Barbara Erskine - The Ghost Tree

‘I wanted to thank you for looking after my dad,’ she began. ‘It was really good of you. I’m sorry it took me so long to find out he was ill.’ She paused, hoping he would acknowledge the fact that he could have made the effort to contact her, but he ignored the remark. He was watching her through narrowed eyes.

‘So, when are you going back to London?’

His question threw her completely. This was her line.

‘I’m staying here,’ she replied after the smallest of hesitations. ‘There’s a lot to sort out. So, I was going to ask you if you could let me know when you’re planning on leaving.’

She saw a flash of something in his eyes. Anger? Shock? Indignation? She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was immediately hidden, to be replaced by his previous bland stare. ‘I hadn’t planned on leaving, Ruth. Your father made it clear that this was my home as long as I wanted to stay here. He told me I was the son he had always wanted.’

In the end, with very bad grace, he agreed to move by the Thursday. The implication in his grudging acceptance of her request after she had threatened to go to her father’s solicitor, was that it would only be a matter of time before he returned.

As a house guest, he was for those last few days exemplary. He was neat, tidy and quiet. She barely saw him. She never met him in the kitchen or on the stairs. She wouldn’t have known he was still there at all had he not from time to time played his radio very softly in the evenings upstairs. Her father had given him the use of the two small rooms on the top floor and the guest bathroom which sat below it on the half landing. Once or twice she had tiptoed up when she knew he was out and tried the doors. Both were locked.

On the day stipulated in her ultimatum he moved out. She had been to the shops. Pushing open the front door she stopped in the hall. The house felt different; empty. She knew at once he had gone. Dropping her bag on the floor she stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up, then she caught sight of an envelope on the hall stand. It contained a postcard – a picture of the Scott Monument in the rain – and a set of keys.

Thank you for your brief hospitality. I am sorry I outstayed my welcome. I will return when you have gone back to London, Tim

That was all. No forwarding address, nothing.

‘I don’t think so!’ She found she had spoken the words out loud.

She ran upstairs two at a time. Both doors on the top floor stood open. She hesitated in the doorway of the first and looked round. He had left the window open and the room was cold, immaculately tidy, the bed stripped, the furniture neatly ordered. The wardrobe doors were slightly open. She peered in to find a mixed collection of empty coat hangers, nothing else. The second room, which overlooked the narrow parallel gardens at the rear of the long terraced street, was of identical size and layout except that the bed had been pushed against the wall to serve as a sofa. On the table there was a tray with neatly washed cups and saucers, an electric kettle, a couple of plates and an assortment of knives and forks and spoons.

In this room there was a range of fitted cupboards across the full width of one wall. Their doors were closed but she could see from where she stood that at some point they had been forced open; the wood was freshly chipped and splintered around the keyholes. Her heart sank. Pulling open the first door she saw the cupboard was full of boxes and suitcases, hat boxes and cardboard files, carelessly stacked on top of each other. With a sense of rising despair she opened the next door. That too was stuffed with boxes and papers. Only one cupboard appeared to have been left untouched. It contained a hanging rail and on it there were some half dozen of her mother’s dresses, some of the tailored trousers she had loved and a slightly moth-eaten fur coat.

It was the first time Ruth had cried since her father died.

She found herself sitting on the makeshift sofa sobbing uncontrollably. These were all her mother’s things. She recognised them; she could see letters and papers scrawled with her mother’s large cursive handwriting; she remembered the old handbag that lay on top of one of the boxes, the little make-up case, her hair brushes, her faded silk bathrobe, scarves, hats.

Had her father pushed them all in so carelessly, or had someone else forced open the cupboards and ransacked them? It had to be Timothy who had so terribly violated her mother’s privacy. Who else would have done it? Her father was a meticulous man. If he had kept her mother’s things, he would have kept them neatly. Standing up, Ruth fingered them miserably. Now, when it was too late to talk to him about it, was this a sign of her father’s love and his loss when her mother died? He had bullied his wife, and harangued her, questioned everything that made her who she was and made her life unbearably unhappy, and yet he had kept all these memories of her. It doubled the insult that Timothy had gone through the cupboards and then shoved the contents back out of sight, not even bothering to hide his depredations.

Why hadn’t she come up to Scotland sooner? Unable to reconcile herself to her father’s treatment of her mother, she had never visited him again after her mother died, not until these last weeks, when he was too ill to speak to her. It had been his next-door neighbour, Sally Laidlaw, who had found her phone number and called her. Timothy had done nothing to contact her and seemed to have been surprised that she existed at all. He had been living in this house for several months and her father had not mentioned to him even once, or so Timothy claimed, that he had a daughter living in London.

Suddenly she couldn’t bear to stay there a moment longer. Running downstairs, her cheeks wet with tears, she went into the front room. She didn’t turn on the light. She just sat there as the colour faded from the sky outside while indoors, behind the heavy net curtains, everything grew dark.

It was only as she was falling asleep that night that it occurred to her to wonder if Timothy had stolen anything.

She had made the room next to her father’s into her base when she had moved into the house; the small box room next to it had been occupied by Harriet for the few days she had stayed. A carer had slept there during her father’s last weeks, but Harriet’s vivacious personality still filled the room now, as did the scent of her various lotions and creams. ‘Glasto’s best,’ she had joked as she was packing to leave. ‘All herbal; all guaranteed to give me a luscious skin or spiritual insight or both. Here, have them.’ She had pushed several bottles into Ruth’s hands. ‘Your need is greater than mine. They will soothe your aura. I can always get more. And here’s the book I told you about. I’ve marked the first place Lord E is mentioned, though he seems to have guided her through her whole life.’ She clasped her fingers round Ruth’s wrists. ‘Remember, for a couple of weeks or so I won’t be too far away. Call me, any time, if it all gets too lonely.’

It was a complete surprise when next morning Ruth received an email from her father’s solicitor inviting her to the office to discuss an ‘unexpected problem’.

James Reid had been a friend of her father’s for many years. The tall, grey-haired man who rose to greet her with great courtesy, pulled out a chair for her then returned to his own side of the desk and produced a folder which he aligned on his blotter without opening it. This was an office, she noticed, where all signs of modernity – computer, scanner, printer – had been relegated to a shelf along the back wall beneath a solid phalanx of old law books. It was somehow comforting.

‘I’m sorry to ask you to come in so soon after our telephone conversation,’ he said once she was settled, ‘but there is something that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.’ They had spoken briefly on the phone after her father’s death, and again at the funeral. Her father’s affairs, he had assured her then, were relatively straightforward. Donald Dunbar had left her, his only child, everything, the house and all his money of which there was quite a substantial sum. Now James Reid glanced up at her with what appeared to be some anxiety. He was a handsome man, perhaps in his mid-sixties, she guessed, and was blessed by a natural expression of wise benevolence. She felt her stomach tighten with anxiety.