Unsettled Ground

by Claire Fuller

  “I was thinking,” Jeanie says, drying the drinking glasses, which for some reason have come out cloudy as though they’d been sandblasted, “about the agreement. The one we had with Rawson for the cottage.” She glances at Bridget, whose cigarette indicates a corner shelf beside the window.

  “I can’t believe Nath was mixed up in all that stuff this morning,” Bridget says. “He could have been anything, you know, when he left school. A firefighter, electrician, anything. If he’d put his mind to it.”

  “Was it ever in writing?” Jeanie places the glasses on the shelf. There is laughter from the lounge—the television audience’s and, above it, Stu’s. Jeanie thinks about the documents that were kept in the chest flying along the track and over the hedges.

  “Too easily influenced by other people, that’s his trouble. Who did you say was there with him?”

  “Someone called Lewis and another lad.”

  “Shaved head? Thin?” Bridget sucks in her cheeks.

  Jeanie nods. “Tom, that was his name.”

  “They live together, Nath and Tom. Tom’s always been trouble, ever since he was little. A terror he was at school, and worse since he’s grown up. His mum died when he was five, you know—breast cancer. So quick, it was.” Bridget snaps her fingers. “Here and gone, just like that.” Jeanie wonders if Bridget clicks her fingers when she tells people the story of Frank’s death. “Poor little mite. His dad was bloody useless, let the kid go feral. Apparently, when he was about ten, someone found him picking up roadkill and taking it home to eat. But I’m sorry it’s come to this. Your mum will be turning in her grave.”

  Jeanie looks quickly away and picks up a fork.

  “You don’t have to take them one at a time, you know. You can lift out the whole cutlery basket.” Bridget grinds out her cigarette in a full ashtray.

  “So was there ever anything in writing?” Jeanie tries again.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Not your mum’s style, was it? Doing things officially.”

  They hear Stu laughing.

  “I’ve got a job.” Jeanie empties the cutlery from the basket into a drawer where nothing appears to be in any order and crumbs clog up the corners.

  “Really?” Bridget says it like she didn’t think Jeanie could have managed this.

  “For a woman who lives on Cutter Hill. She wanted a female gardener. Just mowing the lawn, things like that.”

  “Cutter Hill?” Bridget says. “Near the old phone box that’s been turned into a library?”

  “Saffron did that.”

  “Saffron? That’s her name?” Bridget sounds incredulous, and Jeanie wants to defend her new employer, her friend. Jeanie still has the cheque Saffron gave her, folded in half and tucked into her coat pocket. There’s nowhere to cash it in the village and she’s not sure she would be able to even if she caught the bus to Devizes or Hungerford.

  “And her daughter’s called Angel.”

  “Saffron and Angel!” Bridget puffs a dismissive breath.

  Stu shouts from the lounge and Bridget seems glad of the distraction. “What?” she calls back.

  He laughs. “Brilliant!”

  Bridget heaves herself off the stool and goes to see. As Jeanie closes the dishwasher, she hears Bridget laughing too.

  Bedtime comes and still no Julius. Bridget gives Jeanie a sheet, pillow, and duvet to make up the sofa for him, and when she’s done that she sits on the edge of Nathan’s single bed and waits until she hears Bridget and then Stu finish in the bathroom. She moves from anger at Julius for leaving her here on her own to terror that something has happened to him on his ride from the cottage to the house, imagining him in a ditch with his bicycle buckled. Perhaps he won’t ever come back, and what would she do then? How would she manage? Finally, after an hour of staring up at the wall, she hears a noise downstairs—something smashing—and she jumps up and runs to see. Julius is in the kitchen, holding on to the counter and swaying in the dark. The hall light goes on behind her and Stu is there.

  “How did you bloody get in?” Stu says, putting on the kitchen light, dazzling them. He’s wearing a T-shirt and checked cotton shorts. Jeanie realises she must have left the back door unlocked. She doesn’t say anything. “Turning up in the middle of the night?” Stu continues. “Drunk, the man’s drunk.” Bridget is there too now, in her nightie, tying the belt of her dressing gown. Jeanie sees them all reflected in the kitchen window, lit up like the family on the telly.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Julius slurs.

  Around his feet are broken pieces of a china fruit bowl. Three old apples are lined up against the skirting board. Jeanie edges past Bridget and Stu and begins picking up the larger pieces of china.

  “You’re only here because Dot was Bridget’s friend,” Stu says to Julius. “And you’d better start remembering that. If you can afford to get drunk, you can afford to find your own place.”

  “Stu,” Bridget says, tugging on his T-shirt sleeve. “Their mother just died, and our son had a hand in all this, don’t forget.”

  “Coming in drunk in the middle of the night, wrecking the kitchen. Waking people. It’s time you took a bit more care with the place you call home.”

  On her hands and knees, Jeanie feels a wave of homesickness for the cottage, for her own bed, her own things. She stands and puts the pieces of china in the bin.

  “Mind your feet,” Bridget says.

  “I’ll get him to bed and then I’ll sweep the floor.” Jeanie takes Julius around the waist. “You go,” she says to Bridget and Stu. “I’ll sort this out.”

