“Well, me and Stu, for a start.” Bridget sounds put out.
“Apart from you and Stu.”
“And anyway, your mum knew loads of people. What about Kate Gill from the B&B, and Max? I know Dr. Holloway will want to come. The Rawsons, or maybe just him.”
“Rawson? Why would he want to come? I’m not having either of them in the house. It’s not about trying to make up numbers, is it? It’s not like it’s a party.”
“Julius might want to invite Shelley Swift.”
“Shelley Swift?” Jeanie struggles to place the name.
“Aren’t they friends? I’m sure I saw them together.” She says it with a rise of her eyebrows.
The woman comes to mind: pretty with downy cheeks the colour and shape of apricots, thick limbs, a secretary at the brickworks. “For goodness’ sake, he’s doing a job for her. Something to do with a stuck window. He barely knows her.”
Bridget pops a Polo into her mouth and rolls it around. “All right. How about I drive you to the register office on Wednesday afternoon? I’ll see if Dr. Holloway has the medical certificate for you yet, and then we can phone and make you an appointment.”
“You don’t need to do everything,” Jeanie says crossly. She’s never liked the way Bridget bosses people around and gossips. Bridget has been Dot’s friend since Jeanie and Julius first went to school, when Bridget’s first job was in the infant school office. She’s been one of the surgery’s receptionists for years, partly, Jeanie thinks rather meanly, so that she’ll know what everyone in the village has wrong with them.
Bridget lets out a puff of exasperation. “You’re as stubborn as your mother. I’m trying to help. You just fill out a couple of forms and it’ll be done. Simple.”
Jeanie imagines it will be anything but simple.
5
In the afternoon, Jeanie stares out of the scullery window again but sees nothing; the radio is on but she doesn’t hear it. Her thoughts move from one thing to the next, unable to settle. She remembers sitting on the grass at the top of Ham Hill with her father, watching starlings turn in the autumn dusk, moving together like a black cloud. A murmuration, he called it. “I’ll write the word down for you when we get home,” he said, “and you can copy it out.” But when they got home he had the paper to read, and there were jobs to do and she didn’t remind him. She thinks about the bird scarers she and Julius made from old CDs they found beside a dustbin in the village. He read the labels and they laughed at The Best of Burt Bacharach keeping the crows away from the lettuce. And she recalls her mother waking from a nightmare in the bed they shared after Jeanie’s father died. In the dream, Dot told her, she was in the village shop delivering tomatoes and salad leaves but the place was empty—there was no one there, and somehow she knew there was no one in the pub or any of the houses. And then, Dot said, she was at home, suddenly transported as you can be in dreams, and Jeanie and Julius were gone too, and her mother realized that she was utterly alone.
Now, Jeanie becomes aware of the knocking on the front door only when Maude barks in the kitchen.
“Sit,” she says, and reluctantly Maude obeys. Perhaps it’s the doctor returned for some reason, or Bridget—although she comes in through the back and never knocks. When Jeanie opens the door, Mrs. Rawson is there, with her husband coming up the path behind her. Maude trots to the doorstep, gives a couple of toothy barks, and then shoves her nose in Rawson’s crotch until Jeanie gives a whistle through her teeth, marginally later than she could have, and the dog retreats behind her legs to flop in front of the range.
“We were so sorry to hear about your mother,” Mrs. Rawson says. She leans as though to kiss Jeanie or hug her, but at the last moment holds back.
“Jeanie,” Rawson says, a little awkwardly, showing his white teeth under his white moustache. He holds himself like he knows he’s attractive—for an older man—upright, taller than the doorway, joints loose.
Jeanie feels she has no choice but to hold the door wide and invite them in. She turns off the radio. Mrs. Rawson is younger than her husband by a good few years, and everything about her, from her tight, cropped trousers and high-waisted jacket to the sunglasses on top of her hair—deliberately dyed grey and stylishly cut—says money. Jeanie keeps her own naturally greying hair held back with an elastic band and every couple of months pulls it forward over one shoulder and slices off the ends with the kitchen scissors.
She watches Rawson stare with curiosity around the kitchen, taking in the range and the fire, the piano with the guitar propped next to it, the shadowy corners and the central table scrubbed to brightness, the tidy dresser hung with flowered mugs. She sees it through his eyes, unchanged since he was last inside maybe forty years before. His gaze stops on Jeanie. “Julius called in earlier to use our telephone and he told me what happened. I just can’t believe it.” His head is bent as though he’s bowing in pity or sorrow, but she realizes it’s just that the ceiling and the beams are too low for him.
“We can’t believe it,” his wife chimes in.
Jeanie is surprised to learn that Julius decided to go to the Rawsons’ but says nothing.
“We wanted to come and pay our respects,” Mrs. Rawson continues. She pushes the tops of her fingers into the tight front pockets of her trousers, hunches her shoulders. Her voice is gentle, solicitous. “It must be such a shock. So sudden. Julius told my husband it was a fall.”
“A stroke,” Jeanie says, and hates the word, too soft and beautiful for something so terrible.
Rawson, who is moving towards the piano, stops, and says, “A stroke? Not a fall?”
“A stroke,” Jeanie repeats.
“I’d heard she’d been ill for a little while.” Adding, “Hadn’t she?”
Jeanie wonders how everyone, with the exception of her children, seems to know Dot had been ill. Mrs. Rawson cocks her head and the atmosphere in the room is suddenly dense with something unsaid.
Rawson lifts the piano key lid. “Was this your mother’s?” he asks.
