The Skeleton Tree by Diane Janes (reading women TXT) 📕

she thought Uncle Herb was still alive. Fiona said it was most disconcerting, almost as if he might walk back into the room at any moment. Then she kept on saying, “I was wrong about Ronnie. I was wrong about everything.” I suppose she must have been dwelling on the past. You see, Ronnie had been taken prisoner by the Japs and we never heard a word until the war was over, but all through the war Aunt Elaine was convinced that he had survived. No one knew then, the terrible things the Japs had done to our boys. We found out afterwards that Ronnie had died in a POW camp in 1944. He was only twenty-three.’ The two women stood for a moment in the cool silence of the kitchen passage.

Joan sighed. ‘One heard such terrible stories. Men being starved, beaten, tortured to death. Apparently they picked on the tall men worst of all, because the guards didn’t like looking up to anyone – and I can’t imagine Ronnie bowing to some Jap officer. It wasn’t in him.’

In the passage, Joan exclaimed over the grandfather clock. ‘Is it Elaine’s?’

‘No, or at least not as far as I know. I bought it from a dealer last week.’ (It had been a good price, impossible to resist. Bruce had been forced to admit that it was a bargain.)

‘Well, it’s just like hers, and in exactly the right place. Well done you.’

As they moved from room to room, Joan was full of approval. ‘How lovely you have made everything. If you don’t mind my saying so, you haven’t spoiled it at all.’

At the end of the tour Wendy offered her visitor a cup of tea and they sat at the kitchen table to drink it. Joan needed very little encouragement to reminisce. Visions of long past summers swam before Wendy’s eyes, the characters coming to life as Joan’s memories floated by. There was Elaine Duncan in a shady hat, tending her garden while the children played nearby. Dora stuffing the bedclothes in her mouth to stem a fit of irrepressible giggles when she and Joan traded jokes long after they should have been asleep. Ronnie, the daring elder brother, always running faster and climbing higher; the captain when they played at pirates and the general when they arranged battles with the toy soldiers. The one who never cried when he scraped his knee or got caught when they went scrumping for apples. Hugh was the natural second-in-command, a quieter boy. Bunty was the pretty one who hated spring cabbage and woodlice with almost equal passion.

After pausing to take a breath and glancing down at the last few sips in her teacup, which had long since gone cold, Joan asked, ‘Have you ever noticed anything odd about this house?’

‘It’s got a lot of … unusual features … but I don’t think that’s what you mean, is it?’

Joan laughed. ‘It’s silly, of course, but as children we always believed the house was haunted. It was all Ronnie’s fault. He and Hugh used to come creeping into our room after bedtime and tell us ghost stories. Ronnie had a tremendous imagination and it was all the usual stuff, clanking chains and haunted rooms where people died of shock after trying to sleep there for a night, you know the type of thing. But then one night he told us that there was a ghost here at The Ashes. It wasn’t like his usual stories. It was sort of … matter of fact.’

‘What was the story?’

‘I can’t properly remember. Bear in mind I was only about eight years old at the time. I do remember that the ghost was supposed to have been a girl who only haunted certain parts of the house. The thing is that a couple of nights later, Dora needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and when she was out on the half landing she had absolute hysterics and woke the whole house, claiming that she’d seen the ghost. Well, of course, Aunt Elaine quizzed her the next morning and when she got it out of Dora that Ronnie had told us this story, she was absolutely furious. She took Ronnie into the dining room (it was always the dining room for a severe telling off, I don’t know why) and we could hear her shouting, even from upstairs. When he came out, Ronnie was actually crying. I don’t think we’d ever seen him cry before. Aunt Elaine said we were none of us to ever talk about it again – and after that there were no more ghost stories.’

‘Goodness me, your auntie sounds pretty fierce.’

‘She wasn’t usually, though she did occasionally show flashes of temper. I remember Dora telling me that she’d once seen her get into a terrible, scary rage, but I never saw that side of her. In fact, I really can’t imagine it. Aunt Elaine was such a lady.’

‘And do you think Dora really had seen something, that night on the landing?’

‘I have no idea. We weren’t exactly afraid of Aunt Elaine, but children respected their elders then. Or at least, children who’d been brought up like us. So we never spoke of it again. Or none of them did in front of me. I suppose it’s possible they discussed what had happened among themselves later on, but certainly not in my hearing.’

‘But you think there could have been something in it?’ Wendy asked.

‘I don’t know. Elaine was probably just furious with Ronnie for frightening us younger ones, but when I thought about it much later, what struck me as odd was how it was different from his normal stories. No people dying of fright or being walled up in a nunnery and all that kind of rubbish. I rather wondered if he’d overheard the grown-ups telling the story, or maybe the servants.’

‘But you’ve never asked any of the others?’

Joan smiled sadly. ‘I wish I could, but Ronnie was lost in the