The Skeleton Tree

a right state, isn’t it?’ the woman added, making a movement with her head to encompass the property as a whole. ‘It’ll take a mint of money to put it right.’
Wendy nodded.
‘He loves anything like this, our Jack does. Old houses, traction engines, the lot.’
‘It’s a beautiful old house.’
The woman gave Wendy an odd look. ‘All right if you like that sort of thing, I suppose. Did you want to come by, pet, or are you going in there?’
‘In there’ was a door at the end of the passage on the right-hand side. It led to what had once been a big, old-fashioned kitchen. Wendy entered to find the room already occupied. A small boy was looking out of the window into a cobbled back yard. Following his gaze, Wendy saw the back garden was screened from the kitchen by a range of single-storey outbuildings, whose roofs had mostly fallen in.
‘There’d be room to stable Femo,’ the little boy said in a high, piping voice.
‘I hardly think that Daddy will buy it on the strength of that, darling.’ The boy’s mother was sizing up the ancient cooking range which occupied part of the wall opposite the window.
She doesn’t like it, Wendy thought. Why did no one else seem to get it? Couldn’t anyone else sense its yearning? All The Ashes needed was someone to love it properly.
Two more women entered the room, obviously curiousity viewers like herself.
‘Eee, will you look at that!’ exclaimed the younger of the pair, pointing at the range.
Two men arrived immediately after them and began poking about in a big built-in cupboard. ‘It’s a wonder it’s never burned down with the state of this wiring,’ one of them said.
‘You’d have thought she’d have had that seen to, if it were dangerous,’ the older woman said. Wendy wasn’t sure if the two pairs were together, but the situation made for conversations between strangers.
‘Dangerous?’ This from the same man as before. ‘It’s bloody lethal!’
‘You know these old ones,’ the younger woman put in. ‘They don’t realize. They think things last forever.’
‘Still,’ her companion said. ‘I’m surprised at Mrs Duncan. It’s not as if she were short of a penny or two. I mean, just look at the place. It’s not what I was expecting.’
‘Did you know her then?’ asked the man, who had not yet spoken.
‘Well … by sight, you know. Not really to speak to. I’ve lived in Green Lane since 1938 and she’s been here all that time.’
The other woman glanced at her watch, as if sensing the possibility of a delay. ‘We’d better get going,’ she said. ‘We haven’t seen upstairs yet and I need to be back home for our Gary.’
‘Our mam used to say she was never right after …’
Wendy did not hear the rest, for the women were gone, their places taken by the couple who had arrived at the gate when she did. She tried to ignore the other viewers and concentrate on taking in the room, committing it to memory, because she would probably never see it again. There were windows on three elevations in the kitchen. One faced across the courtyard towards the outbuildings, which even the estate agents’ handout had described, in a rare rush of candour, as ‘semi-derelict’; another looked out to the side, where a stout fence and a shield of trees and shrubs separated the plot from its immediate neighbour; and finally there was a narrow window which looked up the drive towards the road. Wendy had not realized that the rear of the house was slightly wider than the front. Until today that window had always been hidden by the tall double gates which stood partway along the drive, but now they had been opened and this enabled anyone standing in the kitchen to keep an eye out for someone entering the property from the road. Wendy imagined herself looking out for Bruce … putting the kettle on, or pouring him a drink, as she saw his car pull into the drive.
When she left the kitchen, she found her progress along the rear passage was still blocked by the same woman who had spoken to her before. The man called Jack was just returning from his exploration of the cellar, torch in hand.
‘Thank goodness for that. I thought you was gone for good,’ his wife chided, holding the door open for him as he emerged.
Jack exchanged a smile with Wendy as he stepped up from the wooden stairs and closed the cellar door behind him.
‘Where to next?’ His wife consulted the agents’ particulars which she held in her hand. ‘Utility room and storeroom?’
‘This must be the store.’ Jack stepped through an opening next to the cellar door and flashed his torch around the darkened space. Wendy peered in from the doorway, grateful to have fallen in with Jack and his torch at just the right moment. The space was lined from floor to ceiling with dusty wooden shelves, though this still left sufficient space for several people to cram inside, should they choose to.
‘I wonder why they’ve boarded up this window?’ Jack mused, shining the torch directly ahead of him.
‘Come on out of there,’ said his wife. ‘Poking about in that dusty hole.’
Jack ignored her, advancing further into the storeroom while Wendy retreated into the passage. This ended in what the estate agents described as a utility room, though it had clearly seen recent use as a kitchen. There was a big ceramic sink under the window, large enough to bath a small child, its lower plumbing on show and lagged in old sacking. To one side of that was an ancient gas cooker, and at right angles to the cooker was a freestanding two-tier kitchen cupboard of the variety favoured by her own mother in the 1950s. One of the bottom doors was missing and the patterned Perspex of the upper cupboards was cracked and dirty. Wendy experienced a sudden sense of desolation, picturing a lonely old lady who had not been short