Unsettled Ground Read online

  Unsettled

  Ground

  Claire Fuller

  For my parents

  Ursula Pitcher

  and Stephen Fuller

  O, will you find me an acre of land,

  Savoury sage, rosemary and thyme,

  Between the sea foam, and the sea sand,

  Or never be a true love of mine.

  “Scarborough Fair,” traditional English ballad

  1

  The morning sky lightens, and snow falls on the cottage. It falls on the thatch, concealing the moss and the mouse damage, smoothing out the undulations, filling in the hollows and slips, melting where it touches the bricks of the chimney. It settles on the plants and bare soil in the front garden and forms a perfect mound on top of the rotten gatepost, as though shaped from the inside of a teacup. It hides the roof of the chicken coop, and those of the privy and the old dairy, leaving a dusting across the workbench and floor where the window was broken long ago. In the vegetable garden at the back, the snow slides through the rips in the plastic of the polytunnel, chills the onion sets four inches underground, and shrivels the new shoots of the Swiss chard. Only the head of the last winter cabbage refuses to succumb, the interior leaves curled green and strong, waiting.

  In the high double bed up the left staircase, Dot lies beside her adult daughter, Jeanie, who is gently snoring. Something different about the light in the room has woken Dot and she can’t get back to sleep. She gets out of the bed—floorboards cold, air colder—and puts on her dressing gown and slippers. The dog—Jeanie’s dog—a biscuit-coloured lurcher who sleeps on the landing with her back to the chimney breast, raises her head, enquiring about the early hour as Dot passes, lowering it when she gets no answer.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Dot jabs at the embers in the range with the poker and shoves in a ball of paper, some kindling, and a log. She feels a pain. Behind her left eye. Between her left eye and her temple. Does the place have a name? She needs to go to the optician, get her eyes checked, but then what? How will she pay for new glasses? She needs to take her prescription to the chemist, but she is worried about the cost. The light is wrong down here too. Lowing? Owing? Glowing? She touches her temple as though to locate the soreness and sees through the curtains, in the gap where they don’t quite meet, that it is snowing. It is the twenty-eighth of April.

  Her movements must have roused the dog again because now there is a scratching at the door at the bottom of the left staircase and Dot reaches out to unlatch it. She watches her hand grasping the wrought iron, the liver spots and crosshatching seeming peculiar, unlike anything she’s seen before: the mechanics of her fingers, the way the skin on her knuckles stretches over bone, bending around the handle. The articulation is alien—the hand of an impostor. The effort of pushing on the tiny plate with her thumb seems impossible, a bodily weariness worse even than when her twins were three months old and didn’t sleep at the same time, or the terrible year after they turned twelve. But with great concentration she depresses it and the latch lifts. The dog pokes her snout through, the rest of her body following. She whimpers and licks Dot’s left hand where it hangs against her thigh, pushes nose into palm, making the hand swing of its own accord, a pendulum. The pain increases and Dot worries that the dog might wake Jeanie with her whining, Jeanie asleep in the right-hand dip in the double mattress, first made by her husband, Frank, long dead, and on the rare occasions when her children were out of the house, by that other unmentionable-at-home man, who is too long for that old short bed so he cannot stretch out, and then hollowed further by Jeanie even though she is a wisp of a thing and ate only a tiny slice of the Victoria sponge they made for when Dot herself turned seventy last month and had at the little celebration here in the kitchen with Bridget taking telephone pictures of Julius on his fiddle and she on her banjo and Jeanie on the guitar all singing after a drop of port to lubricate the vocal cords Julius always says and how the sensation Dot has now is similar to the way she felt following her third glass clumsy and blurred with her thoughts diffuse dizzily leaving the remains of the cake on the table so that dog naughty stood on her hind legs and yumphed it down and them scolding and laughing until her sides . . . yurt? kurt? . . . all her loves but one, there with her, and the dog barking and jumping and barking too excited and noisy like she’d be in the snow waking Julius who sleeps so lightly and stirs at any noise.

