The Skeleton Tree

of a penny or two, cooking her solitary meal in her big, empty house. The outside door opened at that moment, admitting the little boy with the high-pitched voice and his mother. The woman wrinkled her nose. ‘Pretty squalid, isn’t it?’ she remarked as she passed through.
‘It must have been lovely, once.’
The woman made a dismissive noise as she headed back to the main part of the house. Wendy followed, electing to leave the yard and back garden until the end. She walked along the passage, made the right-angle turn at the kitchen and so returned to the widest part of the hall, where she encountered Jack and his wife again. He was backing out of a closed door – smaller than the norm – which stood between the first room she’d explored and the foot of the stairs.
‘Big walk-in cupboard,’ he informed her. ‘It backs on to the storeroom. If you took down the back wall of this cupboard, it would lead you straight into it. Open it up, get rid of all them shelves, and it would make a nice little study for somebody, that would.’
Wendy nodded, noticing as she did that his wife was starting to look impatient. She sidestepped the wife and began to climb the stairs. The bannister was smooth and solid, the dust already polished from it by the passage of numerous hands. A tall, arched window faced her on the half landing, where she was confronted with another choice: to mount the trio of stairs to her left, which led into a short corridor, or to follow the main staircase as it turned back on itself in order to gain the upper landing. She decided on the latter. The upper landing was almost square and offered five doors to choose from, one of which was slightly smaller and evidently led to the attic. All four bedrooms were large – certainly bigger than any of their bedrooms in Jasmine Close. As she explored each in turn, Wendy inwardly named them: Katie’s, Tara’s and Jamie’s. ‘Our room’ was the biggest of all. It had a cast-iron fireplace and its window overlooked the front garden, which by a trick of the light took on a much better appearance when viewed from above. The grass appeared shorter, the shrubs tamer, the weeds less profuse. While she was contemplating this illusion, she was joined by a trio she had not seen before, two women and a man, who was saying, ‘Derek would know the cost better.’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s suitable at all,’ said the shorter of the women. ‘I was expecting six bedrooms.’
‘There’s really only four,’ the other woman agreed. ‘You can’t count those two little rooms at the end of the passage, where the slaveys slept.’
‘Couldn’t you run a partition through this room?’ asked the man, indicating the largest bedroom.
‘What about the window? That would complicate things,’ said the taller lady, apparently oblivious to Wendy’s meek, ‘Excuse me,’ as she tried to squeeze past them and on to the landing.
‘It would probably make two decent singles, I grant you,’ the man mused, while Wendy felt tempted to shove him down the stairs. To even consider the idea of destroying the symmetry of that lovely room!
She managed to escape them and attempted to explore the attic, but this proved impossible: a flight of steep, narrow stairs ascended into complete darkness. With the electricity disconnected and no torch, it was an impossible task. She did not mind all that much. She had always been slightly spooked by the thought of attics. The moment anyone in a film went up to the attic, you just knew something bad was going to happen. Not here, of course. Not in a lovely, friendly house like this. Instead she descended to the half landing, where she found the bathroom. The plain white bath, basin and toilet were grimly old fashioned and set against chest-high, once-white wooden panelling. In one corner the greying paper was coming away from the ceiling. It was easily big enough to install a shower cubicle as well as a bathtub, she thought. Beyond the bathroom, the passage ended in a door and, when she reached it, Wendy could see at once what the women in the bedroom had been talking about. These had indeed once been the servants’ rooms, one leading directly into another. Though both rooms were about twelve feet wide, the roof sloped up from floor level on each side, making the effective space much smaller. An icy draught was penetrating a gap where one of the skylights in the sloping roof no longer fitted snugly. She realized that she must be in the small wing which extended out above one side of the outbuildings that formed the rear courtyard.
After the few seconds it took to glance around the servants’ quarters, Wendy made her way back to the stairs. The people who had discussed the possibility of vandalizing ‘our bedroom’ were gone. As she paused on the half landing, the sunshine flooding in through the arched window seemed to grow brighter. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine Katie and Jamie, racing up and down the stairs, playing hide-and-seek, bobbing in and out of the numerous doorways. It couldn’t happen, of course. Even though it had always been her special house, it was only a dream. It could never actually be her house. She descended the stairs slowly, enjoying the solid feel of the balustrade, taking in the plasterwork around the light fittings, noticing the paler patches where pictures had once hung. After standing aside to make room for yet more new arrivals, she made her way out of the front door, along the garden path and down the drive towards the rear of the house, which brought her to the yard she had seen from the kitchen window. It was enclosed on two sides by the house and on the third by the semi-ruinous brick-built sheds. The fourth side of the square, where the