The Spider Truces Read Free Page B

wore the same expectant faces they had worn five years earlier, moments before they told him he would never see his mother again.
    “What’s happening?” he asked.
    “Sit down,” his dad said.
    Denny made a joke of squashing his children as he sat on the sofa between them.
    “Take a look at this,” he said.
    He showed them a colour photograph of an old tile-hung cottage with a large cherry tree and a weeping willow in the front garden.
    “Who lives here?” Chrissie asked.
    “An old man and his wife,” said her dad.
    “It’s pretty,” Ellis said.
    “Yes,” Denny said, “it’s very pretty but it’s pretty worn out too. It needs a lot of time spent on it to make it good again. But it’s quite big and there’s a lovely garden and an orchard and lots of space.” Then Denny added softly, “Space to play in.”
    Chrissie flung her arms round her father and they tumbled back on the sofa.
    “What?” Ellis asked. “What’s going on?”
    Denny pulled his son to him and whispered in his ear.
    “Would you like to move out of Orpington and live in a beautiful village surrounded by farmland, in this house?”
    Ellis whispered back, “Yes. Please.” And in an act that left his father speechless, Ellis crossed the room and hid behind his Great-aunt Mafi, burying his head against her back, because his happiness was more than he could bear.
     
     
    Denny O’Rourke parked his Rover 110 at the top of Hubbards Hill and took photographs. His daughter and son stood beside him, taking in the view. The Kentish Weald opened out in front of them, wide and majestic, a ruffled quilt of fields watched over by majestic oak and trustworthy beech, their trunks dark in the low autumn sun.
    The lane in front of him descended into the Weald, crossing a new main road built into the seam of the valley. By the bridge, a toll cottage with two chimneys watched begrudgingly over the fast new traffic beneath it. Beyond a church tower, amongst woodland and half hidden by the undulant fields, were the village rooftops. The village was surrounded on all sides by fields and farm buildings. Two giant silos rose side by side above the tree line. Beyond them, ripples of countryside overlapped in shades of green and brown and yellow towards the Crowborough Beacon and beyond that was the faint outline of the South Downs on the horizon.
    Ellis looked into the expanse and pictured Great-aunt Mafi threading her way along an invisible network of lanes from the coast.
    “She’s out there, somewhere,” he said. “I am looking at where she is but I can’t see her.”
    Denny smiled. “Ready?” he asked, ushering Chrissie and Ellis back to the car.
    “Yes!” said Chrissie. “Very, very ready!”
    “Ready for what?” Ellis asked.
    His dad shrugged and smiled happily. “Everything,” he said, “everything.”
    When the car drew to a halt again, they were in a narrow lane. To the left of them was a short row of council houses in the shade of a beech tree. Denny leant forward in his seat and sunlight flooded into the back of the car. Ellis put his hand up to shade his eyes and saw, to his right, emerging from the glare, a garden with a weeping willow, a tall cherry tree, and beyond them the cottage in the photograph. Their new home. A home without the ghost.
     
     
    The cottage had welcoming eyes and a low fringe of Kent peg tiles. The leaves that had settled around the walls were oak and cherry and cobnut. At the bottom of the garden they were willow and Ellis threw a pile of them above his head into a small, short-lived cloud. If laughter had a colour in October 1976, it was pale yellow, the colour of weeping willow leaves in mid-air.
    “Look, Mafi!” Ellis said, pointing up into the willow tree. “Look at those two big branches. They look like Felix the Cat running fast!”
    Mafi looked up.
    “See it?” he urged her.
    “Yes, I think so.”
    Ellis stared happily at his discovery and Mafi looked happily at him.
    “We never ever get to