Unhallowed Ground (11 page)

Down the road determinedly went Georgie Jefferson, passing the farm on her right, the Horsefields’ house on her left, through the rushing ford she paddled, and then up the hill until she reached the only other habitation to make up the hamlet of Wooton-Coney. A rustic response to Mount Kurzon Buildings. More ramshackle than Furze Pen Cottage, the melting patches of snow left a grey unhealthy shade of thatch, tufted and tattered and clumped to the roof. The front door was a scarred and multi-nailed affair, the tiny garden neglected, overgrown with briars and brambles, dead now, of course, but straggled messily across the white grass. In summer it must be hard to pass through what would surely be a riot of undergrowth. The one fruit tree to the right of the path was dead, strangled by a cruel skirt of barbed wire that someone had wound round its trunk in its infancy, and its gnarled, misshapen branches dripped with accusing, tortured tumours.

‘My name is Georgina Jefferson, I am Stephen Southwell’s sister.’ She smiled. And she nodded behind her to show the slatternly girl which way she’d come. ‘I’m down here for the weekend, so I thought I’d pop over and introduce myself.’

The girl in the blue jeans was in her early twenties, muffled against the cold with a long purple scarf that twisted round her neck like lagging and tied round her back like a halter. It was tangled in several places in straw-coloured, lustreless hair. The hairy sweater that drowned her slight frame was outsize and heavy, and sore red fingers spidered out from fingerless mittens. The several pairs of socks on her feet gave her movements that dragging sound.

‘Oh?’ she said, her blue eyes startlingly bright. ‘Oh?’ And her hand would have moved to her mouth, except that she restrained it. ‘We never thought anyone’d come down.’

‘Who is it, Donna?’ growled a voice from within.

‘Hang on a sec’

She must get in. This was important. Georgie asked quickly, ‘Did you know Stephen? Only, if you did know him, I wondered if you’d give me a moment to ask a few questions, because I never met him and this is my only opportunity to find out more about him.’

Her words sounded pathetic, verging on the needy. And she felt needy, too, standing there like a fool on the front doorstep of a stranger, confessing to what felt like carelessness. ‘I’ve been round to the Horsefields, I called round there this morning, but talking was difficult because Mrs Horsefield was rather flustered. She’s not very well, is she? Your neighbour?’ She attempted to make conversation.

‘You’d better come in then,’ sniffed the girl.

If Donna had been a child you would have said she was sulking. Georgie followed as she shuffled through the dark and airless passage, and Donna grunted, ‘He’s in there.’

The room was similar in size and shape to the one at Furze Pen, and almost as spartan. The man who sat beside the fire was lanky and leathery, with large angry hands and a thick mat of dirty hair. He looked up when Georgie entered but carried on cleaning his gun, rubbing oil along the barrel, rooting through the tube with a frazzled pipe cleaner. ‘I suppose you’ve come about his things?’

She hadn’t imagined it would be this easy. The girl had taken the only seat, the moulded plastic chair on the other side of the fire; the sofa, the only alternative, was covered with a filthy old cover. No wonder the girl seemed cold, the air in the room was damp and freezing, and Cramer’s answer to the arctic conditions was a coalman’s leather jerkin and a blanket like the one on the sofa thrown round his shoulders.

Georgie stood uneasily, and at last the girl, Donna, got up from her seat with a small gesture of annoyance and squatted on the hearth’s limp rug. Georgie felt an instinctive dislike of the man with the uneven teeth and the stubbled chin, the man so absorbed in his weapon, as she took the uncomfortable chair so grudgingly offered. Cramer himself enjoyed the one armchair, stained and filthy though it was. ‘Ah, yes. Mr Horsefield suggested you might know something about Stephen’s furniture.’

‘There weren’t much.’ And as he spoke the tiny roll-up in his mouth moved sullenly with his bottom lip.

The faded curtains were drawn. The icy room was lit by one bare bulb. Crumpled tins of extra-strength lager and plates containing half-finished meals, tomato sauce gone hard and the odd cigarette stubbed out in the mess, littered the floor. The mean piece of rug round the fire was charred and criss-crossed with old burns, bald and blackened like a burned field of stubble. This cottage was certainly no contender for
Homes and Gardens
. ‘It’s not so much the furniture that interests me actually, I’m sure there must have been paintings.’

Cramer continued his poking and rubbing while eyeing her craftily. ‘Yeah?’ He spat his fag end into the grate unpleasantly.

