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

to feel like a heart attack?—and she will have made Julius come home for no reason. She doesn’t like this feeling of being in the wrong, of having to apologize for a false alarm. Not bothering to fold the table down into her bed, she lies on Julius’s couch again, trying to listen for the tick of his bicycle through the hammering of the rain on the roof. She wakes an hour later, cold and with aching joints, to knocking on the caravan door. It’s dark outside and in, and although she expects it to be Julius worrying about her, she unbolts the door cautiously. A different man stands on the ground in front of the bottom step and it’s a second before she recognizes Rawson in a three-piece suit with a yellow tie.

“Miss Seeder,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind me calling round so late. I couldn’t sleep.”

She hesitates. He is the last person she wants to see.

“Could I come in? Just for a moment. It’s getting heavier.” His hair is wet and his shoulders hunched.

Perhaps he has something to tell her about the cottage. Maybe he has tried to let the place and has finally realized that no one else is going to live in it in that state. She stands back. While she lights a few candles, he looks around and wipes his face—his startlingly black eyebrows and that white moustache—with a folded handkerchief he takes from his pocket. The top of his head almost reaches the caravan ceiling. She sees him notice the piles of bedding, the clothes, the food which there isn’t enough cupboard space for, the homemade curtains and still-curling lino, and then he says, “What a nice place you’ve made for yourself here.”

Jeanie folds her arms. She misses the security of Maude at her heels, although that soft dog never provided any real protection.

“Mr. Rawson,” she says warily.

“Quite a little home.” He is not very good at hiding what he really thinks, she can see the shock in his face, no matter what he says. “Though not so easy an approach as to the cottage.” They look at his polished brogues, what might be a leaf stuck to one toe.

“Maybe I should phone the council and ask them to come and lay a footpath from the lane to our door so that visitors don’t get their shoes dirty.”

He tries a smile, and she sees not only horror but pity. “Talking of the cottage, how are you getting on with the garden? There must be a lot to keep up with at this time of year.”

She tilts her head, trying to work out the reason for his visit, what this small talk is leading to. He certainly hasn’t come to ask how her broad beans are doing.

“So what if I’ve been going back? No one else is looking after it.” She thinks she hears the throaty noise of an engine somewhere outside, closer than the main road, on the lane perhaps.

“Quite right. It would be a waste to let everything rot.” His tone is gentle, she might say sincere if she weren’t suspicious of his motives.

“The vegetables are ours—mine—anyway. We grew them. My mother and I put years of work into that garden.”

“Dot, yes.” He pauses. “But it’s not just the garden you’ve been visiting, is it? I know you’ve been going inside. You left the back door unbolted and the ladder wasn’t put away properly.” She feels an unwelcome blush rising at being found out. “Could we sit?” he says. “Discuss this in a civilized fashion?”

She nods to the couch, Julius’s bed. Rawson looks behind him and stays standing; she had no intention of sitting with him.

“Caroline, my wife, would probably say that although you’ve grown those vegetables, they’re on our land and you’re selling them at the end of the lane and elsewhere.”

“And you want a cut? Is that it?” She laughs sourly. “The amount I earn from the vegetables barely pays for the rest of our food.”

“No, no.” He holds his hands out, palms up. “That’s her view, not mine. This is nothing to do with money as far as I’m concerned. It’s your attachment to the place, to the land, that I’m talking about. I’m a farmer too. The earth is in our blood, isn’t it? Caroline doesn’t really get it, never has. But it was the same for your mother, she loved that cottage, that garden.”

Jeanie thinks she can see what he’s trying to do: align them, attempt to find common ground, shared desires, although she can’t work out why. But she isn’t going to have any of it.

The whine of an engine is definitely in the spinney and knowing it sets her heart ticking. “But you still had us evicted.” She spits the last word and he flinches.

“That wasn’t my doing. Caroline insisted we go—”

She cuts him off. “And anyway, what do you know about my mother?” She takes a step forwards, ready to throw him out.

“More than you think. You’re a lot like her.”

“You don’t know anything. And I don’t know why you’ve come here, but now you’re going to leave.”

He doesn’t move. “Dot wanted a place she could call home,” he says. “To have her family around her, a bit of land, feel the sun on her skin. What many of us want when it comes down to it.”

“Is that why you’re here? To tell me things about my mother that I already know?”

Rawson rubs his hands together awkwardly as though he’s gearing himself up for something. “I’d like to offer you the cottage back.”

He is dangling a hook hidden by a twisting worm, she thinks, but the animal in her heart jumps to swallow the bait. “In return for what? Rent? Rent we’ve never had to pay, and you know exactly why. And your wife has the cheek to come round saying we owe two thousand pounds. Two thousand pounds! It’s crazy. Then she won’t take any money anyway!” Jeanie goes to the cupboard,