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

could have had a husband and a child, like Bridget. Or no, not that. A child and no husband, like Saffron. She could have been a proper gardener, a garden designer, a garden designer in Japan, or an engineer. She could have been anything. And poor Julius. If Dot hadn’t said she had a weak heart when she was thirteen, would he have been hurrying through a patch of wasteland late one night, returning to a caravan? Is it possible to trace that event backwards?

“Why did she do it?”

Dr. Holloway can only shake his head.

35

On Friday evening, after she and Julius have eaten, Jeanie helps him to the new bathroom. She only needs to be nearby these days in case he calls out for her, and he rarely does, but she hovers in the kitchen wondering how using the toilet, brushing his teeth, and washing his face can take so long. Over the past four months, builders have converted the old dairy and joined it, via a short level corridor, to the end of what was the scullery. The bathroom has a shower without doors or a shower tray, and handrails around the toilet and attached to the walls, in the place where Jeanie once lay down and tried to sleep.

When Julius comes out she follows behind him and his walking frame to the parlour, and it’s his slow and methodical shuffling that tonight makes her clench her teeth with frustration. She is envious of Saffron having Angel’s noise and energy around her.

In the parlour—now Julius’s bedroom—she helps him undress, taking off his slippers, pulling down his trousers and underpants while he stands holding on to the frame. He has lost weight in his legs and arms, the muscle that was there has wasted through inactivity, and he has a little paunch that he never had before. She guides one foot at a time into his pyjama bottoms and tugs them up around his waist. She no longer notices that she can see his private parts. They know the routine well, and Julius positions himself with his back to his bed and lowers himself down, letting go of the frame. Jeanie unbuttons his shirt, takes one arm out of its sleeve and then the other, but he is slow to help her tonight, doesn’t move his shoulders or elbows like he normally does.

“Come on,” Jeanie says, her irritation showing. “I’m going out, I have to get ready.” She hasn’t told him that tonight she’s going to see Rawson for the second time. “Bridget is coming to babysit.” Julius makes his throat noises, twitches his shoulders and gurns.

“Not babysit,” she backtracks. “Look after you. I know you’re not a baby, Julius, I know. Maybe soon you won’t need anyone here when I pop out.” The occupational health woman says they need to get him a mobile phone with big buttons which he can learn to use in an emergency. Another thing for the to-do list.

Jeanie starts to feed one of Julius’s arms into his pyjama top and he squirms away, jerking his torso and bellowing.

“Stay still,” she says crossly. “I can’t do it if you won’t stay still.”

His hands turn backwards, his fingers clench, and his arms flail. One of his elbows catches her in a rib, and with a stab of pain she cries out and then flops on the bed beside him, the pyjama top on her lap. Only now does she remember that on that morning when they knelt over their mother’s body on the stone flags, Julius hadn’t been wearing a pyjama top; perhaps he’s never liked wearing the tops of his pyjamas? How else is he going to tell her except by resisting? She lays the arms of the pyjama top together, folds it in half. “It’s too hot for this today, isn’t it?” she says.

Jeanie wonders if maybe he understood something of what was going on when she came back from seeing Dr. Holloway and sobbed quietly in the old kitchen while Saffron held her and stroked her hair like she sometimes does for Angel when she’s upset. Jeanie still hasn’t told him about their mother’s lie, just as she hasn’t told him about the fact that she wasn’t dying when she got Jenks to text him to come home. And now she realizes with a shock that all those times when she thought her heart was beating too fast, all the days she missed of school and lay on the sofa in the kitchen imagining the animal inside her, scared of the pain—there couldn’t have been any pain, there was nothing wrong with her. It is hard to rewrite your own history.

Julius lies on his bed and Jeanie pulls just the sheet up to his chest. She fetches her guitar, sits on a chair, and tunes the instrument quickly, knowing that even this will quieten him and steady his breathing. When she first started playing she worried he would be upset by the music, reminding him of what he was missing, but she’s found that it helps calm him so he falls asleep more easily after she’s played. “What’s it to be?” she says and almost begins “Polly Vaughn” but, recalling the lyrics, stops after a couple of notes and instead starts:

“Before our singing is through

And our voices lie broken

Before the silence speaks true

And all the lies we led have spoken

For here we would stay

With all that we borrow

And owe to the day

For holding back tomorrow

Do you know, where then we’ll go?”

When he’s breathing deeply, she puts the guitar down and goes out to the garden, Maude following. She will not cry, she thinks. Not again.

Jeanie comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, to find Bridget sitting at the table in the old kitchen flicking through a celebrity magazine she’s brought with her.

“You’re early,” Jeanie says.

“Nath gave me a lift. My car’s in the garage, ready tomorrow.”

“Nathan?”

“He’s back home. Jobs, money, I don’t know.” She rolls her eyes. “He didn’t have