“More radishes,” he says. “I can put them out, but most of the last lot didn’t go. It’s a bit early in the year for people to want salad.” He takes the basket from her and puts it beside the chiller cabinet. “The asparagus, though, is wonderful. I can take as much as you can bring.” There isn’t any asparagus left in the garden, but plenty more radishes, and if she doesn’t pick them soon, they’ll become mealy and dry. “Let me make a note of everything,” he says. He counts the bundles in the basket, holds his thumb to a screen which he gets from behind the counter, and flicks it, touching various areas with his index finger, all too fast for Jeanie. When he finishes, he looks up and smiles. “There we are then. Can I get you a coffee?”
She’d love a coffee, but she isn’t sure whether he’ll charge her for it or if it will be free and she doesn’t want that floundering moment of confusion. “No thanks,” she says.
“I really am so sorry about your mother. Such a wonderful woman.”
There is a pause and Jeanie knows he is expecting her to leave but they both continue to stand, waiting. Finally, she clenches her belly muscles and says quickly, “Is there anything due, any money for the last delivery?”
“Oh,” Max says, and she sees that he’s embarrassed too. They don’t look at each other. “No, well. Dot didn’t say? I gave her a little in advance, just to help her out, you know. I’ve kept track of it, all above board.” He lights up his screen again which Jeanie sees has some contraption attached to the back to allow him to hold it with one hand. “I can show you if you like?”
“It’s fine,” she says, backing out, past the jars of fancy piccalilli, the mustards, the bags of pasta sealed with cardboard and a single rivet. “I’ll be back on Thursday or Friday with whatever’s ready.” She’s through the open door, Max following.
“But I’ll see you later,” he says, and she is already pushing the bike and trailer across the road. “Up at the cottage.” She has no idea what he’s on about.
In the village shop Jeanie concentrates on keeping the prices steady in her head, making them add up. They are low on lots of basics: toilet paper, flour, soap, bread, pasta, tea. Her periods haven’t stopped yet and she needs tampons. The butter has gone off and there’s no shampoo or dog food. The oil for the lamps is nearly finished, although she has found two boxes of candles under the sink. She hooks a wire basket over her arm and cruises the three narrow aisles. She has five pounds and fifty-five pence in her purse. A bottle of basic cooking oil is more expensive than a tub of margarine, although the latter will do for both frying and sandwiches, but how long will it last without a fridge, and it’s only worth buying if she can also afford a loaf of bread. The tins of dog food are beyond her budget so she decides on a container of Bisto gravy granules—she can make some up and mix them with cooked vegetables and an egg for Maude. She and Julius can eat this dinner too. She recognizes the Bisto packaging, but there are two sorts: red and orange. She runs her finger under the word on the orange container, sounding out the letters at the start: ch. Chicken. The beef flavour is likely to upset Maude’s stomach less, but the chicken variety seems to have extra included, and is cheaper. Jeanie puts the chicken Bisto in her basket. She can’t decide between a packet of four toilet rolls and a bottle of washing-up liquid which would also do for soap, clothes washing, and maybe even shampoo. There is a stack of old newspapers in the dairy they can use for toilet paper if they must; she selects the washing-up liquid. A loaf of bread and a single pint of milk, and she’s reached her limit. With longing, she walks past the aisle stocked with bars of chocolate, trying not to breathe in. At the till she prays she has added up the price of her five items correctly. The total comes to five pounds and thirty-five pence.
Beside the door on her way out she sees a large box with a sign above it, full of random produce: dried pasta, tins of beans, a box of tampons on top. She walks past this too.
11
Bridget and Stu arrive first at the cottage with two large carrier bags of food and a crate of beer. Julius tries not to think about how much Stu will charge for the bottles of IPA. He has changed into a clean shirt and an old jacket which had belonged to his father but sees brown crusts of soil under his fingernails. Bridget hugs him and when she lets him go, she has tears in her eyes.
“How was it?” she says. “I wish you’d let me come.” She flaps her hand at herself, wipes her cheeks, and gives half a laugh.
