Nathan stands upright and goes past her with a practised swagger and puts a hand on the top of Dot’s banjo case. “I was sent to tell you about the eviction notice. Give you some warning. I don’t know nothing about any agreement or payback times.”
“Is this your job now, working for Rawson? Does your mother know what you’re up to?” Jeanie leans the fork against the table and lifts the banjo case out from under his hand and hugs it, an urge to fight firing through her like electric sparks.
He doesn’t answer but picks up a framed photograph of Jeanie and Julius as babies lying at either end of a pram. He turns it over, examines the back and the frame as if assessing its value, before replacing it on the dresser.
“He’s not a man of his word and you ought to be careful, Nathan, doing his dirty work. I have to get on.” She is shaking inside but she holds one arm out, inviting Nathan to leave.
“Monday,” he throws over his shoulder once he’s on the doorstep. “I’ll be back on Monday with the notice.”
From the doorway she watches him walk down the path, a loose-jointed amble, aware, she thinks, that she’s watching. When he gets to the gate, she shouts, “This is our house. It will be our house until we’re carried out in our coffins. You can tell Rawson that.” She slams the door and rests a palm against it, controlling her breathing, slowing her pulse.
When she tells Julius about Nathan’s visit, he rages around the kitchen, like he raged when she told him about Caroline Rawson coming over. He shouts that he’ll go to Bridget’s and demand that she and Stu control their son, or he’ll go and see Rawson and give him a mouthful. She lets his anger roll over her, agreeing, commiserating, calming. She can’t see that either of these plans will do any good in the state that Julius is in. And the sum of money that the Rawsons say they owe—the size of it—is so far beyond the pence and pounds Jeanie’s used to dealing with that it seems fanciful, made up. They could owe two million and it would be the same. But every night she can’t sleep, and tonight, during their dinner of spaghetti mixed with a tin of condensed mushroom soup and whatever vegetables there are to hand, Jeanie twirls the pasta on her fork and doesn’t ever bring it to her mouth.
Jeanie has twenty pence remaining from the money she spent at the shop. Julius adds the change from his pockets and the thirty pounds from his wallet that he was given for helping with the chicken shed. There is nothing to add from Dot’s purse, they’ve already searched it and her handbag for the missing money.
“I heard there’s a food bank in Devizes,” Julius says without looking at her.
“We’re not going to a food bank, Julius. We have a whole garden full of food.” She points outside and doesn’t tell him about the box she saw in the shop.
“When are you going to realize that there’s nothing wrong with asking for help, or taking it when it’s given? All those middle-class kids who can just ask the bank of mum and dad when they need some help. This isn’t any different.”
“But we aren’t kids any more.”
“No, we’re fifty-one and we need a hand. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us.”
“Anyway,” Jeanie says, “who have you been telling that we’re short of food?”
Julius shakes his head, doesn’t answer. “I asked Wheilden if he’s got any more work, but he doesn’t.”
“I’m sure not everyone has paid you what they owe.” Jeanie means Shelley Swift, but she isn’t going to say the name. “You need to ask for it.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“When you stop acting like my mother and telling me what to do.”
“What about money for your tobacco? I suppose you kept some back for that and for your pints with your drinking mates in the Plough.”
“And you’re not going to spend anything on that bloody dog?”
Maude, on the sofa, lifts her head as though she knows she’s being talked about.
“I don’t think you understand. We’re going to lose the cottage.” Jeanie puts her palms on the table. The creature is in her throat. If she opens her mouth wide enough and screams, it will come sliding out, newborn and slippery, ready to fight.
“I understand! I bloody understand.” He shoves the edge of the table towards her and she moves back from it. “We don’t owe any money to Rawson, and he can’t evict us. I’m going round there. I’m going round there right now.”
“Now? It’s after ten.” In the mood Julius is in, she’s worried he might make the whole situation worse.
“Now.” He pulls his coat and cap from the peg, jams his feet into his boots, and grabs the thirty pounds from the table. For a second he looks at the money; then he slaps down a ten-pound note and leaves before Maude is even off the sofa.
