Jeanie thinks she can see what he’s trying to do: align them, attempt to find common ground, shared desires, although she can’t work out why. But she isn’t going to have any of it.
The whine of an engine is definitely in the spinney and knowing it sets her heart ticking. “But you still had us evicted.” She spits the last word and he flinches.
“That wasn’t my doing. Caroline insisted we go—”
She cuts him off. “And anyway, what do you know about my mother?” She takes a step forwards, ready to throw him out.
“More than you think. You’re a lot like her.”
“You don’t know anything. And I don’t know why you’ve come here, but now you’re going to leave.”
He doesn’t move. “Dot wanted a place she could call home,” he says. “To have her family around her, a bit of land, feel the sun on her skin. What many of us want when it comes down to it.”
“Is that why you’re here? To tell me things about my mother that I already know?”
Rawson rubs his hands together awkwardly as though he’s gearing himself up for something. “I’d like to offer you the cottage back.”
He is dangling a hook hidden by a twisting worm, she thinks, but the animal in her heart jumps to swallow the bait. “In return for what? Rent? Rent we’ve never had to pay, and you know exactly why. And your wife has the cheek to come round saying we owe two thousand pounds. Two thousand pounds! It’s crazy. Then she won’t take any money anyway!” Jeanie goes to the cupboard, pulls out the envelope from under the lining, and waves it at him. “So tell me, what is it you want this time? You wouldn’t take the money Mum borrowed, so why would I believe your bloody offer now?”
Rawson runs his hand over his eyes. “Your mother never owed me money,” he says. “She never owed me anything. You’re right—I never asked for any rent, not since your father died.”
Jeanie puffs out air. She doesn’t want to hear it; she just wants him to leave.
“And I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the eviction. That was down to Caroline. She insisted we go away, to try and patch things up, she said, but she arranged the eviction while I wasn’t here. I should have come to see you as soon as I got back, to explain, but—well, there has been a lot to try and sort out between us. Caroline was so angry. More angry than I’d ever seen her. I promised her . . . I promised her so many times.”
Jeanie doesn’t want to hear what he promised his wife. Won’t hear. But he doesn’t stop.
“Caroline found out, you see. About me and Dot.” His voice breaks when he says her name and for a moment Jeanie sees the unhappy man under the person she has always hated. “It started a year or so after your father died—”
“Was killed by you,” Jeanie says.
“Well,” he says. “We can get into all that if you like, but it’s not as straightforward as you were led to believe. One of your mother’s conditions.”
“What does that mean?” she asks aggressively.
Rawson looks away, doesn’t answer, and Jeanie screws the envelope into a ball. The sound outside is the engine of a dirt bike.
“You’ve brought your friends with you?”
Rawson listens. “That’s nothing to do with me.”
Jeanie goes to the door and bolts it. She’d rather be inside with Rawson than take her chances with whoever is out there.
“We knew it was wrong,” he says. “I was married. We ended it so many times, and I promised Caroline. I promised her it wouldn’t start up again. Dot felt bad about it too. But we couldn’t stop. I loved her,” he says, and his voice softens and slows.“Whenever your mother could get away, we’d meet. If Caroline was off somewhere, Dot would come to the house. Often, we’d just talk, play the piano. Sometimes we only managed once a month.”
Jeanie wants to clamp her hands over her ears like a child. Her mother and this man. It can’t be true, even while she knows it is, has always known in some way. She turns her head, can’t look at him, but lets him go on.
“I loved her,” he says again. “And she loved me too. I know it. Perhaps it was only escaping the daily grind of making a living, looking after you two without a husband to help her, running a home, but I like to think it was more than that. We talked about the farm, the garden, the state of the world, the cottage. I wanted to do it up, put in decent plumbing, rethatch the place, but she thought you and your brother would be suspicious.
“She had strong opinions, your mother. Interesting ideas. And she liked to tell me about you and Julius. She loved you both very much.”
