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

her queasy with nerves. She doesn’t understand how her brother talked her into this.

Jeanie and Julius haven’t discussed what song they will begin with. When they play at home, either of them will start with a note and the song is begun. But here, self-consciously, they dither, starting and stopping and beginning again, until Jeanie, in exasperation, begins definitively with “As I Walked Out One April Morning.” One of the two women at the far end picks up both glasses, takes them to the bar, and passes the musicians on her way to the ladies. Jeanie doesn’t catch her eye. The slow song is about a French girl who has been convicted of killing her lover and who asks her executioner to make her death under the guillotine quick and sharp, and Jeanie hasn’t realized how interminable and dreary the song is until she sings it to the silent and mostly empty lounge bar. She cuts out the penultimate verse, and Julius, not noticing that now the girl seems to live, plays three more notes after Jeanie has finished, then stops abruptly and frowns at her. The barmaid appears and fills two new schooners with sherry. The woman returns from the ladies.

“We should go,” Jeanie says from the corner of her mouth.

“We won’t ever get another booking.”

“I don’t ever want another booking.”

The public bar is quiet and then suddenly loud with laughter. The women at the far end continue to sit and stare.

Julius raises his fiddle, strikes a note, and starts very fast.

Jeanie shakes her head, she can’t do this, she won’t do it, but Julius carries on, one foot stamping out a beat. He sings, “Hoi, hoi, a pretty little maid.” Shouting it above the hooting coming from the other room.

“A pretty little maid,” Jeanie repeats, half-heartedly.

“Had a demon lover.”

“Had a demon lover.”

The women in front of the window sit up straighter. After the next verse the barmaid comes back through to the lounge and rests her forearms on the bar to watch. When someone shouts that they need serving she shouts back that they’ll have to come through to the lounge if they want a drink—she’s listening to the band. Julius winks at Jeanie. There are three men and a woman in the pub’s lounge when that song finishes, and two more when they play the jig “Bryan O’Lynn.” The newly arrived women, middle-aged and drunk enough to be slightly unsteady on their feet, hold each other around their waists and join in with the chorus:

“‘It’ll do, do, do, do’

Says Bryan O’Lynn, ‘it’ll do.’”

A few people call out song names, most of which Jeanie hasn’t heard of, but they play a version of “Scarborough Fair” which the crowd sways to. The people in the conservatory finish eating and join the others in the lounge bar, and more come through from the public. Jeanie sees a smiling Dr. Holloway, and Bridget taking a photo on her phone. Behind her is Stu, pint in hand, which he raises to Jeanie. She grins back, she can’t help herself, and then looks down. At the table beside her and Julius, the drinks line up.

Each song is the same as the version they have always played and yet different, recomposed by a change in emphasis, an alternative word, a minuscule modification, which has always made Jeanie wonder at what point in its mutation it can be said to be a different song. When people join in with the chorus she strains to hear their own music and voices, but she is always aware of Julius—an indication that he is passing her the lead, that he is slowing when the lyrics are sad, and his pause before the final phrase so that they end together, to applause and whistling. They finish the evening in harmony, with “Polly Vaughn”:

“He ran up beside her and found it was she

He turned away his head for he could not bear to see

He lifted her up and found she was dead

A fountain of tears for his true love he shed

She’d her apron wrapped about her and he took her for a swan

And it’s so and alas, it was she, Polly Vaughn.”

As they walk back to the caravan, Jeanie thinks she might be drunk, although she doesn’t know what being drunk feels like and she only had a couple of the drinks that were bought for them. She has a giddy, giggly excitement which makes her want to talk and laugh. She and Julius debate each song they played and the audience’s reaction, singing snippets loudly and shoving each other about. There is a full moon and by its light the wasteland is transformed into a charming spinney. The rubbish is invisible and only the trees and bushes, in black and white, remain. They stop by the piano. Rain has crazed and flaked the varnish, water has penetrated the top and the key lid; some notes don’t play and those that do have a hard quality, without resonance. But Julius puts his fingers on the keyboard and they sing nonsense songs together—“There Was a Frog Living in a Well” and “The Herring’s Head”—songs they sang as children with their parents. They belt out the words, making up those they’ve forgotten, unconcerned about the missing notes, and stopping only when Maude’s excited barking from inside the caravan becomes too frenzied to ignore.

25

In the week that follows, Julius’s exhilaration from the pub gig keeps him going, even though he learns from Holloway that the man who wanted to come and hear them play didn’t make it. Next time, Julius thinks. The job in the dairy continues but now he cycles home between milkings and works on sealing the caravan skylight and the places where the rain gets in, mending the awning and digging a pit latrine a little way off in the woods. He feels an unlimited energy buzzing through him which won’t let him sit still. While he works, he thinks up band names and wonders whether a third player