For five minutes Jeanie sits at the table and then, in an act of economy which gives her a momentary boost, she extinguishes the three oil lamps and, lighting a candle, resumes her search of the cottage for the missing money.
In half an hour Julius returns. Jeanie is on her knees putting rarely used crockery back into a dresser cupboard. “Well?” she says.
“They weren’t there.” He sits heavily on the sofa next to the dog. “No lights on, nothing. I went and woke Simons. He wasn’t too happy. He said they’ve gone away. Ten days, two weeks, he wasn’t sure. Greece or somewhere. They don’t even need our money.”
In the morning Jeanie spends nine pounds fifty-seven in the shop, buying most of the necessities she couldn’t afford on Monday: more pasta, toilet rolls, tins of baked beans, toothpaste. Outside she stares at the few handwritten advertisements slotted into a plastic sleeve hanging on the inside of the window, trying to puzzle them out. In the shop, a young man with acne peppered across his forehead is placing glossy magazines along the shelves.
“I was told there was a card in the window advertising for a cleaner,” Jeanie says to him, waving her hand vaguely towards the front of the shop. “But I couldn’t see it.”
“Probably thrown away,” he says, carrying on with his work. “They’re only up for a couple of weeks.”
“My friend said there was definitely one there about a cleaning job.”
The man huffs and, holding his stack of magazines to his chest, goes outside and Jeanie follows. He scans the cards. “Nope, must have been chucked out.” He starts to go back inside.
“Is there one about gardening?” Jeanie leans in and squints. “Did you write these? The handwriting is shocking.”
He comes back and looks over them again, taps the glass. “That’s it.” He reads it without enthusiasm: “Female gardener required by female householder, for lawn mowing and other basic gardening. One to two afternoons a week.”
“Have you got a pen?” She feels around in her handbag.
“Take a picture on your phone,” he says.
“Maybe you could write the phone number down for me?” She knows there’s no pen in her handbag, what would be the point, and besides, the numbers won’t stop jumping. The young man has already gone in. After a moment she follows him and pretends to browse the newspapers on a stand beside the window. When his back is turned, she reaches over and takes the card out of the plastic pocket and slips it into her handbag.
13
On her way home, Jeanie takes a detour up Cutter Hill. She gets off the bike and wheels it slowly, aware of the speed of her heart; making sure she pauses when she thinks she needs to. It’s a couple of miles out of her way, but just as she remembers, the red public telephone box is outside the Rising Sun Inn, which last closed its doors two years ago. As a young child, when she was off school, she would have to come with her mother to this phone box which smelled of wee and old cigarette breath. Dot brought a little bag of twopence pieces and used them to make boring telephone calls about bills and appointments, sometimes lifting Jeanie up so she could press the coins into the slot. The calls seemed to last for ever and most of the time Jeanie squatted beside her mother’s legs, blowing hot air onto a glass panel and drawing pictures
of animals in the condensation. After her mother finished these calls, she usually had a conversation with someone called Sissy, which Jeanie thought was a funny name. There was one conversation with Sissy which she remembers even now, where her mother said, “I can’t,” again and again, and Jeanie drew her own I can’t, I can’t onto the glass as little crosses. “Because of the children, because where would we go, because how would we manage? Because he’s a good man, because I took a vow. That means something, doesn’t it?” Her mother sounded like she was going to cry, and mothers didn’t cry. “There’s nothing to tell you,” she said. “Nothing’s happened.” Her mother listened to Sissy’s reply and got out her handkerchief. “I’m all right. I’ll call another day. Jeanie’s here, I’ve got to go.” Jeanie stood up. Dot held out the phone. “Say goodbye to Sissy.”
“Goodbye, Sissy,” Jeanie whispered into the smelly mouthpiece, but the pips were already sounding.
