The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  The second time it happened, he managed to get a room in a hotel near the station, but it was money we could ill afford. And he had no spare clothes with him, and no razor. ‘I go to work in the morning and I don’t know if I’m going to get home,’ he ranted on the phone to me. ‘I can’t do this, Jane.’

  And yet he’d no choice. It happened again, and again.

  He started talking about renting a flat, in London. At weekends he’d sit at the computer, scrolling through the internet looking at grotty little bedsits and studios. But we had no money for renting flats, and even the cheapest offerings in London were extortionate. The frustration made him angry. He sat there, picking over the details of tiny, bleak rooms in tower blocks, or above takeaways in grim depressing streets, snapping, ‘For God’s sake!’ and, ‘This is ridiculous!’ Words bitten into the air in desperation.

  Had we left our lovely part of London for him to have to go back and live in a soulless damp cell in some godforsaken post code with drug dealers for neighbours? This is what he said. Did he work like a dog to live like a dog too? Was that part of this country dream?

  The idea of him renting a flat in London was abhorrent to me. It was a step on the slippery slope, a dangerous separation. I couldn’t bear the thought of David becoming one of those men that stayed in the city all week while we, the family, resided elsewhere. That had never been part of our plan. Of course I felt bad that his journey was so hard and his day often hideously long, but wasn’t it worth it for us to be together, as a family? Wasn’t it worth it, for us all to be able to live out here?

  ‘I’m trapped, Jane,’ he said. ‘I can’t see any other way to make this work.’

  ‘It’s down to us to make it work,’ I said.

  But he said, ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. I can’t bear the constant stress hanging over me, not knowing if I’ll get into work, not knowing when, or if, I’ll get home again.’

  ‘It was only a few times,’ I said. ‘When it snowed.’

  ‘And what about next winter, if it snows again? What about leaves on the line in the autumn, or any other disruption? It was ridiculous to think I could commute from here. What about the evenings I have to stay late for something – I can’t be watching the clock, thinking I’ve got to leave to make the train. How unprofessional do you think that looks?’

  ‘We’d never see you,’ I said simply.

  And he said, ‘You don’t see me very much now.’

  It seemed to be all we talked about at weekends, now, and if he wasn’t talking about it he was thinking about it. The subject hung over us like a persistent, lowering cloud.

  I remember one Saturday morning we’d been invited along to the stables with the other parents for a show day; Ella was so excited but nervous too, chattering away in the back of the car all the way there. It had been raining solidly the last few days but at last a pale sun was slanting its way through the clouds. The field was pretty much waterlogged but the show went ahead anyway; no one was put off by a bit of mud around here. We watched Ella, her cheeks as red as apples, trotting around the field on her pony. Well, David watched Ella, and I watched him. I saw the wistfulness, like pain, cutting tight across his brow.

  ‘She would never have done this if we’d stayed in London,’ I said.

  He said, ‘I know.’

  ‘This is why we moved here,’ I said. ‘For things like this.’

  Again he said, ‘I know.’ Still without looking at me he put his arm around my shoulder, and squeezed.

  One evening during the long, dreary months before spring started lightening up the days David and I were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing our supper and drinking our wine. It was a Saturday night; Max and Abbie were staying over and the children were all in the den, watching a film. Outside there was the best part of a storm going on, the rain battering against the windows and streaming through the gap in the drainpipe, the wind rattling the guttering above. That drainpipe would need fixing tomorrow; another task to be done.

  ‘Do you regret moving here?’ I said suddenly. Sometimes, when I drink a lot of wine, sorrow sweeps down on me and makes me pick at my mental sores. It makes me say things I know I’ll regret but can’t keep inside.

  ‘Oh, Jane,’ he said.

  ‘Do you? I want to know.’

  But David knew, as I knew, that I was fishing for answers that I didn’t want to hear. He looked at me, carefully, measuring his response.

  Before he could answer I said, ‘I think you do. I think you can’t wait to get away.’

  ‘Jane, don’t be like this,’ he said.

  ‘All you ever talk about is getting a flat, and how terrible your journey is.’

  ‘My journey is terrible. That’s why I want to get a flat, not to get away from you.’

  ‘But then you’d be one of those awful people who live in London all week and treat the country as some sort of holiday laid on, to just dip in and out of.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes you would. You’d swan in at the weekend like a stranger. And what if there was an emergency? What if we needed you?’

  ‘Look it was just an idea,’ he said. ‘We probably can’t afford it any way.’

  ‘Of course we can’t afford it. So why do you have to keep talking about it all the time? Do you do it just to make me feel bad?’

  It was the wine that made me so defensive. That, and fear.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said stiltedly. ‘I won’t talk about it again if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. And we sat there in silence for a moment, but the issue of the flat still remained, like an elephant in the room.

  ‘So do you regret moving here?’ I asked again, unable to let it go.

  ‘I do not regret moving here,’ David said guardedly. ‘But I’m not sure I would have agreed to it if I’d known quite what it would entail.’

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Tears sprang into my eyes instantly, as quick as the flick of a switch.

