The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘For somebody else,’ I said, forcing out the words over a mouthful of stones.

  My mother drew in her breath, then flung her arms around me, almost pulling me off balance. She cried into my neck, as if that made things any better, this outward pouring of distress.

  ‘Oh no,’ she wailed. ‘Oh no. My poor Jane.’

  They sat me at the table, fetched tissues – for my mother’s benefit as much as mine – made me tea, and fussed, bombarding me with their questions and concern, and with their own hurt that I’d kept it from them. I cried, the way I always cried when forced to cry in the presence of my parents: till my nose was blocked and my eyes two tight and swollen slits, my head throbbing and my dignity utterly squashed. I hated being made to feel so vulnerable.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ my mum kept saying, over and over. ‘How could you keep it from us?’

  ‘You should have told us, pet. We have a right to know.’

  And how chastised I felt, sitting there at my own table. ‘I didn’t want to talk about it,’ I said, though there was little chance of getting away with that now. ‘To anyone.’

  ‘I’m not just anyone! I’m your mother. You can talk to me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to involve you,’ I said.

  ‘But we are involved! He’s our son-in-law!’ Her voice rose on a wail and the hairs on the back of my neck shot up like little pinpricks. ‘Oh my good grief, how could he do this to you?’

  ‘Hush now, Lynne,’ my dad said. ‘We don’t know what went on.’

  ‘I want to know!’

  ‘Of course you do. We both do.’

  ‘Why would he go off with another woman when he’s got his lovely family? Why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lynne,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know.’ But then, as if he did know, as if it was blindingly obvious and simply anyone would know it, ‘It doesn’t do for a man to work such long hours, to be away from home so much, to be away from the family. It puts a strain on the marriage . . .’

  They discussed me as if I wasn’t there. I felt like a bystander in my own life. And it got worse as the week went on; they had planned to stay until Saturday, and leave after lunch, thus spending time with David, with all of us, as a family. But that had all changed now. Should they stay on until Sunday, and see David when he came? But could they trust themselves, given what he had done?

  ‘He needs a piece of my mind,’ my mother said. ‘A jolly good talking-to.’

  ‘We need to sit down and discuss things properly,’ my father said. ‘Sensibly.’

  I said, ‘I don’t want to discuss anything.’

  ‘And where’s that attitude going to get you?’ my mother demanded. ‘What about the children? What’s going to happen to them?’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to them,’ I said.

  ‘Children need stability,’ she said. ‘They need their father.’

  ‘Well there’s not much I can do about that,’ I said.

  ‘Of course there is! You and David need to talk about things. You need to sort things out.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, please.’

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ my dad said in the same tone that he’d have used to tell me my skirt was too short, or that I needed to be home by eleven, all those years ago. ‘You need to make plans.’

  Plans, plans. Conversations with my parents generally involved plans of one type or another; plans about what I wanted and what I wanted to do. Ever since I’d left college: my plans for my career, then my marriage, the arrival of my children. All my plans for Sam and Ella, and for David’s career, and eventually our move out here to our new country life: always something, always onwards and upwards. My sunny existence; what pleasure it had brought them. It had all ground to a halt now. I’d no desire to make any more plans.

  On previous visits they’d loved their little trips into the town, their walks to the village, just being here. I’d made it like a show piece: the chocolate-box country life. This time, I had doubly cheated them. No chocolate-box life and no happy marriage. Now, of course, with the benefit of time and distance I can see how selfishly I behaved, and how dismissive I was of their feelings and their sense of loss. But at the time I was too full of my own, and having my parents there and being forced to talk about it just made it worse. I didn’t want to talk about it. Or think about it. Or make plans.

  We struggled through to Saturday. The children bristled away from my parents, too aware of their sympathy. My father tidied up the garden, my mother fussed about the house. They wanted me to talk it through but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to go over it again and again, reliving it all for them. They wanted to support me, but I pushed them away. It felt too much to me like they needed my support, and I couldn’t give it. I had no answers, no great visions of what I was going to do now. I couldn’t wait for them to just go, and leave me alone.