  All these thoughts and more, which Dot is barely aware of, pass through her mind while her body slows. It is a wet coat she wants to shed like the chickens with their autumn moult. An unresponsive weight. Leaden.

  Dot falls back onto the kitchen sofa as though someone had reached out a palm and pushed on her breastbone. The dog sits on her haunches and lowers her head onto Dot’s knee, nudging her hand until she places it between the animal’s ears. And then all thoughts of chickens and children, of birthdays and beds, all thoughts of everything, vanish and are silent.

  The worries of seventy years—the money, the infidelity, the small deceits—are cut away, and when she looks at her hand she can no longer tell where she ends and dog begins. They are one substance, enormous and free, as is the sofa, the stone floor, the walls, the cottage thatch, the snow, the sky. Everything connected.

  “Jeanie,” she calls but hears some other word. She isn’t concerned, she has never felt such love for the world and everything in it. The dog makes a noise that isn’t like any noise a dog would make and backs off, so that Dot is forced to remove her hand from the bony head. She shuffles on the sofa, she wants to touch the animal again, put her arms around the dog and fall inside of her. But as Dot leans, she tips, her left foot turning on its side and sliding along the floor. Her balance is upset, and she pitches face-forward, her right hand going out to break the fall, while the other catches under her chest, the finger with her wedding ring pinned beneath her. Dot’s head goes down and her forehead hits the edge of the hearth where a flagstone has always been slightly raised, shifting it so that the fire irons, which hang beside the range, fall. A last lucid fragment of Dot’s mind worries that the clatter of the metal pan and brush might shock her daughter’s heart from its regular rhythm, until she remembers that this is the biggest lie of all. The poker, which has fallen too, rolls away under the table, rocks once, twice, and then is still.

  2

  Jeanie is woken by Julius shaking her arm, at first gently and then more roughly. She flies down the stairs after him, her nightdress flapping out behind, even though he has said she must walk. It’s gloomy in the kitchen, curtains drawn, lights off, only the orange glow of the fire in the range. Their mother lies face down on the floor, not moving. Jeanie puts her hands to her mouth to hold in her noise.

  “Help me turn her over,” Julius says, and as Jeanie touches their mother, she knows she is dead. Dot’s arms remain by her sides and her ankles cross, slippers coming off, and although she has her dressing gown on, Jeanie thinks she looks as if she were sunbathing, something her mother would never have done; if you were outside, you were working. Jeanie keeps her eyes averted from the wound on Dot’s forehead and then to save herself from seeing any of it, puts her hands over her face. Strips of pinkish light, showing the kitchen and segments of her mother’s body, filter through her fingers. When she and Julius were twelve, up in Priest’s Field, she also hadn’t been able to look away. The dog, who has been cowering under the kitchen table, comes forwards with a whine and Jeanie takes her hands from her face.

  “Maude!” She clicks her fingers and points and the dog slinks back under the table.

  “Her neck, press against her neck. Feel for a pulse,” Julius says. He’s crouching the other side of Dot in only his pyjama bottoms—Jeanie hasn’t seen him without his work clothes on for years—grey hair
s on his chest; arms and torso muscled from manual work.

  Out of habit, and without even knowing she’s doing it, Jeanie presses her fingers to her own neck, and then touches her mother, quickly on the cheek. “She’s cold. It’s too late.”

  “I tried to call for an ambulance but my phone’s dead,” Julius says.

  “We don’t need one. It’s too late.”

  “Must have been a power cut. The electric went off last night. I’ll check the fuse board.”

  “She’s gone, Julius.”

  “What about that chest-pumping thing?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Christ.”

  Julius’s face is solemn, and the situation so surprising that Jeanie wants to laugh. A guffaw of disbelief is rising like a belch inside her and again, she clamps her hands to her mouth to contain it. Julius spreads his large palms over his head, across his receding hairline, and his body convulses, jerking; his sobs like the call of some exotic animal. Jeanie watches him with fascination. They were born nearly a whole day apart, him first and Jeanie second—unexpected and unprepared for—delivered by their panicked father after the midwife had gone home. “My little runt,” Frank had affectionately called his daughter. Jeanie often thinks that those twenty-three hours account for her and Julius’s differences: the way he embraces the world and shows his emotions, open to people and situations; while she, Jeanie, craves home, quiet, and security.

