‘Was Sam drinking?’ he asked.
And I just said, ‘I really don’t know, David. Why don’t you go and ask him yourself?’
EIGHTEEN
Over the summer, barely a weekend went by without at least some of Sam’s friends turning up, for either the Friday or the Saturday night. Sometimes it was just Max, or Max and Tommy, or Max and Tommy and Will. Other times there were more of them, holed up out there in the den, having themselves a little party. Usually they’d stay over, piling onto the sofa bed, or crashing out in sleeping bags on the floor. I bought them beer. After all, as Melanie said, it was better that they should drink in my den than out in a field somewhere. When she said that I was shocked, not so much by her words as by the ease with which she said them, her acceptance that that was just what boys did. As if at least at my house they’d have a roof over their heads, they’d be out of the rain. The thought of my Sam ever lying drunk in an open field horrified me. It wouldn’t happen. It musn’t happen. But if he was out with his friends, how would I know where he was? How would I know what he would have to do, to go along with the crowd? And how would I ever find him, if they left him out there somewhere, alone? Horror at the sheer endlessness of the night around here flashed through my head, the remoteness, the darkness, going on and on, blanketing the land.
So I bought the beer, in an attempt to feel control where I had none. And I heated them up pizza, and took it into the den on big plates. If they were watching a film I’d perch myself on the arm of the sofa and stay there a while, joining in. I might have a drink with them. They were nice to me, those kids. ‘Oh thanks, Jane,’ they’d say when I came in with a tray piled with snacks, or fetched them some cans. And to Sam, ‘Your mum’s so cool.’
I’d always wanted Sam to be popular, to be part of a group. I wanted my son to be the sort of teenager who had friends forever in and out of the house, not the sort that cut himself off and lived in gloomy isolation. And it seemed more important than ever now.
But Sam would never arrange anything without prompting from me. Round at Melanie’s after school I’d say, ‘So, are you guys coming round our house at the weekend?’ I’d throw it out as a general enquiry, looking from Max to Sam and back to Max as I said it, but we all knew that the question was directed at Max. We all knew it would be up to him to tell the others, and to get them to come.
Sam hated me doing this. He thought I was interfering. He’d scowl at me, say, ‘Mum,’ in a shut up hiss.
But I’d laugh it off. I’d say, ‘Come on, Sam. Max doesn’t mind me asking, do you, Max?’
And Max, who was always entertained by Sam’s awkwardness, would laugh too.
Whatever I did, I did it for Sam. I knew that he still struggled to fit in. I only had to see him with those other boys who’d all known each other all their lives to see that he was never really at ease. I’m not so stupid as to think that Sam was the big attraction when they came to our house. I knew that they were there at least partly for the beer, and the convenience of the den. But if they came here, it meant Sam was included. There was always the fear that if they went somewhere else they might leave him out. That was my fear at least, and I assumed it was Sam’s too.
Having those kids here at the weekend was good for me too. They brought laughter into my house, and noise; I found their presence strangely comforting. They alleviated my loneliness, for a little while.
Because believe me I was lonely. A couple of times on a Saturday night I’d left both my kids at home and driven over to Melanie’s and gone to the pub with her, but I’d hated every minute of it. I didn’t know anyone there, apart from Melanie, and I felt as if everyone was looking at me. In truth, I felt they thought I was on the pick-up. Available again. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Melanie had started seeing some guy and flirted with him all night. Not Colin, someone else. It seemed that Colin was fine with this, that they were all friends together. Yet I couldn’t help feeling the intention was for me to pair up with someone too. ‘Relax,’ Melanie said. ‘Go on, live a bit.’ I’d avoided going to that pub with David, because I knew he would have hated it. Yet there I was without him, hating it even more. And I still had the dreaded drive home.
If Sam’s friends were all coming to my house, it gave me an excuse to stay in. I don’t think Melanie cared. I think she was too busy, by then, with her new man. In truth it probably suited her to have Max so much at our house, out of the way. Most weekends I’d have Abbie staying, too. That summer, her children practically lived with us.
