The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  Yet how dowdy I suddenly felt, as so many people from so many countries dressed in so very many different styles rushed past me on my way back down to the tube. How dowdy, and how invisible. I’d worn comfy, flat shoes, so sensible for walking around town; women half my age and twice my height charged past me in heels the likes of which I have never worn. And I didn’t actually want to wear them – I just didn’t want to feel so . . . insignificant. The tube was crowded but I managed to get a seat. I tried not to stare at the people sitting opposite me so I looked past them at the window instead; at the blackness of the glass streaked with blue and white and orange as the lights in the tunnel whizzed by. And then I saw myself. At first, I didn’t realize it was me; I didn’t properly focus. There was just this ghostly haze, but then it took form; the pale face, dark-eyed, distorted like in a mirage; the shock of shortish, untamed, bleached-out hair. I had been absently staring for quite some time before I realized that I was seeing myself.

  Most of all it was the hair that shocked me.

  The last time I sat on a tube train – before Ella was born, before she took those scissors and so innocently lined them up within the length of my hair, and cut – my hair would have been the first thing that I saw reflected in any tube train window; in any window at all. Oh yes, I would have recognized myself then. Anyone would have known me back then, by my hair.

  After the disaster I tried to grow it back. Believe me, I tried. I missed it as much as if I’d had my face removed; my features all rubbed out. To me, my hair was my one defining feature.

  But it wouldn’t grow. It got as far as my shoulders, no more, then the ends split and broke off in a mass of rats’ tails. Eventually I gave up, and had it cut into a short, manageable bob, so much more practical, so much more sensible with the children my priority now. So much easier to look after; so very wash-and-go.

  I’d taken to bleaching my hair at home. Just some kit from the chemist, a little lightener, to brighten up the mouse; so much more convenient than trying to get to a hairdressers out where we lived. I’d thought it looked OK.

  And then I saw myself. Who was I trying to kid? And how did I ever think there was any merit in a hair cut that was wash-and-go?

  Sitting on that train I felt cheated.

  It was the discrepancy that shocked me most. You think you are one thing. You go about, falsely secure in the confines of your own making, blind. And then, so unexpectedly, you are tipped out of your comfort zone and forced to see. And what I saw, right at that moment, was a woman just over forty who was starting to let herself go.

  If I hadn’t been on a crowded train I would have cried. I wanted to cry. I wanted to grab back all those years that I’d so casually let filter by and be what I used to be; I wanted to be young, confident, oblivious. Failing that, I’d rather be walking across fields with the wind and the rain in my face, with no need to think about such things, no point in thinking about such things. I didn’t want to be here, in London, reminded.

  The magazine offices are in a large building just off Old Compton Street, a five-minute walk from Leicester Square tube. I remembered the way, easily enough. Just ten minutes, cutting through the side streets, and you could be in Covent Garden, at lunchtime, or for drinks after work. For me, that was the best bit about working here.

  I am actually three years older than David, and I started on the magazine before he did. I remember him, the new boy fresh out of university, squeaky clean in his brand new suit. I remember when we first got together, in a pub on Neal Street one Friday night after work; I remember the crush at the bar and the noise of all those people, and having to reach up to him on tiptoe to hear him speak. I remember his hand gently moving my hair away from my neck as he bent down to me; and his breath against my ear, sending goosebumps breaking out across my skin. And I remember the drunken kiss, outside, on the way back home.

  The office had been practically rebuilt since I last saw it. It now had a huge glass frontage, with revolving doors, through which an endless stream of trendy, young, creative types slipped seamlessly in and out. I watched them a while, from just across the street, and I seriously regretted my choice of clothing, particularly my sensible shoes. It had been hot on the underground, and I felt grubby from my day. I hoped my face wasn’t too shiny, but I’d no mirror in my bag with which to check.

  How silly that I should feel like this. David loved me for myself; that’s what I’d always believed. He’d love me if I was dressed in a sack. We were married, after all. He’d seen me giving birth; what difference would a bit of lipstick and mascara make after that?

  But as I stood before the unfamiliar office I found myself taunted by the memory of my younger self. I didn’t mind being small back then; I was cute, and I knew it. I flounced around with my long hair flowing behind me, letting the bangles on my wrists jangle like bells, forever announcing my approach. I had David wrapped around my little finger. Most of our courtship – for want of a better word – went on here, at work.

  I crossed over and pushed myself through those doors. The reception had been completely transformed since I worked here; I’d thought it plush back then but that was nothing to the way it looked now, all minimalist chic, a bank of steel-doored lifts ahead, a line of framed front pages of the various magazines on the wall to the left, and to the right the sweeping desk behind which sat an off-putting security guard and an even more intimidating, extremely pretty receptionist.

  But I was not to be deterred; I used to work here, after all.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to the receptionist. ‘I was hoping to see David Berry.’

  I smiled my brightest smile, and she smiled back, but not before I saw her eyes give me a quick, almost imperceptible once-over.

  ‘Is he expecting you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d surprise him. I’m his wife.’

