The Skeleton Tree by Diane Janes (reading women TXT) 📕

daughter while Tara continued to eat her prawn curry, chewing steadily, regarding Wendy with thinly disguised contempt.

‘Tara …’ Wendy began at last. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Then I suggest you don’t say anything.’ Tara remained cool as the proverbial cucumber. ‘If I was you, I’d focus on your own problems in that department and leave me alone.’

‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

‘These rooms aren’t soundproofed, you know. If you scream at someone when you’re in here, anyone who happens to be coming down the stairs can hear every word.’

Wendy looked down at her plate. The food she had eaten seemed to be churning in her stomach, trying to force its way back up her throat. She stood up slowly and walked across to the pedal bin, which she opened with her foot, slowly scraping the mostly uneaten curry downwards, so that it fell into the liner on top of a muddle of onion skins and tea bags. She would not cry. She kept her back to Tara while she put her scraped plate into the dishwasher, then got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water at the kitchen sink. She must not cry. She heard the scrape on the floor as Tara got up from the table and left the room. Wendy turned to see that her daughter must have continued to eat in silence, for her plate was empty.

During the next forty-eight hours, Wendy replayed their conversation again and again. This was what things had come to. Her family life was breaking apart. But it could be fixed. She had to believe that it could all be fixed, starting with Bruce.

When the children scrambled out of the car on Monday afternoon, she was waiting for them on the front step. Jamie returned her hug with his usual exuberance and hurled himself into the house and up the stairs. Katie, on the other hand, seemed uncharacteristically reluctant.

‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ Wendy asked.

‘Nothing.’ Katie obliged with a kiss, but sidled into the house without meeting Wendy’s eye.

‘What’s wrong with Katie?’ she asked as Bruce approached, carrying the children’s bags, which he had paused to retrieve from the boot.

‘Nothing that I know of.’ He bent forward and pecked her on the cheek, in a gesture as perfunctory as Katie’s had been.

‘She’s not been in trouble, has she?’

‘Katie? No. I expect she’s just having one of her funny moods. You know Katie.’

‘I do … and she doesn’t have funny moods for nothing.’

‘Oh, come on … Katie’s capable of throwing a wobbler over all sorts of things. We saw a dead badger run over in the road earlier. It might have been that. If I was you, I’d ignore her and wait until she snaps out of it. Quizzing her will only make it worse.’

‘There haven’t been any more people coming to look at the house,’ Wendy said, as she stood aside to let Bruce pass and then followed him down the hall. ‘I think we should give up on trying to sell independently. Let’s just cut our losses and do a part-exchange on a new house, like you suggested in the first place. We can afford to do it and at least it would mean we were all properly together again, the way we should be.’

He didn’t answer immediately. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell you what, let’s just give it until the kids break up for the summer holidays. That’s barely six or seven weeks away. Shall I take these bags straight upstairs, or do you want them down here? Jamie’s is mostly stuff for the washing machine.’

Sometimes when I look back on those things that happened so many years ago, it’s hard to be sure how much of it was real. The house is real all right. The house is always there. Still standing. Solid. Permanent. Much harder to destroy a house than to destroy a life. I thought of burning the bloody place down once … but of course I couldn’t.

TWELVE

June 1981

Though Wendy had wasted no time in conveying the information about the murder of Edward Graves to Joan on the telephone, she had not actually seen her since their afternoon with Peggy Disberry so, feeling rather guilty about unreciprocated hospitality, she invited Joan to supper. She fed the younger children early (with her exams finished, Tara had already decamped to her father’s house in Solihull) and laid the table in the dining room for herself and her guest with a vase of flowers. They had three courses, including a lemon mousse dessert that she was rather proud of, decorated with tiny rosettes of piped whipped cream. Joan appeared to thoroughly enjoy herself, regaling Wendy with the adventures she had shared with George, whose work as an engineer had taken them to almost every continent.

‘I always went along,’ Joan said. ‘It might have been different, I suppose, if we’d had children, but as it was only the two of us, we could be flexible. We scarcely had what you could call a permanent home in almost thirty years. The place we stayed longest was Oakville in Ontario. We had a lovely house there. And the Canadians are such lovely people. George used to say that I could make a home anywhere, given twenty-four hours, but then he never really cared very much where he was, so long as we had a bottle of gin and his gramophone. He loved Beethoven. The Emperor, the Pastoral Symphony … I think he’d have been happy sitting on a packing case, so long as we got the gin flowing and the gramophone records on.’ She laughed indulgently, as if contemplating the foibles of a mischievous toddler.

‘The house in Oakville was one of the few where I had time to plant things in the garden and see them come up. Our garden in Surat was a marvel, but sadly we were only there for four months …’

They took their coffee into the sitting room, where Wendy continued