  But I felt wretched then, watching them loading up their car on Saturday morning. They looked so defeated and sad. My mother hugged the children for far too long.

  ‘My poor girl,’ she said to Ella, who she clasped in her arms like a rag doll. ‘You can always talk to Granny, you know. I’m just a phone call away.’

  And to Sam, who stood rigid as a skittle when it was his turn to be hugged, ‘Be a brave boy. Look after your mum.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mum,’ I snapped. ‘No one’s died.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She held back from embracing me, clearly hurt. But she did, bizarrely, say, ‘Does David’s father know?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I see David’s father once a year at most and we rarely speak in between. He and David are not exactly close; my mum knows this.

  ‘And his sister?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I repeated. ‘I certainly haven’t told her. That’s up to David, surely.’

  ‘You can’t keep a thing like this secret,’ she said. ‘Other people are affected too.’

  ‘Then what would you have me do?’ I said. ‘Put out a general announcement?’

  She clamped shut her mouth, a thin miserable line. Her eyes, which avoided mine, were glistening with tears.

  ‘Jane!’ my father said.

  And I said, ‘I’m sorry, OK?’

  Just past my mum, Sam was already creeping backwards to the house, step by miniature step, obviously hoping no one would notice. Ella, on the other hand, listened to every word, intrigued.

  ‘Well,’ my mother said stiffly. ‘Love to you all.’ And she got into the car, wiping at her eyes.

  My dad quickly squeezed me, and kissed my cheek. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. ‘And the kids.’

  Feeling guilty now, I said, ‘Are you sure you won’t stay for lunch?’

  ‘Best to get back before the traffic,’ he said. He looked as if he was about to say something else then, but thought better of it. How old he looked, suddenly, my dad. Disappointment and uncertainty do that to people. I’ve noticed that. They age you even more.

  I watched them as they drove away, pulling the car so slowly into the lane.

  Ella, watching also, said, ‘Granny was upset.’

  ‘We’re all upset,’ I said.

  ‘Yes but grandparents aren’t supposed to be upset. They’re supposed to be happy all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Ella,’ I said. ‘No one can be happy all the time.’

  We started walking back into the house, and she said, ‘Is Daddy still coming tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As far as I know.’

  And I thought that was that, the question answered. But once inside the house, and just before she disappeared upstairs, she said, ‘I wish Daddy still lived here. I do. And I know Granny wishes it too. And Sam.’

  And then she ran up to her room, slamming the door behind her.

  I felt as if I was being suffocated. I walked through my house, hot, clammy, my chest an explosion of tears. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I could feel my heartbeat, pounding in my head. My feet stuck to t
he tiles of the floor, I was so hot. I sat down at the kitchen table and cried like a kettle boiling over. There was no one to comfort me, no one to care. The children, as ever, were in their rooms, doors shut, shutting me out. I’d wanted my parents to go but now that they had I felt so glaringly alone. I pictured them, slowly winding their way through the country lanes in their beige Rover, their faces drawn and rejected. I could see them on the motorway, joining the crawl of the slow lane, discussing me for all the hours it would take them to get home. I could feel the scale of their disappointment. I had torn the security of their expectations for me away from them. I had been horrible. And now they were gone.

  I looked around my kitchen at the trappings of my life and I hated everything. The rustically painted blue cupboard doors, the overblown sideboard stacked with crockery and these days God knows what other crap, the AGA, and all the other either helpful or just plain pretentious symbols of the country idyll. What was the point of any of it? Who was I trying to kid? Who was still there to kid? The life I’d so wanted was now stifling me, slapping itself in my face, rubbing my nose in it as my mother would say.

