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

Wendy? The increasing sense that my wife is losing her mind. You need to get a grip.’

Digging is not a good thing. Digging about in the past. Digging up a corner of the garden. I’m not in favour of any of it.

SEVEN

October 1980

Joan had been looking out for Wendy and met her at the front door of her bungalow. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, waving her visitor into a small sitting room, into which had been crammed a pair of overlarge armchairs, an enormous, old-fashioned sideboard and what seemed like innumerable side tables, two of which were positioned adjacent to the armchairs, each already endowed with a glass of sherry, positioned on matching silver coasters. ‘How are you keeping? Family all well, I hope?’

Space was at such a premium that Wendy had to sidestep into the chair which Joan indicated she should take, and when Joan seated herself in the other armchair, their knees all but met across the intervening gap.

‘Chin, chin.’ Joan raised her glass and took a sip of sherry before saying, ‘Now you mentioned on the phone that you wondered why George Frederick Coates didn’t leave the house to anyone in his family, and that set me thinking. I have a feeling that he did have a son who was killed in the First World War. I’m not absolutely sure where I got that idea from, but I suppose Aunt Elaine may have said something about it at one time or another. I don’t believe she and Uncle Herb actually knew these Coates people themselves, but of course there are always people living round and about who do remember things.’

Wendy was abruptly reminded of the nosey parker who lived across the road and had been so eager to tell her things about one of her builders. Joan was right. There were always people who knew – or thought they knew – things. Aloud, she said, ‘That would be a strange coincidence – a casualty of the First World War and then one from the Second, both growing up in the same house.’

‘Not really,’ Joan said sadly. ‘When I was a child there didn’t seem to be many families who hadn’t lost someone in the first war, and plenty lost a son or a sweetheart in the next war too. A terrible lot of men from these parts were killed. You only have to look at the war memorials in the villages.’

‘Of course!’ Wendy exclaimed. ‘The Bishop Barnard war memorial is in the churchyard. I can easily go down there and check if there’s anyone called Coates on it.’

‘Wendy.’ Joan raised her glass in salutation. ‘You have a first-class detective mind.’

‘My daughter Tara has given me some ideas too. Her friend’s father is a bit of a family history fan and he’s found out a lot by looking at old census records and that sort of thing.’

‘Oh, how interesting! And you are going to do that for The Ashes, are you …? Well, when you get round to doing all this, would you mind awfully if I tagged along?’

‘Not at all. It would be more fun with two of us. Though it might be a few weeks yet. We’ve got my daughter’s eighteenth birthday coming up and one or two other things going on.’

‘My time’s my own, dear. Whatever suits you. Unless of course you have already arranged to take your daughter. I wouldn’t want to intrude.’

‘Tara tends to blow hot and cold. She enjoys hearing about the history of the house, but I’m not sure she would actually want to go and do any research. In any case she’s at college through the week and it’s her A-level year, so that keeps her pretty busy.’

‘In that case I am happy to offer myself as Doctor Watson to your Sherlock Holmes. Now … to the photographs.’ She reached to one side of the chair as she spoke and lifted an old, black, leather-bound album from the top of a disparate pile. ‘These belonged to my mother. They were all in storage while we were living abroad, but I must say they have survived remarkably well. I’ve got them in chronological order, to make things easier.’

The earliest images in the album were of Joan’s grandparents, a pair of formal Victorians, sometimes pictured with infants and toddlers who were hopelessly overdressed in layers of petticoats, their heads invariably covered by hats, caps or frilly bonnets. Their identities had been neatly inscribed on the page by Joan’s mother, Dorothy, in ink which had faded to a bluish mauve. There were not many pictures of Dorothy and her sister Elaine until they were aged about ten or eleven, at which time the frequency of the photographs increased, proclaiming as clearly as a written memo the point at which the family had acquired a camera. A vanished world of Edwardian picnics unfolded before Wendy’s eyes, where families clad in their best, from the tips of their polished boots to the beribboned hats on their heads, sat laughing on a series of rugs spread anywhere from Whitby Sands to the ruins of Rieuvaulx Abbey. Dodo’s birthday, an older and wiser Dodo had written underneath one particular shot.

The second album opened up a new era. The album itself must have been expensive. It was covered in a soft, dove grey fabric and each page of mounted photographs was faced with one of tissue paper. The opening page was entirely taken up by a portrait labelled Elaine aged 21.

‘She was very pretty,’ Wendy ventured.

‘Everyone said so.’

The pages of the album steadily marked the passage of the years. First Elaine, then Dorothy, on the arms of their new husbands. By the end of the volume their hat brims were narrower and their skirt hems had risen to reveal shapely ankles.

It was not until the third album that they were positively able to identify The Ashes. By this time they were sharing the books across their knees, eagerly pointing things out to one another. The Ashes