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

cash—and Jeanie accepts it and when she unfolds it, she sees that it is a cheque. Heat prickles the skin of her throat, and her heart begins its knocking. Perhaps it shows in her face, because Saffron says, “I can transfer the money next time. Email me your bank details and I’ll send it across.”

“No,” Jeanie says. “Thanks, a cheque is fine.”

After the wake, four days go by without Shelley Swift sending Julius a text or calling. Several times he picks up his phone and laboriously composes a message but deletes each one and puts his mobile away, feeling out of his depth, unconfident of her interest in him. There have been other women, but not for years. When Julius was in his twenties, the village hall held gigs for local bands, not his kind of music but he always went. Three summers in a row Julius slept with three different women when the gigs were over. Once in the back of an expensive car, another time on a mattress in the back of a van, and a third up against the wall behind the public toilets. He would have liked to give his number to each one of them, all interesting in different ways, but he had no number to give, and they never offered theirs. Older villagers complained about the gigs—the noise and the mess—and after the third summer there were no more bands, and no more women. Then when he was about to turn thirty-five, he met Amy. He liked her, could have fallen in love, and didn’t mind when Jeanie teased him about settling down, moving out, how it was about time one of them did, and although it was banter between siblings, he knew without her saying that while she wanted him to go, she was afraid of being left with Dot, afraid she would never leave when he was gone. He didn’t tell his mother about Amy, but it was Dot who casually mentioned one day that she’d seen her kissing some man outside the Plough. Julius didn’t see Amy after that.

On Friday, another day without work, he goes out on his bike to Little Bedwyn, telling himself he’ll knock on some doors to see if anyone he’s worked for in the past needs anything doing. He hates drumming up jobs this way, the suspicion in people’s faces, the thought that he must look desperate, like a beggar. He visits a farm he worked on a year ago, but the house has a For Sale sign outside, and instead he starts to cycle up the gravel drive of a country house where he once worked helping lay the concrete floors in the garages. They were in the middle of the work when the owner of the house appeared, an old man with a walking stick and a yellow Labrador, and said there was a telephone call for him. They all stopped—Julius and the two men he was working with. “For me?” he said, and his boss frowned, but the old man had already started hobbling back to the house and Julius followed. Someone must be dead, he thought, his mother or his sister, and he wanted the old man to walk faster. He can’t remember now much about the inside of the place except that the hall was huge, with an enormous glittering chandelier. When he picked up the phone, he heard the pips and the chank of coins being pushed into the slot, and his mother was on the other end.

“It’s Jeanie,” she said in a shaky voice.

“Is she okay? What’s happened?”

“I’m worried about her. Her heart.”

“Why are you phoning me?” he shouted. “Call an ambulance, for God’s sake.”

“I just need you to come home.”

When he got back, Jeanie was fine, of course, or as fine as she ever was. It was his mother he worried about then.

Before he gets to the house’s front door, Julius turns in a big loop and cycles back the way he’s come. After that, he calls on a couple of other likely-looking farms but doesn’t pick up any work. When it’s five thirty he slowly rides a route which will take him past the brickworks. He hasn’t much hope of bumping into Shelley Swift, and when he sees a red Nissan coming towards him, he doesn’t really think it can be her. He raises his hand, unable to see clearly through the windscreen. He stops as soon as the car passes and when he looks back, the car has also stopped and reverses quickly up the road towards him with a whine. Shelley Swift lowers her window and although Julius’s timing couldn’t be better, he hasn’t considered anything beyond seeing her and can only stare at her face and her arm resting on the door, all of which are covered in a fine film of brick dust.

“Is your boiler heating up okay?” he says at last and as soon as the words are out they sound like a joke which Jenks would make.

She laughs and says, “It’s in good working order, thank you. How’s yours?”

He blushes and manages some sort of reply.

“What brings you out this way?” she says and when he can’t find an answer, she speaks for him. “Just getting some air? It’s a lovely evening for it.” She winks. “I was thinking of going for a walk. Want to join me?”

She parks her car on the verge and he locks his bike, and they walk across Two Hares Field. She is wearing unsuitable clothes for a walk: a tight skirt and a blouse, and he can tell that her heels are sinking into the damp grass. He helps her over a stile into Foxbury Wood.

“I remember you from school,” she says. “You were in the year below me, always had a bloody nose from fighting. I fancied you even then.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t remember her at all.

This time he kisses her first, and when she presses up to him, he