When she’s waved Bridget off, Jeanie collects her large carrier bag from behind the toilet block. Around the back it smells more of pee than inside, and she wonders why anyone would go here and not in the toilets when they’re open all day and all night and you have to walk past the doors to get to the back. She sits on the bench on the green. On Wednesday evenings the fish and chip shop is closed, and Jeanie is relieved; she doesn’t think she could have tolerated the smell of the frying food without being able to buy any. The lights are off in the flat above, and Jeanie wonders if Bridget or anyone else has thought to tell Shelley Swift about Julius. She opens the tin of baked beans she took from the caravan and eats them surreptitiously with the spoon, hoping no one will pass by. Although she scrapes out the tin, she’s still hungry, but decides to wait until it’s nearly dark to open the soup with the tin opener. It’s condensed cream of mushroom, thick to the point of being almost a jelly; salty and delicious. This soup, which she’s eaten all her life, has never tasted so good. Time passes slowly while she’s sitting on the bench waiting for the pub to empty, and as it gets colder, she has to stand and stamp her feet and wrap her arms around herself. Finally, when the village is quiet, she returns to the ladies toilets, and under the sinks on the hard floor, with her clothes on, she wriggles into the sleeping bag, using her coat and jumper stuffed inside one of the plastic bags as a pillow. Tiny flies and moths flutter around the fluorescent light on the ceiling, and the husks of their forebears dangle in loops of stringy web.
After an hour, Jeanie is so cold she can’t stop her teeth from clacking and her limbs from juddering. She puts on her jumper and coat and crams herself into the corner with her back against the wall. The pain of missing Maude returns and makes her bend over her knees, groaning. She doesn’t sleep.
At a quarter to five when it’s light outside she uses the toilet. Behind the door when she closes it, the dirt and dust and dead insects run from ceiling to floor down the hinged side. Whoever cleans these toilets does it with the toilet doors open. Jeanie washes, and brushes her teeth, but she feels grubby and worries that she smells. The sinks are too small to wash her hair, and she doesn’t have shampoo. She changes her underwear and stuffs the sleeping bag into the large carrier, stowing it again behind the block. She wishes she had saved the soup for the morning. On the walk to Saffron’s house her stomach growls and grinds itself against nothing. She hopes the volunteer driver won’t go past her in the car, and she tries to time her walk so that she can flag the car down before it turns onto Saffron’s drive.
The driver—an ex-military type wearing a tie and a shirt with ironed creases along the arms—doesn’t talk except to introduce himself as Alastair. She’s pleased he’s silent, but she senses that he expects her to thank him, to be grateful for his charity in order that he can feel better about himself, and she won’t do it. You’re too proud for your own good, she can hear Julius saying. Alastair can’t stay in Oxford all day, so they arrange for him to pick her up at noon at the hospital entrance and drive her home.
Already the ITU seems normal—the smell of disinfectant, the alarms from the machines, the other visitors who nod at Jeanie but don’t want to chat, as she doesn’t. Julius is unchanged, although his nurse says they have been reducing the drug that is keeping him asleep and this afternoon they might try removing his breathing support. “We have your number, so we’ll call you as soon as we know anything,” the nurse says. Jeanie doesn’t contradict him; she’s not sure whose number they have, if they do actually have one. She imagines Julius’s phone ringing in a plastic evidence bag in a cupboard in the police station. A message left on his own mobile to say he’s dead.
After Jeanie has sat for an hour beside Julius, trying to think of things that she can possibly tell him, she asks the nurse the way to the cafeteria. The smell of cooking—bacon, chips, toast, and coffee—makes her light-headed with hunger. She finds a seat at one end of a long, mostly empty table, several chairs down from a woman and a man sitting opposite each other and picking at the food they’ve bought. After ten minutes they get up and leave, and before anyone can stop her or ask what she’s doing, Jeanie sits in the man’s seat, the moulded plastic uncomfortably warm. She picks up his knife and fork. He has crushed his paper napkin and dropped it onto his plate. Jeanie lifts it off and eats quickly. Half a fried egg, hash browns, more baked beans, and most of a sausage. She drinks the last of the man’s lukewarm tea, and then she swaps the trays around and eats what remains of the woman’s fruit salad: mostly slices of green apple gone brown. She pockets an unused tiny packet of butter and a miniature jar of jam which has been opened, and then piles up the crockery, stacks the trays, and takes them to the trolley where visitors are encouraged to leave their dirty plates. Here, from someone else’s tray, she wraps a half slice of toast and the hard corner of a croissant into a napkin and puts it in her pocket. She would like to take more—there is so much left uneaten—but her heart is jumping and she is sure that at any moment someone will stop her and question what she’s doing. She doesn’t look around as she leaves.
