The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  And when my parents came to stay, and I overheard my mum saying to Sam, ‘Oh aren’t you lucky having all these fields to play in? That’s where a boy should be: outside, running around,’ it validated what we had done. It made it seem so right. The same when we walked through the woods with David’s sister Nicola and her husband Tom and their kids, with Sam and Ella leading the way, showing off to their cousins the giant tree with the foxes’ lair burrowed under it, and the little stream gurgling out from under the stones in the bridleway. Then, too, I felt that everything really was good with our world.

  People drift off, though, over time. They find it harder to get away. Not family of course, but friends. People like Karen and Ed; they are now names inside a Christmas card. We’d made the break: what more could I expect?

  The thing about moving your life, as we had done, is that you must move it in its entirety. You cannot look back. You cannot do it in half measures, keeping an open door. It will never work if you try to do that.

  SEVEN

  Yet there were times during that first year that I felt myself to be very much on trial. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I was aware of the eyes upon me when I walked through town to do my shopping or approached the school gates, all those people looking at me, waiting to see me fail. I wonder if it is a peculiarly British thing, that desire to see others fall flat on their face, but it is there all right; that ‘who do you think you are?’ attitude directed towards anyone who dares to attempt to do something different with their lives, the hand-rubbing delight when it all goes wrong.

  I’m sure no one meant me malice as such. I was more of an object of sport. ‘How are you finding it here?’ people would ask me in a perfectly friendly manner, but they’d follow their enquiry with ‘Bit different from London, isn’t it?’ or ‘Do you think you’ll be staying?’

  Once, I’d had what I thought was a really successful chat with two women outside Ella’s school one afternoon, talking about all the usual school-mum things from class cake sales to the stress of the morning rush. I even had them laughing, though I can’t remember what about now. But when I walked away from them to meet Ella I couldn’t help overhearing one of them saying to the others, ‘How long do you think she’ll last?’

  These things just made me try harder. I thought of it as a bit like joining a club; the initiation period, if you like. Pass that and you’re in.

  I remember a particular conversation with Melanie, at my house, one Friday evening over a bottle of wine. I must have been complaining about David getting home so late every night, and she said to me, ‘What exactly does your David do in London?’

  ‘He works for a magazine company,’ I said, and I named it, expecting to see recognition in her eyes. Everyone had heard of it. But Melanie’s eyes gave nothing away. ‘He’s the new-business manager,’ I said, ‘which is sort of marketing. They’re based in Soho. I used to work there too, once.’

  Melanie drank down the last of her wine, watching me levelly over the rim of her glass. She said nothing. The truth is, I had expected her to be at least a little impressed by all this, and the fact that she clearly wasn’t threw me; it made me work all the harder.

  ‘I didn’t work in marketing, though,’ I said quickly. ‘I was a designer.’

  ‘You told me before that you were an artist,’ she said and I immediately felt as if I was being picked up for boasting, which I hadn’t meant to do at all. But those magazine days were a big part of my life and at times I missed them hugely. I didn’t want to forget them and have them shunted into the distant past of life before children. Sometimes I felt envious, resentful even, that David was still so much in that world whereas for me it had ended years ago.

  ‘Still,’ I said, putting myself down before she could, ‘the only painting I get to do these days is decorating the house.’

  ‘It’s a nice house,’ Melanie said. ‘Marketing managers must earn a lot of money.’

  Was that a dig? I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Not enough to buy a decent house in London,’ I said.

  ‘Is that why you moved here?’

  ‘Well, and for the schools,’ I said. ‘And the space. Just to find a better life.’

  Melanie laughed. ‘Well let me know if you find it,’ she said.

  Nothing impressed Melanie. That was one of the things that I liked about her, most of the time. Other times I didn’t like it quite so much; it unnerved me. I always had the feeling she could see straight through me. Still, I was certainly in no position to take offence at anything Melanie said.

  It was thanks to Melanie that I became friendly with a few other people. It would have taken me an awful lot longer on my own, had I ever managed it at all. I couldn’t get used to the sheer strangeness of having everyone spread out so far and wide. In London my friends had all been a quick walk or drive or train ride away; to reach them was fast, safe and street-lit. The prospect of driving for twenty minutes or so along pitch-black deserted roads on my own was as great a deterrent for a night out as I could ever imagine. But Melanie would have none of it.

  ‘You’ve got to come,’ she insisted, when now and again there was a school mums’ night out. If ever I objected on the grounds that I couldn’t leave the children she’d send Jake out, often with Kelly, to babysit. She had no worries about leaving Max and Abbie alone, but then they were in the town, and Max was a whole nine months older than my Sam. And on the Friday of the Renfree Park quiz night she got Jake to pick me up in her car and drive me home again afterwards while Kelly stayed with my children, so that I didn’t have to drive and could therefore have a drink. That night felt like a huge step forward to me, laughing with the others over the absurdity of the questions and our combined lack of general knowledge. On our team we had Lisa Staples, whose son Will was in Sam’s class, and Melanie’s friends Angie and John, and another couple whose names I forget now, and we all drank far too much wine. It was just a shame that David couldn’t get home in time to come too.