  ‘We used to love coming here, remember? All those weekends we used to visit and imagine what it would be like to live here. We dreamed about it, remember?’ My voice rose, too sharp, too full of regret.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I remember.’

  David didn’t get a flat in London, but he did come to some arrangement with a colleague. This colleague lived not far from the office and had a room going spare. It made no odds to him if David crashed there from time to time.

  How easy it was then, how convenient: late meetings, drinks after work, just a night, here and there. I do not remember every individual reason, I just know that every time David had to stay in London it felt, to me, like a severing. Whereas before we were undoubtedly stretched too thin, and too taut, now we were starting to tear.

  Whatever happened to him rushing to catch the 7.20 train, or even the 6.20, to come speeding back to the love of his family, waiting for him here in our country escape? Even if that train was cancelled, couldn’t he just get the next one, or find some other way to get home to us? Couldn’t he at least try, or make it feel, to me, as if he tried? Part of me, a very deep, very fundamental part of me, wanted David to race over hot coals to be with me. I wanted him to run to the ends of the earth, further; after all, he would have done, once upon a time.

  I could sense him moving away from me, and as I came to feel deserted, I in turn rejected him.

  I stopped including him in our plans for the weekend. On Saturday mornings when David wanted to lie in bed, I would just get up and out, on with my day, taking Ella to the stables, perhaps dropping Sam in town to meet up with Max and some other boys from school. They’d started going to the rec near the school to play football; it had become a regular thing. And after I picked up Ella again we’d go back into town and do some shopping at the market. She and I might stop at the tea room, or we’d go round to Melanie’s for lunch, to wait for Sam. Quite often, the three of us would be gone for most of the day.

  And when
we got back home again David would be in the garden or at the door, looking out for us. A little agitated perhaps; missing us. And that is what I wanted, that he should miss us; that he should be the one stuck at home waiting for us, for a change, instead of it being forever the other way around.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he’d say. ‘You’ve been gone for ages.’

  ‘Just into town,’ I’d coolly reply. ‘You were tired. I thought you wanted to rest.’

  He was anxious to see his children at the weekends, but as they became busier with their own lives here, they were no longer quite so desperate to see him. I manipulated this. I left him out of things.

  I thought all I wanted was for him to miss us, but looking back I see that I just pushed him away.

  NINE

  My mother’s birthday is in April, and last year I arranged to meet her in London for a day, to have lunch and go shopping. It was a novelty for me as much as her, something we’d never done together before. But we didn’t get to see each other very often, now. Cambridge had proved to be more of a journey, for all of us, than we’d hoped.

  I dropped Sam and Ella at school, and went straight to the station. Melanie was going to pick Ella up for me later, and look after the children at her house until I got back. There was no hurry; I could take all day.

  ‘Stay all evening if you like,’ she’d said when I asked her. ‘You could go and meet your husband. Surprise him. Go and have dinner somewhere nice.’

  She said this to be kind. She knew I hadn’t even told David I was going. I’d told her that he and I had had a row at the weekend, as we seemed to too often these days, all the tensions between us slammed together into two short days and overflowing. The trouble with not seeing each other properly all week was that there was no time to make it up again, and no time just to be at ease with each other, to be close and familiar. Any bad atmosphere on a Sunday night would still be there the following weekend, however suppressed. I cannot even remember what that particular argument was about now, but the result was that I didn’t tell David I was going to London. For him it was just another Tuesday, up and out the door.

  I saw his car in the station car park when I parked mine. How strange it seemed, buying my ticket from the machine and then standing on that little platform, knowing that David had been standing there earlier that day, as he had done so now on so very many days. In nearly two years of living here this was the first time that I had ever caught the train. I even had to check which side of the track was the right direction for London.

  I boarded the train and sat by the window, staring out at the countryside whizzing by. Fields, trees, farm buildings and here and there the ugly blemish of a rail-side scrap yard flashed past me, like markers along the way. You see the best of the countryside, and the worst of it, from the window of a moving train. I tried to recognize the view; to become familiar with it, but I felt strangely disorientated. The last train I’d been on was a packed commuter train within London; now I was going into London, from this very different place. It made me aware of how far away I had moved, both physically in terms of location, and within myself, too. And I started thinking back to when David and I used to come here for weekends and stay in our favourite hotel. And about how we used to walk for miles and talk and dream. It was a long time since David and I had been off on our own on one of those long, rambling walks. And these days we talked about practicalities when we ever had the time to talk at all, not what ifs. For all that we had gained in moving out here, we’d lost something too. And there is the irony. We’d lost our dream through the living of it. And then what do you do? What do you talk about? What fills the space in your head and your heart where your dream used to be?

  I met my mother off the Cambridge train at King’s Cross, so that she didn’t have to negotiate the underground on her own. Yet after all this time I too felt a little uncomfortable, rushing up and down those escalators, navigating my way through the crowds. I could feel my heartbeat picking up and sweat prickling the back of my head as people jostled past me, hurrying me along. I’d forgotten just how crowded it could get. For years this had been normal for me; the rush and the shove of all these people. Not so very long ago I had loved the buzz of the city; I had been a part of it. Now as the crowds pushed past me I felt stuck in slow motion, left behind.

