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

what he’d done, he consented to the agreement and they were allowed to stay on in the cottage, rent-free. They never saw Rawson visit their mother again.

Jeanie is in the garden digging up baby carrots. Max says that his customers like them finger-sized, which Jeanie thinks is a waste of bed space and growing time. When she stands, back aching, she sees someone in the scullery. Since Dot died, she has tried to remember to lock the front door when she is up the garden, but sometimes she forgets. This person isn’t Julius—he has gone to Wheilden Farm to help take down a chicken shed. She bends to get a better look and see whether it’s Stu or, God forbid, one of the Rawsons. She imagines using the garden fork to pin them to the cottage wall, the tines piercing lime render, wattle and daub.

The figure—she can see only the torso through the low cottage window—seems to be moving back and forth as though examining items in the scullery. She takes the garden fork with her, prongs forwards, and goes in through the open back door. The person has gone from the scullery and when she gets to the kitchen, a young man is peering up the left staircase.

“Can I help you?” Jeanie says in a tone that she hopes will suggest outrage but not fear. The man jumps and turns at her voice, and then takes a step back when he sees the fork pointed at him. It is the same young man whom Bridget cuffed in the waiting room of the surgery a week or so ago. He is wearing different clothes now: a cheap suit, the material shiny and too tight for his muscled frame.

“Jeanie?” he says, and smiles, and she realizes that it’s Bridget and Stu’s son, fully grown, his blondish hair gelled sideways and upwards as though a wind is coming at him from the bottom left. The shape of his head, his chin, his cheekbones, make him surprisingly handsome. Did Stu look like this when he was younger? She can’t imagine it. She remembers that there was some trouble with drinking on the village green late at night, making a nuisance of himself at home, and Stu kicked him out. Jeanie hasn’t seen him for years.

“Nathan.” She lowers the garden fork. “What are you doing here?”

“Is your brother home?” He licks his full lips.

“No,” Jeanie says, although as soon as the word is out, she thinks she should have pretended Julius was ill in bed or up the garden. There’s something about Nathan and his veneer of confidence that makes her uncomfortable. “Can I help?”

He hesitates and then says, “I’ve come to give you a warning of eviction.”

“Pardon me?”

Nathan leans against the dresser. “You’re going to be evicted.” His smile becomes a grimace with the effort of keeping it going.

She almost laughs. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I have to put the notice on the front door on Monday, and then you’ll have a week.”

“A week? A week for what?” Jeanie’s voice is rising. She still has hold of the fork and her hands grip it tighter.

“To get out.” Nathan crosses one ankle over the other. Now that he’s said what he came here to say, he seems to relax.

“We have an agreement with Rawson that we can stay. This is crazy. This is our house. And if he or his wife thinks some money is owing, they have to give us some bloody time to pay it back.” She thinks that she or Julius should have tried to go and see Rawson. Sorted this problem out.

Nathan stands upright and goes past her with a practised swagger and puts a hand on the top of Dot’s banjo case. “I was sent to tell you about the eviction notice. Give you some warning. I don’t know nothing about any agreement or payback times.”

“Is this your job now, working for Rawson? Does your mother know what you’re up to?” Jeanie leans the fork against the table and lifts the banjo case out from under his hand and hugs it, an urge to fight firing through her like electric sparks.

He doesn’t answer but picks up a framed photograph of Jeanie and Julius as babies lying at either end of a pram. He turns it over, examines the back and the frame as if assessing its value, before replacing it on the dresser.

“He’s not a man of his word and you ought to be careful, Nathan, doing his dirty work. I have to get on.” She is shaking inside but she holds one arm out, inviting Nathan to leave.

“Monday,” he throws over his shoulder once he’s on the doorstep. “I’ll be back on Monday with the notice.”

From the doorway she watches him walk down the path, a loose-jointed amble, aware, she thinks, that she’s watching. When he gets to the gate, she shouts, “This is our house. It will be our house until we’re carried out in our coffins. You can tell Rawson that.” She slams the door and rests a palm against it, controlling her breathing, slowing her pulse.

When she tells Julius about Nathan’s visit, he rages around the kitchen, like he raged when she told him about Caroline Rawson coming over. He shouts that he’ll go to Bridget’s and demand that she and Stu control their son, or he’ll go and see Rawson and give him a mouthful. She lets his anger roll over her, agreeing, commiserating, calming. She can’t see that either of these plans will do any good in the state that Julius is in. And the sum of money that the Rawsons say they owe—the size of it—is so far beyond the pence and pounds Jeanie’s used to dealing with that it seems fanciful, made up. They could owe two million and it would be the same. But every night she can’t sleep, and tonight, during their dinner of spaghetti mixed with a tin of condensed mushroom soup and whatever vegetables there are to hand, Jeanie