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

When she doesn’t answer, he follows his wife down the path.

As soon as Jeanie has closed the door, she goes to the kitchen window. She doesn’t care if they see her watching. Mrs. Rawson climbs into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover and before she turns the engine on, Jeanie can hear her shouting. The woman backs the vehicle into the opening to the field opposite, making short, sharp jerks forwards and back, and then the Land Rover roars off down the track towards the farm.

From outside the cottage, Julius can hear Jeanie playing the guitar and singing. He flattens his ear against the front door, and she sings the start of “Polly Vaughn”: “I shall tell of a hunter whose life was undone.” He isn’t surprised; this is what they do when things are good and when they aren’t—play music. He pauses, key in the keyhole, remembering that so recently he would have heard a banjo too and his mother’s voice. Now it is Jeanie’s, alone.

The warmth of the kitchen after his walk hits him as he enters—uncomfortably thick and airless. Jeanie is sitting on a kitchen chair, her guitar on her lap. She is tiny, he thinks, like a child, and she stops playing and looks up at him, desperately hopeful, as though he might tell her that it’s a mistake; their mother is alive and nothing is going to change. He can’t come up with anything that will bring her consolation, but because something must be said in the room’s silence, he tells her: “Snow’s almost gone. Nippy though.” He pats Maude, who has risen to greet him, and scratches behind her ears.

Jeanie puts down her guitar and he knows something is coming, something bad. Still she doesn’t speak.

“The doctor’s been then?” he asks. He saw the tracks of a large vehicle up the lane.

“The doctor said it was a stroke. She died of a stroke. Not a fall. I went to the surgery and Bridget said that she’d had two mini-strokes. Or more. I don’t know. I can’t believe she didn’t tell us. That’s what the doctor said she died of, a stroke.”

Julius pulls out a chair and sits. “Christ.” He wonders again if she was alive for any length of time on the kitchen floor, and whether she’d be alive now if he’d gone down when he’d heard the fire irons falling. He knows that Jeanie is thinking this too, he can see it in her face. He knows her face, knows what she’s thinking, he always has.

They are silent, neither of them looking at the other, both aware of the body in the house, in the room next door. Julius drags off his work boots without unlacing them, and he thinks about the number of times his mother told him not to do that with his shoes, that they would be ruined, and where was the money coming from for new shoes? He removes his socks, a hole in a heel, and massages his feet which ache from walking.

“I haven’t made anything for tea. I haven’t even thought about what to cook for tea.” Jeanie stands. Food has always been ready when he’s got home from work, being dished up by Dot or Jeanie as he walks through the door. Every day of his life except this one.

“Sit down. Don’t worry about tea,” he says and his stomach growls so loudly that Jeanie hears it and smiles, and he laughs and the tension in the room is defused.

Jeanie sits and puts her guitar back in her lap, her fingers making chords, plucking at strings out of habit. “Did you go to the bathroom job after all?” she says.

He knows it’s the money she wants to ask about and that she won’t say it directly. It’s always the bloody money. He balls up his socks and throws them at Maude, who’s lying on the sofa on her back with her legs splayed. With an easy twist of her neck she catches the socks in her mouth but lets them drop and goes back to sleep.

He brought the dog home as a surprise for Jeanie a year ago. They’d had one of their rare arguments about something silly—he can no longer remember what started it, but Dot was out of the house, gone to the village or somewhere, and Julius had told Jeanie that one day he was just damn well going to leave. Sometime, or when their mother died, he’d be off. He was sick of living here, worrying about her, why was it even his job? She shouted back that he should go now then, she didn’t need him. And through his teeth, almost hissing, he’d said, “One day you’ll come in from the garden and I’ll be gone.” For a few days they were quiet around each other, the words they’d said making them tender like a bruise knocked again. Their mother asked them over and over what had happened until eventually he snapped, “Leave it, Mum.” A week after that he was working for Craig at a dog breeder’s place ten miles away, running water pipes from the house to the outdoor pens. Too many dogs, too much shit and barking to make it a pleasant job. Maude barked alone in a pen by herself, tipped over her water, trod in her own mess. He heard that she was going to be put down: she’d been sold to a family who hadn’t been able to control her, had no idea of training, and had returned her. She was wilful and bitey, the breeder said, and it was too late now to sort her out. When Julius brought her into the cottage, his mother had said, “Not another dog,” but this time Jeanie and Julius had overruled her.

In the kitchen, Jeanie asks, “How did it go?”

“Okay,” Julius says. “We got the bath upstairs. Took four of us. Bloody heavy. I