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

“No,” he says.

“Mum and Dad taught us all those songs, and that’s it. No one for us to pass them on to.”

“I keep telling you we should do a gig at the Plough.”

“I’m not doing one, so you might as well stop going on about it. Everyone will be looking, judging, gossiping. They do enough of that already, every time I go to the village.”

“No one’s looking at you, Jeanie. Everyone’s too busy thinking about themselves. Trust me. We should do it. I bet you’d love it. We’d be paid. Holloway says he might be able to get someone to come and have a listen. Some bloke who’s interested in regional folk music or something.”

She interrupts him; she’s never going to play at the Plough or anywhere else in public. The wake was enough. “Don’t you want to pass your music on, teach it to someone?”

“What do you mean? Like give lessons?”

She isn’t sure if he’s being wilfully difficult. But she won’t say what she means, not directly. “Not to any old child.”

“Ahh,” he says, long and drawn out. He understands exactly what she means. “My own kid. Nope. Never thought about it.”

“You must have thought about it. Children, marriage.”

“Who’s to say I haven’t got kids scattered all over the county already?”

There were a few times when Julius was younger that he stayed out all night, creeping home in the early morning and asking Jeanie not to tell. Once, late on a hot Sunday morning after a few hours’ sleep, he put the tin bath in the yard and filled it with warm water. Jeanie was peeling vegetables for Sunday lunch and watching him from the open scullery window, sitting in the tub, his broad back and bony knees sticking out of the water. He turned and winked at her and she lobbed a piece of raw potato at him. He ducked too late and it bounced off his head. She threw the hard end of a parsnip with such unexpected anger that when it hit his shoulder he yelped. Another and another followed until he rose up out of the water, grabbed his towel, and retreated, as she yelled with a ferocity that shocked her. It wasn’t that Jeanie wanted what he was having—sex or a relationship—those things left her unmoved; but she knew it would be a woman who would take him away from the cottage, from her.

On the common, Jeanie sits up. “Forget it,” she says, looking out to her left, away from him. “I can’t ever have a proper conversation with you.”

“Sorry,” he says and tugs on her shirt. “Lie down.” She lies back once more, and he says, “I’m not planning on marrying anyone.”

“You don’t need to marry anyone to be with them, have children. With Mum gone, you can do what you want.”

“I’ve always done what I want.”

“Have you?”

“This is crazy.” Now he’s the one who sits up. “It’s like you’ve been itching for a fight ever since we buried her.” When she looks at him, he is a shadow blocking out the light, knees bent and arms resting on them, and for the first time that she can remember, she has no idea what he’s thinking.

“I saw you took the ring,” she says. She watches a red kite circling high above. He doesn’t speak, although she’s hoping he’ll give her an explanation which doesn’t involve a woman, isn’t about Shelley Swift. “I remembered, you know,” Jeanie continues.

“What?” He looks at her over his shoulder.

“That Mum did put her wedding ring in the dish on the scullery windowsill. I remember seeing it there and it wasn’t when she was gardening or making pastry. I’ve been trying to think why she would have taken it off, but I can’t come up with anything.”

“She put it there when she went to see Bridget in the afternoon and sometimes in the morning.”

“Bridget?” Jeanie says, sitting up again. This isn’t what she expected.

“I used to think Mum was shagging Stu.”

“An affair?” Jeanie coughs out her shock. “With Stu?”

“Or just a shag. But, I know. Not very likely.”

“There’s no way she would have. She took marriage far too seriously, hers and other people’s. Vows and all that. She definitely wouldn’t have had a thing with Stu Clements.”

“Remember the second Christmas after Dad died?” Julius says. “Not the first; that was grim. But the second . . . she sent me out to saw down a fir tree. The smallest you can find, she said. But there weren’t any small ones and I had to cut the bloody thing in half to get it in the kitchen. It was just a stump with loads of branches sticking out, in the end.”

“And to get to bed you had to go out through the back door and in through the front,” Jeanie says.

“That whole Christmas Mum was happy. Always laughing. Dancing around the kitchen. Do you remember? That’s when I first saw her wedding ring on the windowsill.”

They’re silent for a while.

“Sometimes though,” Julius says, “don’t you wish she’d had a thing with someone after Dad died?”

“Had a fling with Stu? No.”

“Okay, not Stu, not a fling even, but maybe she could have done something extraordinary, for her own sake. It’s always the same old path, isn’t it, up the hill and down again. Worrying about money. Sometimes, I reckon, we need something to come along and trip us up when we’re not expecting it. Otherwise, one day we’re kids playing with the hose pipe, and the next we’re laid out on an old door in the parlour.”

Jeanie tries to think of something that might trip her up now, at fifty-one. It won’t be eviction; she won’t let that happen. Maybe, if she had been well, she could have hiked up bigger hills, mountains, she could have walked the two thousand miles of the Appalachian Trail.

“It’s not going to happen.” Jeanie pours more tea. Passes the cup, knowing that Julius is keeping up with her thoughts. “It’s all pretence with