Unsettled Ground

she has never felt such love for the world and everything in it. The dog makes a noise that isn’t like any noise a dog would make and backs off, so that Dot is forced to remove her hand from the bony head. She shuffles on the sofa, she wants to touch the animal again, put her arms around the dog and fall inside of her. But as Dot leans, she tips, her left foot turning on its side and sliding along the floor. Her balance is upset, and she pitches face-forward, her right hand going out to break the fall, while the other catches under her chest, the finger with her wedding ring pinned beneath her. Dot’s head goes down and her forehead hits the edge of the hearth where a flagstone has always been slightly raised, shifting it so that the fire irons, which hang beside the range, fall. A last lucid fragment of Dot’s mind worries that the clatter of the metal pan and brush might shock her daughter’s heart from its regular rhythm, until she remembers that this is the biggest lie of all. The poker, which has fallen too, rolls away under the table, rocks once, twice, and then is still.

2

Jeanie is woken by Julius shaking her arm, at first gently and then more roughly. She flies down the stairs after him, her nightdress flapping out behind, even though he has said she must walk. It’s gloomy in the kitchen, curtains drawn, lights off, only the orange glow of the fire in the range. Their mother lies face down on the floor, not moving. Jeanie puts her hands to her mouth to hold in her noise.

“Help me turn her over,” Julius says, and as Jeanie touches their mother, she knows she is dead. Dot’s arms remain by her sides and her ankles cross, slippers coming off, and although she has her dressing gown on, Jeanie thinks she looks as if she were sunbathing, something her mother would never have done; if you were outside, you were working. Jeanie keeps her eyes averted from the wound on Dot’s forehead and then to save herself from seeing any of it, puts her hands over her face. Strips of pinkish light, showing the kitchen and segments of her mother’s body, filter through her fingers. When she and Julius were twelve, up in Priest’s Field, she also hadn’t been able to look away. The dog, who has been cowering under the kitchen table, comes forwards with a whine and Jeanie takes her hands from her face.

“Maude!” She clicks her fingers and points and the dog slinks back under the table.

“Her neck, press against her neck. Feel for a pulse,” Julius says. He’s crouching the other side of Dot in only his pyjama bottoms—Jeanie hasn’t seen him without his work clothes on for years—grey hairs on his chest; arms and torso muscled from manual work.

Out of habit, and without even knowing she’s doing it, Jeanie presses her fingers to her own neck, and then touches her mother, quickly on the cheek. “She’s cold. It’s too late.”

“I tried to call for an ambulance but my phone’s dead,” Julius says.

“We don’t need one. It’s too late.”

“Must have been a power cut. The electric went off last night. I’ll check the fuse board.”

“She’s gone, Julius.”

“What about that chest-pumping thing?”

“She’s dead.”

“Christ.”

Julius’s face is solemn, and the situation so surprising that Jeanie wants to laugh. A guffaw of disbelief is rising like a belch inside her and again, she clamps her hands to her mouth to contain it. Julius spreads his large palms over his head, across his receding hairline, and his body convulses, jerking; his sobs like the call of some exotic animal. Jeanie watches him with fascination. They were born nearly a whole day apart, him first and Jeanie second—unexpected and unprepared for—delivered by their panicked father after the midwife had gone home. “My little runt,” Frank had affectionately called his daughter. Jeanie often thinks that those twenty-three hours account for her and Julius’s differences: the way he embraces the world and shows his emotions, open to people and situations; while she, Jeanie, craves home, quiet, and security.

She reaches awkwardly across the body of their mother and hauls Julius to his feet and guides him to the sofa, where they sit. Maude looks up as though waiting for an invitation to join them, but Jeanie gives a quick shake of her head and the dog rests her snout on her paws.

“I must have heard her fall,” Julius says when his sobs have subsided. He wipes his hand under his nose, rubs his palms across his eyes. “Or the poker and brush, at least. I thought it was Maude playing silly buggers with something. I went back to sleep.”

“It’s not your fault,” Jeanie says, although she doesn’t yet know if she really feels that. Her brother, and their father before him, said many times that they would re-lay that flagstone. When your mother is dead on the kitchen floor is someone to blame? She holds him and they stay like that for a few minutes until Jeanie looks over his shoulder and through the gap in the curtains. “It’s snowing,” she says.

They cover Dot with a blanket. Jeanie wants to lift her onto the sofa, but the sofa is too short. She boils the kettle on the range and makes tea and they sit at the table to drink it with their mother’s body behind them on the floor, as though, like a child in a game of hide-and-seek, she has found a particularly poor place to hide and they are pretending they can’t see her.

“She was a good woman,” Julius says. “A fine mother.”

Jeanie nods, murmurs into her tea.

“Are the trestles still in the old dairy?” she says, knowing that Julius will follow her train of thought like he always has.

In the parlour, she rolls up the rug and pushes the chairs to the edge. She could be preparing for a dance