“We roamed through the garden, down the green avenue,” she sings quietly. Bridget and Kate stop talking and see her, and Jeanie lets the room and the people go out of focus. “Felt the ground start to harden, saw the sky turn its blue.” The knots of people nearest to her also stop talking and look around, shuffling backwards to give her some space. And then she is aware of Julius beside her, his fiddle under his chin. His notes carry further than hers, and the people nearest the front door quieten. She and Julius sing:
“Like a morning bird’s song
Or a light summer’s rain
Like a place to belong
That you cannot sustain
Do you know? Where, then we’ll go.”
When they finish the song there is a collective sigh and Jeanie imagines the breaths of the people, some of whom she knows have come only for the beer and the food, rising above their heads and mingling with her mother’s last breath, settling around the beams and into the cracks in the wood and plaster so that a part of them, like a part of Dot, will remain.
They start another song and Julius’s playing is looser than usual, less controlled, and his head movements more pronounced, like one of those nodding toys on a car’s dashboard. Jeanie hears their mother’s banjo like a vacancy in the music; the sparring and the blending between the three instruments is missing, her voice absent. Perhaps this is how it happens: eventually, after every activity has been carried out at least once without Dot’s presence—the potting on of tomatoes, the making of a rabbit pie, the playing of each song—Jeanie will no longer notice that her mother is gone. She isn’t sure this is what she wants.
Julius untucks his fiddle and drinks from a glass he’s put on top of the piano. Jeanie smells whisky.
“One more!” someone calls.
“Play us another, love,” says a man with bleary eyes and a Scottish accent. He leans so far towards her she thinks he might topple. She glances at Julius, who shrugs and plays a long trembling note, teasing her so that she can’t guess what song it will be until he lets it roll gracefully down into “Polly Vaughn”—a peace offering, perhaps, for arranging the wake.
“I shall tell of a hunter whose life was undone,” Jeanie sings. Her voice is smoky and melancholic.
“By the cruel hand of evil at the setting of the sun
His arrow was loosed and it flew through the dark
His true love was slain as its shaft found its mark.”
And in harmony, Julius joins in, his words running together:
“She’d her apron wrapped about her and he took her for a swan
And it’s so and alas, it was she, Polly Vaughn.”
Jeanie puts her guitar in the corner behind her and, as she turns to the room, through a brief gap between the people she sees someone beside the window, head bent below the ceiling, the dull afternoon light catching the side of his face, his body drooping as though the air inside him has been released. Rawson, she thinks. The people shift and her sight of him is lost, and when they move again a different man is there—one of Julius’s friends—not Rawson at all. Then Dr. Holloway is in front of her, saying, “Have you and your brother ever performed in public?” His voice is loud and a couple of people glance over.
“In public?” Jeanie says.
“You know. A gig.”
“We never play outside the house.”
“But you must, you really must. You’re both terribly good. Your mother told me she played too.”
Someone chimes a piece of cutlery against a glass, the room quietens and Jeanie sees Julius across the length of the table, glass and fork in hand. When the room is silent, he lifts his head, swaying slightly and steadying himself on the back of a chair.
“I wanted to say thank you.” His words are slurred, and he struggles to find them. “First off, to Bridget and Stu for helping to organize this little get-together. For the food and for the beer!” He swings his bottle and some beer foams over the lip. The people in the room raise their glasses and bottles, and drink. “My mother, Dot Seeder, was a good woman, a good and loving mother to me and to Jeanie, over there.” He gestures with his bottle towards her and she shrinks back as people turn to look. “There was always home-cooked food on the table and the fire to keep us warm. She was a hard worker and a loving mother.” Jeanie can’t help but roll her eyes and when he comes to a stop she wonders if that is it, is that all there is to say about Dot? “When my sister Jeanie and I were twelve we were up in Priest’s Field . . .”
You can’t tell them this, Jeanie thinks. This thing is theirs alone.