Sometimes, when David turned up on a Sunday, a couple of boys might still be here from the night before. Max would often be here, loafing about the place as if he owned it. It amused me that Max could wander into the kitchen right in front of David, and casually help himself to food from the fridge, as relaxed as anything while David, in contrast, was totally unrelaxed. David arrived like an awkward visitor, unsure of his welcome. There was no welcome. There couldn’t be.
If Max was here, Sam would barely acknowledge his dad. In fact David’s arrival made him uncomfortable. How could he perform for his friend in the required manner, and simultaneously perform for his father? He couldn’t. The two objectives were incompatible for a self-conscious 15-year-old. And it was Max that Sam needed to get along with, day in, day out.
And Ella took the lead from her brother. If he was cool towards David, then she was too. If Sam acknowledged David with just a bored, no-eye-contact hello, she’d do the same. If he answered, ‘Fine,’ when his dad asked him how he was, so would she. A shrug of the shoulder; an end to the conversation before it had even begun. Poor David. That left him with me.
‘How are things?’ he’d say, as if he really cared, but I didn’t want his charity, his blood-money concern. ‘Is there anything I can do while I’m here?’ he’d ask, looking out at the garden, at the overgrown lawn. He’d look at the state of the house, full stop. He’d register how much things had changed. The towels left hanging over the banister, the shoes and school bags and God knows whatever else left cluttering up the hall. The plates piling up in the kitchen, the wine bottles stacked around the sink, and yes, the beer cans left lying around in the den.
‘We’re fine,’ I’d say, though clearly he thought that we weren’t.
Perhaps, in some perverse way, I got pleasure from seeing the discomfort on his face as he sat there on his sofa, in his house that was no longer his home. If things were acceptable now that weren’t acceptable before, what right had he to complain?
‘I don’t think Sam should be drinking,’ he said to me one Sunday when he was here.
I didn’t care what he thought. In fact, whatever he thought, I would automatically think the opposite. I took up my new stance, easy come, easy go.
I laughed at him. ‘Don’t you?’ I said.
‘No, I don’t,’ he said, all the more uptight because I wasn’t. ‘He’s only just fifteen. He’s only a child.’ And then, ruining it all for himself, he said, ‘He’s got GCSEs next year.’
He looked at me, so intent with his righteousness, then, my erstwhile husband, and I looked at him. How familiar were his eyes. I had known him for almost twenty years. I had lived with him, dreamed with him, borne him his children. When his mother died, he cried in my arms. When his father remarried, the same. When Ella was a baby, he paced the house with her, hour after hour, night after night, holding her tiny, fretful body clamped tight against his chest.
And here he was now, an alien to his own family, so removed. What right had he to judge me, or Sam, or any of us? None, as far as I was concerned. He’d given up all rights the moment he betrayed me.
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘you are such a hypocrite. Would you have Sam being a hypocrite too? Would you? Would you have him out drinking in a field somewhere, miles from home? Because that’s what they do, you know, boys of that age.’ How easily I quoted Melanie to him, how convincingly. I did it, in part, to distance myself from David, and the soured memory of our lives together; from all
that we’d shared and done and believed in. How could I carry on as before, half of what we’d been? I couldn’t. I had to find myself a new way.
Yet David, for all that he’d left us, was still stuck in the old place.
‘We moved here for the children,’ he said, the sudden bitterness in his voice making him sound petty and mean. ‘We moved here because you wanted better schools and a healthy, a wholesome environment for our children. We moved here for that. We gave up everything. A better life for the children, you said. But, tell me, how is this better?’
‘It isn’t my fault that you left us,’ I said.
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said, frustration tightening his face. ‘I’m not talking about that.’ He paused. He looked around him, casting his eyes about the place as if in doing so I would know what he was referring to. ‘I’m talking about Sam, about our son,’ he said. ‘Drinking. How come that’s OK with you? And who are these boys that seem to be forever in the house?’
