The Skeleton Tree

the end of it.
Robert’s three years at university had faded in her memory: a jumble of homecomings and departures, interleaved by waiting. Waiting on the platform for Robert’s train to pull in. Waiting for her building society savings to reach the magical figure of one hundred pounds, so that she could write and tell him. Waiting for Robert’s letters to slip through the letterbox and onto her parents’ bristly doormat. Waiting, always waiting. Robert changed over the course of those three years. His hair grew longer, his temper a little shorter, but it never occurred to her that their future together would be anything but rosy. They were engaged. They loved each other. That was happiness.
After he graduated, Robert was offered a job in Coventry. She hadn’t expected that. Wendy had been working in the typing pool at Bradshaws for three years by then and they were able to use her savings to put down a deposit on a tiny terraced house. Robert moved in immediately and the long-awaited wedding took place at the parish church four months later, just shy of her twenty-first birthday.
The move to Coventry had been a disaster from the start. She missed her friends and family and failed to settle into her new job, where colleagues teased her for her accent and called her ‘Geordie’ (which was more than slightly annoying to a girl who came from Teesside). Her new social life was equally fraught. Robert had a natural flair for making friends, but they were mostly single graduates, who no more than tolerated his funny little wife from up north. When they laughed at her for thinking Siegfried Sassoon was a painter, Robert joined in. In public Robert was Mr Bonhomie, but it was a different story at home, and like a confused child who does not know why she is being punished, Wendy began to cry at every angry look or cross word, which in turn drove Robert to distraction. ‘Don’t turn on the tears,’ he would storm, which invariably made her sob even harder.
Her mother had always said that every baby is a miracle, so Wendy believed that Tara’s arrival would make things better, but a tiny, perpetually grizzling baby was not the miracle they needed. Rows escalated, becoming louder and more frequent, often conducted to a soundtrack of Tara’s screaming, until one night in August 1963, when Tara was ten months old and they were engaged in a series of arguments stretching back intermittently over days, Robert had picked up a glass ashtray and flung it at the chimney breast, where it shattered into a trillion fragments, one of which bounced back, cutting his cheek. Previously their violence had been verbal. The broken glass and the sight of blood on Robert’s cheek represented a frightening escalation. As Wendy cowered in a chair, her husband picked up his car keys and left without another word.
As the sound of his car faded into the distance, an oppressive silence had settled over the house. Wendy stayed in the chair for some time, staring at the broken glass. Eventually she roused herself sufficiently to clear it up, taking the infinite care of a mother whose baby is liable to crawl across the scene of destruction the moment she is set down the next morning. About two hours after Robert’s abrupt departure, the silence in the house was broken by the telephone ringing. She hesitated to answer it. Suppose it was her mother, or Robert’s mother, to both of whom the union had always been represented as completely blissful? But the caller was persistent. Someone who was not prepared to give up. Someone who knew she was at home.
‘Hello?’ She tried to sound calm. And when there was a moment’s silence from the other end, ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Dennis – you know … Robert’s friend, Dennis. Is that you, Wendy?’ (A silly question, she thought – who else would be picking up their phone?)
‘Yes,’ she said, trying even harder to keep her voice level. ‘Do you want Robert? He’s out at the moment.’
‘Robert’s here with me. He doesn’t want to speak to you himself. He’s asked me to tell you … are you still there, Wendy?’
‘Yes,’ she gasped through the tears which came immediately, partly due to the humiliation that Robert must have confided their problems – at least to some degree – in Dennis. How could he do that? How could he break the traditional, unspoken code of presenting a united front to the world? She felt exposed, betrayed.
‘He wants me to tell you that he doesn’t want to live with you anymore.’ Dennis spoke like a schoolboy actor, delivering carefully rehearsed lines, breaking the news as kindly as he could. ‘He says the situation has become insupportable. He says that if you need any money, there is some in the Toby jug.’
What felt like a very long silence followed, while she stood holding the phone to her ear, choking back sobs as the tears rolled down her cheeks, dripped on to the hand that was holding the phone and eventually fell onto the front of her dress, creating a series of damp splotches on the fabric.
‘Are you all right, Wendy?’
She could tell from his voice that Dennis felt sorry for her and didn’t enjoy having to give her Robert’s message. He would do it though, because he liked Robert, and it occurred to her that as well as being sorry for her, he was probably even more sympathetic to Robert.
‘Yes, thank you. I’m perfectly all right.’ It wasn’t even a well-told lie, but it must have been enough to satisfy Dennis, because he said goodnight and replaced the receiver.
In spite of the telephone call, she had initially assumed that Robert would come back. After a couple of days she had swallowed her pride and called Dennis, but though he admitted that Robert was staying with him, he also conveyed to her that Robert declined to come to the phone. Later the same day she