Unsettled Ground

by Claire Fuller

  “Okay,” Saffron says. “I guess you’d have to scythe the whole thing if I wanted it all mown.”

  “I thought I’d open it out a bit further down, have a circle of lawn that you can see from here so that Angel has somewhere to play.”

  “That would be lovely.” Saffron takes Angel’s wrist just before she places her hand on the ground and sucks the chocolate from each fat finger.

  “Doggy,” Angel says.

  “I have your money.” Saffron takes something from the pocket of her dress—the same dress she was wearing the day before and the day before that. “We didn’t agree on how often I’d pay you, but is weekly okay? Ten hours this week, yeah? And you’ll do the same next week?”

  “I’m not sure which days though,” Jeanie says.

  “No problem. Whenever you like.” She holds out the slip she’s taken from her pocket—a piece of paper, not cash—and Jeanie accepts it and when she unfolds it, she sees that it is a cheque. Heat prickles the skin of her throat, and her heart begins its knocking. Perhaps it shows in her face, because Saffron says, “I can transfer the money next time. Email me your bank details and I’ll send it across.”

  “No,” Jeanie says. “Thanks, a cheque is fine.”

  After the wake, four days go by without Shelley Swift sending Julius a text or calling. Several times he picks up his phone and laboriously composes a message but deletes each one and puts his mobile away, feeling out of his depth, unconfident of her interest in him. There have been other women, but not for years. When Julius was in his twenties, the village hall held gigs for local bands, not his kind of music but he always went. Three summers in a row Julius slept with three different women when the gigs were over. Once in the back of an expensive car, another time on a mattress in the back of a van, and a third up against the wall behind the public toilets. He would have liked to give his number to each one of them, all interesting in different ways, but he had no number to give, and they never offered theirs. Older villagers complained about the gigs—the noise and the mess—and after the third summer there were no more bands, and no more women. Then when he was about to turn thirty-five, he met Amy. He liked her, could have fallen in love, and didn’t mind when Jeanie teased him about settling down, moving out, how it was about time one of them did, and although it was banter between siblings, he knew without her saying that while she wanted him to go, she was afraid of being left with Dot, afraid she would never leave when he was gone. He didn’t tell his mother about Amy, but it was Dot who casually mentioned one day that she’d seen her kissing some man outside the Plough. Julius didn’t see Amy after that.

  On Friday, another day without work, he goes out on his bike to Little Bedwyn, telling himself he’ll knock on some doors to see if anyone he’s worked for in the past needs anything doing. He hates drumming up jobs this way, the suspicion in people’s faces, the thought that he must look desperate, like a beggar. He visits a farm he worked on a year ago, but the house has a For Sale sign outside, and instead he starts to cycle up the gravel drive of a country house where he once worked helping lay the concrete floors in the garages. They were in the middle of the work when the owner of the house appeared, an old man with a walking stick and a yellow Labrador, and said there was a telephone call for him. They all stopped—Julius and the two men he was working with. “For me?” he said, and his boss frowned, but the old man had already started hobbling back to the house and Julius followed. Someone must be dead, he thought, his mother or his sister, and he wanted the old man to walk faster. He can’t remember now much about the inside of the place except that the hall was huge, with an enormous glittering chandelier. When he picked up the phone, he heard the pips and the chank of coins being pushed into the slot, and his mother was on the other end.

  “It’s Jeanie,” she said in a shaky voice.

  “Is she okay? What’s happened?”

  “I’m worried about her. Her heart.”

  “Why are you phoning me?” he shouted. “Call an ambulance, for God’s sake.”

  “I just need you to come home.”

  When he got back, Jeanie was fine, of course, or as fine as she ever was. It was his mother he worried about then.