  She reaches awkwardly across the body of their mother and hauls Julius to his feet and guides him to the sofa, where they sit. Maude looks up as though waiting for an invitation to join them, but Jeanie gives a quick shake of her head and the dog rests her snout on her paws.

  “I must have heard her fall,” Julius says when his sobs have subsided. He wipes his hand under his nose, rubs his palms across his eyes. “Or the poker and brush, at least. I thought it was Maude playing silly buggers with something. I went back to sleep.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Jeanie says, although she doesn’t yet know if she really feels that. Her brother, and their father before him, said many times that they would re-lay that flagstone. When your mother is dead on the kitchen floor is someone to blame? She holds him and they stay like that for a few minutes until Jeanie looks over his shoulder and through the gap in the curtains. “It’s snowing,” she says.

  They cover Dot with a blanket. Jeanie wants to lift her onto the sofa, but the sofa is too short. She boils the kettle on the range and makes tea and they sit at the table to drink it with their mother’s body behind them on the floor, as though, like a child in a game of hide-and-seek, she has found a particularly poor place to hide and they are pretending they can’t see her.

  “She was a good woman,” Julius says. “A fine mother.”

  Jeanie nods, murmurs into her tea.

  “Are the trestles still in the old dairy?” she says, knowing that Julius will follow her train of thought like he always has.

  In the parlour, she rolls up the rug and pushes the chairs to the edge. She could be preparing for a dance in a room which has never seen dancing. Julius lays an old door on top of the two trestles and goes back to the kitchen to lift their mother with a heave and a groan. He won’t let Jeanie help. There is a long list of things she regrets never having lifted because of her weak heart: boxes, hay bales, babies, tractors. He carries Dot through to the parlour. It’s chilly in here; much colder than the kitchen. An antimacassar lies on the back of an overstuffed armchair; a Toby jug and a framed photograph of Dot and Frank on their wedding day, in front of an Italian landscape they never visited, stand on a low polished chest; a tapestry screen hides the fireplace which is never used in this half of the cottage.

  Newly married, Dot and Frank lived in the single-bedroom semi-detached cottage for a year, but as soon as the twins were born, Frank negotiated renting the mirror-image right-hand side. He knocked the two cottages together and blocked up one of the front doors so that from the gate the place has a lopsided look about it, while inside it still has two staircases, each leading to a small landing and a bedroom.

  Julius lays Dot on the old door and Jeanie swaps the blanket for a clean sheet.

  Both dressed now, sister and brother sit again at the kitchen table, teapot refilled. Julius has checked the fuse board in the scullery; nothing has blown but the electricity won’t come back on no matter how much he fiddles with the wires.

  “I suppose we have to tell a doctor. Isn’t that what you do when someone dies?” Julius says, almost to himself. There was a process followed when their father died which Jeanie and Julius knew nothing about and now can only guess at.

  “Doctors are for people who are ill,” Jeanie says.

  “But we’ll need a death certificate.”

  What for? Jeanie thinks but doesn’t say out loud.

  “So we can bury her,” Julius says as though answering. “I’ll get a doctor and he’ll give us the form, and that’ll be that.”

  Jeanie shakes her head. Dot wouldn’t have wanted a doctor to come to the house, certificates, forms, authority. None of them has seen a doctor in years.

  But Julius is up, pulling on his work boots. “I’ll have to walk to the village,” he says. The village, Inkbourne, has a GP surgery, a village hall with public toilets, a fish and chip shop, and a small supermarket with a post office counter. There is also the old grocer’s which has been bought by a young man from London with a waxed moustache who has turned it into a deli selling posh bread, cheese, and olives, as well as some vegetables and eggs supplied by Jeanie and Dot. The owner, Max, serves fancy coffees and pastries at aluminium tables on the pavement outside, catching passing trade from walkers following the long-distance path which goes through the village, or Lycra-clad men on bicycles with ten-pound notes folded into the little pocket in the front of their leggings. “I won’t be able to cycle,” Julius says, and Jeanie remembers the snow. “If the surgery is open, I’ll tell Bridget, she’ll definitely want to know, and she can tell one of the doctors. If it’s closed, I’ll go on to her house.” He takes his coat from the hook on the back of the door. Maude stands, wags her tail.

