The Safest Place (13 page)

I’d booked us the Barn Room, overlooking the courtyard at the back. It was our favourite; a large misshapen room with the roof on one side slanting right down to the floor, and a huge
bathroom down a short flight of steps. The receptionist took us up there, and left us, and then we both just stood there in the middle of the room, looking around. Both of us, seemingly,
overwhelmed. To me it was almost too much; I wanted to just look and look, to take in every single detail, to remind myself of what I knew and loved. The first time we had stayed here, David and I,
in this very room, we hadn’t even had children. We’d only known each other a couple of years. How young we were, how full of hope. And how we had clung together on that vast bed. To be
there again, both in that room, and in that lost place in our lives, meant everything to me.

Did David feel the same? I thought so at the time.

He moved first, walking to the wardrobe and hanging his jacket inside it. He went into the bathroom to wash his hands, then came out again, opened one of the bottles of water on the tray on the
dressing table, poured himself a glass and drank it down. And he spoke first too, while I was still motionless, still swamped with the memory of other times. He went to the window and looked out,
and said, ‘I wonder if you could see our house from here if there were no trees or buildings in the way. And no hills. You probably could if the land was flatter.’

He wanted to phone the children before we went down to dinner, to say hello, and then he needed to shower and change. I sat on the bed, waiting for him, wishing he would hurry up. I’d
hoped we’d have time for a drink before dinner, perhaps a walk around the garden, but the evening was disappearing too fast. By the time we got downstairs and went straight into the
restaurant the waitress was laying up tables for breakfast.

‘Oh,’ she said, taken off guard. ‘I thought we were finished,’ and she scurried off to the kitchen to warn the chef. We could hear their raised voices beyond the screen
door, and the banging of pans.

We sat at an unmade-up table away from the kitchen, and soon the waitress reappeared with cutlery and glasses, which she hastily deposited in front of us along with a menu.

‘I’m afraid the lamb’s all gone,’ she said apologetically, ‘and the fish is plaice now instead of bream.’ Quickly, she took our orders, and disappeared again
to the kitchen.

‘We’re somewhat late,’ I said.

‘It’s not even ten,’ David said. ‘It’s hardly late.’

‘Late for dinner,’ I said. ‘Late for here.’

‘I got back as soon as I could,’ he said defensively. ‘But I had a presentation this afternoon, I told you.’

‘Yes I know,’ I said, hurt by his tone. ‘I just meant we’re lucky they’re still serving, that’s all.’

The waitress came with our wine then, and poured. Then she brought out our starters, and stood beside the screen door to the kitchen, waiting while we ate. We were the only people in the
restaurant; no doubt she could hear every word that we said.

‘How was your presentation?’ I asked, making an effort to show interest.

‘Oh you know,’ he said vaguely. ‘We put such a lot of work into the preparation; sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. You can never tell at the time.’
He took a long sip of his wine. ‘I felt really bad having to rush off.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘No.’

We put our forks down and the waitress cleared our plates. Within seconds she’d brought out our mains and was back in position like a sentry by the kitchen door.

‘How has your week been?’ David said.

And now it was my turn to say, ‘Oh you know.’ I could not believe we were speaking like this, so politely, so remotely. Where was the intimacy? Where was the romance I had so very
much wanted to recreate? ‘I put my name down to help at Ella’s school fete. They’re having it on the green this year instead of in the playground, so it’ll be a sort of
village thing too. Oh, and I’ve found someone local to fix the bathroom radiator.’

He raised his eyebrows slightly, and nodded in acknowledgement, but I could tell he was only half listening. The stress of his day was still plain upon his face; his eyes were shadowed and
guarded. I talked on, about this little thing and that, for the benefit of the waitress as much as him. I barely tasted my food. The sound of my own voice grated in my head, too forced, too
bright.

When we used to stay there, we’d go back into the lounge after dinner, and snuggle up on one of the sofas by the fire. And someone would bring us a tray of coffee, and a dish of little
hand-made sweets, and we’d sit there wallowing in the pleasure of it all. But not that night. David was too tired. And I was too disappointed by then, too sorely aware of the difference
between how I’d wanted the evening to be, and how it actually was.

