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

can feel her large breasts inside her silky blouse, soft against his chest. She puts her hands on his cheeks and kisses him back. She draws away, and holding him again with her eyes, she tugs at the silk bow at her throat—somehow part of the blouse—and unbuttons it all the way down, then lifts one of her breasts out of her bra. It is as pale as her neck, with a blue vein snaking downwards. The size and weight of it stretches the brown nipple into an oval. He puts his hand under it, excited by its warmth and its wonderful heft, and he raises it towards his mouth as he bends his head.

“Will you lie down with me here?” he says after a while, wishing he had brought a blanket or was wearing a bigger coat.

“Here?” Shelley Swift says. “In a wood?” And she laughs so much he thinks she might be sick.

When they say goodbye at the car, he is shy, but she only laughs some more. He wants to arrange to see her but doesn’t know how to ask or what she might reply. It is only as he is cycling off that he remembers she hasn’t paid him for the two jobs, and that it isn’t ever going to be possible to ask for the money now.

14

Jeanie and Julius lock up the cottage and walk along the track in the opposite direction to the farm, and up the twisting path to the top of Rivar Down. The incline is steep and they lean into it, thighs burning. Jeanie is annoyed that Julius insists they rest every fifth step for her to catch her breath, but she complies. At the point where the hikers’ route crosses, they go left along the ridge and through a stand of oak where the path is fenced with barbed wire and the grass beyond clipped by sheep. Already Jeanie can feel the sun beating on her forehead and knows they should have brought hats. How could there have been snow only two weeks ago? How could their mother be dead? The knowledge still sometimes takes her by surprise, that Dot isn’t at home washing eggs in the scullery or mixing compost in the greenhouse. There are puddles on the track, and swarms of flies rise up as Maude races past. Julius doesn’t have any work to go to, but both of them could—should—be spending the day in the vegetable garden. Today is the day that Nathan said he would be serving the eviction notice, and although their decision to be out of the cottage wasn’t talked over, somehow they are here with Julius’s rucksack packed with a bottle of water, a flask of tea, and sandwiches made from cheap sliced bread, margarine, and the previous autumn’s raspberry jam. When did they last walk together without having to get somewhere in particular? Jeanie can’t remember. They are behaving as though it is normal: just another stroll, just another picnic. The tea in the flask is black and unsweetened. There is no milk and no sugar.

On Ham Hill they stop to look out at the slope falling steeply below them, criss-crossed with the tracks of sheep, and further away, the land flattening to a mosaic of fields trimmed with hedges, patches of woods, and isolated houses, and between them, the dark trickle of the Ink. Berkshire to their right; Inkbourne and Wiltshire to their left. They can see Rawson’s black-roofed barn and part of the farmhouse, but the cottage and the garden are hidden by trees. They walk on as far as the common, passing a couple in raincoats and walking boots, socks folded over the tops, and the man with a map in a plastic wallet hanging around his neck. They pass a group of foreign teenagers, bored and tired and being chivvied on by an exasperated leader. At the bottom of the gibbet—a twenty-five-foot post standing on the beacon—some idiot has placed a bunch of thistles, roots and soil attached, as a bouquet for the outlaws who were strung up here. Jeanie and Julius walk with their boots sideways, down the steep common, and sit below the shoulder of the hill, out of sight of any walkers.

Julius tosses a corner of his sandwich to Maude. She catches it in her mouth and it disappears with a snap of her teeth.

“You’ll give her bad habits,” Jeanie says. “She’ll sit by your lap when you’re eating at the table and then you won’t be so happy to feed her.” She isn’t really telling him off, she likes that he feeds the dog. She pours a cupful of tea.

“Do you remember, we used to come here with Dad?” Julius says.

“We used to go to Ham Hill, not here,” Jeanie says.

“No, it was definitely here. For our eighth birthday. This was where he gave me my penknife.”

“It was Ham Hill. He left you alone with it and you cut your leg open.”

“That was later. Not here, not on our birthday.”

“God, there was so much blood.” Jeanie blows on the tea and sips. “He was such an irresponsible father.” She laughs. “Do you still have the scar?”

Julius lifts up the bottom of his jeans and shows his shin with a white slash across it.

“Ouch,” she says, passing him the cup. “That’s even worse than I remember.”

Julius drinks, tugs down his jeans. “He was a good musician though.”

Jeanie lies back fully on the grass and Maude runs over and sniffs her face as though to check she isn’t dead, and when Jeanie opens her eyes, all she can see is sky: blue the colour of a dressing gown she had as a child, and white clouds, lacy at the edges, moving from one side of her vision to the other.

“Do you ever think about what’ll happen to our music after we’re gone?”

Julius takes so long to move or to answer that she thinks maybe he hasn’t heard her, but he lies back too, his hands