Jeanie asks Alastair if he wouldn’t mind waiting in the car at the WCs in the village before he drops her at the bottom of the lane near the Rawsons’ farm, where she arranges for him to pick her up in the morning. She lets him assume that she has to use the loo but collects her large carrier bag from the back of the toilets, and if Alastair notices that she has one more bag with her when she gets back in the car, he passes no comment.
In the five days that she’s been away, the garden has gone out of control. The weeds are so vigorous between the vegetable rows that she can’t see the carrot tops or the beetroot leaves; bindweed snakes up the runner bean poles, more couch grass is invading from the sides, and the spinach is bolting. She knows she should pick up her hoe and get to work, but instead she pulls up some carrots and collects cherry tomatoes from the polytunnel, and eats them sitting next to her mother’s grave, together with the toast and croissant end she took from the hospital canteen. The little square of butter is soft and she licks it from its paper and uses her finger to empty the tiny pot of jam. It’s not enough. She thinks again about who her mother really was, to be having this relationship with Rawson for so long. There is so much Jeanie wants to ask Dot now. How was it that first time she left her wedding ring on the scullery windowsill and walked to the farm? Was she attracted to Rawson while she was married, as Bridget suggested? How could she let her children believe Rawson was the enemy, the killer of their father, when she loved the man? She kept Frank’s memory perfect and her own secret safe, but at what personal cost?
Jeanie thought she would spend the evening working in the garden, and then she would smash a pane of glass and sleep in the cottage, but when she looks through the scullery window, the place is full of memories and more unsettling than even the public toilets. In the old dairy, she makes a thin mattress from some sacking, cardboard, and newspaper, and gets into her sleeping bag with her jumper and coat on. Thoughts of the message she made Jenks send when Julius was with Shelley Swift swirl in her head. Whatever went on between them, Shelley Swift hasn’t been to see Julius or tried to contact Jeanie. She wishes she’d been brave enough to knock on the woman’s door that night. Perhaps she would have been invited upstairs, offered a cup of tea while Julius put his boots on. She imagines looking out of the grimy windows and seeing the village from another perspective: the village green, the deli, and the shop all from a different angle. Then Jeanie imagines telling Shelley Swift that Julius has been shot. She breaks down, tearing at her hair and smudging her orange lipstick. Jeanie expects a bitter pleasure from her fantasy, but the emotion that takes her into sleep is sympathy, and in her half dream she puts her arms around Shelley Swift and they cry together.
In the middle of the night Jeanie wakes to the feather-like touch of something crawling over her face—a spider or another night-time insect—and she jumps out of the sleeping bag with a scream, madly brushing herself down and shaking out her ha
ir. She recalls a radio programme about the insects that crawl or burrow into humans while they’re sleeping. In the morning she eats more carrots and as many radishes as she can manage before her mouth burns and she has to rush to the privy. Alastair is waiting for her at the bottom of the lane at eight thirty, his blazer hanging behind him on a hook which she didn’t know cars had. Jeanie sleeps while he drives and wakes in the hospital car park with saliva on her chin.
In the ITU Julius is paler, his cheeks more sunken. When Jeanie speaks to his nurse he says, “Julius had a bit of a rough night, but he’s doing as well as can be expected. Mr. Jones will be around this afternoon and you can have a chat with him.” But Alastair can’t stay for the afternoons and she doesn’t want to ask for a different driver who can. When Jeanie takes a break from sitting beside Julius, she goes again to the cafeteria and this time finishes the end of someone’s egg mayonnaise baguette and scrapes out the bottom of a pot of yoghurt. She has to check the picture on the lid to see that it’s supposed to taste of cherries.
