In the year following the death of her father, Jeanie had been given the task of removing her father’s things from the bedroom he’d shared with his wife for thirteen years. Dot wasn’t up to it, wasn’t capable of much that year besides sitting in the kitchen or following her daughter around. Any suitable clothes had already been passed to Julius, trouser bottoms taken up, cuffs shortened, Frank’s good suit and his coat mothballed for when Julius was older. Other clothes, Jeanie gave to the Salvation Army, the shoes too—though he was twelve, Julius’s feet were already half a size larger than his father’s. Only the chest of drawers on Frank’s side of the bed remained to be cleared. When Jeanie opened the top drawer the spicy smell of his favourite boiled sweets wafted out, mixed with something oily, male. All sorts of things had been shoved in the top drawer: the newspaper he must have been reading in bed the night before he died, nail clippers, his razor and spare blades in a paper packet. In a copper bowl were pennies from his pockets heaped together with screws, a piece of flint with a sharp edge, fasteners and washers. Dot wanted Jeanie to throw it all out and move her own clothes over from the room she shared with Julius. She lied and told her mother that she’d got rid of Frank’s stuff, but instead she placed her vests and jumpers over the top of the last of her father’s things, so that for a while—a few months at least—her clothes smelled of Winter Mixture and the nuts and bolts of her father.
When Jeanie hears a knock on the front door, she goes to the bedroom window and tries to see who it is, but the visitor is just out of sight. If she opens the window they’ll hear her and look up, and then she’ll have to go down. She sighs, leaves the yellow dress on the bed, and goes down.
Mrs. Rawson is on the doorstep and twice Jeanie has to order Maude to stop barking and go back into the kitchen. Mrs. Rawson is wearing cream leather trousers, a kind of silky top with what looks like drawings of shops on it, a camel-coloured raincoat with a big collar, and sunglasses. She has a large handbag over her arm. “I need to speak to you,” she says, and Jeanie is so taken aback that she opens the door wide and for the second time in two days lets the woman in.
In 1979, at age twenty, Caroline May was crowned Wiltshire Young Farmers’ Dairy Queen, and a few months later married the man who presented the prize. This, Jeanie overheard Bridget tell Dot, and she knows that there were problems early in the Rawsons’ marriage—babies lost or unconceived. Bridget would say this with a slow shake of her head as though not having a child were the worst a woman could suffer. Mrs. Rawson has always been pleasant to Jeanie when they’ve met on the lane or passed each other in the village. Civil, if not friendly, and that has suited her fine. It is her husband whom Jeanie actively dislikes.
Mrs. Rawson doesn’t take off her sunglasses even though the kitchen is lit only with oil lamps and the little natural light that comes in through the low front window and from the scullery at the back.
“I’m sorry to call around again so soon,” Mrs. Rawson says. She smiles and then the smile is gone.
“Would you like to sit down? I’ll put the kettle on.”
“No tea. Thank you. This won’t take long.” She remains standing, the two women in the kitchen with the table between them.
“Unfortunately, I’ve come to talk about an outstanding debt,” Mrs. Rawson says coldly.
“What debt?” Jeanie says.
“On the cottage.”
“What do you mean?”
“An unpaid debt.”
“On the cottage? There can’t be a debt on the cottage. We don’t pay any rent. We have an agreement.” Jeanie doesn’t let her emotion show. She can be as icy as Caroline Rawson if she needs to be, but the animal in her heart is stirring.
“Indeed. An understanding. Which meant that your mother and you and your brother could stay on in the cottage after your father died, and she paid—”
“Was killed,” Jeanie corrects her.
Mrs. Rawson talks over her: “—and she was paying weekly until a few months ago, when I understand from my husband she started slipping into arrears.”
“What?” Jeanie grips the top of a kitchen chair.
“She was finding it difficult to keep up.” Mrs. Rawson speaks as though reciting lines she learned earlier.
“I’m sorry,” Jeanie says, although she isn’t sorry at all. “There’s no rent to pay, and there never was.” Her heart is knocking but she tries to take the same level tone, concentrating on her breathing. If she looks too hard, she can see herself, warped and murky, in Mrs. Rawson’s glasses. “The agreement, the understanding, whatever you want to call it, was
