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

sink and flings the glove out of the door, and then takes hold of the fitted cushion on the couch to brush behind it. As she pulls, it splits open and four tiny pink creatures tumble out. Maude eats them in an instant and Jeanie shrieks at the shock of it, kicking the cushion outside.

Ed is there, next to the step. “Problem, love?” he says.

“No.” Jeanie hugs herself. “Just doing some clearing up.”

“That damn piano’s gone as far as it’s going. Even with the dolly and some planks, it’s not gonna budge now.”

“Where is it?”

Ed points towards the lane. “’Bout halfway. Near where some kids have had a fire.”

What does it matter, halfway or all the way to the caravan, it was never going inside.

“You’ll go back for everything else?”

“There is nothing else.”

“The things outside the cottage, on the track, like we agreed.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, ain’t nothing there.”

“Where is it, then?”

“How should I know?” Ed says. “It was your stuff to look out for.”

“There’s nothing there? Are you sure?”

“A few bits of paper, box of old shoes. Didn’t think you’d want them.”

“But the furniture? The table and chairs?”

“Someone must have took it.”

“Who? Who would have taken it?” With a rising panic Jeanie sees their possessions: the bucket her father mended, the binoculars for when they watched birds together, the rag rug her mother made from old clothes. These are people and memories, not just objects.

Ed shrugs, gives her a look that suggests she’s stupid to think it would still be there. “We’ll be off then,” he says. “Let you get settled in.” There’s that smirk again and Jeanie thinks about punching him, asking for her money back, but there’s something about him that makes her afraid, and she lets him go.

She sits on the step and puts her head in her hands, and Maude, disturbed, comes and paws at her leg. She puts her arms around the dog. “All of it gone,” she says. Maybe she should call Ed back to double-check that he’s correct—that he went to the right place, that he looked hard enough.

Julius pushes his bicycle with the loaded trailer past the bushes at the opening to the little area of wasteland. Everything glows with a green freshness and a clarity he’s not noticed before. The outlines of the new leaves on a magnificent beech, the feathery seed heads lifting from clumps of coltsfoot in the slight breeze. The thought that his mother is dead and the cottage gone continues to jolt him at odd moments, but he can’t keep down this feeling of joy. And then, amongst the lanky grass near a clearing where someone has had a fire and where the light falls to the ground in yellow puddles, there is a piano. An upright piano. He leaves the bike and comes round the front and sees that it is their piano from the cottage with its ornate front panel and candle sconces. Here, cockeyed, with two wheels sunk into soft earth, it seems fantastical, part of a fairy story, and he laughs. He lifts the key lid and, bending, plays the beginning of the Bach prelude he played for Shelley Swift on his fiddle. The notes go up and away like his music never did in the cottage or her flat, echoing off the trees and expanding skywards. He has half a mind to get his fiddle and see how that sounds too. He’s been humming the music for three days and now here he is, in a wood, playing it on their own piano.

When he played the Bach for Shelley Swift she said it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her. He kissed her while they sat on the sofa and then, in a quick move, she straddled his lap to face him, her legs either side of his thighs. She pressed herself against his chest, against his erection inside his jeans, and she took both his hands and put them on her breasts. When they stopped kissing, he said, “I found somewhere else to live today.”

“What?”

“A caravan in a little bit of woodland. Off the main road. You should come out sometime for a visit. Reckon you’d like it.”

“A caravan?”

She moved off him and adjusted her skirt. “Me and camping don’t mix. Insects, moths. Squatting in the bushes.” She laughed.

“It’s not camping, not exactly.”

She had a hand in her bra, adjusting herself. “For your sister too, is it? The caravan?” And Shelley Swift’s laugh had rolled out again.

Now in the spinney, Jeanie says from behind him, “I wanted it,” and Julius stops playing the piano as though he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t, something pleasurable that is his alone. But he can’t take his fingers off the keys, he can’t let go of his laughter yet. “Ed brought it over. Stu’s ill in bed.”

He plays quietly and the prelude becomes something syncopated, his fingers running across the keys in unexpected ways.

“We can’t live here, Julius,” his sister says, and he knows he should stop and listen to her, but it’s an effort to drag himself away from the music. After a few more notes he stands straight and faces her.

“It’s small, but we’ll make it cosy.” He does believe what he says: Jeanie is a good homemaker, and he will look after her. “Did the move go okay?”

“It’s all gone,” Jeanie says. She knows she’s being deliberately obtuse as though to make him realize it’s his fault. She needs someone to blame.

“What’s gone?”

“All of it.” She speaks petulantly, like a child, and then is angry. “Someone’s taken everything.” And she sees that a delicate joy which was in her brother’s face while he was playing has gone. “I asked Ed to fetch it, but it isn’t there.”

“I don’t understand. The things at Bridget’s?”

“The things from the track, outside the cottage.” She snaps at him to make him feel stupid for not understanding quickly enough, or guilty for having been happy.

“All the things? Who the hell