  She makes Julius drink a pint of water, puts him to bed in Nathan’s room, and then gets under the duvet she’s laid out for her brother on the sofa. She tries to sleep—the first time in her life she has slept somewhere other than the cottage—but she lies with her eyes open, the clutter of the lounge around her, wondering what she and Julius are going to do now.

  In the morning, Jeanie is up with the bedding folded away before Bridget and Stu stir. She has formulated the angry speech she will give Julius when she goes in to wake him, but he comes into the lounge first, dressed in yesterday’s clothes and smelling of old cigarette smoke and stale beer. His eyes are bloodshot and his skin sallow. She’d like to ask him whether he’s spent the money he earned from the milking job, but she doesn’t want to sound like Stu. Julius puts his arms around her and she is rigid for a moment, but then relaxes with the relief that he is here.

  “I’m sorting out somewhere for us to live,” he says.

  “I can’t stay here,” Jeanie says. “I can’t do it. I’ll camp out in the woods if I have to.”

  He squeezes her tighter. “I know, I know. Another night or two, that’s all.”

  18

  Avoiding the middle of Inkbourne will add an extra mile or two on to the cycle ride from Bridget’s to the cottage, but for Jeanie it’s preferable to bumping into someone who might have heard about the eviction. How would she explain why she and Julius are homeless? What would she say if anyone asked where they’re going to live now? She moves the trailer from Julius’s bike to hers and gets Maude to climb into it so that she can practise going slowly up and down the road outside Bridget’s house before she sets off. After they get going, when Jeanie glances behind, Maude is facing into the wind with her mouth open, jowls flapping.

  Jeanie cycles past the farmyard and up the track, shocked again to see their possessions flung out along the verge. Items and objects she’d taken for granted when they were indoors—the blue cupboard which always stood on the right-hand landing, a china washbowl with a chip in its rim, the embarrassment of a chamber pot tipped on its side, a box of assorted woolly hats and gloves—all lie in odd juxtapositions, as though a huge hand had picked up the cottage and shaken it for fun, letting the contents tumble out, before setting the building back on its foundations. It hasn’t rained overnight but the morning’s dew has left beads of moisture on the polished furniture and soaked into the fabrics. Maude jumps out of the
trailer and capers around it all, racing down the track, happy to be home.

  Although only a night and a morning have passed since she and Julius left, Jeanie expects something to be different; without them here surely something should have altered—new people moved in or workmen started on renovating the place. But there are no vehicles on the track, and when she peers through the front windows the disarray in the parlour is as it was before, while in the kitchen, the dresser remains against the wall and the piano halfway across the room, where Nathan, Lewis, and Tom gave it up as too heavy. She rattles the front door, although she knows it will be locked, and when she goes around the cottage, the back door is of course bolted from the inside. She lets the chickens out and gives them food and fresh water. They are disgruntled that it is so late, and the small brown one has fewer feathers on its back, but there are eggs to collect which she can take with her and give to Bridget. She walks up the garden, avoiding the grave, and considers gathering everything that will burn and building a bonfire so that Rawson, or whoever lives in the cottage next, won’t get the benefit of it. But there have been too many years of double digging, too much back-breaking flint picking and plant tending to destroy the garden, and besides, what is there that would burn? The rough fencing, the compost bins? Jeanie fills the watering can from the outside tap and waters the tomato plants, which are drooping in the greenhouse.

  When she’s finished the urgent jobs, the cottage draws her back. She cups her hands around her eyes and stares in through the scullery window and sees a similar untidiness as in the front rooms. In the old dairy she lifts down a wooden ladder which hangs from brackets on the wall, and with some difficulty manoeuvres it outside and around to the front. Julius wouldn’t like her doing it, but he isn’t here. She props the ladder against her bedroom window, jabbing the feet into the earth to secure it, and climbs. Maude, at the bottom, yaps at her. Jeanie’s bedroom window has never closed securely and in winter she and Dot would stuff the crannies with rags and balls of newspaper. Now she gets her finger in the gap, pulls the window open, and clambers inside.

  Even after only one uninhabited night, the cottage smells abandoned. The wardrobe and the metal frame of the double bed she shared with Dot are still in the room—it seems the men were unable to find a spanner of the right size to take the bed apart—but the base, the mattress, and the bedding are outside. With fresh eyes she sees the things that were inconsequential when it was her bedroom: the spot around the window where the plaster is blown, the blooming stains on the walls like great circles of ringworm, and the hole in the corner of the ceiling which mice would drop out of, and where they used to catch the water in a bucket when it rained. Downstairs, Jeanie’s footsteps echo, and the house seems cavernous. After a week or a fortnight, a month, without anyone living in it, she knows the cottage will slip further into decay. The flagstones in the kitchen will lift higher, soot will blow down the chimneys, rats will come to gnaw and scratch, until, in time, the house will regress into its constituent parts, becoming earth, grass, stone, and wood.