He thought she was after money!

With gathering annoyance Georgie continued, ‘I never knew Stephen, you see. And that’s why these paintings are so important to me. But I would like to know if you did remove the stuff from the cottage, and why you felt you had the right to do that.’

‘The legal blokes had finished with it. That bleeding stuff was worth nowt, they’d have thrown it out if I hadn’t got it. I don’t like to see things go to waste.’

‘He’s got a stall, see,’ chipped in Donna in her reedy, catarrhal voice while starting to roll a fag of her own. She licked the paper with deep concentration and poked at the flakes of tobacco sticking out of the end with a match. Her flaxen hair touched the floor and she peered up through it. Every so often she delved into the box for a tissue with which to wipe her peeling nose.

‘They wouldn’t have brought me owt, hardly worth the bleeding petrol.’

‘But it might have been more prudent to wait. To get permission, perhaps. It was a bit premature.’

Cramer raised one dark eyebrow. ‘As I said, I thought it was bleeding done with. I didn’t think there’d be anyone.’

‘But have you still got the furniture or has it already gone? Have you got anything I could look at? And what about the pictures? What has happened to those?’

‘They’re all out in the bleeding shed. I hadn’t got round to loading it all up. What d’you want me to do then? Cart the bleeding lot back? Like hell.’

Georgie wasn’t sure until she’d seen it. Outraged to be made to feel such a nuisance—a right pain in the bleeding arse—Cramer was making out she should accept without question his right to Stephen’s belongings, should be almost grateful that he’d gone in there and removed almost every last stick. There was nothing in the man’s attitude to suggest shame or guilt. No, only annoyance that she’d come asking.

‘Chad’s got his own business, see,’ said Donna with a snuffle of pride, striking a damp match several times on the chimney in order to light her cigarette. ‘That’s why he needed the stuff. But you’ll hear nothing good about him in this bloody hole. He doesn’t get on with them at the farm, nobody does round here. He rents the cottage off them, pays them the rent each week, and that’s as far as it goes. They want him out now,’ she added, puffing hard, ‘that’s why the place is going to rot around us. They want us out so they can do the place up and let it for grockles at fancy prices.’ She dragged the smoke deep into her lungs and threw the match onto the fire. The flame from that tiny piece of wood almost outdid the fire itself. ‘We keep telling them the damp’s coming in, but that old cow don’t take no notice. Serve them right if the place falls down.’

If they took some small trouble themselves they could make quite a dramatic difference. They could clear up the rubbish for a start, they could hang the dragging curtains back on their hooks. They could wander outside and pick up any number of broken branches to make up the paltry fire, but they’d rather sit here and freeze with their grievance. Georgie was glad she had kept her coat on. But she wasn’t here to criticize. Just as important as his belongings was any information that might be gleaned about the elusive Stephen. She might as well ask immediately in case she got thrown out. ‘And what about my brother? Did you get on with him? Did you know him?’

‘He kept to himself,’ muttered Chad Cramer. ‘We all do round here,’ he accused Georgie with a thrusting, bristly chin.

‘But Stephen must have had some friends? Did nobody ever call on him here? Did he go out anywhere local?’ And she wanted to scream,
Did nobody know him for God’s sake?

Donna rubbed her chilblained fingers. ‘I only moved in with Chad last year, so I dunno what went on before that. But since I’ve been here I never seen anyone visit that cottage ’cept old Horsefield with his bleeding magazines, nagged into going by batty Nance. And I dunno that Stephen was that grateful or friendly with Horace.’ She flicked ash onto the grate. It added to the pile there, along with the hundreds of old dog-ends. ‘Was he, Chad?’

Chad shook his head while continuing to rub the barrel of his gun. He cocked it and stared down the barrel with one dark eye.

Donna went on, ‘And he was ill, see, so he couldn’t go far, could he? Not in the year that I knew him. If he did go out it weren’t for long and it was only to do his painting. Well, there’s sod all else to do round here unless you’re into hunting, like Chad.’

‘But he must have gone somewhere to sell his paintings.’ Georgie had to know. She couldn’t go home with nothing, dammit. ‘And if he didn’t do that then he must have gone somewhere to claim his benefit, even Stephen couldn’t have existed on fresh air,’ she wheedled. ‘And what about a doctor? Didn’t the doctor ever visit him? Towards the end? When he was so ill?’