  We went to Oxford Street, starting at Selfridges and then moving along to John Lewis, where my mother felt more at home. After browsing around the security of women’s wear for an hour or so we squeezed back out through the crowds, and found a café down a side road near Marylebone High Street to have lunch.

  ‘This has all changed since I was last here,’ my mother said. ‘Mind you, that must be getting on for twenty years. I don’t think I’ve been down here since we came to choose your wedding dress.’

  I smiled. ‘That would be eighteen years then,’ I said. ‘It’s changed since I was here last, too.’

  ‘I do find it tiring in those shops, though,’ she said. ‘It’s always so hot. And far too busy.’

  ‘Perhaps we should stick to the side roads. It’s lovely just here.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s all very expensive, though, isn’t it?’ She poked at her chicken salad with her fork, and whispered rather loudly, ‘You know I could have made this at home for less than a quarter of the price.’

  ‘That’s not the point, though,’ I said. ‘The point is it’s your birthday.’

  She asked about the children, so eager to know every detail. How was Sam doing at school, and Ella? Had Sam grown since she saw him at Easter, because my goodness hadn’t he shot up then! And Ella; was she still hoping to have her own horse one day?

  ‘Such a lovely life they have,’ she said. ‘So much better to bring children up in the country air.’

  She asked after David too. ‘How is he finding the commuting?’ she said. ‘Is he still coming home so late?’

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ I said, not really wanting to talk about it.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure your father could have coped with a journey like that. He was home for his dinner at half past six most nights. Still, things change, I suppose. It’s very good of David to make that sacrifice for his family.’

  I think perhaps we both pretended to enjoy the day more than we really did. My mother because she had never really liked London, and me because being there highlighted both what I had left behind and the change in me. When I lived in London I’d have dashed around those shops, as impatient as the next person. Now I felt like a tourist, and I minded that. I felt like I’d lost my right to be there; my sense of ownership had gone and in its place was an unwelcome timidity. I found myself speaking almost apologetically to the waiter at lunch and to staff in the shops, saying ‘excuse me’ too often, too grateful for being served. Several times, walking along the street, I bumped shoulders with someone hurrying past the other way. My mother and I seemed to block the pavement, moving slowly along like people from another world.

  By three o’clock she was anxious to get home to Cambridge.

  ‘Well,’ she said when we were back at King’s Cross. ‘That was a lovely day.’ She could relax now that she was going home. ‘Now you take care getting back,’ she said. ‘Ring me when you get home. And give my love to the children, and to David. Tell the children I will see them very soon. And Grandpa sends his love.’

  I watched her bustling down the platform to her train, anxious to be gone, and I felt overwhelmed with sadness. My mother would so much rather have visited us all, at home, where she would have spent time with my children, and travelled in the car beside my father. But such visits were confined to school holidays now, and as my parents grew older it would become harder still. I missed my parents these days in a way that I hadn’t when I was younger. When I lived in London I was too busy even to think about them most of the time.

  But now there was often too much time, and too much space.

  I checked my watch, making a thing of it, trying to look a
s if I needed to be somewhere. It wasn’t even half-past three yet. I couldn’t face going back around the shops on my own, but it was far too early to go home. Ridiculously, the thought of Melanie seeing me come back so soon made me feel obliged to stay in London. I could just picture her raised eyebrows, her knowing look. ‘Go and see your husband,’ she’d said, and of course I should do that, but in the middle of the afternoon?

  I wandered out of the station thinking I’d get a coffee somewhere but there were no pretty side streets here, no fancy cafés as far as I could see. I ended up in a sandwich bar that was filled with travellers killing time between trains. But that was OK; I too was a traveller filling time.

  I thought about phoning David while I scalded my mouth on too-hot coffee, and then I thought of all the reasons why it would be better not to. He might be in a meeting; I might need to leave a message. What would I say then? I should have told him I was coming to London; it seemed so petty now that I hadn’t. He might not want to see me; he might be too busy. ‘But if I’d known you were coming . . .’ he might say.

  No; far better, as Melanie had said, to just turn up and surprise him.

  It did, I have to say here, occur to me as wrong that I would even think twice about phoning or stopping by to see my own husband, yet I was struck by a sudden loss of confidence. Actually, not so sudden; I’d been aware of it all day. I felt out of place, so different from the last time I had been there, and it was the thought of David seeing that difference that worried me.

  For my day in London I’d made a bit of an effort; it was mild for April and I’d put on a skirt that I’d bought from one of the catalogues that came through the post, with just a long cardigan over the top. These clothes would have passed for quite smart the way I lived now. Normally, at home, I went around in jeans and a sweatshirt; there were no shops to buy anything else, and no need to dress up. How ridiculous would I look traipsing across the fields in the latest fashions anyway? Things were more practical in the country, and I liked it that way.