Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (best large ereader txt) 📕

until they reach the town and begin circling the parking area in the main square. Bridget is too hesitant, indicating first one way and then the other, missing a couple of spaces and going round again. She only learned to drive a few years ago. “I suppose you’ll carry on living in the cottage?” She pulls into a space without indicating, narrowly missing a car already parked.

Jeanie doesn’t know how to answer. What does Bridget know about what Caroline Rawson claimed? About how little money they have in the tin? Jeanie makes a non-committal hmm which could be taken either way. Bridget yanks up the handbrake and puts her fingers on the sleeve of Jeanie’s coat. Jeanie looks at them—the wedding and engagement rings, the nail varnish, a chipped red the colour of Winifred, a rose which grows in the cottage’s front garden. “I know about your mum and the thing with Rawson,” she says softly, as though testing whether Jeanie knows it too.

“The agreement, do you mean?” Jeanie says. Of course Bridget knows about the agreement, this isn’t a surprise. “Nothing changes it now Mum’s dead. It was always supposed to apply to me and Julius too. We can stay in the cottage for the rest of our lives without paying any rent.”

Bridget examines her closely, her eyes flicking from one pupil to the other. “The agreement, yes,” she says, although there’s something false about her tone. She turns off the engine. “Is that what you want, then? To stay on in the cottage?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

Bridget reaches into the back seat for her handbag. “You don’t think it’s a bit unnatural?” She takes out a tube of Polos, puts a mint in her mouth, and offers the packet to Jeanie.

Jeanie shakes her head. “Unnatural? What’s unnatural?”

“Well, I don’t know. Living with your brother when you’re fifty-one. Gardening. That cottage.” Bridget shudders. Jeanie knows she doesn’t like the place, finds it dingy and claustrophobic. She won’t ever use the privy when she visits. Says it’s full of spiders.

“It’s our home. We’ve always been there.”

“Exactly,” Bridget says. “Look, I’m just saying you should live a little. Get a proper job maybe. Earn some real money. Buy some new clothes.”

“New clothes? My mother has just died. I don’t care about new clothes.”

“That came out wrong.” Bridget folds the packet of mints away. “I’m sorry, it’s just, what if you can’t carry on living there? You need to think about that.”

“Of course we’ll carry on living there. That was the agreement.” Perhaps Bridget does know about the rent that Mrs. Rawson says they owe. She and Julius haven’t talked about it since Jeanie told him that Caroline Rawson came round, and he hasn’t yet been to see her husband like she said he should. Nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen. Still, as much as she tries to dismiss that outrageous amount, it flies around inside her like a bluebottle at a window, making her heart buzz with anxiety.

Bridget seems to think for a moment, starts to say something and then dismisses it. “Well, if you’re going to stay, you must get that man to put in some decent plumbing, a bathroom with an inside loo, get it rethatched. The place needs sorting out.” She takes her purse from her handbag and pokes through the coins. “Do you have a pound? I think that’s what the car-park machine needs.”

Jeanie would like to put her fingers to her heart to keep the creature from escaping but she looks in the compartment in her own purse where she keeps her coins. She knows there is exactly three pounds and fifty-four pence in there—all the loose change from the tin. Julius took back the twenty pounds he put on the table, and she knows he will have bought tobacco with it, rolling papers, matches, maybe topped up his phone. She needs the change in her purse to buy bread and margarine and milk, some cheese if she can make it stretch that far. Bridget peers over and takes the fifty-pence piece. “That’ll help,” she says, and goes to buy a ticket.

When they’re standing on the pavement Bridget checks her phone for the time. “Your appointment’s in fifteen minutes, so you should be fine.” Bridget has telephoned and got her booked in. Jeanie and Julius discussed whether they needed to register the death if they’re going to be burying their mother in the garden and decided they did. Jeanie feels sick at the thought of the forms and would have preferred Julius to do it, but Devizes is an hour in the car, and he would never have made it without throwing up.

“I’ll meet you back here at half past,” Bridget says.

The waiting area in the register office is empty of people. Tinny classical music is playing and on the wall there is a large painting of flowers in a vase—lily of the valley and roses—flowers that don’t bloom at the same time. She gives her name to the woman at the desk and sits in a chair. They are the same chairs in style and upholstery as the ones in the surgery waiting room. Perhaps waiting room chairs are the same across the country, across the world; perhaps one company has a corner on the sales of waiting room chairs. Apart from the awful music—something that is meant to cover all three situations she supposes: birth, death, and marriage—it is quiet until she hears a roar coming from behind a closed door, cheering and whooping like a football crowd, and the waiting room fills up with people in bright clothes, streaming out and congratulating and clapping a couple who hold hands and laugh. Jeanie stands and smiles too, caught up in the celebration. The group leaves, their chatter fading down the street, and Jeanie is bereft, holding her breath so that she won’t cry at being left behind while the party carries on elsewhere, as always. The tinny music is audible again, and her name