  An image of David ripped through my head, sudden, unwanted. I could see him as clearly as if he was there, his handsome face so relaxed, so free of us. I thought of him in London, enjoying all the delights of the city on this fine summer’s day, with the other woman, so unencumbered.

  I got up from the table. I opened a bottle of wine, and within the next fifteen minutes or so I had drunk it. Do you know how quiet it is in the country? It was a Saturday, for God’s sake; a day for shopping and getting out and about, for seeing friends, going to sports matches, cafés, the cinema, for enjoying your precious, hard-earned weekend in your precious and oh-so-short life. I sat at my table, spent from tears and alcohol, and my world was filled with utter silence.

  Then the phone rang, cutting into my misery. I ignored it at first because I was too suddenly drunk and too numb to do otherwise. But it rang and it rang. Eventually I pushed back my chair and stumbled over to the dresser to answer it.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, the demands of the real world pulling me up, sharp.

  It was Melanie, though it took a while for me to know it. It took her a while to speak. I imagine she was taking in the many layers of my hello. I held the phone against my ear and the silence batted in my head. And then she spoke, like a saviour, my only friend in all the world.

  ‘I’m coming over,’ she said.

  She brought Max and Ella with her, two bottles of wine, a packet of biscuits and some sausages.

  ‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Bet you haven’t had any.’ Lunch turned out to be dinner by the time we got round to making it, finding a few old potatoes to bake in the Aga along with the sausages, a tin of baked beans and some pasta that we mixed with a jar of pesto from the back of the cupboard. We’d drunk one of the bottles of wine by then and I’d moved on from drunkenness into that thin altered state in which you can drink and drink and never feel the escape again. I functioned robotically, doling out food for the kids, shoving some into myself. We sat out at the table on the patio, Melanie and me, sat there as the sun went down, talking, drinking, and in my case, intermittently crying.

  ‘Don’t let him do this to you,’ Melanie said. ‘You’ve got to be strong.’

  But I didn’t feel strong. I felt trampled, utterly ground into the dirt.

  The girls came out for a while, hanging around us as girls do when there’s an adult drama to behold; they played on the swing, surreptitiously listening and watching, until they got bored and wandered off to climb up the hill. We could see them from where we sat, two little stick figures silhouetted against the dusk. The boys were in the house; through the open windows came the fairground crackle and blare of some Xbox game or other, and the tinny guitaring of Sam’s latest CD, played over and over.

  At some point, when it was almost dark, Max came out and joined us. He’d got himself a beer from the fridge, and he sat himself down at the table with us to drink it, quite at ease in our company in a way in which Sam could never be.

  ‘What’s Sam doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Sulking probably,’ he said with a grin. ‘I just thrashed him at Halo.’

  ‘Go and get the girls down, will you, Max?’ Melanie said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘In a minute.’

  He expected us to carry on talking while he was there, and Melanie did so, including him in our conversation as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I wished my kids were like that; that they’d sit down and join in instead of being so separate. I especially wished Sam was like that. But it was just one irony in a long list of cruel ironies that the more I craved Sam’s company, the less he wanted mine.

  ‘Jane needs to get out more now, doesn’t she, Max?’ Melanie said. ‘She doesn’t want to be stuck out here moping on her own.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Max said.

  ‘Need the loo,’ Melanie said, and she went off inside.

  When she was gone Max leant over and rubbed my arm.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Jane,’ he said.

  The contact startled me, the gesture itself. Sam would never do anything like that. Sam would never sympathize or empathize with me, or offer me comfort. Sam would not even talk to me. I looked at Max and he grinned at me, not the least embarrassed.

  When Melanie came back out she said, ‘You know what you need? You need a holiday.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ I said shakily. ‘I can really manage that.’

  ‘Of course you can. We’ll all go. We’ll go camping.’

  ‘Camping?’ I said, my head so groggy, so slow to follow.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Next week. Last week of the holidays.’

  ‘Cool,’ Max said.