We went straight from dinner to our room, and to bed. I curled up beside him in that vast bed, but we did not make love. Yet nor did we go straight to sleep.

I lay awake long after we’d turned the light out, and I could sense that David was still awake, too, beside me. I could tell by the shallow sigh of his breathing. I could almost hear him
thinking. Eventually he reached his hand across towards me underneath the duvet, and took hold of mine. ‘This is all quite strange, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Staying here
again.’

The next day dawned bright and clear, daylight breaking through the gap in the curtains, waking me early. I had not slept well, and my head was heavy from last night’s
wine. Beside me David slept on; I listened to the rhythm of his breathing, so familiar, so seemingly at peace. I could picture in my head every single time that we had stayed here over the years,
all those fragile memories, stacked up, layer upon layer, like pages in a book. I could see myself so young, before children, drawing back the curtains, throwing myself down on the bed to lie next
to David. ‘What will we be like in ten, twenty years’ time?’ I could hear myself saying, so sure, so immune to the future. ‘What will we be like when we’re old?
We’ll still come here, won’t we? We’ll be like ghosts, haunting the place.’

I wondered if we would ever stay here again. I hoped we would, but how time moves, and how things change. Lying there beside David, I realized how much we had both changed. Back then, I never
thought we would really be living here one day. We’d swapped those brief weekends for permanence. Would I do it again? Would I have done it at all if I could have seen so far ahead?

That day we went on our favourite old walk, the one that started from a tiny village five or so miles away, down narrow, one-track lanes signposted to nowhere; it took us an age just to find the
village again. We hadn’t been on this walk since we’d moved here. If asked why, we would probably have said that there hadn’t been time, that we simply hadn’t got round to
it but meant to soon . . . some poor, poor excuse. How quickly things slide if you let them.

But here we were again, at last, and how beautiful it still was; the stream rippling over pebbles under willow trees, the gentle rise of the hills and everything so green and verdant. Early
summer has always been my favourite time of year here, when the whole world bursts into life, lush and full. With every breath my head was filled with the heady scent of the blossom on the trees
and the cow parsley in the hedgerows, combined with the sharpness of dew-soaked grass, so fresh, so clean, so new. I never noticed anything like that in London. In London, at the first glimmer of a
warm day, the overriding smell would be of the trapped fumes of the traffic; and, where we lived, barbecues. Oh my God the barbecues. That is what I think of when I think of the London suburbs in
summer: the combined acrid stink of burnt fat, paraffin and traffic fumes. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss it at all.

The morning started quite cold but quickly the sun burnt through, slanting into our eyes, beating down on us, bright and strong. I should have brought a hat. There was no breeze; the air was
still as can be, thick with so much pollen and so many spores. We walked slowly, especially up that hill. The exertion made my fingers swell up like sausages, and sweat prickled under my hair. I
could feel my boots rubbing blisters on my heels; an irritation at first, becoming steadily more painful with every step. I wished I’d brought some plasters, or worn thicker socks. The
discomfort consumed me. And I’d wanted to enjoy this so much; I’d wanted it to be so perfect.

In the past, when we walked here, we would talk so freely, about everything; about our lives, our hopes and dreams. The memory of those other times swirled about my head, snippets of long-ago
conversations echoing clearly in my mind. Above all, how young we seemed, that David, that Jane. How at ease with each other, and how free.

Now, we talked about the children.

‘What will they do at Melanie’s?’ David asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The usual stuff. Go to the rec probably.’

‘Where will they all sleep?’

‘Ella will be in with Abbie and Sam will be in with Max. They’ve got sleeping bags. They’ll be fine.’ All these questions annoyed me. I felt as if he doubted my
arrangements. ‘They’ve slept at Melanie’s before, David.’

‘Not for two nights, though. And not both of them at the same time. It’s a lot for her to take on.’

‘They’re good kids,’ I said.

‘Of course they are. I do know that. You don’t need to tell me.’

We walked on in silence. Where were our dreams, now; where were those innermost thoughts that we used to share, so close, so in tune with each other? The strangest thing, the most disturbing
thing was that I felt unable to talk with David as I used to. The words were in my head but there they stayed, unspoken. I wanted to talk, but I sensed a wall, silencing me.

