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

would be in the cottage cooking a roast, and he and his father would sit side by side in the old dairy with all the little jobs Frank was supposed to catch up on piled in front of them on the workbench: a basket with a broken handle, the sole of a shoe which was flapping loose from the leather upper, old tools that needed sharpening. A tiny radio the colour of English mustard and small enough to fit in a pocket stood on the windowsill, tuned to Radio 3. The Third Programme, his father called it. Frank liked Beethoven, Chopin, and Bach—Mozart was dismissed as too sweet, music for the ladies. His father spoke over the pieces he knew well, saying, “Listen to this bit, listen to this,” and waving a shoe or a chisel in the air. Sometimes he would sing along—sounds, not words—so that although Julius couldn’t really hear the music over his father’s commentary, he was swept up in Frank’s enthusiasm. When Dot and Jeanie were out of the house, he and his father would attempt to play some of the pieces they’d heard—his father on the piano and Julius on the fiddle, although he learned to call it a violin when they played classical music. “That’s it,” Frank would say encouragingly. “You’ve got it.” A month or so before his father died, Julius overheard him talking to one of his pals from his social club. “Plays like a dream,” Frank said. “A bloody dream.” Julius listened harder. “She gets it from her mother, of course, both of them are naturals.”

Jeanie rounds up the chickens early and sits beside Dot’s grave to eat a sandwich she made at Bridget’s. Already the earth mound is green with a forest of seedling weeds and the area is visible only if you know to look for it. She feels as though she should apologize to Dot for making a mess of things in such a short space of time, when her mother managed to keep them all together in the cottage for more than fifty years. Undone in a couple of weeks. Although perhaps her mother should share some of the blame, except Jeanie can’t unravel it yet; doesn’t have the energy for it until she and Julius are settled. She’s excited that he has found somewhere, hopeful—as always—and she tries not to remember the schemes and plans that have gone wrong in the past. Instead she picks some spinach, garlic, and the last winter cabbage and cycles with Maude in the trailer to Cutter Hill, to work on Saffron’s garden. Saffron and Angel are not at home, but an envelope has been taped to the handles of the lawnmower and inside is another cheque. Jeanie wonders how easy it is to tell that a cheque hasn’t been paid into an account—she has heard about online banking, but she can’t imagine how it works. She puts the envelope in her pocket, knowing that, just like Julius with Shelley Swift, she is working without being paid.

To get to Bridget’s from Saffron’s house, Jeanie has no choice but to cycle through the village. Across the green is the fish and chip shop, already open, with a woman at the counter being served by Doug, and five children climbing on the bench inside, pressing their hands and faces against the glass. Jeanie would have cycled past but she is tired, and she slows and comes to a stop, wondering if she has enough money for some chips. One child, seeing her looking, puts his open mouth on the window and puffs out his cheeks like some peculiar sea creature, his mouth a pink hole. Above the fish and chip shop, the grubby windows on the first floor seem to be positioned too close together, giving the front a shady cross-eyed look. Ignoring the boy at the glass, who is pulled away by a sibling, she hears the notes of a violin coming from the windows above and the thing inside her chest shifts and kicks. She gets off the bike and, holding Maude on the lead, loiters outside the village hall next door and pretends to read the leaflets on the noticeboard. The violinist makes a couple of false starts, and when they do get going it isn’t any music she’s played with her brother, but she knows it is Julius and she knows this is where Shelley Swift lives. The piece is classical, something he played with their father accompanying him on the piano. Bach perhaps. Their mother scorned the classical stuff: rich people’s music, she called it, and Jeanie hasn’t heard this piece played in years, maybe not since their father died. The music flows out of the windows one wavering note at a time, achingly sweet, a pear drop caught in her throat. When the playing is finished, she hears Shelley Swift and Julius laughing, and she knows that she’s lost him.

19

In Nathan’s old bedroom, Jeanie searches through the things that Stu brought from the cottage. It isn’t that she needs confirmation that Julius’s fiddle is gone, but that she wants to see if he has taken anything else, something that might mean he’s gone too. She comes first to her mother’s banjo case behind the stack of boxes. No one has opened it since Dot died. She sits on the bed and takes it onto her lap. The smell of the interior is the same as she remembers. Dust in the crevices of the green velvet insides, the comforting odour of an old bus: worn upholstery mixed with engine oil.

She removes the banjo from the case and plucks at the five strings, out of tune, of course. She sets it beside her and opens the case’s top compartment: a yellow duster and a thumb pick which Dot never used. The second compartment, below where the neck of the banjo would sit, is smaller, and wedged in tightly is a brown envelope, thick with whatever it contains. When