The Skeleton Tree

monstrosities which looked down on their neighbours in every sense, here a wrought-iron balcony serving a central upstairs French window, there a mini-mansion with art-deco curves and stained glass top lights.
It would have been easy to overlook number thirty-seven altogether, because it stood much further back from the road than all its fellows and was mostly hidden by the overgrown hawthorn hedge which separated the front garden from the pavement. Apart from the brief interval it took anyone to pass the front gate, you couldn’t see the house from the road at all. Even the gate itself was different to every other garden gate in Green Lane, having the appearance of a farm gate, sturdy, rectangular and always closed. A rectangle of wood had been fixed to the gate at some point in the past, with the name of the house burned into it. It had been there so long that the wood had weathered until the whole piece was almost as dark as the name itself, but it was still just possible to make it out: The Ashes. At some stage the house number had been added to one of the gateposts. A three and a seven, barely noticeable; the sort of small wooden numbers that could be obtained cheaply from a hardware shop. The numbers had once been black, but had long since acquired a greenish tint like the gatepost itself, and the screws or nails which secured the numbers had gone rusty. Everything was in need of a good clean-up and a lick of paint.
Wendy knew next to nothing about architecture, but even she could tell that the house was old, probably the oldest building on Green Lane. It was built of brown brick – smaller bricks than its modern neighbours, bricks which belonged to an earlier age – and it had a grey slate roof. She guessed that it must once have stood alone, probably the only dwelling on what would then have been a quiet country lane. In fact, it seemed to her that the house had remained a little bit aloof, as if it had never quite come to terms with having neighbours.
From the very first time she saw it, the house had intrigued her. Its front aspect looked like a house in a child’s drawing, with a central front door, flanked by two downstairs windows, taller than they were wide, with a pair of matching windows on the first floor. She had probably walked past it a hundred times, holding Katie by the hand, pushing Jamie in his pram, then holding his hand, and eventually walking on her own once he had started school. But whenever she passed, she invariably glanced over the gate and down the drive, which ran along one side of the plot and presumably continued along the side of the house, though the view was obstructed by a pair of head-high wooden gates which stretched from the side of the house to the perimeter fence. Above the gates, she could see that the side wall of the house continued for some distance, suggesting that the building went back quite a long way. The front garden clearly needed more attention than it ever received, and as the years went by the whole place achieved an increasingly neglected air.
The occupant or occupants were a complete mystery. She had never seen any signs of life, though whenever she glanced down the drive after dark she could see the glow of an electric light behind the closed curtains of one downstairs window – always the one to the right of the front door. It was the sole indication that anyone lived there at all.
Much later she would remember how she had drawn the children’s attention to The Ashes on a couple of occasions when they were all walking down to the village together. On the first of these she had declared that she would love to see inside the house.
‘It looks pretty decrepit,’ Tara had commented. ‘Helen at school says some old relic lives there, all by herself.’
On the second occasion, Wendy had asked Katie if she wouldn’t like to live in a house like that.
‘Oh no,’ Katie said. ‘There might be ghosts.’
‘Nonsense,’ Wendy said. ‘It looks to me like the sort of house where you might have an adventure.’
Katie wasn’t having it. ‘It just looks spooky to me.’
By the summer of 1979, the area behind the hawthorn hedge bore little resemblance to a garden. The grass, which had not been cut at all that year, had grown knee-high and run to seed, while the stone sundial which had once been clearly visible in the centre of the lawn was so overgrown with brambles that it might not have been there at all. A coterie of nettles had risen beside the wooden gateposts, impudently poking their heads out and leaning across the pavement, while bindweed snaked its way all over the cracked concrete of the drive. The onset of autumn and winter only increased the sense of dereliction. Plants and weeds turned brown, drooped, rotted, then frosted. The house maintained its expressionless air.
The arrival of the ‘For Sale’ board that bitter January day stopped Wendy dead in her tracks. The wind was stinging her face, so she had her head down and was level with the gate of number thirty-seven before she saw the board, but its presence had the most extraordinary effect on her. It was almost as if someone had delivered a blow to her chest, leaving her gasping for breath. All her impotent longing to see over the house surfaced in a rush.
Viewing by appointment only, the board said. Well, why shouldn’t she make an appointment? It wasn’t really right, said a voice in her head. She would only be wasting someone’s time. It was true that they were planning to look for another house – a bigger house – but not one like this. This was a detached, double-fronted property, sitting on a large plot of land. She knew