20
Pepperwood farmhouse stands face-on to the lane with a grand front garden full of clipped laurel and box kept tidy by a gardener who visits once a week. The house is symmetrical with a central footpath up to the door. Jeanie ties Maude to the wrought-iron gate, walks up the path, and lets the door knocker fall. The thud reverberates deep inside the house.
The previous evening Stu mentioned that the Rawsons had returned from wherever they’d been. Stu had gone with Ed to the Plough, where it seemed to Jeanie that all sorts of information was exchanged and overheard. She wanted to ask Stu if Julius had been in there—her brother had arrived quiet and sober at Bridget and Stu’s after they’d gone to bed—but she didn’t want to rouse Stu’s anger, and she also didn’t want to know the answer.
Jeanie expects a housekeeper to open the Rawsons’ door, had planned on introducing herself and asking for Mr. Rawson. If the nature of her visit was enquired about, she’d practised saying it was a personal matter. Now she stands on the doorstep, heart chafing, the creature thrashing about in its tiny cage. But it is Caroline Rawson who answers the door in her tight white jeans and a leather jacket which wouldn’t save much skin if she fell off a motorbike. Under it, her shirt is tucked in only at the front. She must be a couple of years younger than Bridget, but she has the complexion of a forty-year-old.
“Oh,” Mrs. Rawson says, caught in the moment of poking around in her oversize handbag hanging off one arm. “Jeanie.”
Jeanie is suddenly aware of the cardigan she’s been wearing for at least two weeks, the long thick skirt, tatty coat, and wellingtons. She finds her voice. “I’d like to speak to your husband.”
Mrs. Rawson discovers her phone in her bag and presses a button. “He’s not in, I’m afraid.” She sounds formal, businesslike, but perhaps not as hard and unfeeling as she had been when she came to the cottage. She looks out, down the lane, over Jeanie’s shoulder.
“Well, can I speak to you?”
“Actually, I’m going out. My sister should be arriving any minute.”
“It won’t take long.”
Mrs. Rawson looks out at the lane again, then perhaps good manners take over and she lets Jeanie in. She leads her towards the back of the hall and into a kitchen so light and bright it hurts her eyes. A see-through dining table and eight see-through chairs dazzle under a glass roof and in front of a wall of windows which overlooks a patio and a swimming pool. None of it is like it was when Jeanie was a child. The white kitchen cupboards reach up to the ceiling and have no handles, and in front of them is a long central island made of white granite, with two sinks, each with arcing silver taps. Mrs. Rawson puts her handbag on the island and stands beside it. “If this is about the cottage, that’s my husband’s business. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“But you came to see me,” Jeanie says. “To tell me we owed two thousand pounds.” She almost laughs at how ridiculous that sounds.
Mrs. Rawson drops her mobile phone into her bag in a gesture of resignation. “Well, yes, I did,” she says, and for a moment Jeanie thinks that the woman is going to say it was a mistake, all of it—the money, the eviction—but then she seems to gather herself inwards, stand straighter. “But like I said, what Dot owed is for my husband to sort out. I’m very sorry that you lost your mother and so suddenly, but—”
“You know we’ve been evicted? Turned out of our own home?”
“I had heard that, yes.” When Mrs. Rawson blinks, her eyes stay closed for a second too long.
“Nathan gave you and your husband a full report, I suppose? Paid that young man well to do your dirty work, did you?” Jeanie shakes her head in disgust, thinking now that her mother’s silence in return for the cottage was not worth it. Dot should have gone to the police and told them that Rawson was responsible for Frank’s death. Shown them the bolt that Julius found in Priest’s Field. Let Rawson go to prison. They might have lost the cottage back then, but what’s the difference—they’ve lost it now.
“Nathan Clements is being paid for doing a job,” Mrs. Rawson says carefully. “It’s his choice about whether to take the work or not.”
“Jesus, you people.”
Mrs. Rawson’s smile is hard. “Well, I’ll tell my husband you called round. I’m sure he’ll be interested to know what you had to say.”
Jeanie doesn’t move. She lets her anger sink. She didn’t come here to have a fight with Caroline Rawson or anyone else. “Two thousand pounds, you said? Yes?”
Mrs. Rawson holds out her arm to shepherd Jeanie towards the door.
