“You should have come and got me.”
“Where from? Shelley Swift’s?”
“You know I was at Stockland’s.”
“And what good would that have done?” She grips the sides of the doorway, her heart’s excited little punches goading her on.
“Well, either you think I can help or you think I can’t.”
“I don’t care any more. I really don’t care. I thought we were in this together, but we’re not.”
From the bottom of the steps he reaches up for her, a moment of contrition or guilt. “We are, we are. We’ll always look out for each other.”
“Not if you’re not here! How will we look out for each other if you’re not here?”
“Jeanie, please.”
Suddenly her energy for anger is spent. “Go back to Shelley Swift. Really. I think you should go now. I’m fine here. I managed without you last night and I’ll manage again.” She reaches to grab the door. Its side scrapes against him as she pulls it closed, and he wrenches back on it, but she slams the door and for a second his fingers are jammed, and he swears as he yanks them out. She bolts the door quickly and stands with her back to it, head up.
“Jesus! Jeanie, don’t be stupid. Open the door.”
She presses against her heart while he hammers, the same beat Lewis made on the washing-up bowl.
“Go away, Julius. I don’t need you.”
She sees him at an angle, peering through the window beside the door. Before he can move to the window at the far end, she draws the curtains closed and sits on the couch. She puts her head in her hands, dizzy, hoping she isn’t going to faint. Julius comes back to the door and she jumps at his thumping.
“You know what?” he shouts. “You’re just like your mother. Why shouldn’t I spend some time with a woman? One that isn’t my mother or my sister? What’s wrong with that? It’s completely normal. She always had something to say about anyone I liked, listing all the things she thought was wrong with them, putting me off. It was just a way of keeping me at home. Like she kept you at home too, Jeanie! Well, now she’s gone and there is no bloody home any more, so why shouldn’t I have a life? Find someone to love? You said it yourself, we’re fifty-one. Fifty-one! Bloody hell. You should get out, Jeanie, leave home, finally. You might find you enjoy yourself.”
When she doesn’t reply or open the door, she hears him go. There is a pain in her throat, a constriction which travels down her chest. She stands, one hand on the counter for balance, and calls her brother’s name, but he has already gone.
Julius cycles recklessly to the village in the dusk and arrives hot and sweaty. He sits for an hour next to Jenks at the bar in the Plough. He buys the last bag of pork scratchings hanging from a cardboard display and a packet of salted peanuts, washing them down with a second pint of bitter. Working on the farm always makes him hungry and thirsty. He’s angry with Jeanie for locking him out, even if she has good reason. And then, feeling guilty, he thinks that tomorrow he will phone the police or the RSPCA about the dog, although he still needs to get his damn charger from the caravan. Tomorrow he will go and see Stu about Nathan and the others, in fact he will bloody go round to wherever it is Nathan lives and have a word.
Jenks talks to Julius about how great the music session was, how amazing Jeanie’s playing and singing are, as though Julius wasn’t one of the musicians, wasn’t even there. Julius makes noises of agreement while thinking of Shelley Swift and wondering whether in a few months’ time they will be retelling each other the story of how they met and became lovers, girlfriend and boyfriend, partners, whatever the word is when you’re fifty-one: the stuck window, the pilot light, their first kiss on the landing, the time in the woods, and the fiddle playing. By nine thirty, Julius has had enough of Jenks’s endless chatter of football matches and dated jokes about knockers and priests. He stands in the doorway of the pub. It’s raining, and he wonders whether Jeanie will have calmed down enough to let him in. It’s a long way to cycle to the caravan in the rain just to find out that she hasn’t. He unlocks his bike and pushes it quickly up through the village.