It was a long walk, without our dreams to carry us along. My feet were killing me. I tried to ignore the pain. I breathed slowly, trying to absorb it. We still had a good couple of miles to go.
I’d got the hotel to make us a picnic and we stopped at the top of the hill to eat it, sitting down in the long, damp grass. I took off my boots, though I knew that putting them on again
would be agony. The skin on my heels was rubbed pink and raw.

‘Haven’t you got any plasters with you?’ David said, as if he thought that maybe I had but for some bizarre reason had opted not to put them on.

I didn’t reply. Everything was annoying me: my sore feet, David, just the fact of being annoyed was irritating me further. I’d hoped so much;
too
much. We sat there looking
back down the hill at the village nestling below, and all I could think of was the last time we had been here; the last time and all those precious times before. We hadn’t struggled for
things to talk about then. We hadn’t sat side by side like this, so close in proximity but as distant as strangers. What had happened to us to make so great a change? I’d wanted this
walk – this whole weekend – to be just like it used to be. Yet I could feel the division between us as solidly as if it were a physical barrier.

Down below, in the distance, two boys were playing in a field at the edge of the village. We could see them in miniature, running around, so free in all that space. We watched them, and I
thought of Sam, and I know that David did too. They represented all that we had wanted, space for our children, the room to move and grow.

Beside me, David sighed. ‘I wonder what Sam and Ella are doing now,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘I miss them in the week,’ he said. ‘When I’m in London, you all seem so very far away.’

He sounded so sad, so wistful. My eyes were brimming up with tears and I pinched my hands hard together so as not to let them out. I sat with my knees drawn up and rested my chin on them; I
watched those boys playing and felt my heart would break. I knew that David would much rather have been with his children than sitting there on that hillside with me.

Later we sat in the hotel lounge, tired after our walk. We drank tea, and read our books. Someone had lit a fire, even though we didn’t need it; one solitary log quietly
smouldering away. We dozed in the heat, lost from ourselves, until it was time to go back to the comparative chill of our room and get ready for dinner. We phoned Melanie, so that we could speak to
the children. I spoke to Melanie first, putting on that bright, tinny voice that I so often caught myself using around her. David sat on the bed and watched me, and he heard it too.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We’re having a fantastic time.’

There was chaos in Melanie’s house. I knew there would be, at that time of the day, on a Saturday evening. I could hear it in the background; I could hear Jake, who had probably just
turned up with Kelly, shouting over the noise of the others. But it was OK for Sam and Ella to be in that chaos, to be part of it. It was good for them; such a change from the quiet of our house.
It was always so lively at Melanie’s. I convinced myself that Sam and Ella enjoyed being there.

I said my brief hellos to the children. I could barely hear them over all that noise. David sat on the bed, waiting for his turn to speak.

And then I watched him as he spoke to them, though I pretended not to. I saw how hard he concentrated, straining to hear the answers to his questions. ‘What did you get up to today?
I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.’ I saw how he frowned, trying to hear their replies. I saw how much he missed them. And when he hung up, he muttered, ‘God.’

‘What?’ I said.

For a second it was on his lips to comment on the chaos of Melanie’s house, and of his unease at his children being in that chaos. I saw the words as clearly as if they were written in a
bubble and my defences rose. But he bit them back. ‘Let’s go and have dinner,’ he said instead, his voice flat, denying all expression.

This time we did have time for our walk around the garden, and our drink in the bar. And we made a better effort to relax over dinner, planting smiles on our faces, talking about the children,
the house; easy, safe topics. Yet absurd as it was, I felt self-conscious. I had put on some make-up, something I hadn’t done for years. A little grey eye-shadow and mascara, and a touch of
pink blusher on my wind-blown cheeks. I’d felt like a clown putting it on, so unnatural was it to me. I was wearing the same dress as the night before because it was the only decent dress I
possessed, but I’d put a different cardigan on over it. Did I pass muster? Did I do? Or did I look as I felt; like someone who’d forgotten how to try suddenly trying far too hard.