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

if his sperm reaches her egg, they might make a baby.” Even Jeanie knew Dot was skating over the details. Jeanie mixed up the birthing film she’d been told about with what little she knew, and imagined a tiny hinny—the product of a stallion and a jenny—sloshing out from between a woman’s legs. “And if they do—make a baby, I mean—it’s always hard for the woman, hard for her heart, carrying a baby around inside for nine months. And you know, Jeanie, that you have a very special heart.” Here her mother paused, her hand on her own heart, tears maybe in her eyes. Jeanie looked away, embarrassed. “It would be dangerous for you to have a baby. Not good for your heart, Jeanie. Do you understand?” Jeanie quite liked the idea of having a hinny, but the sex stuff and the boyfriends she couldn’t care less about.

“I understand,” she said to her mother.

Jeanie, Bridget, and Stu watch another two episodes of the police drama with their dinners on their laps again, and then the two women go into the kitchen—Bridget to smoke and Jeanie to empty and reload the dishwasher; she needs to feel she’s earning her keep. Bridget talks about her day at the doctors’ surgery and who came in with what, a long flow of information about illnesses and prognoses. Jeanie interrupts to say, “Stu told me that Mum borrowed some money from him.”

Bridget stops talking and blows smoke up to the ceiling. “You shouldn’t worry about that now. You can sort it out when you’re settled somewhere.”

“The Rawsons say we owe them rent. They say Mum got behind. Did Julius tell you?” Jeanie turns off the tap where she’s been rinsing the dirty plates.

Bridget stubs out her cigarette and puts a Polo mint in her mouth. “I tell you what, how about a nice cup of hot chocolate?” She gets up, opens the fridge, and takes out the milk. The interior light makes her face look sick.

“Stu said she borrowed eight hundred pounds.”

“I expect it was about that. I leave the lending to him.”

“Was it to give to Rawson?”

“I think she did get a bit behind.”

“So, she was paying for the cottage all these years?”

“There was some sort of arrangement, you know that.” Bridget speaks in a way which makes her sound desperate not to have to answer fully. She spoons chocolate powder from a jar into three mugs, adds milk, and opens the microwave.

“When did Stu lend her the money?” Jeanie feels like she’s wading through deep water and Bridget isn’t going to help pull her out.

The microwave’s interior is splattered with old food. Bridget presses buttons. “Why does this matter now?”

“Please.”

Bridget sighs. “I suppose it might have been a month ago, or a bit more.” Jeanie slaps the counter with her palms and Bridget startles. “Don’t upset yourself,” she says. “You know it isn’t good for you.”

With her fingers on her ribs, over her heart, Jeanie closes her eyes. “I’m trying to understand. The agreement is that we can stay in the cottage. That the cottage is ours until we die. And free. There was no rent to pay, ever. And now we find out that all this time Mum’s been paying the Rawsons. She borrows money but doesn’t use it to pay off the debt, which isn’t due in the first place. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe she mislaid it,” Bridget says hopefully.

Jeanie shakes her head. “It was in her banjo case. I found it today. She wouldn’t have forgotten it there.” Jeanie waits to see if Bridget will suggest she return the money to Stu.

The microwave pings, and Bridget opens the door, stirs the hot chocolate, and resets the buttons. “Just let it go. Maybe it’s best you’re out of the cottage, the place is damp and falling down. Keep the money, use it as a deposit for somewhere else. I won’t tell Stu you’ve found it. You can pay him back whenever.”

“What I don’t understand is why she didn’t tell us any of this. The rent, getting behind, borrowing from Stu. Being ill, even. We’re adults. We could have helped.”

“You and Julius need to move on, and you’ll be fine. Buy yourself something nice. You deserve it.” The microwave pings a second time. Bridget puts a mug in front of Jeanie. “Bring it into the lounge,” she says, heading out of the kitchen with the other two mugs. But Jeanie doesn’t follow; she stays at the counter, remembering how her mother used to make hot chocolate with powdered cocoa and sugar, heating the milk in a saucepan with a glass disc in the bottom so she would know from its rattle when the milk was boiling. Where is that glass disc now? Probably cracked and ground into the mud outside the cottage.

Later, when Bridget is in the bath and Stu is still watching television, Jeanie counts out five hundred pounds of the cash, leaving three hundred in the envelope, and goes into the lounge.

“Here,” she says to Stu. He takes a moment to draw his eyes away from the television—another crime drama.

“What’s that?” he says.

“Five hundred quid. Some of the money Mum borrowed.”

Stu mutes the television and stands.

“So that means, just to be clear,” Jeanie says, “that we owe you another five hundred—three for the rest of the debt and another two hundred for the coffin. Plus whatever for the beer at the wake.” She still feels sick about the coffin, all that money, chopped up by Julius’s axe and stored in the old dairy ready to go on the fire—the fire they won’t be having again in the cottage. “Here.” She thrusts the cash at him, and he takes it.

“Are you sure? You can pay it back later, when you’re more sorted.”

“I’m sure,” Jeanie says.

He puts the cash into a baggy pocket in the side of his shorts. As she’s leaving the room he says, “I hear you and Julius are going to be playing at the Plough.”

She comes back towards