“I don’t see how you’re going to manage that enormous garden on your own. All those vegetables. I never knew how you and Dot did it, the weeding, the digging, it’s no wonder—”
Jeanie stops her. “Something that pays more regularly than supplying vegetables to the deli and the B&B.”
“Is it the cost of the funeral you’re worrying about?”
“We’re not having a funeral,” Jeanie says, but Bridget isn’t listening.
“I couldn’t believe the cost of Dad’s. Bloody rip-off, if you ask me. I could send Stu round. He’d help, sort out a decent coffin and transport maybe. His mate Ed helped with Dad’s. I’d have to ask Stu though about having a body in the back of his van. That’d be a new one.” She gives a gruff laugh and then looks at Jeanie apologetically.
Jeanie is offended—the thought of her mother in the back of Stu’s van. Tins of old paint and his other rubbish pushed to the side.
“A local job,” Jeanie says. “If you hear of anything.”
“I heard the brickworks were looking for someone to help with admin. You’d be in the same office as Shelley Swift, though. Can you type?” She laughs and then looks horrified, the implication of her question betrayed on her face. Now that Dot is dead, only Julius openly knows that Jeanie struggles to read and write. But she is sure Bridget must suspect it.
“No,” Jeanie says, nettled, remembering the registrar’s fingers pecking at the keyboard. “I can’t type.”
Bridget stares straight out through the windscreen.
Occasionally Jeanie sees these problems as her own failings and is ashamed, but most of the time she is cross that the world is designed for people who can read and write with ease. When she recovered from one bout of rheumatic fever and returned to school, it seemed that the children in her class had suddenly learned to pick up a pencil and make patterns of circles and lines that everyone else understood. She was put in the remedial class for reading and writing, but the patterns and the process never stayed still for her, and after a while she couldn’t be bothered to keep trying. History she liked, learning about how the Great Fire of London started, colouring in pictures of the houses along the Thames, her red crayon worn to a stub. At home, when she told Dot about it, her mother replied, “When I was your age I knew how to start the fire in the grate and how to bake a cake without it burning. That was good enough for me.”
A few times the school bobby came around asking questions about Jeanie’s poor attendance when her couple of days’ absence had lengthened to ten without a note from the doctor. Each time Jeanie had managed to be on the sofa tucked in under a blanket, and after a few words and a wagging finger the school bobby had gone away. There weren’t any books in the cottage, although occasionally her father read the newspaper, the old pages of which were used to stuff the window frames in winter. He tried to encourage her a few times: sitting her on his knee and holding the newspaper out in front of them. She enjoyed being enclosed in their papery tent, but she had no desire for the words, and he had little patience. Other parents may have read to their children before bed but in the Seeder cottage they played music together before she and Julius brushed their teeth at the scullery sink and went upstairs. Jeanie left school as soon as she could, at sixteen, without any qualifications.
In the car, Bridget says, “Jobs are all advertised online these days. Catering assistants and whatnot. You could always pop into a library, they’d help you do an internet search.”
Jeanie looks out of the window; they’re coming into the village. She has never been into a library and she never will—all those books snapping at her. She can’t use the internet, go online, search for work, complete an application form, send an email. Not even, and perhaps especially not, with a librarian’s help. The keeper of the words. And besides, she would have to buy a ticket and catch the bus into Devizes or Hungerford to get to a library.
“Shall I take you back to the cottage or do you need to pick anything up from the village?” Bridget asks.
“The cottage. Thanks,” Jeanie says quietly. She’s too drained to think about what groceries they need and what they can afford.
When they’re outside, Bridget says, more kindly, “The shop has some of those cards up in the window. Old people selling stuff, like those great fat tellies that no one wants any more. Sometimes there are adverts for cleaners or gardeners.”
Jeanie knows she should invite Bridget in, to thank her for taking her to the register office, for all her help, but she also knows that if she were to make Bridget a cup of tea the milk would separate in the hot liquid and form into lumps because the fridge is no longer cold, and she doesn’t want Bridget to see the hole that Julius will hopefully have started digging. Bridget doesn’t show any inclination to get out of the car.
Inside, Jeanie calls for Julius and when she gets no reply she collapses on the sofa. Maude jumps up beside her, licking her face and hands, until Jeanie catches the dog and wraps her arms around Maude’s neck, pulling her in close, breathing in her doggy-rivery smell.
Jeanie builds up the fire in the kitchen, boils the kettle on the range, and makes herself a cup of hot water. She takes it into the parlour, the dog following. Her mother’s covered body lies on the table and the room is chilly and smells of rosemary.
“What are we going to do?” she says. She might be addressing the body, or Maude. One of them doesn’t reply, the other tilts her head and stares, waiting for Jeanie to provide the