“It was fine,” he says, and when she seems to want more, he adds, “Nice.”
“A cremation?”
“No,” he says, and then thinking that she’ll ask where Dot is buried, immediately says, “Yes.” He pulls the corners of his mouth down. “Sorry, it’s been a long day.”
“I expect you don’t know if you’re coming or going.” She puts the carriers on the table. “I know, I know, you didn’t want me to bring much, but . . .” She shrugs and takes out a plate of sandwiches covered in cling film and unwraps them, as well as three large pork pies. “Where’s Jeanie?” Bridget slices the pies and puts the food out on the table. Stu has gone back to the van for more beer.
“She went to deliver some vegetables to Max,” Julius says.
Bridget stops in the middle of sliding a quiche lorraine out of its packet. “You didn’t tell her, did you?” He looks away. “Oh, Julius. She’s not going to be in the village for long, surely? She’s going to come back and find her house full of people.”
Did they have a wake for their father? Julius can’t remember, but as Bridget is laying out slices of buttered malt loaf he remembers Frank’s birthday cake: badly iced in pink by Jeanie. Julius had piped a blue Happy Birthday Dad in barely readable script on the top. The cake sat beside the sink in the scullery for more than three weeks after their father died. None of them ate it and none of them could throw it away. The icing hardened and crazed like the frozen puddles Julius liked to break with the heel of his shoe in winter. The cake grew a grey speckled rash and a sage-green moss sprouted from the cracks. Bridget took the cake away in the end while their mother had sat in a dull, unseeing silence at the kitchen table.
“Jeanie wouldn’t have let me have a wake,” Julius says to Bridget. “She was dead set against it.”
Luke Emerson, the roofer from East Grafton, Richard Letford, who sometimes hires Julius when he needs an extra hand with fitting a kitchen, and Jenks arrive at the same time. They gather beside the beer and hem Julius in, between the dresser and the table.
“She was a fine woman all right,” Luke says as though continuing a conversation. Bottles of beer are handed round. Jenks, his cigarette in his mouth, shakes Julius’s hand. “I appreciate the invitation,” he says. Julius isn’t certain that he did invite Jenks, or that Jenks ever met Dot. “I remember your mum,” he says, and seems to be thinking about what should come next. Julius tries to pull his hand away but Jenks grips it tighter and shakes it some more. “Vegetables,” he says, and lets go. “Carrots,” he says, removing his cigarette and taking a swig of his beer. “Those posh ones with the leaves on. Don’t know why, it’s more work, slicing them off. Should be cheaper.”
“And beetroots,” Luke says.
Jenks swings round. “Potatoes with mud all over them, like a muddy spud is supposed to be better for you.”
“Can’t go wrong with a few brussels sprouts,” Richard says.
“On the stalk though,” Jenks says. “What’s that about?”
Julius leans in towards Richard and asks, “Got any work coming up? I’m a bit short at the moment.”
“Sorry, mate,” Richard says. “It’s all pretty quiet. No one’s booking any big projects.”
“Me neither,” Luke says. “Too bloody quiet. It’s those Eastern Europeans, working for peanuts.”
“Sooner we’re out of there, the better,” Richard says.
As the conversation moves on, Julius looks behind him and sees that the room has filled with a dozen people. Through the mass of bodies, he spies Shelley Swift in profile beside the do
or to the left staircase, talking to the man who sets up the stalls at the Tuesday market. She has had her hair cut, and whereas the rest of her skin that he’s already seen—her face and shoulders, cleavage, arms, hands, and legs from the knees down—is a reddish colour, the back of her neck is a milky white. He remembers the feel of her tongue on his lips, the smell of her lemon soap, although it has gone from his fingers.
As though she knows he’s watching, Shelley Swift turns and smiles straight at him, takes a sip from her glass, and turns back to the market stall man. Julius is suddenly parched and he tips up his bottle, finishing his beer. Jenks hands him another and Julius edges between the people and the rising volume towards Shelley Swift.
“I’m so sorry about Dot.” Julius frowns at the woman with her hand on his arm, trying to bring her name to mind. He knows she runs the B&B in the village.