Chad Cramer’s contribution was grudging and unexpected. ‘He didn’t hold with no doctors an’ I wouldn’t know about his bleeding dole. That hag, Buckpit, might know more about that. She might have cashed cheques for him. It was her who fetched his shopping. But you won’t get much out of that bleeding bitch.’

‘But… what did Stephen look like?’ It was more of a plea. If nothing else, his reticent neighbours could surely tell her this, soften her childish vision of the moody, wild-eyed artist who couldn’t give a toss for the world or the people in it.

Donna brightened up to be asked such a simple question. She sniffed, ‘He looked exactly like you, you know. Scruffier. Bigger. But you. There was nothing odd about him. He was just quite normal. There’s a self-portrait he did somewhere with all the junk in the shed. Isn’t there, Chad?’

‘You’ll have to look for yourself,’ said Cramer, casually leaning forward and claiming Donna’s half-smoked fag from her fingers. He dragged on it himself. ‘I don’t take no bleeding notice.’

Donna asked disinterestedly, ‘What will you do with the place? Sell it?’

‘A nice little scoop,’ leered Chad.

Georgie ignored him. ‘I think I’m going to have to. There’d be no point in me keeping it up. I wouldn’t be able to use it enough to make it worthwhile.’

The girl blew her nose sorely. She enquired, between tissues, ‘You wouldn’t want to live here then?’

‘I couldn’t,’ Georgie admitted. ‘I work in London.’ And please don’t ask me what I do. I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to think about that.

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Donna with a painful wheeze. ‘Who’d wanna end up in a shit hole like this? It’s the end of bleeding nowhere. The arsehole of the world.’

‘You were keen enough on it once,’ said Chad unpleasantly. ‘You couldn’t get enough of it once.’

‘Huh, there wasn’t much bleeding choice.’

‘You didn’t say that then. You was all pleading and begging then. And you know what you can do if you feel that bleeding way, you can piss off. That’s what you can bleeding well do.’

Donna softened immediately, her voice turning into a wheedle. She stretched herself out and tried to reach Chad’s knee with her hand, but he pushed her off roughly, having none of it. ‘It’s just that we never go anywhere, Chad, and it’s so bleeding cold.’ The girl gave an exaggerated shiver and adjusted the serpentlike scarf. ‘You could maybe move into town somewhere and use a garage for the stuff, or a yard. Save on petrol.’

‘You know bleeding well why we stay. To leave here now’d be playing straight into their hands.’

Georgie felt uneasy, the atmosphere between them was hostile. She would have to remind them why she was waiting or these recriminations could well go on all night. ‘Well, maybe I could take a look at the bits you’ve got while I’m here. I go back to London tomorrow so I’m afraid this just can’t wait.’

Chad nodded to Donna, who huffed and puffed as she got off the floor, tucking in bits and pieces of clothing, pulling her socks over her knees as if preparing for some expedition.

‘I could give you a few bob for the stuff,’ said Chad Cramer gruffly as Georgie got up to follow Donna out. ‘Save you finding somebody else. Some bugger had to clear it.’

Some chance. She gave a frosty reply. ‘I’ll have a look at it first and I’ll let you know before I leave.’

He was a nasty piece of work, and what was the miserable Donna doing living here with this oaf of a man? A girl her age? She’d do better to hitch herself up with some travellers, from whence it looked as if she’d come. At least she might be treated with some semblance of respect. At least there might be a decent fire and some lively young company. Cramer might sell furniture, he might get the pick of the goods on his stall, but as Georgie followed the girl’s stooping figure through the hall and out to the outhouse, she eyed the patches of seeping damp, the depressing, uncarpeted passage, the miserable, unshaded light bulbs, and thought it strange that the fellow did not use his scavengings to improve standards in his own sorry home.

It was almost as sparse as Stephen’s and there was no love in it.

T
HE MORE SHE HEARD
the more Georgie came to believe that Stephen was no angry young man after all. More of a timid mouse. More like a woman, as if he had discovered a gentle way of screaming.

The old railway carriage, minus its wheels and embedded in earth, sat in the corner of scrub which made up Chad Cramer’s land, a weed-entangled, final siding. Donna, shivering with cold, shoved the door with her shoulder. This precarious shed was so crammed with books, furniture, mattresses and bits of scrap carpet, so stuffed with pots and pans and electrical appliances, that it took a while to notice the windows were painted over in white. This, along with the cold, gave the impression that Chad’s small warehouse was more of a long, low tunnel of ice.