ground Page 7
