The Safest Place (16 page)

And just the sound of her name, the sound of her name on his tongue, in his mouth, flicked a switch inside my head and I felt myself crumple. Diana. Diana. How tenderly he formed the word. I
started crying, uncontrollably, sobbing so hard I couldn’t get my breath.

‘Jane, please, I’m sorry . . .’

He put his hand out to me but I slapped it away. I didn’t want him to touch me. I’d wanted him to deny it. I’d wanted him to tell me there was no one, to insist, to lie. But to
tell me her name, and to tell me it so easily, made it unbearably real. She might as well have been in the room. She might as well have been standing right there, draping herself all over him.

‘Please, Jane, don’t cry like this,’ he said, but I couldn’t stop.

‘Where did you meet her?’ I asked through a mouthful of tears. ‘How long have you been seeing her?’

‘Jane, don’t . . .’

‘Tell me!’ And then it dawned on me; the obvious, the impossible. ‘Is it her that you stay with when you stay in London?’

I sat on my bed. I’d cried myself into a thick, sore head, my eyes swollen and bruised. I could hear David, Sam and Ella downstairs in the kitchen, having their lunch.
How could David eat? How could he move about in our house, talk to our children, function normally, now?

‘What’s wrong with Mum?’ I heard Ella ask.

And he said, ‘She’s got a bit of a headache. She’s gone to lie down.’

The liar, the liar.

I could hear them chatting. I could hear my children laughing, with David, oblivious that he had ripped their world apart.

The daylight was dipping and our bedroom cast in shadow by the time David eventually ventured upstairs. I heard his footsteps on the landing, the creak of the floorboards, and
I could sense him lurking out there, plucking up the courage to come in. The handle turned, and he slowly pushed open the door.

I’d stopped crying some time ago, but I was still sitting on the bed, numb. He shuffled in to the room, closing the door behind him.

‘Can I get you something to eat?’ he asked, speaking gently, quietly, as if I was ill.

‘No,’ I said, and he loitered there, the manifestation of concern.

‘Or a cup of tea?’

‘
No
.’

For a long time he stood there, in front of me. I kept my eyes fixed, firmly, on the knees of his jeans.

‘Talk to me, Jane,’ he said.

I kept silent, my mouth clamped shut.

He sighed. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other; I watched the denim around his knees alternately crease and ease. I bought him those jeans for Christmas.

Eventually he sat down on the bed beside me, with his elbows resting on his knees, hands propping up his chin. And he sighed again. His presence, so close to me, was like a magnet,
simultaneously pulling, and pushing me away.

‘I didn’t mean for it to happen,’ he said, and really, I could have predicted those words. Isn’t that so often the way with men – they didn’t actually mean
for whatever it was to have happened? It wasn’t deliberate; it wasn’t their fault. Be it forgetting your anniversary, or not putting out the bins. Or fucking someone else.

‘I didn’t plan it,’ he said, and I almost wanted to laugh. Did he really think that made any difference? ‘You and me . . . we’ve grown apart, Jane. Since we moved
here. I don’t feel so close to you any more. You’ve got your life here with the children, and I suppose I feel . . . well . . . just not such a part of it any more.’

I didn’t want to hear that. I didn’t want any of this to be my fault. It wasn’t me who’d gone screwing someone else.

‘Don’t try and twist things,’ I said, still not looking at his face. ‘It’s not my fault that you’re never here. But of course now I know why you always want
to stay in London.’

‘It’s not like that. You know it’s not like that.’

‘I know you’re fucking someone else!’

I sensed, more than saw, him flinch. ‘Jane, it wasn’t like that. I have to stay in London for work, you know that. Diana – ’ There, he said her name again. I didn’t
want to have to hear him say her name ‘– Diana listened to me. We got on well. We just grew close.’

‘Well that’s all right then.’

‘Jane, don’t be like this,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

‘So . . . cold.’

‘What do you expect me to be like?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said and he sat up straight now, hands spread open on his knees. ‘I want you to try and understand.’

‘
Understand
?’ I said. ‘You want my
sympathy
?’ I looked at him now, square in the face. His eyes were dark, small, too familiar, too filled with what he
had done. My heart set itself in stone. ‘You want me to tell you it’s OK?’

He stared back at me, at a loss now. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, helpless. At last he said, ‘It wouldn’t have happened, Jane, if you hadn’t pushed me
away.’

And quick as a flash I said, ‘I didn’t push you away, David. You were just too weak to stay.’

We spent the rest of the day in awkward silence, moving around each other, moving around the children. He slept downstairs, slinking up to our room to remove his things. I sat
frigid on the bed as he collected his pillow and the T-shirt that he slept in; as he took the spare duvet from the cupboard on the landing. He crept about quietly, meekly, and I hated him for his
cowardice. I hated him for leaving me there, alone in our bed with my misery untethered. I wanted him to comfort me, to witness my suffering, to feel it with me . . . I wanted his remorse.

‘Who is she?’ I demanded first thing, when I went downstairs and found him buttering toast in the kitchen.

He looked at me, confused.

‘Oh I know that she is called Diana,’ I said, my voice rough and dry from too much crying and not enough sleep, ‘but who is she beyond that? Diana who? Is she young, old?
Younger than me? Is she blonde, brunette? Tall, short? Is she thinner than me, prettier than me, does she have bigger tits?’ He winced, visibly. Oh that I could bring her down to that.
‘Where did you meet her? Oh – she’s a colleague. We’ve established that. By the coffee machine then, or the photocopier? Do you still have photocopiers at work? It’s
so long since I was in an office – goodness I must be out of touch. Did you thrill her with your marketing skills? Did she thrill you with hers?’ On and on I raged, my words, my whole
self just an inch from hysteria. ‘Is she married? Does she have a husband who might mind about this?’