As Jeanie rolls the bike up to the phone box, her shopping bags swinging from the handlebars, she can see that something inside is different and when she opens the door she discovers that the telephone is gone and the back wall where it once hung is filled with books. Fat, gaudy paperbacks with creased spines. More are piled up on the concrete floor, bulging pages where the damp has got in.
At home, she lifts Julius’s mobile phone from his coat pocket when he isn’t looking and takes it up to the end of the garden. It’s charged, so she knows he must have been in the pub. Following the number on the card she has taken from the shop’s window digit by digit, she pushes the buttons. She doesn’t want to tell Julius what she’s doing, not until she can say that she actually has a job.
The following day, Jeanie stands at an open five-bar gate, beyond which is an old car and an overgrown lawn with a crazy paving path snaking to the front door of a bungalow. Paint is peeling from the woodwork and last year’s leaves are curled in the corner of the brown-tiled porch. The doorbell chime plays the start of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The woman who comes to the door is wearing a flowered dress which reaches to her ankles, below which are flat sandals with leather bars over the big toes. She is younger than Jeanie expected, thirty maybe, with a jewel on the side of her nose that the sun catches, as though the woman were signalling.
“I recognize you,” she says when she sees Jeanie at the edge of the porch. “You’re one of the women who grow the vegetables. I work a few mornings in the deli.” Her dress moves as though a draught were coming through the house, and a young child emerges from behind her skirt. With a jangle of bracelets, the woman holds out her hand to Jeanie. “I’m Saffron,” she says, and Jeanie shakes it. “And this is Angel.” She hoists the child onto her hip, rucking up the girl’s oversize shirt, revealing chunky calves and thighs. Angel has yellow paint in her hair and on her fingers, and she smears it across Saffron’s neck, which is pale against the child’s hazelnut-brown skin. The woman leads Jeanie through the house, explaining how she bought the place six months ago with some money she was left by her father, who was an utter shit by the way, and how she thought she might knock it down and build something new but she’s become attached to it in the couple of months she’s been there. Jeanie remembers what Julius said about other people having the bank of mum and dad to fall back on. Saffron is still talking, explaining how Angel loves to run in a circle from one room to the next because each opens into another, and here’s the central courtyard which she’s thinking of glassing over. Without any embarrassment she says she wants to surround Angel with positive women, that’s why she wants a female gardener. Jeanie isn’t sure whether she should admit to not always feeling positive. They walk through the kitchen, the table cluttered with paints and paper.
Out through the french windows, Saffron puts Angel down—What names! Jeanie thinks—telling her that the garden feels like too much for her to tackle, she wouldn’t know where to start. She lived in Oxford before Inkbourne and she’s not yet sure about the country, but she wanted to be nearer her mother for Angel’s sake. “Well, for babysitting opportunities, if I’m honest,” she adds. “I’m doing a postgrad certificate in psychodynamic counselling at Oxford.” Jeanie doesn’t ask what this is; she’s too afraid that she’ll understand the explanation even less than the name of the thing. “It’s a lot of work, much more than I expected, and it’s hard to keep up with this one running around. It’s just me and Angel. Me and her father, it was a one-off thing, you know. Never saw him again.” Saffron laughs. All the information of her life spills so easily from her that Jeanie is both embarrassed and envious of her ability to be this unreserved. They stand on a patio made of concrete slabs and look down across the lawn. The grass has grown to full height, a stone birdbath in the middle has nearly disappeared, and overrun flower beds blend in on either side. The view takes Jeanie’s eye past a mature tree to the far end of the garden and the fields beyond, and then upwards to a line of oaks on a low ridge in the distance. The shadows of the clouds move across the hillside and there isn’t another house in sight. All is green and gold.
“It’s beautiful, yeah?” Saffron says. “But what should I do? Have it mowed? It’ll take for ever.”
“No,” Jeanie says. “Don’t mow it, not all of it. Cut a winding path through the grass, plant some wildflowers, make some spaces around the trees where your daughter can play. A meadow.”
“A meadow,” Saffron says, and grabs Jeanie’s arm with a tinkle of metal. “That’s what this one was going to be called, weren’t you, Angel?”
