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

to listen as Joan moved seamlessly about the globe. She felt as if Joan’s life had been lived on a fast train, while her own had consisted mostly of standing on the platform, waving a hankie as the train ran through. Only when the hour approached eleven did Joan return to the subject that had first brought them together.

‘The inhabitants of The Ashes have always been stay-at-homes,’ she said. ‘Here for the duration, as it were. Except for you. Barely a year … but we must go wherever life takes us. Has anyone made you an offer for the house yet?’

‘Not so far, no.’

‘Didn’t you once tell me that you and your husband could be eligible for a part-exchange scheme?’

‘We could.’ Wendy hesitated. ‘We’d lose out a bit financially doing it that way, but it’s a possibility. Bruce was very keen on the idea at one time, but he seems to have lost interest in it. He said we should keep trying for a buyer ourselves until the schools break up, and when I mentioned it again on the phone last night, he said something about holding out until the end of the school holidays. For some reason he’s completely gone off the idea.’

Joan’s face took on a serious expression. ‘If I were you, my dear, I’d talk him back into it. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Peggy Disberry said, and in your place I would get myself down there to be back with my husband as soon as possible. Well, I must be going.’ She pushed herself up using the arms of the chair. ‘Look at the time! Dear me, I have gone on and on … and I have to be up for a dentist’s appointment at ten in the morning. It’s just a check-up, fortunately.’

Wendy stood up too, smiling and saying what a nice night it had been and how they must do it again. As they exchanged farewells, Joan leaned forward, unexpectedly placing her hands on Wendy’s shoulders and brushing her lips across Wendy’s cheek, something she had never done before. Wendy stood on the front step and watched Joan reverse her car down the drive, saw the arc of her headlights as she straightened up in the road, and then the tail lights, no more than a red glow through the hawthorn hedge as Joan’s car headed away up Green Lane. She wondered what Joan had meant about Peggy Disberry.

Three days later the telephone rang mid-morning, interrupting Wendy in the act of hoovering the sitting room.

‘Mrs Thornton?’ It was no one she recognized.

‘Yes? Hullo?’

‘My name is Fiona Huntley-Wilkes. We haven’t met, but I believe you knew my aunt, Joan Webb.’

Wendy instantly grasped the implication of the past tense. ‘Yes, I do. I did. Has something happened to Joan?’

‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you, but she was killed in a car accident on Tuesday morning. She was on her way to the dentist and there was a lorry coming down the hill in the village. It was her right of way, but his brakes failed and the lorry just came straight out of the side road and shunted her car into the wall. If it’s any comfort, they believe she died instantly.’

Fiona Huntley-Wilkes sounded almost dispassionate. It occurred to Wendy that hers must be one name on a very long list of people who had to be told. Joan’s niece must have said these same things so many times now that it had become hard to invest them with meaning. ‘The accident was on the local news, but no names were mentioned, so you mightn’t have connected it with Auntie. I don’t know how well you knew her,’ the voice continued. ‘But my sister and I are her next of kin and we’re going through her address book, telling everyone. Her funeral is on Monday at the crematorium. That’s what she wanted. She’d left instructions. Oh … and it’s family flowers only, please.’

Wendy fetched a pencil and took down the details like an automaton. The time of the funeral, the address to send donations in lieu of flowers. She didn’t tell her caller that Joan had been to supper the night before she died. It was hard enough trying to stifle the tears as it was.

It was only when she replaced the handset that she realized she must have been talking with one of Elaine Duncan’s granddaughters. Someone who, with Joan’s address book open before her, must have realized that she was speaking to the person who now lived in her grandmother’s old home. Funny that she had made no reference to it. Well, perhaps there was no reason why she should. She was probably too busy for small talk. She would have a lot of people to call.

Poor Joan. Tears welled in her eyes as she returned to the hoover. When she switched it back on, she realized that it wasn’t sucking properly and, on checking, she found that the bag was full. A tear overlapped her lower lid and dripped on to the vacuum cleaner as she removed the bag and headed for the kitchen. The pack of refills was normally kept on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard, but when she opened the door and reached up, she found that they had somehow got pushed towards the back of the shelf, so that her questing fingers only made contact with the polythene packaging. When she attempted to get a grip on it, she only succeeded in sliding it further away.

‘Dammit,’ she hissed. No one but Bruce was tall enough to reach things at the back of the top shelf without standing on something.

She was about to carry a chair across when she had another idea and instead grabbed a fish slice from the jar of utensils alongside the hob. Angling it until contact was made with the back wall of the cupboard, she brought it down and pulled forward. She scarcely had time to appreciate that there was