Jeanie can’t bear the tremble in Rawson’s voice, the tenderness, the grief.
“We often talked about whether we could be together properly, but there are . . . well, there are things that happened a long time ago to Caroline and me, and in the end, I couldn’t do that to her—leave her. And your mother said her job was to look after you, and Julius of course. It was a promise she’d made to herself; she wouldn’t ever tell me why. But she loved you being at home with her.”
“None of this is possible,” Jeanie says angrily. “I don’t believe you.” An image flashes into her head of her mother’s wedding ring on the scullery windowsill, and even as she speaks she understands that she and Julius were the last to know.
“As I think Caroline said when she unfortunately came to see you, there’s a receipt book at home. It was a joke between me and Dot—signing her initials by each date. When she got ill it became harder for us to meet. I was so worried about her, but she wouldn’t let me help. I suppose she felt guilty that she wasn’t giving anything in return for the cottage, and so she offered money. I didn’t want her money. I only wanted her.”
There’s a prickle in Jeanie’s nose and the thump of blood in her ears.
“I always told her the cottage was hers, and yours of course, for as long as you and Julius needed it. I said I would sign it over to her, but she wouldn’t have it. She was a bloody stubborn woman when she wanted to be, wouldn’t take anything from anyone unless she was giving something in return. But I didn’t tell Caroline that Dot wasn’t paying any rent; I let her see the receipt book and she believed what she wanted to believe. And then, after Dot died, it all came out, that no rent was ever paid and that we were still in love.” He finishes on a kind of sob.
Jeanie puts her fingers against her heart, but she can no longer keep her voice regulated. “And so just like that, out of guilt or whatever bloody thing it is you think you’re suffering from, you’ve come to offer me the cottage back. Is that it?”
“I want to make amends. Sort things out between us. You and Julius can move back into the cottage, and I—well, I would like to invite both of you round to the house sometimes if you wanted to come. Caroline isn’t there—we’re having a trial separation, just to see what happens. Dot talked about you and your brother so often.” His hands find each other and his fingers twist. “I’m afraid I haven’t expressed this well.” He looks at Jeanie suddenly, directly, and they stare at each other in the candlelight. “What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Jeanie is shouting. “I think you want a ready-made family. A bit lonely are you, now your wife’s gone and your mistress is dead?”
Rawson pulls back. “I want to help you. You’re Dot’s children—and Frank’s, of course—and I just want some connection to her. Only that.”
“Get out.”
He doesn’t move.
“Get out!” She throws the screwed-up envelope, but it doesn’t even touch him, only falls at his feet.
Rawson remains motionless while Jeanie, keeping her eyes on him, edges towards the kitchen drawer. She yanks it open and delves inside with her hand. Her movement rocks him from his rooted state as though a great wind had come towards him and abruptly he is released, and he pushes on the caravan door, fumbling with the bolt, as Jeanie turns towards the drawer and finds the poker. She pulls it out and spins round, the point raised and forwards. Rawson is gone into the dark spinney, leaving the door swingi
ng open. The rain has stopped but all about there is the pattering of drops falling from the leaves and, again, the bike’s engine. She steps back inside, bolts the door once more, and rests her forehead against it, holding the poker with both hands.
Thirty-eight years, she thinks. The man who killed her father. She doesn’t believe it. She can’t. She won’t.
For several minutes the dirt bike circles the spinney and with each lap it seems to draw closer to the caravan. And then the engine is switched off and she hears men’s voices shouting. She kneels by the door, straining to listen, the poker still with her. She can’t make out the words, but she understands the tone. Rawson, she thinks, and one other—Nathan? There is silence for one, two, three breaths, and a yell which might be a name. Then a single gunshot. So loud and close that she jumps, knocking against the table leg and ending curled on the floor with her arms wrapped around her head. She is all heart and pumping blood. From outside comes the kick of the bike’s engine, a rev, and it is away, growing quieter until she thinks she hears it on the lane, and then it’s gone. Still she lies curled on the caravan floor, waiting.