  ‘We’ll have a right laugh,’ Melanie said.

  ‘But we haven’t booked anywhere,’ I said, and Melanie and Max both looked at me like the out-of-Londoner that I was.

  ‘We don’t need to book,’ Melanie said. ‘We’ll just pitch up. We’ll drive down to Dorset. ’

  ‘We haven’t even got a tent,’ I said.

  ‘Never mind that,’ Melanie said. ‘We’ve got a couple, haven’t we, Max? Three if we take Jake’s. Let’s just pack up tomorrow and go.’

  ‘David’s coming tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Well can’t you tell him not to? Can’t you tell him you’re going on holiday?’

  ‘I don’t know. The children want to see him.’

  ‘The children want to see him?’ Melanie said, her voice too sharp.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can’t just cancel him.’

  ‘You could if you wanted to.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘OK then,’ she said tightly.

  ‘Right,’ Max said. ‘Think I’ll go and fetch the girls down.’

  ‘You do that,’ Melanie said.

  Now she was annoyed with me. I felt like I was drowning. Nothing was solid. Nothing was sure.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I do want to go camping. It’s a great idea. Just not tomorrow.’

  ‘Fine,’ Melanie said. ‘Then we’ll go on Monday.’

  Melanie, Max and Ella all stayed over that night. Melanie slept next to me on top of my bed in an old T-shirt of mine. It was oppressively hot, even with the windows wide open. I’d had far too much to drink but still I couldn’t sleep. The wine had made my heart race and I felt too tense, touched with irrational anxiety. I’d downed two large glasses of water before coming upstairs, but my whole body was still horribly dehydrated, my insides pinched and dry.

  Beside me, Melanie slept easily, her breath coming in short, faint snores. She’d collapsed back onto the bed and fallen asleep almost instantly, untroubled by all the issues that bothered me. I have never been able to just crash down anywhere, sleeping wherever and alongside whoever; not even back in my student days. I guard my privacy too tightly. And although this was my bed it didn’t feel like it, with Melanie there, and with the scent of my parents
still clinging to the sheets. I could smell the stuff my mother used on her hair on my pillow, and around me the familiar man-smell of my dad. And I felt hollowed out with loneliness.

  I missed David. I missed the smell of him and the sound of him; I missed the security of the known. Memories of our time together before we moved here haunted me, and how very fine it all seemed now in retrospect, our shared life in our little house in our little street in London, especially those years back when Sam was small. We got by. We were happy then, before the demands for a better life started adding up. I’d been so quick to reject it all but now look at all that I’d lost. I’d been so sure of what I wanted when we moved here, but now I’d have given anything to wind the clock back. Yet who could I ever confess that to? Not my parents, whom I’d sent so miserably packing. I was far too proud. And not those friends back in London I’d too quickly lost touch with; how they would gloat now, if they knew about David and me. The last time I’d seen Karen I’d practically rammed it down her throat how blissfully happy we were out here; how could I tell her it had all gone so wrong?

  But nor could I tell Melanie. It was a very particular picture I painted for Melanie but it was the picture that she wanted to see. David was all evil in her eyes; I was better off without him. She rallied me, supported me and she kept me going. Without Melanie my loneliness would have swallowed me whole. But I couldn’t tell her that I missed David. Nor that I wished we’d never left London now. Oh no. She wouldn’t have been quite so understanding then; I sensed that well enough.

  TWENTY

  Melanie and her kids were still here when David turned up on Sunday. She and I were hunting through the house for anything that might be useful to take with us, and stuffing it into my car. We are a family ill-equipped for camping, having only ever stayed in those ready-erected home-from-home tents on purpose-built sites in France, and that was just a few times, years ago when the kids were small. We’d a couple of sleeping bags, a torch, and some picnic plates and that was about it. Oh, and the infuriatingly hard-to-put-together camp beds that the kids slept on when Nicola and her family occasionally came to stay.