“When my sister Jeanie and I were twelve, our father was murdered—” Julius’s voice cracks. He trails off, swaying where he stands, his chin trembling and tears falling. “Murdered, in a bloody field,” he says, barely lifting his head.
They’ve never shared what they saw with anyone and it has tied them together for thirty-nine years, and now with a little drink in him and their mother dead, Julius is prepared to share it with anyone who will listen. She is disgusted.
A man who might have been a friend of their father’s, although he looks much older than Jeanie remembers, pats Julius on the back and steers him towards a chair. Her brother resists, rolling his shoulder to remove the man’s hand.
Jeanie sees something glint under the kitchen table. She gets down on her hands and knees and, ignoring the questions from Bridget and the looks from Kate, crawls underneath. Julius is still speaking, but other people are trying to hush him now. Lying on the stone floor amongst the crumbs and dust that she hasn’t had the inclination to sweep up since their mother died is the missing poker. She picks it up and shuffles out backwards, and before she can hear any more of what Julius is saying she is out through the scullery and up the garden with Maude to the strip of bare soil. Where a gravestone might have stood, were they ever able to afford one, she stabs the poker into the ground. A late afternoon sun that is pushing through the cloud stretches the shadow of the poker across the earth, slicing the grave in two. “Where did you put the money, Mum?” Jeanie says out loud and Maude looks up at her. She goes with the dog to the greenhouse and sees the chaos she made of the tomato plants, compost, and pots. They will have to be done again. She turns a wooden crate upside down for somewhere to sit and sees that fallen behind it are her mother’s gardening gloves, which she misplaced months ago. The leather is dirty and stiff, and the stubby fingers are slightly curled and set into the shape of Dot’s hands. Jeanie slips her fingers into where her mother’s had been and lowers her face into the palms and cries, racking sobs which heave her body and make Maude nuzzle against her in confusion. The gloves become wet and the dirt smears across Jeanie’s forehead, and she weeps until her nose is full, her eyes puff up, and she hears the people leave.
12
The day after the wake Julius stays in bed all day and Jeanie doesn’t go up to his room, angry with him for adding to what they owe Stu, for drinking, for letting those people into the cottage, and for saying what had happened in Priest’s Field. She hopes he didn’t manage to finish the story. When he finally makes it downstairs, instead of picking up their instruments and playing as they would have done in the past, they talk about the agreement. Julius says that out of principle he won’t do any more jobs for Rawson, even though the few he was given were organized through the farm manager, Simons. Jeanie, holding tight to her opinion, had hoped that any work he did on the farm might have reduced what the Rawsons said they owed—if it was owed at all. Again, they return to the questions: How could money be due on a cottage that was rent-free? If the money Dot borrowed from Stu was to pay the Rawsons, why didn’t she hand it over? And where is it? They don’t have any answers. They rarely discussed money in the past and it comes awkwardly now, and they never talked in any depth about the agreement, they know it simply as an arrangement that was negotiated between Dot and Rawson a year after their father’s death—an event that was only ever alluded to, all of them orbiting an incident so horrific they were unable to
shift themselves closer.
Frank died the day before he turned thirty-two. Now, Jeanie is amazed at how young he was, how much life was before him, but when she was twelve, she thought her father ancient, and wise. She hadn’t yet reached the stage where she might have challenged him or grown irritated by his views and sloppy ways. Every day of the months leading up to the harvest that year—1980—was full of chatter about the imminent arrival of Rawson’s new tractor. It was all Frank and Julius talked about at the tea table. The old one was temperamental and liked to stop in the middle of a field and would start only when Frank had spent an hour or two tinkering with it. The new Massey Ferguson was delivered too late to pull the trailers for the harvest, but it arrived soon after, together with a new plough.
Jeanie didn’t remember the tractor and plough being delivered, but she was left with an impression of them both: the top of the back tyres with their raised treads higher than her head, the shiny red body, the black vinyl seat with its wrap-around arms, and the sharp shine on the blades of the plough. Frank and Julius took turns sitting on the tractor seat, and Rawson started it up for them to admire. There was a day’s delay, some problem with hitching the new plough to the tractor, but finally it was ready to go out.