Jeanie stays beside the kitchen counter. “I have it here. Some of the money. Not all of it, but something.” She takes the envelope with her mother’s handwriting on the front from one of the deep pockets of her coat. She hasn’t been able to find her handbag, not that there was anything much in it. It’s not in any of the boxes in Nathan’s old room and she can’t find it amongst the stuff still on the track. “Perhaps you could give the money to your husband, have a word with him, and then my brother and I can move back in. To the cottage.” Mrs. Rawson is staring at her. “My brother and I are staying with some friends, well, a friend of my mother’s, but it’s not—it’s not—great. And that cottage, you know, is our home.” Jeanie is mortified to hear her voice wobble, but she presses on. “Julius and I were born in that cottage, it’s where we’ve lived all our lives, it’s where our mother died, and where . . .” Jeanie stops herself before she admits that it’s also where she’s buried. Her hand is outstretched, with the envelope trembling over the polished work surface.
Caroline Rawson clasps her hands together.
“Please,” Jeanie says.
Mrs. Rawson continues to look at her. There is no softening in her face. “No,” she says.
“No? No, what?” Jeanie withdraws her hand and the envelope with it.
“No, I can’t take it.”
“Why not?”
“Because apparently your mother already tried to give my husband the money. She came here like you with an envelope of cash and he wouldn’t take it.” She gives a weird laugh that Jeanie doesn’t understand.
“Why not?”
A car horn sounds from outside. “I’m sorry, but that’ll be my sister.”
“Why wouldn’t he take it if you think there’s some rent owing?”
Mrs. Rawson gives up on waiting for Jeanie to move and scoops up her bag. “It’s my husband you need to speak to about this, not me.” She walks towards the hall. “Alexa, kitchen lights off,” she says, and the room darkens. Before Jeanie can work out how that happened, she hears the front door open and hurries after Mrs. Rawson. As soon as they are both outside, Maude stands where she’s been tied up, expectant. On the doorstep, as Mrs. Rawson locks the door, she says, “Look, just keep the money, okay? Use it as a deposit on somewhere else. I’m sorry.” She flaps her free hand in front of her face and hurries to the waiting car, a green sports car, low, with a long bonnet, and she gets in the passenger seat. Through the windscreen Jeanie watches Mrs. Rawson and her sister embrace, holding each other tight for a full two minutes. Her sister does a three-point turn and they drive away.
21
“Man flu,” Bridget says quietly, wrinkling her nose. She and Jeanie are standing on the landing outside Bridget’s bedroom where Stu lies in bed with a box of tissues and a mug of Lemsip on his bedside table. “But you don’t need to worry—Stu’s already phoned Ed and he’s on his way now.” She looks at her watch. “And I have to get to work.”
Not Ed, Jeanie thinks. Anyone but Ed. “Maybe we should put it off until Julius has a free day or wait until Stu’s better,” she says. Julius is still doing his milking job but says the place is too far for him to cycle home between shifts, and he has no choice but to hang around the dairy for hours in the middle of the day. He said he’d tell them he couldn’t take the job, but Jeanie said she couldn’t stay at Bridget and Stu’s even one more night, and she’d insisted they needed his earnings.
�
��God, that could be days, a week or more.” Bridget is already at the bottom of the stairs putting on her coat, and Jeanie follows her down. “Ed owes Stu a favour for something or other. Just don’t let him pull a fast one; that man will do anything for money.”
Ed grabs the boxes and suitcases from Nathan’s room at a run, up and down the stairs to his pickup, while Jeanie manages two trips and four bags. He’s strong for such a small man.
“More than double what Stu told me it’d be,” Ed says.
All the time that Jeanie has been at Bridget and Stu’s—three days and four nights—she has walked to the cottage in the morning to see to the chickens, collect the eggs, tend the garden, and talk to her mother. The place calls her back. It began to rain heavily one afternoon when she was due to cycle to Saffron’s, and she did her best to cover up the things outside on the track using the remaining linen from the chest and a tarpaulin she dragged out from the old dairy. But the day after she went to see Mrs. Rawson, Jeanie noticed that a chest of drawers and a bedside table had gone, as well as the tin bath. She thought about asking Bridget if the stuff could be stored in Stu’s garage, but what would he do with the crap that it was already full of? Each time Jeanie left the cottage she stuffed a couple of carrier bags with small things: a tin of plasters, cotton reels and needles, an alarm clock which might or might not be working, some offcuts of material. As she sorted through it all she hoped to find Dot’s wedding ring, but never came across it. Jeanie stashed the bags in Nathan’s old bedroom.