Back at the cottage in the afternoon she takes the twin-tub out from the old dairy, as well as the trestles and the strips of coffin which Julius split for firewood, and piles it up in the yard. When the room is empty, she sweeps it, destroying any webs she can find and brushing away the spiders. It’s cleaner, but in the early morning the cold seeps up from the concrete floor and the air chills through the broken window, and her sleep is fitful with dreams that she can’t remember but leave her with an anxiousness she isn’t able to shake off. Her joints ache when she first stands up, her ankles so painful she is unsteady, and she goes slowly to the garden tap where she washes and brushes her teeth and rinses out her underwear. She eats a few raw vegetables to keep her going until she can get to the cafeteria. She worries that her clothes smell, that she smells.
In the hospital, Julius looks more gaunt and his skin has a yellowish tinge.
“I thought you were going to take his breathing tube out,” she says to a new nurse who has come on duty. The nurse smiles—a practised look of competence and sympathy.
“We tried to remove it yesterday afternoon, but Julius found it difficult to breathe on his own. We’ll try again in a day or so.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Jeanie knows it’s a stupid question, but she wants reassurance.
The nurse smiles again. “Why don’t you bring in a book and read to him? Patients often respond well to people talking to them.”
“I can’t read,” Jeanie says, and it comes out spitefully, bitterly, and they both know that she says it to make the nurse feel awkward.
Jeanie thinks she can see the nurse swallow back her retort, but whatever she was going to say is replaced with, “Just a chat then, about the weather, anything.”
Over the next few days Jeanie collects things from the caravan and carries them back to the old dairy a few at a time: more clothes and bedding, the radio which surprisingly wasn’t taken, saucepans and a frying pan, cutlery, all the tinned food that was left, and her guitar. In the afternoons she works amongst the vegetables and doesn’t go to Saffron’s; she doesn’t want to meet her because she doesn’t know what to say. In the evenings she builds a small fire near her mother’s grave, boils vegetables, and eats them with whatever she has gleaned from the hospital cafeteria. She thinks about Dot, and Jeanie’s new knowledge about her mother and Rawson becomes a slow downward drift of thoughts and emotions which settle into a sediment that she learns to live with. Only occasionally the silt is shaken, and fresh questions arise. How did they get messages to each other when Dot didn’t have a phone, and Caroline Rawson would have often been at home? How much did Dot tell Bridget? She wonders what music they played together and wishes that her mother had accepted Rawson’s help when she was ill. A new memory surfaces from five years ago or ten: Dot in a fluster, late for an appointment with the dentist, putting on lipstick in front of the small mirror which hung in the scullery. “Lipstick for the dentist?” Jeanie said. Her mother laughed, a quick, embarrassed laugh. “Oh, silly me,” she said and wiped it off with a flannel before she rushed out. A woman with strong opinions and interesting ideas. Rawson’s words come back. Jeanie would like to talk with that woman.
∙
One morning when she is waiting at the end of the lane for Alastair, who is unusually late, a different car pulls up, an old one, and Saffron gets out.
“I only just heard what’s happened,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jeanie ducks to look in the back window; the car seat is empty.
“Angel’s with my mum. Your friend Bridget knocked on my door last night, looking for you. She thought you’d been staying with us. Where have you been sleeping? I found the caravan, but you weren’t there. It was a complete mess. And did you know there’s a piano on its back in the woods?”
“I’m fine,” Jeanie says and folds her arms.
“You look thin, worn out. Come on, get in the car.”
“I’m waiting for my lift to the hospital.”
“I’m your lift today. It’s all been arranged, now get in.”
On the way, Saffron says she read about the shooting on the front page of the local paper. There was a photograph of the caravan and another of Julius smiling outside the pub, which they must have got from somewhere, but Saffron had no idea it was anything to do with Jeanie.
“Someone trashed the caravan,” Jeanie says. “Went through the lot, after the police probably did the same.”