  I saw her double-take, the surprise on her face. Was it really that shocking that I could be David Berry’s wife? Or was I just being paranoid, my own self-consciousness getting the better of me? I thought of David, waltzing into this building every morning in his smart suit with his hair all short and neat; I thought of what his colleagues saw of him and knew of him. He was a good-looking man, my husband; that woman behind the reception desk, every woman in the building for that matter, would no doubt have noticed that.

  I felt a needle of jealousy right under my ribs, sharp, unexpected. Still, he was married to me.

  The receptionist pressed some buttons, spoke into her headset, and then ignored me. I stood there, trying not to feel in the way, while people hurried past me on their way from the lifts to the door and vice versa, all of them looking straight out of the pages of the very magazines that they worked on.

  After a moment I said, ‘Shall I go up?’

  She looked at me as if she had forgotten I was there. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘He’s coming down.’

  And that annoyed me a little; as if I couldn’t be trusted to find my way up to the fourth floor where the marketing department was. I felt excluded, waiting down there, when I’d hoped to breeze into David’s office with a big smile, receive his warm, pleased-to-see-me kiss and perch myself jauntily on the edge of his desk. Just like I used to, all those years ago.

  The lift doors opened, and there he was.

  ‘Jane,’ he said straight away. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to see you,’ I said, pointing out the obvious.

  He looked confused. ‘Is it one of the children? Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, no they’re fine.’ I laughed a bright quick laugh, more for the benefit of the receptionist than him; she was watching us, clearly entertained. ‘I was in London for the day and I thought I’d surprise you.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. Just that.

  ‘I met my mother,’ I said. And I lied, ‘I thought I told you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, frowning. ‘No, you didn’t.’

  That receptionist was quite openly staring at us. I swear I hea
rd her snigger.

  ‘I thought you might show me your office,’ I said coyly, tilting my head slightly to one side, much the way that I used to do.

  But he said, ‘There’s a meeting going on up there at the moment. I came out when they said you were here. I thought something must have happened.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If you’d let me know you were coming I’d have – I don’t know – ’ He was anxious to get back to his meeting. He glanced at his watch, and mirroring his actions, I looked at mine. It was twenty past four.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It was a bit spur of the moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t ask you up for a coffee or anything.’

  ‘No. Well. Never mind. I’d better get back for the children anyway.’

  He smiled. ‘It was nice to see you,’ he said, so terribly polite.

  ‘It was nice to see you too.’

  ‘I don’t know how long this meeting will go on for but I’ll try and get back on the 7.20 train,’ he said, as if that was consolation, as if I thought for a moment he’d actually make it. These meetings, they go on and on. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  Back outside, I took a deep breath. I watched all those London people dashing about in their busy, London lives.

  What had I hoped for? That he’d just abandon his work and whisk me off somewhere in the middle of the afternoon?

  This was the real world.

  I thought about David on the train home. I couldn’t think about anything else.

  It was a long time since I had seen him in his work environment, and it had made me realize that I knew so little about his daily life these days, away from us. All I knew about life in that office in London was what I remembered from when I had worked there, nearly eleven years ago. In my head, the other people who worked alongside and around David were the same old people who had been there back then, but of course that wouldn’t be the case. Most of those people would have moved on by now, and still more would have joined and since left too, in their place. The chances are I wouldn’t have known anyone. I never kept in touch with anyone from work after I left; I was too busy with my children. And I knew that, certainly in my department, people came and went all the time. My memory was stuck in a time warp. The truth was I knew nothing about David’s working life. I didn’t even know the name of the colleague whose flat he sometimes stayed at.

  And yet I could have known. I really should have known. I should have asked him. But I realized then that I had stopped talking to David a long time ago.

  I stared out of that train window at the monotony of houses, trees, and fields flashing by, and I was struck by a wave of remorse. And worse than that: of uncertainty.

  Visiting him there at his office, it was I who was the misfit, and yet that was how I had come to view him these days at home. Inwardly, I had felt some perverse satisfaction at the sight of him getting things wrong with the children; getting the names of their new friends muddled; not knowing that Ella had been on a school trip to Bath; that Sam had moved up a set in maths. I had come to see it as his fault that he did not know all the little details of our daily lives – after all, he had chosen to remove himself even more from us by frequently staying in London. It wasn’t down to me to have to tell him everything, to fill in the gaps caused by his absence.

  I felt smug too when I watched him trying to horse around in the garden with Ella, insisting on giving her piggybacks when she was far too old now to want to play, or when he had to badger Sam to kick a ball with him, pleading, ‘Come on, Sam, I’ll be in goal.’ And Sam, whose football skills had improved no end under the tutelage of Max, would say, ‘Aw, Dad,’ and smack a ball straight past him, and laugh.

  Once, just recently, I caught him staring out the kitchen window at Sam and Ella as they played on the swing, Ella standing on the seat and Sam half-hanging by his hands from the top with his feet propped on the cross bar of the side frame. They were mucking around, taking it in turns to sing some daft rhyme, using words from a teenage language unknown to us.

