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

been able to find her handbag, not that there was anything much in it. It’s not in any of the boxes in Nathan’s old room and she can’t find it amongst the stuff still on the track. “Perhaps you could give the money to your husband, have a word with him, and then my brother and I can move back in. To the cottage.” Mrs. Rawson is staring at her. “My brother and I are staying with some friends, well, a friend of my mother’s, but it’s not—it’s not—great. And that cottage, you know, is our home.” Jeanie is mortified to hear her voice wobble, but she presses on. “Julius and I were born in that cottage, it’s where we’ve lived all our lives, it’s where our mother died, and where . . .” Jeanie stops herself before she admits that it’s also where she’s buried. Her hand is outstretched, with the envelope trembling over the polished work surface.

Caroline Rawson clasps her hands together.

“Please,” Jeanie says.

Mrs. Rawson continues to look at her. There is no softening in her face. “No,” she says.

“No? No, what?” Jeanie withdraws her hand and the envelope with it.

“No, I can’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“Because apparently your mother already tried to give my husband the money. She came here like you with an envelope of cash and he wouldn’t take it.” She gives a weird laugh that Jeanie doesn’t understand.

“Why not?”

A car horn sounds from outside. “I’m sorry, but that’ll be my sister.”

“Why wouldn’t he take it if you think there’s some rent owing?”

Mrs. Rawson gives up on waiting for Jeanie to move and scoops up her bag. “It’s my husband you need to speak to about this, not me.” She walks towards the hall. “Alexa, kitchen lights off,” she says, and the room darkens. Before Jeanie can work out how that happened, she hears the front door open and hurries after Mrs. Rawson. As soon as they are both outside, Maude stands where she’s been tied up, expectant. On the doorstep, as Mrs. Rawson locks the door, she says, “Look, just keep the money, okay? Use it as a deposit on somewhere else. I’m sorry.” She flaps her free hand in front of her face and hurries to the waiting car, a green sports car, low, with a long bonnet, and she gets in the passenger seat. Through the windscreen Jeanie watches Mrs. Rawson and her sister embrace, holding each other tight for a full two minutes. Her sister does a three-point turn and they drive away.

21

“Man flu,” Bridget says quietly, wrinkling her nose. She and Jeanie are standing on the landing outside Bridget’s bedroom where Stu lies in bed with a box of tissues and a mug of Lemsip on his bedside table. “But you don’t need to worry—Stu’s already phoned Ed and he’s on his way now.” She looks at her watch. “And I have to get to work.”

Not Ed, Jeanie thinks. Anyone but Ed. “Maybe we should put it off until Julius has a free day or wait until Stu’s better,” she says. Julius is still doing his milking job but says the place is too far for him to cycle home between shifts, and he has no choice but to hang around the dairy for hours in the middle of the day. He said he’d tell them he couldn’t take the job, but Jeanie said she couldn’t stay at Bridget and Stu’s even one more night, and she’d insisted they needed his earnings.

“God, that could be days, a week or more.” Bridget is already at the bottom of the stairs putting on her coat, and Jeanie follows her down. “Ed owes Stu a favour for something or other. Just don’t let him pull a fast one; that man will do anything for money.”

Ed grabs the boxes and suitcases from Nathan’s room at a run, up and down the stairs to his pickup, while Jeanie manages two trips and four bags. He’s strong for such a small man.

“More than double what Stu told me it’d be,” Ed says.

All the time that Jeanie has been at Bridget and Stu’s—three days and four nights—she has walked to the cottage in the morning to see to the chickens, collect the eggs, tend the garden, and talk to her mother. The place calls her back. It began to rain heavily one afternoon when she was due to cycle to Saffron’s, and she did her best to cover up the things outside on the track using the remaining linen from the chest and a tarpaulin she dragged out from the old dairy. But the day after she went to see Mrs. Rawson, Jeanie noticed that a chest of drawers and a bedside table had gone, as well as the tin bath. She thought about asking Bridget if the stuff could be stored in Stu’s garage, but what would he do with the crap that it was already full of? Each time Jeanie left the cottage she stuffed a couple of carrier bags with small things: a tin of plasters, cotton reels and needles, an alarm clock which might or might not be working, some offcuts of material. As she sorted through it all she hoped to find Dot’s wedding ring, but never came across it. Jeanie stashed the bags in Nathan’s old bedroom.

“What have you got in here, bricks?” Ed shoulders another box into the back of his pickup.

“Just bits and pieces.” Jeanie forces a smile.

“You do know where we’ve got to take this clobber?”

She hates the word clobber. She clenches her jaw, breathes. “To a little place in the woods,” she says. That’s all Julius would tell her.

“Yeah, right,” Ed says, laughing and shaking his head as he lifts up her bike.

When they’re sitting in the cab with Maude—the footwells and the gap between the windscreen and the dashboard are stuffed with disposable coffee cups, cans, burger cartons, and bits of paper—as Ed is about to turn the key in the ignition, Jeanie says, “When you’ve