The pain in Jeanie’s chest grows into a burning that she can’t ignore. She takes a couple of painkillers with a swig of water, holding a fist hard to the middle of her chest, and wonders if this is it. All the rests she took, all the things her mother wouldn’t let her do, all the places she didn’t go, have come to this moment. It could be hours before Julius returns, if he ever does. She imagines being found in the caravan in a day or a week. Dying or dead. She lies on the bed, crying with the pain and for Maude, and for herself. Rain patters on the caravan roof. For the first time she wishes that she had a mobile phone. After an hour when no position, standing or lying, relieves the pain and it is dark outside, she takes the torch, locks the caravan, and walks. Her coat isn’t properly waterproof, she didn’t think to pack an umbrella when they left the cottage, and the rain runs down her face and the back of her neck. Every few steps she has to rest, doubled over and groaning, the torchlight illuminating the muddy toes of her wellingtons. In the village she heads for the telephone box next to the bus stop. She will phone the police about Maude, she will phone Julius’s mobile—although she isn’t sure she can remember the number—she will phone for an ambulance. But when she opens the red door, the telephone is gone, replaced with a circular yellow box printed with an image of a heart with a lightning bolt through it, and a figure kneeling beside the body of another, hands on chest. She is reminded of Julius kneeling beside the body of their mother on the kitchen floor, only six weeks ago. Perhaps Julius will be in the Plough, sitting with a pint in the public bar, and not at Shelley Swift’s. Please, she thinks, do not make me have to knock on Shelley Swift’s door and ask for my brother; she doesn’t look up when she passes the fish and chip shop. It’s just before ten and the yellow lights from the pub shine out through the windows. It looks inviting, warm, dry. She goes into the public bar where a few tables are occupied, a slot machine jingles to itself, and the only man in there turns to look at her.
“It’s Jeanie, isn’t it?” the man says. “Jenks.” He nods a hello. “Why’ve you been walking in the rain? Let me get you a drink. You look in need of a hot toddy.”
“Is my brother here?” she says.
“You’ve just missed him. He’s gone up the road.” Jenks tilts his head, a knowing smile on his face. “You know. Up the road. What are you having?”
Jeanie holds on to the bar as another spasm grips her. She inhales and exhales slowly. “No drink, thank you. Can you phone him or text him?”
Jenks picks up his phone from beside his pint. “No problemo. Text might be best. You never know what he could be in the middle of.” He raises his eyebrows. “Run out of credit, have you? Are you all right?”
Jeanie tries to smile. “Ask him to come home, would you? To the caravan.”
“You don’t want him to come over here?” Jenks says.
“As soon as possible. It’s an emergency. To the caravan,” she repeats. Jeanie can’t wait for him in the pub, talking to Jenks, pretending everything is okay.
“Asap,” Jenks says.
“And tell him—tell him I’m sorry.”
“Right,” Jenks says, typing with an index finger into his phone.
The lights are on in the sitting room above the fish and chip shop. Julius pushes his bike into the alleyway and locks it. He knocks on Shelley Swift’s door and hears her clumping down the stairs.
“Julius,” she says, surprised. “What’re you doing here?”
“I was thinking about you,” he says.
“Really?” She laughs. A happy laugh, he thinks; a pleased-to-see-you laugh. But she stays in the doorway and doesn’t invite him upstairs and he notices that she has a book in her hand—Death in the Afternoon—closed on her index finger to mark her place. “And what were you thinking?” she says.
“This and that.”
“Yes, but what exactly?” Her smile is coy, as though there’s
a secret word he needs to say before she’ll let him in.
“About how I can’t get enough of you.”
She seems pleased with this. “You’d better come in then.”
He follows her upstairs. She’s wearing a shapeless jumper and a pair of grey jogging bottoms with the word JUICY up one leg. He wants nothing more than to put his hands on her large behind and take her back to bed, but as soon as he’s in her sitting room he becomes blundering and tongue-tied, and although he didn’t notice it in the pub, he’s suddenly aware of the ripe smell of the farmyard and his own sweat coming off him. He feels a surge of anger that Jeanie didn’t let him into the caravan at least to have a wash after work. No wonder she’s alone, even the dog has deserted her. He is immediately ashamed of the thought. While Shelley Swift makes coffee, he uses the bathroom, dampening the corner of a hand towel and scrubbing at his neck. He tries to sniff his armpits and washes these too.