  “Aren’t you meant to be finishing that plumbing job with Craig today?” Jeanie says.

  “I’m not going to help lift a cast-iron bath upstairs into some bathroom on the day my mother dies.”

  “How will you let him know?”

  “He’ll realize soon enough that I’m not coming.”

  “Isn’t he meant to be paying you today?”

  Julius pauses. “I’m not going to leave you here on your own all day.”

  “I’ve got to feed the chickens. There are things to do in the garden that won’t wait.” She comes towards him. “You should go, get paid. We need the money.”

  Julius’s hand is on the front-door catch. “I’ll see. If I can’t cycle there, I’m going to be late anyway.” There is irritation in his voice, perhaps he notices too, because he comes back into the room and puts his arms around her. “We’ll be all right,” he says into her hair. “It’ll be all right.”

  “I know it,” she says, pushing him away. “Get going.”

  She watches him leave from the cottage’s front door, Maude by her side, expectant and then disappointed at being held back. Jeanie sucks in the freezing air. April’s mud is hidden, the snow showing only the bumps and dips of the plants like the sheet laid over the body in the room behind her. Maybe the shock of the snow so late in the year made Dot fall. If she saw it, she would have worried about the vegetable seedlings out in the cold, and about the time and the money they’d lose. Later, Jeanie would have come in from the garden to see her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a scrap of paper, chewing on the end of her pencil while she calculated one column of numbers and another.

  ∙

  For half a mile, the track curves through a small wood and then between the hedges of two fields. On any other day Julius would have stopped at the place where the view opens out and climbs, up the steep and sin
uous scarp with Rivar Down on the right and, leftwards, the three-mile stretch of the high chalk ridge all the way to Combe Gibbet. Clusters of trees on the slopes—beech, oak, and conifer—are white, the snow thick and the sky low on the grazed common land. But today he keeps his head down, not noticing the tracks of small mammals and birds who have gone before him through the snow. He rolls a cigarette and smokes it while he follows the ruts which his feet know from fifty-odd years of walking or cycling along them, even if today the ruts are hidden. Towards the end, the track straightens, and he goes past the back of the dented sign that says Private, No Public Right of Way before the farmyard. Here, he passes a large barn made of planks stained black, concrete sheds with open sides filled with forgotten machinery and surrounded by nettles. Around the corner is the Rawsons’ brick-and-flint farmhouse and their manicured garden, the topiary like giant snowmen. He could walk four more miles to the village or he could knock on the Rawsons’ door and ask to use their landline or a mobile. Pepperwood Farm has been in the Rawson family for three generations; Rawson was twenty when he inherited it after his father died of a heart attack. Its 120 acres include the arable land from the bottom of the ridge to the bank of the Ink, the muddy stream which gives the village its name. It includes the beech wood on either side of the track and the meadow behind the garden, and officially, it included the cottage and its land. Julius sometimes works on the farm when they need an extra pair of hands, but the jobs are always arranged through the farm manager. If Julius ever sees Rawson, in his country squire get-up of tweed jacket, waistcoat, and corduroy trousers, he keeps out of the man’s way. But four miles walking on the morning your mother has died is another four miles walking. He goes up to the farmhouse door.

  3

  Julius falters over the lion’s head knocker. He has never stood on the front doorstep of the farmhouse before. As a child, he often went to the farm with Jeanie and their father and played in and around the disorderly collection of barns and outbuildings which are mostly tucked around the back. They spent time roaming the fields, picking blackberries and watching badgers at night as if the land belonged to the Seeders and not the Rawsons. From the back door inside, Julius has only ever been as far as the pantry, when he and his sister were invited in by the housekeeper for a glass of lemonade.