“Kate Gill,” she says.
“Kate,” he says, embarrassed that he forgot, although delivering the eggs had been Dot and Jeanie’s job. Bridget must have told her about the wake. Kate is saying something and he refocuses his attention.
“Will Jeanie look after them on her own now?”
“Look after who?” Julius says.
“The chickens. Only it’ll be a lot of work, won’t it? The size of the garden—Dot showed me round it once. I suppose you’ll be able to help.”
Julius stares at his bottle of beer and sees that it’s already empty. “Can I get you another drink?” he asks and takes her glass before she can reply. He slips away just as Stu comes up. Julius opens another bottle and moves counterclockwise around the table, heading once more for Shelley Swift. Bridget intercepts him.
“This is Dr. Holloway,” she says, introducing a large man. They shake hands.
“How was the service?” the doctor asks. Julius knows he should have prepared himself for this question—everyone is going to ask it.
“Fine, fine,” he says. He looks at his hands, picks a rind out from under a nail. “It was simple. Nice. Nice and simple.”
“Just the two of you, was it, Julius?” Bridget says, and he wonders if she’s only upset that she wasn’t invited or whether she suspects something.
“Julius,” the doctor says. “Julius Seeder!” He laughs, deep and booming. “I get it now.”
“Wasn’t that down to Frank?” Bridget says. “Dot told me that he thought your name sounded grand, important, and neither of them realized what they’d done until you were five and started school.”
Julius no longer minds about his name. In the playground, as soon as he’d learned to punch, no one teased him much about it.
“In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are,” Dr. Holloway says.
Julius is only half listening, one eye and one ear on the corner of the room between the sofa and the left staircase.
“Something Julius Caesar said. I find the words truer the older I get.” There is a gap in the conversation and then the doctor says, “How’s your sister doing? Is she about?”
“Excuse me,” Julius says. “Just got to . . .” He points vaguely across the room and inches himself past the doctor and Bridget, knocking the plate of malt loaf with his hip.
“Careful there,” says a man coming the other way, catching the plate before it falls. It’s the bloke who sets up the market stalls. Julius tries to see who Shelley Swift is talking to now.
“Do you know the thing I always remember about your mum?” the man says.
Julius shakes his head. He can’t remember this man’s name either.
“In winter, on those mornings when it’s cold enough to freeze your bloody bollocks off, so cold that if you’ve got damp fingers, they’ll stick to the metal poles, Dot would arrive with a couple of hard-boiled eggs in her coat pockets. She gave me them, once. Hot. Said they’d keep my hands warm and give me something to eat later. That’s a woman with her head screwed on right, I thought. A sensible woman. A good woman.”
What will they say about him when he’s gone? Julius wonders. Lived with his mother, and then his sister. Worked hard, but never made enough money. Never did anything with his life. Never went anywhere. Engines made him throw up. His thoughts drift away from the conversation and then Shelley Swift is beside him. She’s wearing a dress that his mother would have said was too low-cut for a wake, curving around her body. Christ, what does it matter what his mother would have thought? She is in the ground, under the apple tree. What would they say if they knew? He almost laughs. He feels light-headed, on his way to being drunk but at that easy, slack stage. He bends towards Shelley Swift, looking at her tremendous breasts swelling at the top of her dress, and inhales the smell of her lemon soap.
“Thanks for coming,” he says, and she smiles up at him. “You’re right. She was,” he says to the man who puts up the market stalls.
Jeanie is past the farmhouse, cycling faster than she knows she should, the trailer rattling along behind. Anything could happen: she could fly over the handlebars or the animal in her heart might burst out, but right now she doesn’t give a monkey’s. If Rawson or his wife appeared, she would run them both down and not stop. Past the large barn, across the concrete slabs and the bumps where they were poured and joined, she turns the bend onto the track, where she sees the first parked car, and then another and another, pulled up in a row along the verge. Half a dozen or more. Stu’s van is there but she doesn’t recognize any of the others—she never remembers cars, they are only ever silver or black or some different colour. Immediately she knows that Julius has invited people over while she was out of the way. The track is too narrow now to stay on the bike with the trailer joggling along behind. She gets off and pushes. At the front gate she sees a few people moving about in the kitchen, their bodies cut off below the thighs and their heads and shoulders vanished because of the low window. She won’t go in, instead she storms around the back of the cottage, up the garden where Maude has been put, and into the greenhouse.