Nothing else comes, except drops of water plunking on the caravan roof. She gets to her hands and knees and, finally, stands. Listens again. Silence. With the poker in one hand she unlocks and pushes the door open: the firepit, the lean-to shelter with the tarpaulin, leaves shifting in the blackness, the smell of damp earth. In the dark, nothing seems changed.
29
As she stands in the doorway, Jeanie thinks of Tom and how he raised his arm to shoot at her dog, and then she sees a vision of Maude lying out there somewhere, like a heap of wet cardboard. Tom can turn the caravan upside down looking for the non-existent money, he can take every belonging she has left, she doesn’t care, as long as she doesn’t find Maude injured or dead in the undergrowth. If it is Rawson, well, it will bloody serve him right. Jamming on her wellingtons, she is quickly down the steps, poker brandished, and standing in front of the caravan, listening. She goes around the side, creeping out into the spinney, placing each foot carefully so as not to rustle a leaf, snap a twig. The dirt bike may have gone, but has the man with the gun? The layout of the spinney is clear in her head even in the dark, and as each shape looms she knows it: the trunk of the single beech, the holly—higher and wider than the caravan—the fallen tree, the stumps and mounds of hidden rubble. She holds the poker aloft as though she might have to use it to hack her way through a jungle. Whistling for Maude and hoping that anyone out there will think the sound is an animal, she stays off the main path, inching her way through the ivy.
Near the tipped-over piano an indistinct form lies in the ground elder: she feels instant relief that it’s not dog-shaped. Instead it is long, stretched out on its back, legs splayed. A man. She moves closer, head low, wary that it might be a trap and he could suddenly rise up, gun in hand. With the poker ready, she approaches him from the feet, seeing the soles of his boots, jeans, coat flapped open, arms down. For another moment in the gloom she can’t identify the body, the features, isn’t able to arrange them. Then she covers her mouth with her hand, drops the poker, and kneels beside her brother. She can smell his odour of soap, tobacco, and sweat, mixed with scuffed humus and leaf mould. Her shadow covers him and she shifts to see him better. His right cheek and forehead are peppered with holes: the face of a mediaeval church carving, singular and stately, punctured by woodworm. There is very little blood.
“What have I done?” she whispers, thinking of the text she made Jenks send. “Julius!” She shakes his shoulder and presses her fingertips to his neck but in her anxiety can’t work out where his pulse is meant to be—she who feels for her own every day. She presses his wrist—nothing—remembers the picture of the figure on the yellow defibrillator where the public telephone used to be, leaning over the person on the ground. Something to do with pushing on their chest but in what way and for how long? Her thoughts fumble from one idea to the next. She rummages in Julius’s coat and jeans pockets for his mobile and pulls the phone out along with a scattering of coins. The phone remains dark even when she jabs at the numbers and pushes the button on the side, holding it down like she’s seen Julius do. In a panic of indecision, she stands quickly, drops the phone, and immediately kneels again, shaking him hard this time. “Julius!” His head jiggles loosely.
Then she runs through the spinney, galumphing past the fallen piano, not caring about the racket she’s making, the way her heart is leaping and the pain in her lungs. She follows the tyre track of a single bike to the lay-by where Rawson’s car, if that’s where he parked it, is now gone. Here she hesitates—left to the village over the fields and whichever house she comes to first? She turns right. On the main road cars roar past every few minutes in both directions, headlights glaring. As one comes towards her, she puts a boot onto the tarmac, waving her arms and yelling, but the car is faster and closer than she anticipates and it swerves, sending her stumbling back into the ditch. Its horn blares and fades as the car disappears. After three or four minutes, as another comes towards her, she waves again and this one stops a little further on. Its hazard lights flash, and she runs to it. The driver has lowered the passenger window and she can hear him shouting.
