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

in a room which has never seen dancing. Julius lays an old door on top of the two trestles and goes back to the kitchen to lift their mother with a heave and a groan. He won’t let Jeanie help. There is a long list of things she regrets never having lifted because of her weak heart: boxes, hay bales, babies, tractors. He carries Dot through to the parlour. It’s chilly in here; much colder than the kitchen. An antimacassar lies on the back of an overstuffed armchair; a Toby jug and a framed photograph of Dot and Frank on their wedding day, in front of an Italian landscape they never visited, stand on a low polished chest; a tapestry screen hides the fireplace which is never used in this half of the cottage.

Newly married, Dot and Frank lived in the single-bedroom semi-detached cottage for a year, but as soon as the twins were born, Frank negotiated renting the mirror-image right-hand side. He knocked the two cottages together and blocked up one of the front doors so that from the gate the place has a lopsided look about it, while inside it still has two staircases, each leading to a small landing and a bedroom.

Julius lays Dot on the old door and Jeanie swaps the blanket for a clean sheet.

Both dressed now, sister and brother sit again at the kitchen table, teapot refilled. Julius has checked the fuse board in the scullery; nothing has blown but the electricity won’t come back on no matter how much he fiddles with the wires.

“I suppose we have to tell a doctor. Isn’t that what you do when someone dies?” Julius says, almost to himself. There was a process followed when their father died which Jeanie and Julius knew nothing about and now can only guess at.

“Doctors are for people who are ill,” Jeanie says.

“But we’ll need a death certificate.”

What for? Jeanie thinks but doesn’t say out loud.

“So we can bury her,” Julius says as though answering. “I’ll get a doctor and he’ll give us the form, and that’ll be that.”

Jeanie shakes her head. Dot wouldn’t have wanted a doctor to come to the house, certificates, forms, authority. None of them has seen a doctor in years.

But Julius is up, pulling on his work boots. “I’ll have to walk to the village,” he says. The village, Inkbourne, has a GP surgery, a village hall with public toilets, a fish and chip shop, and a small supermarket with a post office counter. There is also the old grocer’s which has been bought by a young man from London with a waxed moustache who has turned it into a deli selling posh bread, cheese, and olives, as well as some vegetables and eggs supplied by Jeanie and Dot. The owner, Max, serves fancy coffees and pastries at aluminium tables on the pavement outside, catching passing trade from walkers following the long-distance path which goes through the village, or Lycra-clad men on bicycles with ten-pound notes folded into the little pocket in the front of their leggings. “I won’t be able to cycle,” Julius says, and Jeanie remembers the snow. “If the surgery is open, I’ll tell Bridget, she’ll definitely want to know, and she can tell one of the doctors. If it’s closed, I’ll go on to her house.” He takes his coat from the hook on the back of the door. Maude stands, wags her tail.

“Aren’t you meant to be finishing that plumbing job with Craig today?” Jeanie says.

“I’m not going to help lift a cast-iron bath upstairs into some bathroom on the day my mother dies.”

“How will you let him know?”

“He’ll realize soon enough that I’m not coming.”

“Isn’t he meant to be paying you today?”

Julius pauses. “I’m not going to leave you here on your own all day.”

“I’ve got to feed the chickens. There are things to do in the garden that won’t wait.” She comes towards him. “You should go, get paid. We need the money.”

Julius’s hand is on the front-door catch. “I’ll see. If I can’t cycle there, I’m going to be late anyway.” There is irritation in his voice, perhaps he notices too, because he comes back into the room and puts his arms around her. “We’ll be all right,” he says into her hair. “It’ll be all right.”

“I know it,” she says, pushing him away. “Get going.”

She watches him leave from the cottage’s front door, Maude by her side, expectant and then disappointed at being held back. Jeanie sucks in the freezing air. April’s mud is hidden, the snow showing only the bumps and dips of the plants like the sheet laid over the body in the room behind her. Maybe the shock of the snow so late in the year made Dot fall. If she saw it, she would have worried about the vegetable seedlings out in the cold, and about the time and the money they’d lose. Later, Jeanie would have come in from the garden to see her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a scrap of paper, chewing on the end of her pencil while she calculated one column of numbers and another.

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For half a mile, the track curves through a small wood and then between the hedges of two fields. On any other day Julius would have stopped at the place where the view opens out and climbs, up the steep and sinuous scarp with Rivar Down on the right and, leftwards, the three-mile stretch of the high chalk ridge all the way to Combe Gibbet. Clusters of trees on the slopes—beech, oak, and conifer—are white, the snow thick and the sky low on the grazed common land. But today he keeps his head down, not noticing the tracks of small mammals and birds who have gone before him through the snow. He rolls a cigarette and smokes it while he follows the ruts which his feet know from fifty-odd years of walking or cycling along them, even if today the ruts are hidden.