They—Frank, Julius, and Jeanie—were up in Priest’s Field ploughing the first line of furrows. Frank said that ploughing wasn’t girls’ work, but he let Jeanie come with them, telling her that she wouldn’t be allowed on the tractor. She walked in the long grass at the edge of the field, arms crossed, furious that she could only watch while Julius sat between their father’s legs, his hands on the steering wheel, whooping with pleasure. She kept up with them for a while, trailing alongside, seeing the plough’s blades slice and turn the sod. The smell of new earth had a sweet dread for her in those days: the end of the summer and the start of the school year. Soon she became bored—it was hot out in the field that September and she hated the stink of the exhaust, the unending din of the engine—and she let the tractor, with her father and brother on it, lumber on ahead. She sat and watched a hoverfly dance around some teasel heads. The tractor’s hoarse rattle reached the end of the field. She was drowsy and thinking about lying down when there was a bang, the burst of an explosion moving past her, immediately followed by the engine screaming. When she stood and shaded her eyes, she couldn’t see the tractor, but the screaming didn’t stop and as she began to run, the noise, continuous and high-pitched, was worse even than when one of Rawson’s horses kicked a farm dog and sent it flying. The screaming was no longer machine, but human.
She slowed when she saw the tractor tipped on its side, the engine still running but the plough somehow unhitched and underneath. It was Julius who was screaming, thrown so hard into the hedge that the hawthorns had him pinned there.
“Where’s Dad?” she shouted.
Her brother struggled and twisted, the thorns catching his skin and clothes. “Don’t look, don’t look!”
Jeanie saw her father’s hand, his arm trapped beneath a wheel. She recognized the long, piano player’s fingers, the pared nails. “Dad?” she called. In the hedge Julius struggled more and shouted at her to keep away, to go and fetch someone. But Jeanie crouched and saw the top of her father’s arm, saw the white of his shirt streaked with the mud of the field, and a crimson flower blooming. She called for him again. She couldn’t make sense of the mess of tractor, man, and plough until she noticed the buttons up the front of his shirt, his shoulders and his neck, but this ending, bloody, as though he had pushed his head deep into the ground. And then she saw and understood. She put her hands to her eyes and finally Julius was quiet and still.
For Julius that moment was all sound and light: the tractor or Jeanie screaming, the sun so bright it hurt his eyes, burned his face, seared the image in his mind. The image is in a box he rarely opens. The memory that has stayed with him most is from a time after the accident. It might have been days later, except that the wheat was halfway grown and the hawthorn was again full of petals, and by then there must have been police, an ambulance, a health and safety investigation of the farm, a delayed funeral, an inquest: accidental death. This day too was hot, and Dot took him and his sister to Priest’s Field, to the spot where their father died. At school he had earned some awed respect for using the word decapitated without flinching. He said it so often it lost its meaning.
That afternoon he was bored. His mother and sister—recently diagnosed with a heart condition—sat on a blanket with a flask of tea and slices of cake in a tin. Jeanie picked a bunch of red campion to lay on the spot where Frank died but Julius thought this was a stupid idea: the grass they were sitting on was full of the stuff. He wouldn’t sit with them, instead he tramped up and down between the lines of wheat, the sun burning the back of his neck. Every now and then he picked up a broken flint, testing the sharpness of its edge against his thumb. His mother called that they were leaving, and then he saw an object glint in the dry soil. When he bent over it, he realized it was, or had been, a large bolt, its nut gone and the metal shining where it had been bent out of shape by some terrific force. He imagined it might be a meteorite or, better, part of an alien spaceship which crash-landed and the authorities hushed up. If he dug down far enough, he might find the spaceship itself buried in the earth and he could bring his friends from school to the field and charge them fifty pence each to take a look.
“What have you got there?” his mother asked, and he went to hold out his hand to her and Jeanie, proud of his find. His sister exclaimed over it, as excited as he was, but their mother said, “Dirty rubbish,” and snatched the bolt from him.
