Back inside the house, Nell’s waiting. I know I’m in trouble. Yet she doesn’t shout or yell or go all spiky. She simply gets up from the kitchen table and beckons me to follow.
‘I want to show you something – properly this time,’ she says.
Upstairs it seems darker than ever. We go to the end of the passage, then down the two steps that take us to the door behind the curtain. Unlocking the room, Nell flicks a switch on the wall. Light dazzles from a bare bulb strung with cobwebs. I’ve been bursting to search this place. Now, though, I hang back in the doorway as Nell pushes a cardboard box and some books to one side. She reaches underneath the table, groaning and twisting her arm until she’s got what she’s looking for.
‘This,’ she says, straightening up, ‘is what it’s all about.’
She’s holding the jar that I couldn’t reach the other day. Seeing it properly now, it’s actually a bit boring-looking. I can’t help but feel a little disappointed.
‘Your father took this without asking,’ Nell says. ‘That’s why we don’t speak any more.’
‘I don’t get it. I mean, if he took it, why’s it here and not with him?’
‘He took what was inside it – twenty-one years ago.’
I stare at the jar. It’s pottery with a metal lid and Nell holds it in front of her like a gift. As I go to take it, she whips it away like she can’t quite let it go after all.
‘What was inside?’ I’m guessing money or jewellery. It must have been something big for her and Dad to fall out like that.
‘Jacob,’ she says.
I dip my head. I don’t think I’ve heard her properly.
‘Jacob?’
Nell tuts. ‘Your father hasn’t even told you that much, has he?’
Actually, neither of them would tell me anything when I asked this morning.
‘He’s your father’s younger brother,’ she says.
‘Dad hasn’t got a brother.’ I look at Nell. Those steely grey eyes. ‘Has he?’
‘He hasn’t now, no. Jacob died when he was eleven. Your father was seventeen at the time.’
‘But he can’t … I mean …’ I stop, mouth open in shock.
‘I’m sorry you’ve had to find out like this.’
My own dad never mentioned he had a brother. There’s so much of him I don’t know about. And now there’s another stranger in our family – Jacob – who, I’m finding out, was my uncle.
Nell tucks the jar under her arm. ‘Let’s see,’ she says, and pulls out a box from the piles of stuff on top of the table. ‘No, not that one.’ She gets another one, rummages through and pulls out a book that’s covered in dusty cardboard. It’s an old photograph album. I crane my neck for a look.
‘That’s Jacob,’ Nell says, pointing to a picture a couple of pages in. The photo is of a boy with thick blond hair, hanging upside down from a tree. He’s wearing a striped jumper that looks like it’s shrunk, and one of his front teeth is missing. It’s a sweet, happy photo that makes me smile and go watery-eyed at the same time.
Then it comes back to me, what she said in the kitchen that day when she wanted to send me to Dad’s: I didn’t do so well with my own two. She must’ve been thinking about Jacob.
Nell takes a breath. ‘He was out in the woods climbing a tree with your father when he slipped. The fall broke his neck.’
I look at the picture again. It doesn’t seem so sweet now, just really sad. He’s the boy who never grew up to be someone’s dad, or to be my uncle, and Theo’s. And that tree that he’s hanging from – I wonder if that branch is part of Flo’s fairy door, or whether it’s just a trick of the light. Perhaps, like Dad, Jacob believed in fairies too.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘oh.’ So this is why Nell didn’t want me to climb trees.
Tears fill my eyes then spill down my face. An even more terrible thought hits me: by saying Jacob slipped does she really mean something else, something ten times more awful?
‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’ I ask.
‘Yes, it was. I don’t blame your father, not for that. They’d climbed that tree hundreds of times before, but I should’ve been more aware of the dangers.’ She taps the photo. ‘Especially as neither of them had any fear.’
Like Flo, I think, who moves about the wood like a monkey and never ever looks like she’d fall. I can’t take my eyes off that little jar. To think it’s all that’s left of a once living person, a person who had a name, a brother, a mother.
‘So what did Dad do that made you so angry?’ I ask.
With another deep breath, Nell straightens her back.
‘Without telling anyone, he took Jacob’s ashes. He went quite mad about it,’ she says. ‘To this day, he won’t tell me where they are.’
‘Wow!’ I say. ‘What a horrible thing to do!’
No wonder the two of them don’t speak any more. Suddenly I feel sorry for Nell.
‘I bet he scattered them in the woods – it makes sense he would’ve, doesn’t it?’
Nell looks rueful. ‘Yes, my dear, it would make sense. But all he’d say was that the fairies had taken Jacob.’
The fairies: I’d guessed as much.
‘How do you make sense of that?’ she asks.
I can’t. I don’t trust myself to say anything helpful. I could tell her Dad says there’s magic in the woods and he thinks I’ve got a gift for seeing it. She’d tut and roll her eyes, so I could explain that I have seen things: green things, golden things like specks of light that I think are fairies. And she’d laugh at me, and I’d understand why. In our family everyone says Mum’s the dreamer while Dad and I are the practical ones. Suddenly it’s like everyone’s changed places.
‘Why did Dad do it?’ I ask, because people don’t just take another person’s ashes. There had to be a reason.
‘Ask your father,’ Nell says. ‘I’d be fascinated to hear how he justifies himself. Especially now.’
I don’t know what she means. I can’t ask Dad either because he’s on his way to London.
‘Can’t you just tell me?’ I ask.
‘And let him off the hook?’ said Nell. ‘Absolutely not.’