The Skeleton Tree

returned from a shopping trip and found that Robert had sneaked into the house during her absence and removed all his personal belongings. She tried ringing him at work, but he was never available to take her calls, and after three weeks, though still shell-shocked and disbelieving, Wendy finally accepted the situation. She packed a suitcase, put Tara into her pushchair and took a taxi to the station, where she used the last of the money from the Toby jug for the train ticket, which brought her back north to the safety of her parents’ house in Middlesbrough.
Robert had evidently been monitoring her movements, because the first of the envelopes arrived a few days later. They appeared at a rate of one per month, each containing a cheque, always made out in neat black ink, in Robert’s distinctive handwriting. There was never an accompanying note, not even a card at Christmas. At first these wordless arrivals wounded her, but she eventually grew hardened to them, extracting the monthly cheques without bothering to run hopeful fingers around the inside of the envelope in case she had missed something.
In the meantime, Robert’s solicitor began to communicate with hers. Her mother never quite got over the shock. There had never been a divorce in the family. Respectable women of her mother’s generation didn’t get divorced. They didn’t ‘give up’ after a mere three years of marriage, preferring the comparative dignity of sitting in winged armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace to their husbands, fading slowly, like the wedding photographs on the mantelpiece.
Wendy’s mother stayed in touch with Robert’s. Sometimes Wendy gave her mother photographs of Tara to give to Robert’s mother. She guessed that some of these photographs were destined for Robert himself, but she never enquired or commented on it. She would have sent him photographs of his daughter if he had asked for them. But he did not ask, not directly at least, for any photographs or news of Tara. Sometimes she wondered how much you needed to hate someone in order to cut them off so completely, but as the months passed she realized that the route to survival lay in trying to achieve an equal detachment. She slotted back as far as possible into her former life, even getting her old job back in the typing pool at Bradshaws, returning home each evening to a dinner cooked by her mother, who made no complaints about minding Tara through the day. Eventually the abnormality of Robert’s behaviour became less strange to her than the fact that she had once shared her life with him. She never saw him and never spoke to him. As her divorce progressed, he became like one of those characters in a television play, who is apparently central to the plot yet never appears.
Her first encounter with Bruce took place on a chilly December afternoon in 1967. Rain was slating down from a leaden sky and the gutters were awash. It was the sort of day when umbrellas are up and heads are down, but Wendy had forgotten her umbrella and was relying on a little plastic rain hood, from which strands of her hair were escaping in wet tendrils. A passing car had splattered the front of her tights with dirty brown slush and, to complete her humiliation, when she was in the middle of the zebra crossing her carrier bag decided to capitulate to the downpour and give way completely, leaving her clutching string handles attached to shreds of brown paper. Bruce – then a complete stranger – had followed her on to the crossing and, seeing what had happened, took pity and stopped to help her retrieve the spilled shopping, piling the various items into her arms so that everything was saved except for an exploded paper bag of sprouts, which had to be left to their fate.
When they reached the opposite side of the road, Bruce insisted on her taking shelter in a bank doorway while he ran into a nearby shop and bought a string bag. He introduced himself while she repacked her shopping, then waited with her under the dripping awning of a nearby butcher’s shop until her bus came, the two of them watching the grisly demise of the scattered Brussels sprouts, as they were crushed beneath the passing traffic. For years afterwards it would bring a private smile to her lips, remembering how he had made her laugh, drawing her attention to one particularly intrepid sprout which had rolled to and fro across the road, just managing to avoid the wheels of passing cars and lorries, until it was eventually flattened by a furniture van and they let out a simultaneous ‘ooh’ of disappointment, which drew surprised glances from others waiting at the bus shelter. Telephone numbers had been exchanged and a rendezvous for a drink agreed before her bus arrived.
Her mother had not initially warmed to the idea of Bruce. The expression ‘on the rebound’ was employed. Fortunately, Bruce was the sort of chap her father described as ‘steady’, and even her mother was won over when it became apparent that Tara had taken to Bruce from the off.
They had not been dating very long before Bruce poured out the story of his own doomed love. He had been engaged to a girl called Frances in his native Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and they too had played the waiting game, saving up for a house deposit while Frances finished her teacher training. During Frances’s final year at college, Bruce was despatched on a temporary posting to Teesside. The courtship had continued via letters, phone calls and only occasional meetings. Then Bruce had received a promotion which made the Teesside posting permanent, and while he continued to write of setting a wedding date and doing some house-hunting, Frances’s letters began to cool, until the day one arrived informing him that she wanted to break off the engagement altogether. She had talked it over with her mother, Frances wrote, and decided