Julius sits on the sofa next to Shelley Swift’s giant cat. Paperback novels are piled on the coffee table. “Did you know,” she says as she brings in two cups of coffee and a glass of water on a little tray, “there’s one of those old phone boxes on Cutter Hill full of books? Loads of thrillers. Not as easy as reading on my Kindle, but they’re free.”
“I like real books too,” Julius says because he wants to agree with her.
“Yeah?” she says. “What are you reading at the moment?” She nudges the cat off the sofa and sits beside Julius. He leans over to kiss her without answering because he has no answer, but she shoves him gently away.
“I’m too hot for all that stuff,” she says, and picks up a folded newspaper from the floor and flaps it in front of her. Her laughter creases her eyes into slits and makes him want to kiss her even more. She takes off her jumper and her scent wafts out, lemon soap and brick dust. Underneath, she’s wearing the silky blouse she had on that afternoon in the woods. She plucks at its front. “I think I must be having a hot flush.” Her throat and cheeks are red, and he can’t stop looking at her. Women’s bodies are complicated, they do things Julius doesn’t want to understand although he’s lived with two of them for fifty-one years. But everything Shelley Swift’s body does intrigues and delights him. She puts the newspaper down, picks up the glass of water, and holds it to her neck, tilting it against one side and then the other. “Is it warm in here or is it just me?”
“I love you, Shelley Swift,” he says, and he can feel it in his body like an ache.
She laughs again. “Don’t be silly, Julius Seeder.”
He puts an arm around her, making her tip her glass, spilling some water on the sofa.
“Watch it,” she says, pulling away and standing. She puts the glass down, and in between the coffee table and the gas fire, she twirls in front of him, arms raised.
“Will you marry me?” The words are out before he even thinks them. He has a fleeting image of Jeanie in the caravan, alone, and then it’s gone.
“Marry you!” Shelley Swift continues to turn and laugh. “You are joking, aren’t you?”
He can imagine her shrieking the words down her phone to one of her friends or typing them into her mobile in capital letters. “What’s so funny?” he says. “I’ve got a wedding ring.”
She comes to a stop. “You’ve got what?”
“A ring. Not on me, but I’ve got one.” He can’t exactly remember where he put his mother’s wedding ring. Perhaps in the bedside drawer before they had to leave the cottage. What happened to it after that? The bedside table was out on the lane with everything else, and then it was taken.
Shelley Swift flops back beside him onto the sofa. “Oh, Julius,” she says softly. There are dark stains under her arms, and he loves these too. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re such a sweet man. So old-fashioned, with your funny fiddle music. But I can’t marry you. I’ve known you all of five minutes.”
“Give it ten, then.” He smiles.
“I don’t want to marry anyone.”
For an instant he thinks it’s another joke, that in a second she’ll start laughing and say yes, but she only stares at him and then seems to decide that he needs an explanation. “I’ve got this place and my job,” she says. “I can take early retirement in a few years. Why would I want to get married?”
For love, he wants to say, so that we can be together, but he lets her carry on. She is almost talking to herself.
“I’m fifty-two. Too old for all that settling-down stuff. I’m not the marrying sort. You know me.” She looks at him sadly. He thinks that he doesn’t know her. But he would like to.
“We can live together, then.” He knows he sounds desperate.
She puts a hand on his knee. “I’m not that sort either. I have Pixie, she’s enough. You must be able to see it wouldn’t work. You’re a lovely man, Julius. A good man.”
Good. It’s the word everyone used about his mother. The horror of it must show on his face because she gives his knee a squeeze and says, “We can still have a bit of fun though, can’t we?” She moves her hand higher up his leg.
He stands. He wants to be out of there, he wants never to have asked her. “I should go.” He picks up his damp coat and gets one arm in while the other flails around for the corresponding hole.
“Don’t be like that. Come on.” She pats the sofa. “Sit down.”
His arm finds the place it’s supposed to go.
“Last night was wonderful,” she says. “We don’t need to make any plans for the future to do that again, do we?”
