by Diane Janes
‘I’m sure Marcus could never bring himself to live in such an ugly house,’ a woman in a duffel coat and boots laced to the knee was telling her companion.
‘Dreadful old place,’ declared a man in a check jacket. ‘The best thing they could do is demolish the whole thing. You’d get half-a-dozen starter-homes in this plot, if you planned them running sideways from the road.’
‘Decrepit is the word I would use, dear.’ A woman in pale green patent shoes had just emerged from the back door and was picking her way across the cobbles, her face a study in disgust.
It isn’t fair, Wendy thought. I’m the one who really loves it, but I can’t have it.
At teatime that day, the rest of the family took very little interest in Wendy’s account of her visit to The Ashes. Bruce uh-huhhed a couple of times, before Tara jumped in to change the subject. In spite of their lack of encouragement, Wendy couldn’t get the house out of her mind, and when she and Bruce climbed into bed that night, she said wistfully, ‘You should have seen the size of the biggest bedroom. We could have easily fitted a king-size bed in there.’
‘I know we need to look for somewhere with a bit more space,’ Bruce said, ‘but are you really that unhappy here?’ He sounded puzzled, even a little anxious.
‘No, no, of course not. It’s just a lovely house, that’s all. I’ve always felt like it was my special house. My dream house, I suppose.’
‘Well, OK … But you know we couldn’t ever afford to buy it?’
‘Of course I know that.’
‘Then … don’t you think it’s a bit weird to keep going on about it?’
‘I’m not going on about it. I was just interested to see inside, that’s all.’
There was a pause before he spoke again. ‘And you’re not … unhappy?’
‘I’m perfectly happy. I couldn’t be happier.’
‘You’re not bored? Being at home all day?’
‘I don’t have time to be bored. I’ve always got loads to do.’
‘Good. That’s OK then.’ He kissed her and she kissed him back. It was a familiar preamble to love-making, but that night Bruce turned over and went to sleep, leaving her wakefully pondering her weight gain, her approaching fortieth birthday, and the rather odd way Bruce had asked about her state of happiness.
Why would he think she was unhappy? She had known happiness and unhappiness. She knew the difference now, even if she had once been mistaken. She had been much younger then. It had been easy to believe that happiness lay just where she expected to find it. Robert had been her childhood sweetheart. She couldn’t even recall a time when she hadn’t known him. People liked Robert. Older people approved of him. Her parents used to say things like, ‘Robert is terribly clever,’ as if being clever was something she ought to have been a little bit afraid of – and perhaps it was. Robert had taken her to the school dance and then to the pictures, after which it had been generally understood that they were going out together. There had been one long, glorious school summer holiday, with more visits to the pictures, and days out to Whitby and Scarborough, both easily accessible on the train from Middlesbrough and all financed by Robert’s Saturday job at the local greengrocers, and they had engaged in endless sessions of snogging on the sofa in her parents’ front room. By the time Robert left for university they were already engaged … but it was going to be a long engagement. ‘We are going to wait,’ they would tell people virtuously, as if by waiting they would be getting something better at 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 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 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 muc
h 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.
