The Skeleton Tree

that she would be making a mistake in marrying him. She said that while she was very fond of Bruce (an awful get out, ‘very fond’), she had realized that she did not love him enough to uproot herself, leaving her family and all her friends, for a place where she knew no one but him. ‘My heart was broken, of course,’ Bruce said. ‘But that was before I met you.’
It certainly appeared that Frances’s instincts had been proved right. Bruce’s meeting with Wendy had taken place a matter of weeks after her Dear John letter, while Frances herself had wasted very little time in marrying one of her old friends from college, after what Bruce’s mother described as a whirlwind romance. There had been nothing of the whirlwind about Bruce. He and Wendy became acquainted slowly and carefully, like a pair of children building a castle out of Lego bricks. They married in 1969: a quiet register office affair, though Tara cajoled Bruce into letting her have a bridesmaid dress and a posy. People warned them that Tara might be difficult, but Bruce was the father she had never known and Katie the baby sister she claimed to have always longed for. All the pieces fitted together beautifully – and that was happiness, Wendy thought.
There had been occasional moments of self-doubt, particularly as her fortieth birthday loomed large on the horizon. Sometimes she wondered if she ought to be doing more with her life. Other women were embarking on Open University courses or netting second incomes after training to be nurses or teachers, whereas she and Bruce just kept on going in the same old way, ferrying the children about, Bruce playing squash once or twice a week, Wendy going to night classes (her cake decorating surpassed all, but she never really mastered conversational Spanish). She wasn’t sure that the Open University offered very much for failed Spanish conversationalists.

The act itself was all too easy, too fast. It was the concealment, the clearing up afterwards that took the time. Blood everywhere, staining everything, turning from scarlet to rusty brown. And all the time, expecting someone to come. Fearing discovery.
You can’t get bloodstains out, not once they’ve dried. Don’t believe all that stuff about soaking things in cold water, or using Vanish soap. That’s why I had to build a bonfire in the back garden. It was the only way I could think of to get rid of the clothes. There were no rules against having bonfires back then, and it was November. A good time for bonfires.
TWO
February 1980
Though she had no real hope of buying The Ashes, each time Wendy drew level with the gate she was almost afraid to look. Roughly a fortnight after the public viewings, the sign she had been anticipating finally appeared, tacked across the original sale board on the gate: Sold – Subject to Contract. That was it. Her numbers had not come up on the pools in time.
The telephone call came on a weekday evening while they were having tea (or what posher folks would have called dinner). Wendy was sitting in the seat nearest to the door, so she got up to answer the phone. In an era of nuisance calls from purveyors of fitted kitchens and double glazing, her ‘Hello’ was cool and cautious.
‘Is that Wendy Thornton?’
She didn’t recognize the voice, and then misunderstood the initial introduction, so it took a moment or two of confused interaction before she eventually realized that the caller was a distant cousin, Larry, who was barely more than a memory from half-forgotten weddings and funerals.
‘Oh, Larry … what a nice surprise. How are you?’ She was conscious that her enthusiasm sounded artificial (though the surprise was genuine enough: she couldn’t recollect Larry ever calling her before). Through the open door of the dining room, she caught a glimpse of Bruce, frowning. They had only just sat down to eat and he objected to this interruption in their normal routine. She turned away before he had a chance to mouth anything about ringing back. Small patches of warmth had already formed on her cheeks, born of the embarrassment of her initial hostility. She could hardly compound the felony by telling Larry that it wasn’t a convenient time.
Her husband and children had fallen silent, forking in their food while listening in on her half of the conversation. First there was a lengthy pause while she gave her full attention to what Larry was saying. Then, ‘Yes … yes … oh, yes, very sad.’ Another pause. ‘But of course, she was a good age, wasn’t she? I did think about coming down for the funeral, but it’s such a long way for me and I would have had to arrange for someone to collect Jamie from school …’
Out of the corner of her eye, Wendy saw seventeen-year-old Tara exchange bemused looks with her father across the table. Even as she uttered the words, Wendy knew that they probably came across as a thin excuse to Larry, who was a childless bachelor and, in any case, very probably recognized it for the lie that it was. She would not for a moment have contemplated travelling all the way down to London for the funeral of an ancient relative whom she had not seen in years. Her most recent visit to her mother’s one surviving aunt had been at least five years ago and had only been undertaken because it coincided with some other family excursion south.
Back in the dining room, eight-year-old Katie, the first to decide that the telephone call was of no particular interest, asked her father whether he intended to watch a programme that night on BBC2.
‘Ninety-one? Well, there, I knew she was getting on …’ Wendy knew she was prattling, but it was hard to know what to say, with Larry being a virtual stranger and her having no idea what had put it into his head to contact her at all. The reveal came