Mrs. Rawson’s sympathetic smile tightens, and Jeanie can see the woman wants to get out of the cottage as soon as it is polite to do so. Jeanie wants them gone too; she needs to be alone with her random thoughts which now, with these people in the house, she must try to keep in order. Rawson, though, seems unaware, deliberately or otherwise, of what his wife wants, and sits on the piano stool—the leather split and the horsehair showing—and plays part of a tune with his right hand, a trill of a song that sounds like it comes from an old-time musical. Immediately Maude is up and barking and Rawson looks down at the dog. “All right, all right,” he says, and smiles.
“Maude!” Jeanie calls the dog back and she goes under the table. “It was my father’s,” Jeanie says, and Rawson lifts his fingers quickly off and puts his hands down, almost appearing to wipe them on his trousers.
“Well—” Mrs. Rawson starts, readying them to leave.
“Did you get the electricity sorted out?” Rawson says. He stands, puts one hand on the top of the piano.
“No,” Jeanie says sharply. She has no time for this man; she despises him. She shouldn’t have let him in, her mother would never have let him put one foot in the cottage.
“Julius told me your power’s off.”
“We’re managing. We’ve got the range.”
“Of course,” Rawson says. “Of course.” Jeanie can tell he has nothing else to say and yet he is lingering.
“Well,” Mrs. Rawson says again. She has taken her car keys out of her bag and is holding them. “Please do let us know if there’s anything we can do.”
“Can I see her?” Rawson says. “That’s if she’s still here. Her body, I mean.” His words stagger out, one over the next. He touches his white moustache which brackets his wide mouth, first one side, then the other.
It’s the last thing Jeanie expected to hear, and from his wife’s expression, hers too. “Darling,” she says, like a warning.
“See her?” Jeanie says.
“I think we should go,” Mrs. Rawson says. “Let you get on.” Her voice is mechanical and she doesn’t look at Jeanie, only at her husband.
At the door Rawson turns back once more. “Will you let me know about the funeral, the wake?”
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 spent years ripping those buggers out and now they all want them put back.”
She carries on playing her guitar quietly while his stomach growls again.
“I found out about funerals today,” he says. “I used Craig’s phone to call an undertaker.”
“And?”
“And Christ.” He sweeps his hand through his hair. “They’re bloody expensive. Thousands. They didn’t want to give me prices over the phone, kept umming and ahhing and trying to get me to make an appointment to come and look at some coffins. ‘So sorry about your loss’ and crap like that, when all they want is your money. They said there was some social fund, but you’ve got to be on benefits.”
“Thousands?” Jeanie says.
“Do you remember a few years ago having that conversation about how we all wanted to be buried?” Julius says.
“No.”
“Yes, you do. We were sitting round the table, here. You’d heard something on the radio about green funerals or some other rubbish. Said you wanted to be buried in a wicker coffin and put under a tree.”
“I would never have said that.”
“Well, you did. I remember. And Mum said, ‘You must be joking. I want the full works. Proper comfy silk-lined coffin and one of those carriages pulled by black horses with black plumes, all the way to the church.’”
“And everyone in the village had to come out and stand on the pavement while she went past.”
He knew she remembered. “Hats off, heads lowered.”
“And hymns, she wanted, didn’t she? Hymns and then weeping. Lots and lots of weeping.”
They smile and Jeanie puts her guitar behind her, propped in the corner between the wall and the piano. They don’t look at each other, taking in the information about the cost of a funeral. They’ve never had thousands, never will. Jeanie feels queasy with it, thinking about money.
“How much is in the tin?” Julius says.
In the scullery, Jeanie searches behind the sink skirt, behind the box of ant powder, groping for the housekeeping tin. It’s circular and rusted, with a picture of a Spanish dancing woman on the top, and once must have been filled with biscuits. Jeanie has never opened it herself before. Dot was the keeper of the household income and in charge of all outgoings. Each week Jeanie handed over whatever cash she’d collected from the honesty box screwed to an old table at the bottom of the lane where she put odd vegetables—the carrots with many legs, nibbled turnips—and surplus eggs, although people often weren’t very honest. And Julius handed over his money from
the bits of work he managed to get—helping with removals, farm jobs, a few days of tiling or decorating—all of it paid in cash. Jeanie knows he keeps some money back for beer and tobacco, and to top up the credit on his phone. Dot contributed the money that Max gave her for the produce they supplied to the deli, as well as the cash from Kate Gill who took their eggs and fruit for breakfasts at the B&B. Money was always watched, especially when Dot had to pay the council tax and other bills at the post office counter in the village shop. But there was never anything Jeanie wanted that Dot didn’t agree to save for, although there wasn’t much that Jeanie wanted. Before Maude, all she’d have asked for was another dog—the one they’d had died of old age when Jeanie was fifteen—but Dot had always refused, saying they were too much trouble, too expensive. They’d managed with very little money, and Jeanie has always assumed this was because years ago Rawson had agreed not to charge them rent for the cottage.
At the kitchen table she prises the lid off the tin. She doesn’t know how much she expected to find but certainly more than the change rattling around in there now. Julius puts his finger in and stirs the coins, counting. Jeanie has always struggled to understand columns of numbers and the mathematics that was taught at school which required her to do written calculations. Show your workings—the phrase would make her feel exposed, in danger, and to avoid doing maths she acted up in class and was often sent out to the corridor or the headmaster’s office. Jeanie has never had a problem with money or mental arithmetic. She can see that the tin contains three pounds and fifty-four pence. The price of four loaves of sliced bread from the village shop.
“Three pounds and fifty-four pence,” Julius says. “That can’t be right.”
Jeanie moves her fingers to her opposite wrist, presses, and counts. “How will we pay for the funeral?” she says.
Julius shakes his head. “There must be more money somewhere.” He puts the lid back on the tin.
“The cost of the coffin? Getting it to the church or wherever?”
“I don’t know,” Julius says.
Unsettled Ground Page 3