Sometime after that, at about the anniversary of Frank’s death, Dot told him and Jeanie that the tractor and the plough were delivered without hitch pins—the pieces of metal that couple the tractor safely to the plough—or else they were lost, and new ones had been made from nuts and bolts. She told the story in such a roundabout way, while refusing to answer questions, that the twins were never clear about the details. But three times Rawson came to the cottage late at night after Jeanie and Julius were supposed to be asleep. On the first night when Julius heard Rawson’s voice, he crept downstairs and tried to listen to the conversation through the parlour door. On the second and third nights, Jeanie also listened, sitting on the left-hand stairs. In the morning on their way to school they discussed the snippets of talk they’d overheard, finishing each other’s sentences, piecing the events together: the year before, Rawson, excited to get his new tractor and plough but frustrated about the missing pieces, had fashioned them out of bolts; something homemade and so unsafe, the nuts had been sheared off with the consequences that neither Jeanie nor Julius could now unsee. They talked until they decided that Rawson must know he was guilty—of manslaughter, of murder—and out of shame and remorse, or terror that Dot would finally tell the police what he’d done, he consented to the agreement and they were allowed to stay on in the cottage, rent-free. They never saw Rawson visit their mother again.
Jeanie is in the garden digging up baby carrots. Max says that his customers like them finger-sized, which Jeanie thinks is a waste of bed space and growing time. When she stands, back aching, she sees someone in the scullery. Since Dot died, she has tried to remember to lock the front door when she is up the garden, but sometimes she forgets. This person isn’t Julius—he has gone to Wheilden Farm to help take down a chicken shed. She bends to get a better look and see whether it’s Stu or, God forbid, one of the Rawsons. She imagines using the garden fork to pin them to the cottage wall, the tines piercing lime render, wattle and daub.
The figure—she can see only the torso through the low cottage window—seems to be moving back and forth as though examining items in the scullery. She takes the garden fork with her, prongs forwards, and goes in through the open back door. The person has gone from the scullery and when she gets to the kitchen, a young man is peering up the left staircase.
“Can I help you?” Jeanie says in a tone that she hop
es will suggest outrage but not fear. The man jumps and turns at her voice, and then takes a step back when he sees the fork pointed at him. It is the same young man whom Bridget cuffed in the waiting room of the surgery a week or so ago. He is wearing different clothes now: a cheap suit, the material shiny and too tight for his muscled frame.
“Jeanie?” he says, and smiles, and she realizes that it’s Bridget and Stu’s son, fully grown, his blondish hair gelled sideways and upwards as though a wind is coming at him from the bottom left. The shape of his head, his chin, his cheekbones, make him surprisingly handsome. Did Stu look like this when he was younger? She can’t imagine it. She remembers that there was some trouble with drinking on the village green late at night, making a nuisance of himself at home, and Stu kicked him out. Jeanie hasn’t seen him for years.
“Nathan.” She lowers the garden fork. “What are you doing here?”
“Is your brother home?” He licks his full lips.
“No,” Jeanie says, although as soon as the word is out, she thinks she should have pretended Julius was ill in bed or up the garden. There’s something about Nathan and his veneer of confidence that makes her uncomfortable. “Can I help?”
He hesitates and then says, “I’ve come to give you a warning of eviction.”
“Pardon me?”
Nathan leans against the dresser. “You’re going to be evicted.” His smile becomes a grimace with the effort of keeping it going.
She almost laughs. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I have to put the notice on the front door on Monday, and then you’ll have a week.”
“A week? A week for what?” Jeanie’s voice is rising. She still has hold of the fork and her hands grip it tighter.
“To get out.” Nathan crosses one ankle over the other. Now that he’s said what he came here to say, he seems to relax.
“We have an agreement with Rawson that we can stay. This is crazy. This is our house. And if he or his wife thinks some money is owing, they have to give us some bloody time to pay it back.” She thinks that she or Julius should have tried to go and see Rawson. Sorted this problem out.
Unsettled Ground Page 9