Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

Author:Claire Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2021-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

18

Avoiding the middle of Inkbourne will add an extra mile or two on to the cycle ride from Bridget’s to the cottage, but for Jeanie it’s preferable to bumping into someone who might have heard about the eviction. How would she explain why she and Julius are homeless? What would she say if anyone asked where they’re going to live now? She moves the trailer from Julius’s bike to hers and gets Maude to climb into it so that she can practise going slowly up and down the road outside Bridget’s house before she sets off. After they get going, when Jeanie glances behind, Maude is facing into the wind with her mouth open, jowls flapping.

Jeanie cycles past the farmyard and up the track, shocked again to see their possessions flung out along the verge. Items and objects she’d taken for granted when they were indoors—the blue cupboard which always stood on the right-hand landing, a china washbowl with a chip in its rim, the embarrassment of a chamber pot tipped on its side, a box of assorted woolly hats and gloves—all lie in odd juxtapositions, as though a huge hand had picked up the cottage and shaken it for fun, letting the contents tumble out, before setting the building back on its foundations. It hasn’t rained overnight but the morning’s dew has left beads of moisture on the polished furniture and soaked into the fabrics. Maude jumps out of the trailer and capers around it all, racing down the track, happy to be home.

Although only a night and a morning have passed since she and Julius left, Jeanie expects something to be different; without them here surely something should have altered—new people moved in or workmen started on renovating the place. But there are no vehicles on the track, and when she peers through the front windows the disarray in the parlour is as it was before, while in the kitchen, the dresser remains against the wall and the piano halfway across the room, where Nathan, Lewis, and Tom gave it up as too heavy. She rattles the front door, although she knows it will be locked, and when she goes around the cottage, the back door is of course bolted from the inside. She lets the chickens out and gives them food and fresh water. They are disgruntled that it is so late, and the small brown one has fewer feathers on its back, but there are eggs to collect which she can take with her and give to Bridget. She walks up the garden, avoiding the grave, and considers gathering everything that will burn and building a bonfire so that Rawson, or whoever lives in the cottage next, won’t get the benefit of it. But there have been too many years of double digging, too much back-breaking flint picking and plant tending to destroy the garden, and besides, what is there that would burn? The rough fencing, the compost bins? Jeanie fills the watering can from the outside tap and waters the tomato plants, which are drooping in the greenhouse.

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