‘They’re his friends,’ I said. ‘Would you rather he didn’t have any?’
‘I’d rather they weren’t drinking alcohol,’ he said. ‘I’d rather he was working hard at school, playing football, doing normal 15-year-old things.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped. ‘He has a social life. Lucky him.’
David shook his head, as though in disbelief. ‘You used to worry endlessly about the schools in London and the wrong sort of peer pressure,’ he said. ‘Yet here you are, encouraging Sam to lead exactly the sort of life that you had us leave London to get away from. So what was it all for then, Jane?’
‘I left London to get away from the constant, exhausting competitiveness,’ I said. ‘From all that “my kid’s better than your kid” stuff that got rammed down my throat everyday.’
‘We left London to get away from that school Sam was in,’ he said, correcting me. ‘But now I don’t see that it would have been any different.’
‘Of course it would have been. Things are so much more relaxed here.’
‘You can say that again.’ We were sitting in the living room, David on the sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped. His left leg was juddering, caught on a nerve, or in irritation. The force of his resentment took me back somewhat. Wasn’t I was the one who should be angry? Didn’t I have the monopoly on all emotion, now?
‘I want Sam to do well at school,’ he said, stressing the words. ‘Of course I want him to have friends but I don’t want him hanging around drinking, at his age. Just because I’m not here . . . I still want what’s best for him.’
And there it was; my hook. I caught it. I flung it back at him.
‘Well you weren’t thinking what was best for him when you decided to shack up with your Diana, were you?’ I said.
David left, as ever, on a bad note. I could never let him go with any peace. My pride and my hurt wouldn’t let me. He came, we all suffered, he went away again and we suffered more.
The irony was that Sam didn’t actually drink very much. He’d have a can to fit in with his friends, but he’d make it last all evening. I think he’d have been happier with a coke. Maybe they’d all have been happy with cokes, but I bought them beer. I thought I was one step ahead, keeping down with the kids.
NINETEEN
My parents came to stay for a few days in the middle of August. So far, I’d managed to avoid telling them about David and me. One advantage of living further away was that it made it easier to pretend, and I’d dodged their questions on the phone. ‘How is David?’ my mum asked every time I spoke to her, and, more probingly, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘David’s fine,’ I’d say, because as far as I knew he was fine, physically at least. And as to everything being all right, I’d misunderstand her meaning, deliberately. ‘Just busy,’ I’d say. ‘A bit tired, you know. Rushing the kids around.’ That sort of thing.
But my parents are not fools, and their antennae were up. Sometimes, when my mum rang, one of the children would answer the phone. No doubt she quizzed them, though not directly of course. She was far too sensitive to ask them anything outright, but she’d have gathered enough fuel to build her suspicions.
They’d have to know eventually, but the thought of telling them brought with it such an air of formality, and of finality too. It made it real, and it made it their business, when I didn’t want it to be their business. Also, and this really is the truth now, I was ashamed. My husband had gone off with another woman: what did that say about me? I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone, let alone my parents, speculating, or judging me, or, worse than that, pitying me.
So I dreaded seeing them, because I dreaded telling them, and therefore I was off with them from the minute they arrived. I was defensive; I couldn’t help myself. They pulled up in the car mid-afternoon on a hot, humid Tuesday, worn and tired from the journey, expecting me to greet them with my usual show of flowers in the hall and chilled drinks waiting in the garden, and the smell of a freshly baked cake. My lovely home all spic and span. Oh sure, I’d swept the floor and tidied up the kitchen, changed the sheets on my bed, where they would be sleeping, and thrown the spare duvet down for myself, in the den. But my house was suffused with an air of defiant gloom; it lay over everything, thick as dust. They would have noticed it as soon as they walked in.