In the warm, scented air she scoops compost into a dozen clay pots, the soil running between her fingers, much looser than the clotted pile of earth she stood beside a few hours before. Did Julius finish filling in the grave before he was stupid enough to let these people into their house? She dibs a hole in the compost, turns a young tomato plant out into her palm, and buries its roots in the earth. Like cooking, it is a job she did beside her mother for nearly fifty years, and now the lack of her, the empty space, is tangible: the way Dot shifted from one hip to the other when she had to stand for long periods, how she flicked her head when her hair fell in her eyes, the way she would catch a bee in her cupped hands without being stung.
The greenhouse is the place where mother and daughter talked or were contentedly silent. It is the place where they stood side by side while Dot explained things when Jeanie was young. It is here that Dot taught her how to listen to her own heartbeat, how to take her pulse with her fingers on her throat or wrist, to breathe slowly.
Now, Jeanie works angrily, potting on the tomatoes, shoving the delicate roots too hard into the soil, knowing they will grow crooked, and not caring. Pot after pot she rushes until she picks one up, ready to hurl it through a pane of glass, but with her arm raised, she hears a bray of voices as someone opens the back door of the cottage and goes into the privy. She puts the pot down. She lifts her head, listening, wondering if she can simply walk out of the garden, down the lane, and disappear. Then she wipes her earth-blackened fingers on her skirt, leaves the greenhouse, and goes into the cottage.
Through the scullery, she slips into the dark end of the kitchen, letting Maude in with her. The dog looks at the people, turns around, and slinks out. The room is more crowded than Jeanie anticipated: a dozen or so people crammed in around the kitchen table and sitting on the sofa, the buzz of multiple conversations, the haze of cigarette smoke turned orange by the oil lamps; the oil they can’t afford to waste. No one was allowed to smoke in the house when Dot was alive.
In the gaps between
the bodies she sees the bottles of beer on the dresser, as well as a half-empty bottle of port, and when she sees the label, she realizes that someone must have taken it out of her own dresser. On the table are plates of food—Bridget’s involvement she presumes. There is the big brown teapot they never use, and on the end closest to her, the remains of the rabbit pie. Maybe, with any luck, it will make someone ill—it was baked three days ago and hasn’t been refrigerated. She wants to shout for them to leave, to drive them out like cattle. She wants only the fire, the dog, and her brother. The packed room and the people are overwhelming; sweat prickles her hairline. Bridget is talking to Kate, and Jeanie tries to hear what they are saying, thinks it might be something about fifty-one-year-olds still living with their mother, until recently, of course; never having a proper job; never learning to read or write as well as everyone else. But it is something about life being too short and how you should accept love from wherever you can find it, no matter what other people think. Jeanie watches the doctor, standing with Max and eating a piece of pork pie. A crumb falls onto his lapel and then to the floor.
Julius is in the corner by the left staircase, a cigarette between his fingers, talking to a woman with her back to Jeanie, and it takes her a moment to recognize Shelley Swift with a new haircut, showing her thick neck and chunky shoulders, done up like she’s at a wedding, not a wake. Nobody notices Jeanie as she edges forwards, ready to bolt, like the dog. She grabs for her guitar and sits on the piano stool, bending her head over the strings so that no one will speak to her, and she tunes it. It’s only Julius she’s calling to. When she looks up, his hand is on Shelley Swift’s arm. Someone, Stu, gives him a glass, and he takes a swig, grimaces. They don’t usually drink alcohol at home, only on birthdays and Christmas and then just a drop of port, although she knows Julius goes to the pub, but he has never come home drunk. She plucks harder at the guitar to make him look over.
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