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

the mobile she first called on about the job was Julius’s and that the police must have it now. Somehow she needs to sort out getting her own mobile phone.

She hurries past the farm—she hasn’t seen Rawson in the week and a half that she’s been sleeping in the old dairy. The grass is long down the middle of the track but now she sees that it has been swept forwards, showing its shiny undersides like the nap on a strip of velour and pointing towards the cottage. Stu’s van is parked outside, and with a lurch of her heart she is sure he must have brought Bridget over with news from the hospital. She thinks about turning round and going somewhere else, but she carries on, past the van and its open driver’s window. Neither Stu nor Bridget is inside. She knows too that her time is up sleeping in the old dairy—they will have discovered that the cottage is locked and empty, may even have seen her bed made out of the two long seat cushions which she brought from the caravan.

Jeanie goes round the back of the cottage and hears a sound, a yawn perhaps or a cough. Before she is in the yard a dog is running at her, jumping up and making her stagger backwards, a rope leash trailing from the collar. Stu is there, in the yard, waiting for her, sitting on an upturned bucket. He stands and smiles.

“Maude?” Jeanie says. “Is it Maude?” The dog whimpers and pants with excitement, rear end pulled from one side to the other with the swinging of her tail, until Jeanie collapses to her knees and Maude—rangy legs, big head—tries to climb on her lap.

“One of my mates found her,” Stu says. “Near Devizes, hanging around an old barn. I brought her straight over, reckoned you could do with some good news. By the look of her, she’s been surviving on what she could catch.”

“Did you run away?” Jeanie says. “Where have you been, you silly dog? Where have you been?” She laughs and the dog licks Jeanie’s mouth, her eyes, and the tears from her cheeks. Skinnier, smellier, dirty fur matted, but without doubt, Maude.

33

At the end of September of the following year, the sun shines for more than a week. It crisps the topsoil and hardens the skins of the harvested squash: Crown Prince and Sweet Dumpling strung like heavy washing on a length of rope between two posts. The light bleaches the wooden planks laid between the vegetable beds and ripens the heads of the couch grass which has burrowed its white fingers under the fencing. The sun turns the tomatoes a deep red, stretching the skins until they split, while its heat dries out the cottage thatch and drives the mice and insects further in, searching for damp shade. There is a tear in the netting of the fruit cage and twice Jeanie has to chase out birds. She needs to repair it. She needs to do a lot of things. She winds her way through the raspberry canes, collecting berries in a bowl she holds in the crook of her arm. When it’s full, she takes it and her trug down through the garden. She passes the apple trees, where grass and wildflowers have grown and only a slight rise in the earth shows that anything might be buried there. She passes through the gate into the yard, scattering chickens. Beside the back door, the rosemary bush is leggier and in need of a trim. Maude lies on her side, panting in the narrow shade thrown down by the cottage, raising her head wearily and lowering it as Jeanie passes by on her way into the scullery.

Jeanie puts the trug on the drainer: beetroots, tomatoes—the ugly-shaped ones which Max won’t take for the deli—the last of the peas, the first of the leeks. There are voices in the other room, a low, measured conversation. She washes her hands at the sink and calls out, “You okay in there?” There’s no response. She takes a few raspberries and goes through to the old kitchen and turns off the voices on the radio. Only the dresser and the range remain from what was in the room when Jeanie lived here last. The grate is clear and the fire permanently out now that there is a boiler and cooker in the scullery, the room she calls the new kitchen. Stu turned up on the day she moved back in, seven weeks ago, bringing a smaller table than the previous one but with a wipe-clean top—the surface chipped and scratched—and three upright chairs from a house clearance, as well as a mattress which he heaved upstairs. She’s sure that he saw her makeshift bed on the floor of the old dairy the day he returned Maude, and she thinks that perhaps these gifts stem from an unexpressed guilt at his son’s involvement in her predicament. Jeanie prefers to believe this is the reason, rather than pity.

Stu came again the next day too.

“Got something else for you in the van,” he said.

Jeanie followed him out to the track. He opened the back doors and inside was her old chicken coop, dismantled, and some of her chickens.

“Five of them’s gone,” Stu said. “Ed’s missus wrung a few necks for their Sunday dinners.”

A week after that, Dr. Holloway arrived with a wing-backed chair in his jeep. He carried it into the cottage and put it by the window where the sofa used to be.

Now, Julius is sitting in it, facing the front garden.

“It’s too hot for September,” Jeanie says to him. “I’m going to have to do the watering later or the leaves will fry. At least you’ve got a little breeze coming in.”

Julius makes a guttural sound, his mouth crooked and working hard.

“Hot, yes.” She perches on the arm of the chair. “Look what I’ve got for you.” She holds out her hand and shows him the