“You flipping idiot. You can’t hitch-hike here. Do you want to get yourself killed?” He is leaning across the empty passenger seat and he quietens when she looks in, perhaps having expected a teenage boy, not an older woman. Jeanie grips the edges of the door with both hands. The man is old, maybe in his eighties, bald, long-faced. “Get in.” He stretches to open the door. “Quick. I can’t stop here. It’s too dangerous.” Jeanie gets in, closes the door. Her seat is low, cradling. “Put your seat belt on. I nearly didn’t see you, really, you’ll cause a crash hitch-hiking at night like that. Where is it you’re trying to get to?” The man indicates and pulls out.
Jeanie is oddly calm and polite when she says, “My brother’s been shot. I think he’s dead. Do you have a mobile phone?”
“What?” The man looks at her as though she might have her own gun shoved into a pocket or tucked into a belt.
“In the spinney.” Jeanie flaps a hand behind her. “In the spinney,” she shouts like he might know the place. The car accelerates too fast and they lurch forwards, and when the man overcompensates with the brake, they bounce back against their seats. His glasses slide to the end of his nose, but he doesn’t push them back up, only hunches over the wheel nervously.
“I’ll find somewhere safe to stop,” he says, although they go past one turning and then another, and she wonders if he’s driving her to a police station to report her and hand her over as a carjacking maniac. Finally, he pulls into a floodlit industrial unit where forklift trucks are loading crates into the back of an articulated lorry. It’s the man who makes the emergency call in the end. Jeanie’s hands won’t hold the phone steady, her index finger doesn’t seem to have the strength to press nine three times. The person on the other end wants a location for the emergency and Jeanie gives the man who has driven her here the name of the lane, and she tries to describe the lay-by with the track that leads into the spinney, while the man repeats the information into his phone. Jeanie clamps her hands between her knees and clenches her jaw to stop herself from shaking and stares out at the illuminated forecourt and the people who work all night doing jobs she has never imagined. They have to reverse into a corner of the yard so that the lorry has enough space to turn and leave. A man in a high-vis jacket comes over, the foreman, and raps on the driver’s window.
“No private vehicles,” he says loudly.
“Sorry, sorry,” the driver of the car says, waving, smiling, but not putting down the window. He pulls out after the lorry, heading in the opposite direction to the spinney.
“I have to go back,” Jeanie says. “Will you take me back?”
“That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?”
“It’s the other way.” She turns in her seat, looks over her shoulder, wonders if this
man is too old to be driving.
They have to find another place where he can turn the car, and he drives slowly, prudently, like Bridget, and cars overtake them, even in the dark. He twitches and shuffles in his seat as though he feels they should be making conversation, and casts sidelong glances at her. At last, he says, “I’ve got a brother. He lives in Australia. He was a bloody pain in the backside when we were young, but I miss him.” She doesn’t have anything to say to that.
They overshoot the turning to the lane and only realize when they pass an ambulance with its blue light flashing, going in the opposite direction. Again, like some awful comedy radio play, they have to find yet another place for the man to turn the car round.
When they reach the lay-by, two police cars are already there, along with the ambulance. Jeanie has the car door open before the man has turned off the ignition, and she runs towards the spinney, but a couple of police officers steer her away, and in the headlights of the man’s car they ask her who she is, who Julius is, their relationship. There are lights in the woods, voices, orders being given.
She pushes at the police officers. “He’s my brother for God’s sake. Let me through.”
They tell her to calm herself down, that the paramedics are with him. They make her sit in the back of a police car and carry on asking her questions, but she sees two people bumping a stretcher up the track and she tugs on the door handle, which won’t open, and twists in her seat.
“Is he alive?” she says. “Is he alive?”
She sits waiting at a table in a small room with only a clock and a few posters on the walls with warnings she tries to read but can’t focus on. A man puts his head around the door and says they’ll be with her as soon as possible.
“How’s my brother?” she asks. “Do you know?”
Unsettled Ground Page 21