“What have you got in here, bricks?” Ed shoulders another box into the back of his pickup.
“Just bits and pieces.” Jeanie forces a smile.
“You do know where we’ve got to take this clobber?”
She hates the word clobber. She clenches her jaw, breathes. “To a little place in the woods,” she says. That’s all Julius would tell her.
“Yeah, right,” Ed says, laughing and shaking his head as he lifts up her bike.
When they’re sitting in the cab with Maude—the footwells and the gap between the windscreen and the dashboard are stuffed with disposable coffee cups, cans, burger cartons, and bits of paper—as Ed is about to turn the key in the ignition, Jeanie says, “When you’ve dropped this lot off, I’d like you to collect some things from outside the cottage too. Things that were put outside when we were evicted.” And before he can say no, she adds, “I’ll pay you.” She still hasn’t told Julius that she found the money or that she visited Mrs. Rawson. Julius will have other ideas on how to spend what’s left of it: some idiotic business plan to open a cocktail bar in the village or divert the Ink and grow watercress, but if she can’t have the cottage, Jeanie wants her things around her.
Ed pulls the key out and leans back but doesn’t say anything. In the moment where neither of them speaks she worries he is going to say no, that he’s too busy. “I have the money,” she blurts out. “It’ll be three trips, I think.”
“Outside the cottage, is it?”
“On the track. The rest of our things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Kitchen things, clothes, some furniture.”
“Furniture, is it?”
“A sofa and a few chairs, not much.”
“But I’ll need someone to help me, see. With the lifting, if there’s a sofa.” He smiles and she sees that he’s missing some of his back teeth. His voice is gummy, she can hear his tongue filling his mouth.
“A hundred, I was thinking,” Jeanie says, and Ed seems to mull it over.
“Stu won’t be able to help me, not with him laid up in bed, like. I’ll have to find someone else who’s free today and they’ll want paying, of course.”
“A hundred and fifty then.” She wants to save some of the three hundred she has left for emergencies, for food, for the electricity and gas and council tax for the new place. Talking about money makes her palms sweat, her heart tick too fast. She needs him to say yes.
He eyes her.
“Two hundred,” she says. “And I want you to bring our piano from inside the cottage,” she adds quickly, as though dropping it in at the last moment will make the task insignificant, a simple extra. If Dot’s banjo is coming, she wants Frank’s piano. “The back door should be unbolted.”
“Collect a piano for two hundred quid?” Ed scoffs. “Do you know how heavy those things are? I don’t reckon I’ll have time to get any of it. I’m only doing this one trip because Stu did a favour for me a while back. I’m supposed to be on another job after this and I’ll have to rent a dolly to move a piano.”
“Two hundred and fifty,” Jeanie says, and suddenly worried that he won’t do any of it, she adds rashly, “Plus the chickens. Ten hens, the coop, and the run.” She hates the thought of her chickens living with this man but taking care of Maude and worrying about Julius already feels too much.
He weighs up her offer. “I s’pose whoever I get to help might take them in part payment but they’ll still want some cash. It’ll have to be three hundred.”
“Done,” Jeanie says. It’s all the rest of the money.
“Done,” Ed says with a smile, and she knows she’s made a bad deal. “I’ll need the money now,” he adds.
She takes the envelope out from her coat pocket and turns away from him to count the cash. She knows the remaining three hundred is all there, but she counts it to make sure. She takes it out, the envelope empty, and hands it over. As she puts the envelope back in her pocket, she feels like weeping. Julius can’t ever know about it now. Ed counts the money, puts the folded notes in the top pocket of his shirt, and starts the pickup.
Maude rests her head on Jeanie’s knee as they drive out of the estate and through Inkbourne, past the village green. They go north on the main road for four miles and turn onto a lane Jeanie has never been along before.
“This is it,” Ed says.