  Before he gets to the house’s front door, Julius turns in a big loop and cycles back the way he’s come. After that, he calls on a couple of other likely-looking farms but doesn’t pick up any work. When it’s five thirty he slowly rides a route which will take him past the brickworks. He hasn’t much hope of bumping into Shelley Swift, and when he sees a red Nissan coming towards him, he doesn’t really think it can be her. He raises his hand, unable to see clearly through the windscreen. He stops as soon as the car passes and when he looks back, the car has also stopped and reverses quickly up the road towards him with a whine. Shelley Swift lowers her window and although Julius’s timing couldn’t be better, he hasn’t considered anything beyond seeing her and can only stare at her face and her arm resting on the door, all of which are covered in a fine film of brick dust.

  “Is your boiler heating up okay?” he says at last and as soon as the words are out they sound like a joke which Jenks would make.

  She laughs and says, “It’s in good working order, thank you. How’s yours?”

  He blushes and manages some sort of reply.

  “What brings you out this way?” she says and when he can’t find an answer, she speaks for him. “Just getting some air? It’s a lovely evening for it.” She winks. “I was thinking of going for a walk. Want to join me?”

  She parks her car on the verge and he locks his bike, and they walk across Two Hares Field. She is wearing unsuitable clothes for a walk: a tight skirt and a blouse, and he can tell that her heels are sinking into the damp grass. He helps her over a stile into Foxbury Wood.

  “I remember you from school,” she says. “You were in the year below me, always had a bloody nose from fighting. I fancied you even then.”

  He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t remember her at all.

  This time he kisses her first, and when she presses up to him, he can feel her large breasts inside her silky blouse, soft against his chest. She puts her hands on his cheeks and kisses him back. She draws away, and holding him again with her eyes, she tugs at the silk bow at her throat—somehow part of the blouse—and unbuttons it all the way down, then lifts one of her breasts out of her bra. It is as pale as her neck, with a blue vein snaking downwards. The size and weight of it stretches the brown nipple into an oval. He puts his hand under it, excited by its warmth and its wonderful heft, and he raises it towards his mouth as he bends his head.

  “Will you lie down with me here?” he says after a while, wishing he had brought a blanket or was wearing a bigger coat.

  “Here?” Shelley Swift says. “In a wood?” And she laughs so much he thinks she might be sick.

  When they say goodbye at the car, he is shy, but she only laughs some more. He wants to arrange to see her but doesn’t know how to ask or what she might reply. It is only as he is cycling off that he remembers she hasn’t paid him for the two jobs, and that it isn’t ever going to be possible to ask for the money now.

  14

  Jeanie and Julius lock up the cottage and walk along the track in the opposite direction to the farm, and up the twisting path to the top of Rivar Down. The incline is steep and they lean into it, thighs burning. Jeanie is annoyed that Julius insists they rest every fifth step for her to catch her breath, but she complies. At the point where the hikers’ route crosses, they go left along the ridge and through a stand of oak where the path is fenced with barbed wire and the grass beyond clipped by sheep. Already Jeanie can feel the sun beating on her forehead and knows they should have brought hats. How could there have been snow only two weeks ago? How could their mother be dead? The knowledge still sometimes takes her by surprise, that Dot isn’t at home washing eggs in the scullery or mixing compost in the greenhouse. There are puddles on the track, and swarms of flies rise up as Maude races past. Julius
doesn’t have any work to go to, but both of them could—should—be spending the day in the vegetable garden. Today is the day that Nathan said he would be serving the eviction notice, and although their decision to be out of the cottage wasn’t talked over, somehow they are here with Julius’s rucksack packed with a bottle of water, a flask of tea, and sandwiches made from cheap sliced bread, margarine, and the previous autumn’s raspberry jam. When did they last walk together without having to get somewhere in particular? Jeanie can’t remember. They are behaving as though it is normal: just another stroll, just another picnic. The tea in the flask is black and unsweetened. There is no milk and no sugar.