Looking back, I see how cowardly I was, and really how cruel, leaving them to work it out for themselves. They went up to my room to settle themselves in, and there they discovered the absence of David’s things. My parents travel light but even so I would always clear a space for them in my wardrobe, and tidy the clutter away from the top of my chest of drawers. But all of David’s things were gone; what he hadn’t taken with him, and what I couldn’t bring myself to chuck out, I’d stuffed into boxes and hidden in the cupboard in the hall. My parents would have noticed the lack of anything of his hanging in the huge double wardrobe, or folded on the shelves above and below. I can picture them tentatively opening the drawers and seeing some of them filled with my various clothes and others left empty; I had not yet reached the stage where I was ready to expand into the extra space. They were up there an awfully long time, and they were very quiet. I can imagine them sitting on my bed, forced to think the unthinkable, shocked, as the penny must finally have dropped, and I am not proud. I am not proud at all.
Yet with my parents I will always be a child, and I behaved like one. Too well I remember the teenage embarrassment of them wanting to know each time I’d got a new boyfriend, or had just broken up with one; of their over-concerned questions and over-personal intonations that they hoped I was being ‘sensible’; the mortification of them realizing I was actually having sex. Well how much worse – how infinitely much worse – would it be to have to tell them that my marriage was over?
But was it over, totally, finally? I didn’t want to believe it myself: how could I possibly present it that way to them? I couldn’t. I didn’t want to talk about it all. I wanted just to drift, and to be left to do so.
My father came down first, the advance patrol. It was always that way, in times of crises. He tracked me down in the kitchen, where I was waiting for him, as sulky and defensive as a 16-year-old girl. My mother, I knew, would be sitting on my bed, anxiously waiting another five minutes till she too would come down. My father was the calm one, the practical one, the one who took charge. He’d want answers, facts, and it was always deemed in our family that he would do better by tackling me alone. My mother brought too much emotion into it. Any drama, in our family, ended up being hers.
I was washing a lettuce at the kitchen sink, a task that demanded my total attention as this lettuce was from the garden, and riddled with slugs. My father came and leaned against the counter next to me. I kept my eyes focused on that lettuce.
‘Everything all right, pet?’ he said.
‘So many bloody slugs,’ I said, and turned the tap on harder.
My father stood there. He watched me. Ten, twenty, excruciating sec
onds passed. Where were the children when I wanted them, why weren’t they clamouring about their grandparents as they used to, competing for attention, giving me my space? But Sam and Ella had slunk off to their own aloneness, wanting their space too now, making the effort for no one. That is how it was, these days.
‘Your mother –’ my dad said, and it was the same as always: your mother wondered, your mother was thinking, your mother was a little bit concerned – ‘Your mother couldn’t help noticing there are none of David’s things in the bedroom.’
I said nothing. I scrubbed at that lettuce as if it was a rag.
‘What’s going on, pet?’
I could hear the floorboards creaking upstairs, the gentle thud of my mother’s step on the stairs. She couldn’t keep away any longer. Ridiculously, infuriatingly, I felt the sharp sting of tears. What is it with families? They strip you naked as the day you were born. They see everywhere; no secrets, no hiding away.
The lump in my throat swelled, hot and wet as a giant leech.
‘Come on, pet. You can tell us.’
My mother entered the kitchen with a quiver of indrawn breath. ‘What is it, Ray? What’s going on?’ she asked of my father, her voice feebly high, half sob, half plea.
‘All right, Lynne,’ he said. ‘Everything’s under control. Jane was about to tell me. Weren’t you, Jane?’
I stared at my lettuce, at the water running off its leaves, an eternal, ferocious fountain. I willed myself away. I willed myself anywhere; anywhere, anything, but this. The sound of my mother’s shaking breath sent the tears chugging down my cheeks, beyond my control.
‘He’s left me,’ I said, staring down at my lettuce.
‘What do you mean, he’s left you?’ my mother demanded and oh how that phrase could resonate down the years with just a minor change, here or there. ‘What do you mean, you’ve lost your bag/coat/key?’ Only this time, it was my husband I’d so carelessly mislaid.
The Safest Place Page 16