“You’re back in your old place, are you? Bridget said you and Julius lived in a cottage at the top of the lane.”
“That’s right.”
“How’s Maude?” Saffron says. “Is someone looking after her?”
Jeanie drops her chin against the memory of Maude’s hot breath, the way the dog’s eyes followed her around a room, how Maude butted her head against Jeanie’s legs when she wanted food or a walk. Jeanie will not cry in front of Saffron. She will not cry. And to keep the tears from coming she makes her trembling anger return by saying, “They stole Julius’s fiddle and Mum’s banjo.” She is certain the thefts and the mess in the caravan are down to either Ed or Lewis.
Saffron glances over. “Have you reported it?” Jeanie doesn’t return the look. She likes Saffron but she is from a different world where lost things are found and ill people survive.
“How’s the garden?” Jeanie says, to change the subject.
“It’s beautiful, you should come and see it. I’m going to order the wildflower plugs for the end of September. You will plant them for me, won’t you?”
Jeanie doesn’t reply.
“I wanted to ask you something else about the gardening.” Saffron speaks quietly, eyes on the road. “I noticed you haven’t paid in any of the cheques I gave you. And I wondered, is it because you don’t have a bank account?” Jeanie can’t help the twitch in her shoulders, the slight turn of her head. “I thought that might be the case. I’ve got the cash and I can help you open an account if you want, it’s not difficult.”
“Has Bridget told you everything, then?” Jeanie says, but she’s past being angry.
“She said you haven’t made an appointment with your GP.”
Jeanie thinks Bridget talks too much about other people. “I haven’t had time,” she says.
Julius is being moved to a side room when Jeanie arrives, and she and Saffron wait in the Relatives’ Room. Mr. Jones and Julius’s regular nurse come in after half an hour, and Jeanie knows it isn’t with good news. She’s given more information about Julius and his lungs and his breathing and his temperature which she doesn’t take in, but she can tell from the tone of the voices that what she is hearing is a warning, a preparation. Not for anything immediate, but soon.
“Shall I come with you?” Saffron says, but Jeanie shakes her head. The nurse leads her to the room where Julius lies, paler and thinner, if that’s possible. He still hasn’t opened his eyes, or spoken to her, or told her what she should do.
The
nurse checks monitors, wires, tubes, and says, “I’ll give you a moment.”
Jeanie sits, holds her brother’s hand, strokes his arm, and touches his cheek with a knuckle. She wonders how she will arrange to bury him next to their mother.
“You can go if you want to,” she whispers. “I’ll manage. I’ll be fine.”
32
Saffron insists that Jeanie go with her to pick up Angel from her grandmother’s house, and then to the bungalow for a cup of tea and to see the garden, even if Jeanie won’t stay the night. She cooks pasta with tomato sauce, and although Jeanie says she isn’t hungry she eats seconds. They walk the path through the meadow. It needs another mow—Saffron says she hasn’t had the time: whenever she’s home, she’s studying, doing things with Angel, or they’re both asleep. They sit under the flowering Indian horse chestnut and eat the cupcakes that Angel and her grandmother have made: blue icing indented with child-sized fingerprints. Angel runs up the grassy path and rolls back down on her side, over and over, veering off into the long grass, running back up, and shouting at them to watch. When Saffron’s mobile rings, Jeanie goes cold—this and Bridget’s are the numbers she’s now given the nurses’ station for emergencies—but it’s Saffron’s mother reminding her to bring a raincoat for Angel tomorrow because it’s supposed to be wet.
Saffron takes Jeanie back to the farm lane in the car and asks if she can come up to the cottage.
“I’d love to see where you live,” she says.
Jeanie looks into the back where Angel has conveniently fallen asleep in her car seat. “It’d be a shame to wake her.”
“Some other time then?”
“Some other time,” Jeanie says, getting out.
Saffron puts the passenger window down and Jeanie leans in. “But you’re happy for me to come and fetch you, if I get a call?”
Jeanie nods. She has told Saffron that the mobile she first called on about the job was Julius’s and that the police must have it now. Somehow she needs to sort out getting her own mobile phone.
Unsettled Ground Page 24