  On Ham Hill they stop to look out at the slope falling steeply below them, criss-crossed with the tracks of sheep, and further away, the land flattening to a mosaic of fields trimmed with hedges, patches of woods, and isolated houses, and between them, the dark trickle of the Ink. Berkshire to their right; Inkbourne and Wiltshire to their left. They can see Rawson’s black-roofed barn and part of the farmhouse, but the cottage and the garden are hidden by trees. They walk on as far as the common, passing a couple in raincoats and walking boots, socks folded over the tops, and the man with a map in a plastic wallet hanging around his neck. They pass a group of foreign teenagers, bored and tired and being chivvied on by an exasperated leader. At the bottom of the gibbet—a twenty-five-foot post standing on the beacon—some idiot has placed a bunch of thistles, roots and soil attached, as a bouquet for the outlaws who were strung up here. Jeanie and Julius walk with their boots sideways, down the steep common, and sit below the shoulder of the hill, out of sight of any walkers.

  Julius tosses a corner of his sandwich to Maude. She catches it in her mouth and it disappears with a snap of her teeth.

  “You’ll give her bad habits,” Jeanie says. “She’ll sit by your lap when you’re eating at the table and then you won’t be so happy to feed her.” She isn’t really telling him off, she likes that he feeds the dog. She pours a cupful of tea.

  “Do you remember, we used to come here with Dad?” Julius says.

  “We used to go to Ham Hill, not here,” Jeanie says.

  “No, it was definitely here. For our eighth birthday. This was where he gave me my penknife.”

  “It was Ham Hill. He left you alone with it and you cut your leg open.”

  “That was later. Not here, not on our birthday.”

  “God, there was so much blood.” Jeanie blows on the tea and sips. “He was such an irresponsible father.” She laughs. “Do you still have the scar?”

  Julius lifts up the bottom of his jeans and shows his shin with a white slash across it.

  “Ouch,” she says, passing him the cup. “That’s even worse than I remember.”

  Julius drinks, tugs down his jeans. “He was a good musician though.”

  Jeanie lies back fully on the grass and Maude runs over and sniffs her face as though to check she isn’t dead, and when Jeanie opens her eyes, all she can see is sky: blue the colour of a dressing gown she had as a child, and white clouds, lacy at the edges, moving from one side of her vision to the other.

  “Do you ever think about what’ll happen to our music after we’re gone?”

  Julius takes so long to move or to answer that she thinks maybe he hasn’t heard her, but he lies back too, his hands behind his head.

  “No,” he says.

  “Mum and Dad taught us all those songs, and that’s it. No one for us to pass them on to.”

  “I keep telling you we should do a gig at the Plough.”

  “I’m not doing one, so you might as well stop going on about it. Everyone will be looking, judging, gossiping. They do enough of that already, every time I go to the village.”

  “No one’s looking at you, Jeanie. Everyone’s too busy thinking about themselves. Trust me. We should do it. I bet you’d love it. We’d be paid. Holloway says he might be able to get someone to come and have a listen. Some bloke who’s interested in regional folk music or something.”

  She interrupts him; she’s never going to play at the Plough or anywhere else in public. The wake was enough. “Don’t you want to pass your music on, teach it to someone?”

  “What do you mean? Like give lessons?”

  She isn’t sure if he’s being wilfully difficult. But she won’t say what she means, not directly. “Not to any old child.”

  “Ahh,” he says, long and drawn out. He understands exactly what she means. “My own kid. Nope. Never thought about it.”

  “You must have thought about it. Children, marriage.”

  “Who’s to say I haven’t got kids scattered all over the county already?”

  There were a few times when Julius was younger that he stayed out all night, creeping home in the early morning and asking Jeanie not to tell. Once, late on a hot Sunday morning after a few hours’ sleep, he put the tin bath in the yard and filled it with warm water. Jeanie was peeling vegetables for Sunday lunch and watching him from the open scullery window, sitting in the tub, his broad back and bony knees sticking out of the water. He turned and winked at her and she lobbed a piece of raw potato at him. He ducked too late and it bounced off his head. She threw the hard end of a parsnip with such unexpected anger that when it hit his shoulder he yelped. Another and another followed until he rose up out of the water, grabbed his towel, and retreated, as she yelled with a ferocity that shocked her. It wasn’t that Jeanie wanted what he was having—sex or a relationship—those things left her unmoved; but she knew it would be a woman who would take him away from the cottage, from her.