  It was Melanie who suggested I should offer to go into Ella’s school, to help with art. Melanie knew everything that was going on in both schools; she made it her business. News never came to Melanie second-hand.

  ‘Put your art to some good use,’ she said. ‘They’re crying out for help.’

  And I loved it; sitting with the children, showing them different techniques using different materials and helping them to develop their skills. It was infinitely more rewarding than making those cards at home on my own, cards which cost almost as much to produce as I could ever make by selling them. And as Melanie pointed out, where would I sell my cards around here? Besides, going into Ella’s school once a week made me feel part of the community, and less like ‘that woman from London’.

  I embraced my new life with enthusiasm, and integral to it all was Melanie. Sometimes, especially on all those long dark nights waiting for David to come home, I thanked God that I had met her. Because how lonely would I have been stuck out here, in our house miles from everywhere, had I not?

  I hardly ever saw David during the week. The times he managed to leave work in time to catch the 7.20 train from Paddington were all too rare now, and most nights we were all in bed asleep before he got home. It seemed there was always some reason for him to stay late at the office, work to finish, meetings to be had.

  Things were harder these days; in these tough economic times the magazine world was suffering. There were redundancies already announced, and more on the way. The fear of this kept him awake at night, and had him counting the cost of our mortgage. The stress of the long journey added to the stresses of work; it became a constant issue, wearing him down.

  ‘Couldn’t you just change jobs?’ I said to him once, trying to be helpful. ‘Find something closer to home.’

  But he said, ‘I can’t just change jobs. What would I do out here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure you’d find something. And you could spend more time at home then, and less time travelling.’ />
  He looked at me incredulously. And he said, ‘Be realistic, Jane. How many marketing agencies or publishing houses do you suppose there are scattered around these fields?’

  I flinched when he said that. Out here. These fields. That was how he’d started referring to this place that we both, once, so loved.

  When we first moved here, the weekends were our focus; the time we would be together as a family. I shopped ahead, and I tidied the house so it would be lovely for all of us. I prepared for each weekend as if for a holiday, planning long walks through the woods with the children, and romantic evenings, just the two of us, snuggled up by the fire. All week, my hopes were raised; the children’s too. We lived for the weekends, back then.

  The children missed their dad. If they saw him at all in the week it was by accident: a nocturnal meeting on the landing on the way to the bathroom; a glimpse of him cursing outside on a black morning, trying to start the car. When they complained that he was never there I’d say, as though it was Christmas coming and not just another weekend, ‘Soon be here now. Not long to go.’ We’d count down the days, starting with each miserable Monday. Only four/three/two more to go.

  But the expectation, month in, month out, became too much; the intensity somehow crippling. It rendered the children gauche. They’d be too boisterous, too shrill in their excitement, clambering all over David when he was tired, fighting for his attention. He’d snap at them and they’d retreat, wounded, like actors off a stage.

  ‘Just give me a minute,’ he’d say, guilty then. But what use was a minute to Sam and Ella, who’d waited all week just to see him?

  I missed him too. I missed the closeness we used to have; the chats late into the night. He slept beside me but I hardly ever saw him awake. There is something odd, something invasive about having a person creep into your bed at night and then out of it again in the morning, ghost-like, without you even knowing they are there, even if that person is your husband. It made me cool towards him. I missed the affection, the closeness, of falling asleep in his arms. Most nights he saw me sleeping, naked, vulnerable. I saw him not at all.

  On the rare occasions that I did still wait up for him he would come in smelling of the train and the city – a smell both familiar and alien to me now – and I’d see him moving about my kitchen in his suit, still a part of the world I had left behind, and he seemed like a stranger. At times I felt awkward in his presence. It was too difficult to keep adjusting, and adjusting back again. By the weekend I’d have a thousand things I wanted to talk to him about, just little snippets stored up through the week that I wanted to pass on, or gossip to share, but when it came to it I found myself oddly silent. He was too tired; too preoccupied with his own concerns. Some weekends we’d end up barely talking at all, our time snatched away before we had the chance to properly reconnect.

  EIGHT

  Our first winter here the worst of the weather came in the form of rain and sleet and fog, bad enough to deal with on dark country roads, but last year it snowed, hard. The first fall came one night in mid-December, and so tenderly I look back and see my children yelping with delight in the morning, hurling themselves out into the fairytale whiteness of an untouched, blanketed day. Theirs were not just the first footprints crunching into the snow down our lane, they were the only footprints. Ella stamped out her name; Sam ran in random circles, shaking off the constraints of adolescence, and finally throwing himself to the ground and rolling like a puppy. They climbed the hill, with much difficulty, and skidded back down again, using the dustbin lids as sledges, the pitch of their voices so excited, so full of delight, knifing through the stillness. They had never seen snow on such a scale before. There was no chance of school, no chance of going anywhere in the car. For them it was wonderful.

  But not for David.