The child smiles up at them. “I had a banana,” she says to Jeanie, and waits.
“Was it blue?” Jeanie says.
“Yellow, silly,” Angel says, and runs off through the grass, shouting, “Banana, banana.”
Saffron and Jeanie go as far as the tree, which Jeanie names as an Indian horse chestnut, and she gets the job. It’s that simple, and she wonders why she has never thought to do this before. They agree on ten pounds an hour, two afternoons a week to begin with. Whichever days suit. There is a shed full of tools which were Saffron’s father’s, including a lawnmower and a can which they decide contains petrol when they sniff it. Jeanie asks if she can bring Maude but is too relieved to have got the job to dare to mention that she’d like to be paid in cash, and weekly. Back in the kitchen, Saffron makes tea and Jeanie sits with Angel, watching her paint a brown shape which looks like an apricot stone with lines coming off it, black splodges at one end that are too wet and run off the page when the child holds it out for her. “Is it a giant seed?” she asks. “A big brown eye with eyelashes?”
“Maur,” Angel says, and shoves the painting at her.
“I think it’s your dog,” Saffron says, looking over.
When Jeanie gets home, she tapes Angel’s painting to the kitchen wall and tells Julius that she has a job.
She is excited, amazed at what she has managed to do so easily, and although she knows that what she will be earning won’t touch their debts, the idea of doing work other than looking after her own house and garden makes her feel like something inside her—as tiny as an onion seed—is splitting open, ready to send out its shoot. But Julius looks up from his plate of fried eggs and spinach, and says, “That’s great.” He is distracted, about the debts, the missing money, she presumes, and when he doesn’t ask her any questions about what the job is or where, the seed shrivels, and Jeanie thinks that it is too late for both of them and for the cottage.
Still, the following afternoon, which is dry and windy, she cycles slowly to the bungalow with Maude running alongside. In the house, Jeanie introduces Angel to the dog and the child pats Maude so hard on her back that Saffron lifts Angel away, saying she must be more gentle, and the child cries and kicks her legs. Maude doesn’t seem to mind being beaten by small hands, but Jeanie takes the dog outside where she sulks, lying on the patio with her head between her paws. Jeanie pulls the lawnmower out of the shed, careful to do it without exerting herself, and is surprised to see that it is fairly new; it starts f
irst go. The shed is full of all the equipment she might ever need, and going through it, as well as being away from the cottage and Julius, are good distractions from her other thoughts: whether Nathan was bluffing about the eviction, when Stu might ask for his money back, where her mother could have put the cash. Jeanie marks out the path with short lengths of wood which she cuts with a saw from the shed, and is excited to see the shape of it, winding down through the garden, taking the visitor on a tour of one flower bed and another, a tree, a cast-concrete urn she has found in the shrubbery.
Jeanie returns on Sunday afternoon, and when she has finished working, Saffron comes out with glasses of water, cups of tea, and a packet of chocolate biscuits. They sit on the patio—there’s no table or chairs—and Angel approaches Maude again.
“Let her sniff your hand first,” Saffron says. “Hold it out flat. Be gentle.”
“She’s a very mild-tempered dog,” Jeanie says. “A bit of a coward, really.” Maude licks Angel’s hand, then her face, and Angel sits heavily on her backside, her chin crimping and her bottom lip rolling out. Before the wail starts, Saffron crawls on her hands and knees, bangles clinking, and nuzzles Angel’s neck and then licks her face too, and Jeanie is reminded of the play fights she and Julius would have with their father, clinging on to his neck as he roared in mock anger. Angel laughs and the dog bounces off down the garden.
When they’re sitting once more and Angel is focused on her chocolate biscuit, which is melting over her dimpled hands, Jeanie says, “I’ll have to scythe the path first. The grass is too long to mow straight away.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Just a bit more work.” She thinks about the amount of physical exertion this will be and the possible consequences, and decides she no longer cares.
Unsettled Ground Page 10
