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

18

Avoiding the middle of Inkbourne will add an extra mile or two on to the cycle ride from Bridget’s to the cottage, but for Jeanie it’s preferable to bumping into someone who might have heard about the eviction. How would she explain why she and Julius are homeless? What would she say if anyone asked where they’re going to live now? She moves the trailer from Julius’s bike to hers and gets Maude to climb into it so that she can practise going slowly up and down the road outside Bridget’s house before she sets off. After they get going, when Jeanie glances behind, Maude is facing into the wind with her mouth open, jowls flapping.

Jeanie cycles past the farmyard and up the track, shocked again to see their possessions flung out along the verge. Items and objects she’d taken for granted when they were indoors—the blue cupboard which always stood on the right-hand landing, a china washbowl with a chip in its rim, the embarrassment of a chamber pot tipped on its side, a box of assorted woolly hats and gloves—all lie in odd juxtapositions, as though a huge hand had picked up the cottage and shaken it for fun, letting the contents tumble out, before setting the building back on its foundations. It hasn’t rained overnight but the morning’s dew has left beads of moisture on the polished furniture and soaked into the fabrics. Maude jumps out of the trailer and capers around it all, racing down the track, happy to be home.

Although only a night and a morning have passed since she and Julius left, Jeanie expects something to be different; without them here surely something should have altered—new people moved in or workmen started on renovating the place. But there are no vehicles on the track, and when she peers through the front windows the disarray in the parlour is as it was before, while in the kitchen, the dresser remains against the wall and the piano halfway across the room, where Nathan, Lewis, and Tom gave it up as too heavy. She rattles the front door, although she knows it will be locked, and when she goes around the cottage, the back door is of course bolted from the inside. She lets the chickens out and gives them food and fresh water. They are disgruntled that it is so late, and the small brown one has fewer feathers on its back, but there are eggs to collect which she can take with her and give to Bridget. She walks up the garden, avoiding the grave, and considers gathering everything that will burn and building a bonfire so that Rawson, or whoever lives in the cottage next, won’t get the benefit of it. But there have been too many years of double digging, too much back-breaking flint picking and plant tending to destroy the garden, and besides, what is there that would burn? The rough fencing, the compost bins? Jeanie fills the watering can from the outside tap and waters the tomato plants, which are drooping in the greenhouse.

When she’s finished the urgent jobs, the cottage draws her back. She cups her hands around her eyes and stares in through the scullery window and sees a similar untidiness as in the front rooms. In the old dairy she lifts down a wooden ladder which hangs from brackets on the wall, and with some difficulty manoeuvres it outside and around to the front. Julius wouldn’t like her doing it, but he isn’t here. She props the ladder against her bedroom window, jabbing the feet into the earth to secure it, and climbs. Maude, at the bottom, yaps at her. Jeanie’s bedroom window has never closed securely and in winter she and Dot would stuff the crannies with rags and balls of newspaper. Now she gets her finger in the gap, pulls the window open, and clambers inside.

Even after only one uninhabited night, the cottage smells abandoned. The wardrobe and the metal frame of the double bed she shared with Dot are still in the room—it seems the men were unable to find a spanner of the right size to take the bed apart—but the base, the mattress, and the bedding are outside. With fresh eyes she sees the things that were inconsequential when it was her bedroom: the spot around the window where the plaster is blown, the blooming stains on the walls like great circles of ringworm, and the hole in the corner of the ceiling which mice would drop out of, and where they used to catch the water in a bucket when it rained. Downstairs, Jeanie’s footsteps echo, and the house seems cavernous. After a week or a fortnight, a month, without anyone living in it, she knows the cottage will slip further into decay. The flagstones in the kitchen will lift higher, soot will blow down the chimneys, rats will come to gnaw and scratch, until, in time, the house will regress into its constituent parts, becoming earth, grass, stone, and wood.

She stands in front of the iron range, which radiates its coldness against the backs of her legs. The fire hasn’t ever been allowed to go out completely before. Often when the flames leaped up again, Dot would say it was the same fire she’d lit aged eighteen, the day Frank carried her across the threshold. She wonders where her mother’s wedding ring is; has Julius kept it safe? A collection of oil lamps lie on the floor with their glass shades smashed, and she steps over them, unbolts the back door, and whistles for Maude, who is still barking at the front. Back in the kitchen, she eases the full log basket across the room and, perching on its lip, opens the piano lid and plays a minor chord. She learned the piano by copying her father, although she has always preferred the guitar. The piano is even more out of tune than before, but she plays an introduction and