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

At a quarter to five when it’s light outside she uses the toilet. Behind the door when she closes it, the dirt and dust and dead insects run from ceiling to floor down the hinged side. Whoever cleans these toilets does it with the toilet doors open. Jeanie washes, and brushes her teeth, but she feels grubby and worries that she smells. The sinks are too small to wash her hair, and she doesn’t have shampoo. She changes her underwear and stuffs the sleeping bag into the large carrier, stowing it again behind the block. She wishes she had saved the soup for the morning. On the walk to Saffron’s house her stomach growls and grinds itself against nothing. She hopes the volunteer driver won’t go past her in the car, and she tries to time her walk so that she can flag the car down before it turns onto Saffron’s drive.

The driver—an ex-military type wearing a tie and a shirt with ironed creases along the arms—doesn’t talk except to introduce himself as Alastair. She’s pleased he’s silent, but she senses that he expects her to thank him, to be grateful for his charity in order that he can feel better about himself, and she won’t do it. You’re too proud for your own good, she can hear Julius saying. Alastair can’t stay in Oxford all day, so they arrange for him to pick her up at noon at the hospital entrance and drive her home.

Already the ITU seems normal—the smell of disinfectant, the alarms from the machines, the other visitors who nod at Jeanie but don’t want to chat, as she doesn’t. Julius is unchanged, although his nurse says they have been reducing the drug that is keeping him asleep and this afternoon they might try removing his breathing support. “We have your number, so we’ll call you as soon as we know anything,” the nurse says. Jeanie doesn’t contradict him; she’s not sure whose number they have, if they do actually have one. She imagines Julius’s phone ringing in a plastic evidence bag in a cupboard in the police station. A message left on his own mobile to say he’s dead.

After Jeanie has sat for an hour beside Julius, trying to think of things that she can possibly tell him, she asks the nurse the way to the cafeteria. The smell of cooking—bacon, chips, toast, and coffee—makes her light-headed with hunger. She finds a seat at one end of a long, mostly empty table, several chairs down from a woman and a man sitting opposite each other and picking at the food they’ve bought. After ten minutes they get up and leave, and before anyone can stop her or ask what she’s doing, Jeanie sits in the man’s seat, the moulded plastic uncomfortably warm. She picks up his knife and fork. He has crushed his paper napkin and dropped it onto his plate. Jeanie lifts it off and eats quickly. Half a fried egg, hash browns, more baked beans, and most of a sausage. She drinks the last of the man’s lukewarm tea, and then she swaps the trays around and eats what remains of the woman’s fruit salad: mostly slices of green apple gone brown. She pockets an unused tiny packet of butter and a miniature jar of jam which has been opened, and then piles up the crockery, stacks the trays, and takes them to the trolley where visitors are encouraged to leave their dirty plates. Here, from someone else’s tray, she wraps a half slice of toast and the hard corner of a croissant into a napkin and puts it in her pocket. She would like to take more—there is so much left uneaten—but her heart is jumping and she is sure that at any moment someone will stop her and question what she’s doing. She doesn’t look around as she leaves.

Jeanie asks Alastair if he wouldn’t mind waiting in the car at the WCs in the village before he drops her at the bottom of the lane near the Rawsons’ farm, where she arranges for him to pick her up in the morning. She lets him assume that she has to use the loo but collects her large carrier bag from the back of the toilets, and if Alastair notices that she has one more bag with her when she gets back in the car, he passes no comment.

In the five days that she’s been away, the garden has gone out of control. The weeds are so vigorous between the vegetable rows that she can’t see the carrot tops or the beetroot leaves; bindweed snakes up the runner bean poles, more couch grass is invading from the sides, and the spinach is bolting. She knows she should pick up her hoe and get to work, but instead she pulls up some carrots and collects cherry tomatoes from the polytunnel, and eats them sitting next to her mother’s grave, together with the toast and croissant end she took from the hospital canteen. The little square of butter is soft and she licks it from its paper and uses her finger to empty the tiny pot of jam. It’s not enough. She thinks again about who her mother really was, to be having this relationship with Rawson for so long. There is so much Jeanie wants to ask Dot now. How was it that first time she left her wedding ring on the scullery windowsill and walked to the farm? Was she attracted to Rawson while she was married, as Bridget suggested? How could she let her children believe Rawson was the enemy, the killer of their father, when she loved the man? She kept Frank’s memory perfect and her own secret safe, but at what personal cost?

Jeanie thought she would spend the evening working in the garden, and then she would smash a pane of glass and sleep in the cottage, but when she looks