He pulls into a lay-by and she stares out of the passenger window. The cracked concrete of the small parking area is studded with common plantains and the perimeter is overrun with nettles and thistles. Scrambling through it is old man’s beard.
“Here?” Jeanie says. There’s no house.
Ed reverses the pickup a short way down a rutted track between straggly alders and past scattered heaps of rubbish. Jeanie can see the faded colours of a paddling pool, a broken plastic bread crate, decaying sheets of what might be plasterboard piled on top of a disembowelled armchair. Further in, sticking out of the ground elder, is a wheelbarrow with a flat tyre, and the handlebars of a child’s bike.
“It can’t be here,” she says, thinking that Ed must be dropping something off, fly-tipping, except that all the things in the back are hers. He gets out and lets down the tailgate while she stays in the front, waiting. A cushion is propped against the back of the driver’s seat so that Ed can reach the pedals and the steering wheel. When she looks behind, he’s scooping several bags into his arms and walking into the scrubby woodland.
She lets Maude out and the dog runs off, nose lowered, and then she gets out herself. The narrow path of trampled weeds that Ed went down leads further into the thicket, dense with holly and more alders and nettles. There is birdsong: blackbird and robin, and the football rattle of a magpie. In the distance Jeanie can hear the intermittent drone of wheels on tarmac from the main road. She passes a scorched circle with a couple of logs for seats and a few blackened cans. People come here, she thinks. Drinkers, down-and-outs, druggies, the homeless.
Above the top of more scrubby bushes she sees a greenish-white roof.
“That’s it,” Ed shouts from a little way ahead.
When she sees it fully, she thinks again that there must be some mistake. This can’t be the place. Ed puts down the bags and smirks, as though waiting for her reaction so he can tell the story in the pub later. How he took that oddball, Jeanie Seeder, to live on some dirty no-man’s-land. She won’t give anything away; she won’t cry out. She waits until he walks off for another load to do that.
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sp; The caravan must have once been white but is now more of a mottled green, darker on the roof where leaves have fallen and decayed to slime. About ten feet long, it has one window—also green—on the side facing Jeanie, beside the open door. Both ends are propped up on bricks and there is another small stack in front of the door, for a step. Beside it are the remains of an awning over a wooden structure half-destroyed by creeper. She remembers Nick’s mother’s caravan: white and clean. She can’t bring herself to step forwards, and she looks through the trees in case Ed might have got it wrong and there is a cottage further on.
“Stu said your brother gave it a clean,” she hears Ed call. She goes to the step and looks in. The smell assaults her: fungal, damp wood, and the urine stink of animal, maybe even human. Through the murky underwater light, she sees dirty plywood, a curved ceiling, lino curling at the edges of the floor, green mould in the corners. This can’t be the place. She goes to step up, and before she can stop her, Maude jumps inside, running the few feet between a table with bench seats at one end and a single fitted couch at the other. When Jeanie steps in after her, the caravan rocks. The bench seats have fitted cushions, stained and torn—showing their foam insides—and on the table is the dented metal dustpan and balding brush from the cottage. Above the fitted couch is another window the width of the room, also with a greenish tinge. Maude jumps on the couch, sniffing and pawing at the cushion, her claws ripping the already decayed fabric, and it is clear from the smell and the crumbs of stuffing that something has been nesting here. “Off! Off!” Jeanie clicks her fingers at Maude and the dog jumps down but stuffs her nose in the cushion. Jeanie leans past her and the foul smell to pull back the curtain—the fabric is yellowed but its repeating 1970s pattern of a boy on a tractor is just discernible—and she is left with a ragged corner of material between her fingers. She flicks it off in disgust. Through the window a mossy-coloured Ed is already on his third journey.
She looks behind her. They can’t live here. Along the side opposite the door is a laminated countertop, and she lifts half of it to find a filthy two-ring stove. Cautiously, she lifts the adjacent flap and screams. Inside, lying in a plastic sink, is a burnt hand, cut off at the wrist and curled in on itself. She drops the flap, stumbles backwards into Maude, who yelps and dances around her, and then Jeanie bends, hands on knees, slowing her breathing. She makes herself lift the sink lid again and, looking closer, sees a workman’s glove, stained and empty.
Unsettled Ground Page 16