  Doggedly, he got up at the crack of dawn as usual while the snow was still falling, went out to get the spade from the garden shed, and tried to clear the area beside the house where the cars were parked. I watched him from our bedroom window. With futile, angry determination he shovelled the snow away from the front wheels of the Renault, trying to dig a path down onto the road, while the flakes kept on falling, settling on him, and still settling, almost as fast as he cleared it, on the ground. He looked so comical with snow all over his head and his shoulders, one man and his spade against nature. Eventually he flung the spade down to the side and stood there, defeated, just staring out at the snow. Then he got in the car and started it, the engine juddering coldly, unwillingly; the sound so at odds with the stillness of the morning. He got back out, wiped the snow off the windows, then got in again, and, incredibly, started rolling the car down onto the road. I watched this with disbelief. He so obviously wouldn’t get very far. As well as our drive, he would have to clear the lane, and all the roads beyond.

  He made it perhaps five hundred yards up the lane. Then perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, he slid the car to the side of the road, right up into the bushes. And there he left it. I watched him get out of the car, slam the door, and start crunching his way back to the house. I ran downstairs to meet him.

  ‘We should have got a four-wheel drive,’ he snapped at me, forgetting he hadn’t wanted to get a second car at all. ‘Why didn’t we get a four-wheel drive?’

  He stamped the snow off his shoes, shook it off his head.

  I put my hand on his arm and wiped the snow from his coat. ‘There’s no point in trying to go anywhere in this,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we just go back to bed?’

  ‘I can’t go back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get to work somehow. I’ve got a big meeting today.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I doubt if the trains will be running anyway.’

  David stared out at the snow, his face tight with frustration. ‘God,’ he said. ‘This is impossible.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Can’t you just stay at home and enjoy it?’ I said. ‘It’s only one day.’

  But it wasn’t one day, it was several. Each day, with increasing agitation, David got up and walked down the lane, inspecting the road. The snow had fallen a good ten inches deep, and it was frozen solid. It would be madness to try and drive anywhere. It was fine for me and the children; we all thought it was huge fun, setting off on expeditions across white, untrodden fields to the village to buy provisions, like explorers across the Antarctic. We really loved it. But for David it was hell. I did understand his anxiety. His is the kind of profession where it is important to be seen, more so than ever these days. Be missing from your desk too long and there is always the danger that someone else might fill your place. He worked from home as much as he could, using the computer and the phone and getting irritated if anyone accidentally interrupted him with their presence, but it wasn’t the same as being there in the office.

  And the novelty of having him at home quickly wore off when he was so irritable and on edge all the time. When he wasn’t working he prowled around the house as though caged, or stood outside just staring up the lane at the snow, as if willing it to disappear.

  I felt blamed in some way, as if it was my fault that it had snowed; as if it was my fault that he was stuck at home, trapped. After all, although he never quite spelled it out, it had been my idea to move here.

  After the snow came the ice, and in many ways that was so much worse. The main roads were pretty much clear but the smaller roads, such as the roads around our house, were treacherous. Between our house and the main road were a good three miles of twisting, narrow, unlit lanes made deadly by black ice, especially early in the morning and late at night. When I went out, I drove at a crawl, but David, of course, was in a hurry every morning, rushing to catch that train. I’d listen to him leave, to the car disappearing, too fast, up the road and my heart would tense, and stay tense all day. I worried about him getting to the station in the morning, and I worried about him again coming home at night, and I assume that he worried about me, too, driving the children back and forth to school. Yet when I spo
ke to him at work, that concern did not properly manifest itself. Our conversations felt distant, perfunctory, like him, back there in the land of the sharp-suited marketing man, the land that I had long left behind. He sounded a million miles away. Down the phone I could hear the background throb of the office; the occasional raised voice; laughter. Sometimes he would have to break off from me, to speak to someone else. And when I put the phone back down after saying goodbye, the silence of my home slapped against me, thick in my ears.

  Several times, that winter, David couldn’t get home at all.

  The snow had spread from us to London and the trains were running a reduced service, with frequent cancellations. He did get to work, eventually, but then he couldn’t make it home again.

  The first time, he phoned me from Paddington.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said straight away, shouting over the background noise of the station. ‘There are no more bloody trains.’

  I did believe it. It had only been a matter of time till this happened, in weather like this. When we lived in London, the mere possibility of snow would disrupt the trains. Of course it would happen, living out here. ‘Don’t go in,’ I’d said. ‘You’ll spend most of the day travelling. And what if you can’t get home again? Work at home. You’ve got to.’

  But oh no. David had to struggle on in to the office; a soldier in the field of marketing.

  I said nothing. What could I say, to make things any better?

  ‘Now what the hell am I going to do?’ David shouted down the phone and I could hear the anguish, the utter frustration in his voice. ‘I don’t fucking believe this.’

  He spent that night in the office, sleeping on a sofa in HR. I do believe this to be true. He was so angry, so ratty and unshaven when he got home the next night, that it couldn’t really have been otherwise.

  It happened a few more times over the course of that winter; more bad weather, more cancelled trains. The strain it put on David was unbearable; like the strain it put on us.