  She stands in front of the iron range, which radiates its coldness against the backs of her legs. The fire hasn’t ever been allowed to go out completely before. Often when the flames leaped up again, Dot would say it was the same fire she’d lit aged eighteen, the day Frank carried her across the threshold. She wonders where her mother’s wedding ring is; has Julius kept it safe? A collection of oil lamps lie on the floor with their glass shades smashed, and she steps over them, unbolts the back door, and whistles for Maude, who is still barking at the front. Back in the kitchen, she eases the full log basket across the room and, perching on its lip, opens the piano lid and plays a minor chord. She learned the piano by copying her father, although she has always preferred the guitar. The piano is even more out of tune than before, but she plays an introduction and sings:

  “It was on one fine March morning when I bid my home adieu

  And took the road to London town my fortune to renew

  I cursed all foreign money, no credit could I gain

  Which filled my heart with longing for the trees of Hadlington.”

  The piano jangles loudly, its out-of-tune-ness amplified. She hums along while she tries to get the piano part correct. It’s a song she has only played on the guitar.

  She sings another verse, hesitantly, but enjoying the reverberation of the piano bouncing around the empty room. She closes her eyes to see the fire lit again behind her, Julius eating at the table, Maude twitching in her sleep on the sofa.

  “If it weren’t for the wolves and the bears, I’d sleep out in the woods . . .”

  Another voice joins hers, and she jumps off the log basket, the falling piano lid closely missing her fingers. Julius is leaning on the doorjamb, a smile on his face.

  “I knew you’d be here,” he says.

  “Aren’t you meant to be putting up a fence somewhere?” She sits again.

  “It doesn’t feel like ours any more, does it?” He looks around. “It’s already stopped being a home, somehow. Just a horrible, mouldy little house.”

  His description offends her. “Go back to work, Julius. We need to give Bridget some money for food. We need to pay Stu back.” She doesn’t say and Rawson.

  “Turns out the work was twenty miles away. I would have had to go in the van.”

  “Oh, Julius.” She half rises to go to him, but he shifts his shoulders, rejecting her sympathy.

  Perhaps he realizes it and tries to compensate by sounding concerned. “I’m not sure you should have lifted that ladder on your own.”

  “It was fine. I managed.”

  “I phoned Richard Letford earlier. The kitchen fitter?”

  “Another job?”

  “Not exactly.” He smiles. “I needed to check on something he mentioned at Mum’s do.” Julius comes to the log basket, nudges her along with his hip, and she moves over. He opens the piano and plays a few chirpy notes with his left hand.

  “I have some news,” he says over the piano, his right hand joining in to make the music swing.

  “What news?” She’s impatient, she doesn’t have time for his teasing, the way he likes to make her wait.

  He carries on playing the jingly tune and sings:

  “When I was a little girl, I wished I was a boy

  I tagged along behind the gang and wore my corduroys

  Everybody said I only did it to annoy

  But I was gonna be an engineer.”

  “Julius.” She gives him a shove with her body, and he sways sideways to almost horizontal and comes back upright, still playing and singing.

  “Julius, what news?” she says, laughing now. She’s heard him play this song before.

  “Mamma said, ‘Why can’t you be a lady?

  Your duty is to make me the mother of a pearl

  Wait until you’re older, dear

  And maybe you’ll be glad that you’re a girl.’”

  “Tell me.” She closes the piano over his fingers and he has to stop.

  “I think I’ve found us somewhere to live.”

  “Really?” She wants so badly to believe that he has.

  “I haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’ll be fine. We’ll make it fine. Better than living with Bridget and Stu.” He stands.

  “Anything will be better than that. Where is it? What is it? Another cottage?”

  “Richard’s giving me a lift there this afternoon. Let me go and see it first, and then I’ll take you.”

  “A lift? Will you be okay?”

  “It’s not far. Ten minutes in a car.”

  “Why don’t I come too? If we can move in today, we could get the things off the track before it rains.”

  “I’d better go.” He lights up his phone to check the time. “Richard’s picking me up from the village.” He goes into the scullery, Maude and Jeanie following.

  “But you haven’t told me anything.”

  “And I meant to say, I bumped into Dr. Holloway too. He’s got
us a gig.”

  “A gig? No, Julius.”

  “At the Plough. He said he put in a good word with Chris, the landlord.”

  “No. I can’t play in front of people.”

  “You played in front of everyone after we buried Mum.”

  “That was different.”

  “Then you can play with your back to the audience. Anyway, we might not have an audience.” He gives her a quick hug and is through the door. He pokes his head back in. “I’ll put the ladder away.”

  Julius cycles to the village with his fiddle in its case strapped to the back of his bike. He’s hungry and hot but he can’t go to Bridget and Stu’s because they haven’t given him a key, and what would he do there? A pint of bitter would slip down easily now, and one of the Plough’s steak and ale pies. He doesn’t have enough cash for that, although tomorrow he has another relief milking job starting for a week. He wonders if Chris would let him order a pie and pint, and pay later, but in the end he buys a bottle of Coke, a sandwich, and a bag of crisps from the shop and eats them standing on the pavement, reading the adverts in the window. Someone’s advertising an upright piano, free to anyone who can collect it—Frank’s old one left in the cottage isn’t going to be worth anything either.