  On the common, Jeanie sits up. “Forget it,” she says, looking out to her left, away from him. “I can’t ever have a proper conversation with you.”

  “Sorry,” he says and tugs on her shirt. “Lie down.” She lies back once more, and he says, “I’m not planning on marrying anyone.”

  “You don’t need to marry anyone to be with them, have children. With Mum gone, you can do what you want.”

  “I’ve always done what I want.”

  “Have you?”

  “This is crazy.” Now he’s the one who sits up. “It’s like you’ve been itching for a fight ever since we buried her.” When she looks at him, he is a shadow blocking out the light, knees bent and arms resting on them, and for the first time that she can remember, she has no idea what he’s thinking.

  “I saw you took the ring,” she says. She watches a red kite circling high above. He doesn’t speak, although she’s hoping he’ll give her an explanation which doesn’t involve a woman, isn’t about Shelley Swift. “I remembered, you know,” Jeanie continues.

  “What?” He looks at her over his shoulder.

  “That Mum did put her wedding ring in the dish on the scullery windowsill. I remember seeing it there and it wasn’t when she was gardening or making pastry. I’ve been trying to think why she would have taken it off, but I can’t come up with anything.”

  “She put it there when she went to see Bridget in the afternoon and sometimes in the morning.”

  “Bridget?” Jeanie says, sitting up again. This isn’t what she expected.

  “I used to think Mum was shagging Stu.”

  “An affair?” Jeanie coughs out her shock. “With Stu?”

  “Or just a shag. But, I know. Not very likely.”

  “There’s no way she would have. She took marriage far too seriously, hers and other people’s. Vows and all that. She definitely wouldn’t have had a thing with Stu Clements.”

  “Remember the second Christmas after Dad died?” Julius says. “Not the first; that was grim. But the second . . . she sent me out to saw down a fir tree. The smallest you can find, she said. But there weren’t any small ones and I had to cut the bloody thing in half to get it in the kitchen. It was just a stump with loads of branches sticking out, in the end.”

  “And to get to bed you had to go out through the back door and in through the front,” Jeanie says.

  “That whole Christmas Mum was happy. A
lways laughing. Dancing around the kitchen. Do you remember? That’s when I first saw her wedding ring on the windowsill.”

  They’re silent for a while.

  “Sometimes though,” Julius says, “don’t you wish she’d had a thing with someone after Dad died?”

  “Had a fling with Stu? No.”

  “Okay, not Stu, not a fling even, but maybe she could have done something extraordinary, for her own sake. It’s always the same old path, isn’t it, up the hill and down again. Worrying about money. Sometimes, I reckon, we need something to come along and trip us up when we’re not expecting it. Otherwise, one day we’re kids playing with the hose pipe, and the next we’re laid out on an old door in the parlour.”

  Jeanie tries to think of something that might trip her up now, at fifty-one. It won’t be eviction; she won’t let that happen. Maybe, if she had been well, she could have hiked up bigger hills, mountains, she could have walked the two thousand miles of the Appalachian Trail.

  “It’s not going to happen.” Jeanie pours more tea. Passes the cup, knowing that Julius is keeping up with her thoughts. “It’s all pretence with the Rawsons. Sending Nathan to scare us.”

  “I need to have that word with Stu.”

  “We can sort this out ourselves.” She leans back on her elbows, legs straight. “It’s a misunderstanding. The house is ours. It’s just the Rawsons’ empty threat to make us pay up.”

  “But we haven’t paid up.”

  “Because we don’t owe them anything.”

  Jeanie and Julius get home in the late afternoon. They don’t talk about the eviction, each gaining confidence from the other that nothing will have happened, so that when Jeanie sees the piece of paper pinned over the front door’s lock, she doesn’t believe it, until Julius is pushing past her, saying, “Fuck.” And even she can work out the start of the word in red letters. Then the sickness returns, the desire to go to bed and sleep to forget the debts, the worry about what they can do without, how they will manage. Only sleep takes these circling thoughts away, although that is becoming more difficult, and now even working in Saffron’s garden won’t stop the sweat dampening her palms or keep her heart from rocking.