  ‘They grow so fast,’ David said to me and there was a note of bewilderment in his voice, and of melancholy, as if it had happened overnight, as if he really hadn’t noticed before. ‘They’re my children,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think I don’t even know them.’

  What I should have done was wrapped my arms around him. I should have cuddled him and laughed it off, or given some reassurance. But instead I moved away from him in the kitchen. I slammed on a pan to start cooking supper.

  ‘Wonder whose fault that is?’ I said.

  I got back to Melanie’s at about a quarter to eight. I did think about going home first for a while to make it seem as if I’d stayed in London longer and had gone out with David after all. But what was the point of that, really? I have never been any good at lying, and Melanie was too sharp, too quick for me. She’d soon have it worked out, and then I’d have her contempt to contend with as well as her pity, and I couldn’t face that.

  Besides, I was tired. I wanted to gather up my children and go home.

  She opened the door to me and said, ‘I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.’

  ‘It was a long day,’ I said.

  The kids were still eating, munching on slices of pizza while they watched some American sitcom on TV. Sam, Ella and Abbie were squeezed onto the sofa. Max had got Jake’s mattress down even though Jake wasn’t there, and he was sprawled out on it, propped up on one elbow, legs stretched full-length and crossed at the ankles. I climbed over him and followed Melanie into the kitchen.

  As if knowing it was what I needed, she grabbed a glass off the draining board, opened the fridge and poured me some wine from the box she’d got wedged inside the door next to the milk.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and she poured another glass for herself. Then she opened the back door and we went out into her tiny yard, and sat down on the upturned metal buckets that she used for seats out there.

  ‘Well then?’ she asked, pointedly. ‘How was your day?

  ‘Fine,’ I said as casually as I could. ‘It was nice to see my mother.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Melanie said. It was quite cold out there now, and I pulled my cardigan closer around me, so avoiding the intensity of her stare. ‘Did you go and see David?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes I did,’ I said. ‘I felt a bit guilty because I dragged him out of a meeting.’

  ‘Did you go somewhere?’

  ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘He didn’t know how long his meeting would go on.’ This was the truth; I wasn’t just making excuses for David, but it did feel that way with Melanie’s calculating eyes fixed upon me.

  ‘Didn’t you want to wait for him till it had finished?’

  ‘I couldn’t really,’ I said. ‘I might have been hanging around for ages.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said again, but she didn’t look convinced. ‘So is he staying in London tonight?’

  ‘No, no, he’s coming home. Sometime.’

  ‘Shame you couldn’t have come home together then.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ To change the subject, I said, ‘Thanks for having Sam and Ella.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘That’s what friends are for.’ She sounded slightly hurt. She wanted me to talk more about David, but I couldn’t, not then. I felt too vulnerable, too exposed under her stare. And I knew she judged him harshly; she made little effort to hide it. Now she said, ‘What does your David do on the nights he stays in London?’

  ‘Oh you know,’ I said. ‘Meetings. Drinks with clients.’ I laughed, a little unsteadily. ‘It’s just the nature of the job.’

  ‘You want to watch him,’ she said. ‘You know what those city types are like.’ Then she laughed too, baring those teeth, sharp as a wolf’s. ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘You’re married to one.’

  I tried not to flinch when she said this. After all
, wasn’t any man working long hours in London a ‘type’? Any man with a long commute home, doing his best to get on in his career, doing his best for his family? And wasn’t any woman like me a type too, wanting to escape the city for a purer, simpler life in the country? We are all types, surely. Even Melanie, living her casual life on an income of peanuts, and having her dig at me.

  What happened to me could happen to anyone. Please bear that in mind, all you out there who would judge me.

  TEN

  I started thinking more and more about those precious weekends that David and I used to spend here at the hotel in the village, without the children. Away from the stresses and chores of everyday life, I saw the best of him, and he of me. No wonder we both loved it here so much. When we moved here, I’d expected it to be the same. I’d thought that the romance would come with us; that somehow we would escape the grind that any marriage must endure. It would be like living within a permanent romantic weekend; that’s what I believed, stupid, foolish me.

  We had not been away on a proper holiday, either with or without the children, since we moved here. Our holidays had all been taken up with other people coming to visit us or by going to visit family, or just with time spent at home working on the house. Besides, there was no spare money for holidays, not after doing up the house as we wanted; and installing the AGA and the wood-burning stove. And in some strange way, it felt almost disloyal to want to get away so soon, especially as the reality was that David spent so little of his time here anyway.

  And I couldn’t ask my parents to look after the children. When they came to stay they came to see all of us. And after they’d had to travel such a distance to be with us, we couldn’t then go off and leave them just with Sam and Ella; it would feel wrong. It would also give them reason to suspect that maybe all was not well, and I couldn’t bear to do that.

  They were so excited by our move to the country; my mother especially, even though it meant we were further away from them than we had been. In London, she had understood my need to get away now and again only too well; she couldn’t see why I had ever wanted to live there in the first place. But what would she think about us wanting to get away on our own now, from here, when we had not even been here for two years yet? She’d pry. She wouldn’t mean to, but she would. And she would worry.