Pixie, who is under the coffee table, comes out and, with ease, jumps up to the seat Julius has vacated, settling herself there in a circular motion. He doesn’t know how to tell Shelley Swift that he won’t be able to see her again, can’t ever come back after this. Still sitting on the sofa, she reaches up and takes his hand, and he looks at her freckled fingers, feels her soft skin. And then he pulls his hand out from hers.
28
Back in the caravan, Jeanie strips off her wet clothes and puts on dry ones. The pain in her chest has gone so completely it might never have existed, and she thinks perhaps it was only indigestion—isn’t that meant to feel like a heart attack?—and she will have made Julius come home for no reason. She doesn’t like this feeling of being in the wrong, of having to apologize for a false alarm. Not bothering to fold the table down into her bed, she lies on Julius’s couch again, trying to listen for the tick of his bicycle through the hammering of the rain on the roof. She wakes an hour later, cold and with aching joints, to knocking on the caravan door. It’s dark outside and in, and although she expects it to be Julius worrying about her, she unbolts the door cautiously. A different man stands on the ground in front of the bottom step and it’s a second before she recognizes Rawson in a three-piece suit with a yellow tie.
“Miss Seeder,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind me calling round so late. I couldn’t sleep.”
She hesitates. He is the last person she wants to see.
“Could I come in? Just for a moment. It’s getting heavier.” His hair is wet and his shoulders hunched.
Perhaps he has something to tell her about the cottage. Maybe he has tried to let the place and has finally realized that no one else is going to live in it in that state. She stands back. While she lights a few candles, he looks around and wipes his face—his startlingly black eyebrows and that white moustache—with a folded handkerchief he takes from his pocket. The top of his head almost reaches the caravan ceiling. She sees him notice the piles of bedding, the clothes, the food which there isn’t enough cupboard space for, the homemade curtains and still-curling lino, and then he says, “What a nice place you’ve made for yourself here.”
Jeanie folds her arms. She misses the security of Maude at her heels, although that soft dog never provided any real protection.
“Mr. Rawson,” she says warily.
“Quite a little home.” He is not very good at hiding what he really thinks, she can see the shock in his face, no matter
what he says. “Though not so easy an approach as to the cottage.” They look at his polished brogues, what might be a leaf stuck to one toe.
“Maybe I should phone the council and ask them to come and lay a footpath from the lane to our door so that visitors don’t get their shoes dirty.”
He tries a smile, and she sees not only horror but pity. “Talking of the cottage, how are you getting on with the garden? There must be a lot to keep up with at this time of year.”
She tilts her head, trying to work out the reason for his visit, what this small talk is leading to. He certainly hasn’t come to ask how her broad beans are doing.
“So what if I’ve been going back? No one else is looking after it.” She thinks she hears the throaty noise of an engine somewhere outside, closer than the main road, on the lane perhaps.
“Quite right. It would be a waste to let everything rot.” His tone is gentle, she might say sincere if she weren’t suspicious of his motives.
“The vegetables are ours—mine—anyway. We grew them. My mother and I put years of work into that garden.”
“Dot, yes.” He pauses. “But it’s not just the garden you’ve been visiting, is it? I know you’ve been going inside. You left the back door unbolted and the ladder wasn’t put away properly.” She feels an unwelcome blush rising at being found out. “Could we sit?” he says. “Discuss this in a civilized fashion?”
She nods to the couch, Julius’s bed. Rawson looks behind him and stays standing; she had no intention of sitting with him.
“Caroline, my wife, would probably say that although you’ve grown those vegetables, they’re on our land and you’re selling them at the end of the lane and elsewhere.”
“And you want a cut? Is that it?” She laughs sourly. “The amount I earn from the vegetables barely pays for the rest of our food.”
“No, no.” He holds his hands out, palms up. “That’s her view, not mine. This is nothing to do with money as far as I’m concerned. It’s your attachment to the place, to the land, that I’m talking about. I’m a farmer too. The earth is in our blood, isn’t it? Caroline doesn’t really get it, never has. But it was the same for your mother, she loved that cottage, that garden.”
Unsettled Ground Page 20