He listened to my ranting in silence. He listened till I eventually stopped, dried up, and thus he gained the upper hand. He looked at me, so frighteningly detached from me, and suddenly I was
aware of my grubby old bathrobe gone yellow round the collar and the sleeves, of my blotchy red cheeks and the mat of my unbrushed hair sticking back from my face. I was aware of the shrillness of
my voice, and of my bare feet planted on the tiles of the floor, of my neglected toenails as misshapen as a dead man’s teeth.

And when he was sure that I had finished raving, he said, slowly, and in a tone that suggested I was mad to consider otherwise, ‘Of course she isn’t married.’

‘But you are!’ I sobbed at him. ‘You are!’

But who was she? I thought back to the days when I worked on the magazine; I painted all those faces back into my head. When I first met David, I looked down on him slightly,
from a work point of view. We all did, in my department. Not just on him; we looked down on everyone in marketing, just as we looked down on everyone in accounts or HR. They weren’t the real
magazine people that we were; not journalists or designers. They were office workers of one type or another, lucky to have landed themselves a job alongside us. We pictured them, trawling through
the situations vacant pages in the media section of the daily papers, aspiring to any position that sounded more glamorous than, for example, a job at the local council, or at an IT firm.

Oh yes, I had the upper hand, way back then. How smug I was, throwing scraps of my creative favour his way. And he was enthralled.

Did I ever meet her? Was she there when I was there?

She can’t have been. I bet no one was still there from back when I worked on the magazine. They’d have all moved on long ago. No one stayed put in that world for long, no one except
David, that is. But might I have met her at some do, in the past? I hadn’t been to any work parties for years, not since Ella was small. In my working life celebrations were the norm; it was
part of the job to be always having a good time, to go to press parties, launch parties, fashion parties . . . there was always something. But all that changed with the slide in the economy. There
were no parties to speak of these days, no more cash to flash. If I had met her at any kind of function it would have been a long, long time ago, and how unlikely that was. But still she hovered in
and out of my memories, a cardboard cut-out of a cameo, a cartoon imposter, popping up at the edges.

We still had the rest of Sunday to get through.

Like cats, Sam and Ella avoided us, aware of the atmosphere, but unaware of what it might mean to them. They avoided me in particular, slinking out of a room if I walked into it, keeping out of
my way. That made it all the worse: as if I had done wrong somehow, as if I was the bad witch. I hated to hear David talking to them; even more I hated to hear them still speaking to him.

‘Do you know what he has done?’ I wanted to shout at them. ‘Do you know what your father has done?’

But of course they didn’t know, yet.

‘Why were you and Mummy fighting?’ I heard Ella asking David later on Sunday morning, and I stopped still, silent outside the kitchen door, awaiting his answer.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Oh nothing. Just grown-up stuff. Don’t you worry about it.’

The coward. Did he think he could keep it from her and Sam? Did he think he could just carry on as before, coming and going, as if everything was just normal?

Later, I saw him, out there in the garden, talking on his phone. He was standing about halfway down, out of earshot from the house. I was in our bedroom, and I watched him from
the window. I watched how he stood with one hand in his pocket, moving from foot to foot, shoulders hunched. He had his back to the house but now and again he moved just enough for me to see his
face. He was frowning so intensely, his expression painfully raw.

He was speaking to his precious Diana, obviously. I watched him with a lump in my throat so swollen I felt I would never swallow again. It was just coming up to five o’clock, and the sun,
with which we had been so blessed for these last few days, had disappeared now, driven away by the arrival of grey cloud and drizzle. The day was passing grindingly slowly, full of threat, full of
fear. Eventually he put his phone back into his pocket, but still he stayed out there, staring at nothing.

Something about him, about the expression on his face when I caught a glimpse of it, and the tense set of his body, hurt my heart more than anything. I loved David; his feelings, his quirks and
the things that drove him and worried him had been part of my awareness for so long. I thought I knew him better than anyone. I felt as linked to him as if we were physically tied. How could it be
that so much of him, his concerns, his secrets, could now rest with somebody else?

He came up to our room late on Sunday night. I had stayed there for most of the afternoon and all of the evening, lying low like an animal, nursing my wounds. Life elsewhere in
the house had carried on, excluding me. Conversations had been had, meals, however haphazard, had been cooked and eaten. I had been missed hardly at all.

Now, late as it was, decisions had to be made, practicalities seen to. However you try to avoid it, life will still need to be lived. The fear of Monday, of tomorrow in all its forms and
meanings, reared up, insurmountable, before me.

‘Jane,’ he said, creeping into the room and closing the door behind him, and how I hated the sound of my own name right then. Over and over inside my head I could hear the way he had
said her name: ‘Diana’.

He dared to sit down beside me. I felt the dip of the bed, his closeness so intrusive. ‘Jane,’ he said again. ‘I am sorry. So sorry.’

In my head I thought, Sorry, sorry, what good is sorry?

I did not speak. Surely, he did not expect me to.

We sat there in horrible, agonizing silence. After an age, he said, ‘What happens to us now?’

I forced myself to look at him. His face was tight and anxious, and helpless as a boy’s.

‘You have caused this situation,’ I said. ‘You can sort it out.’

He ran his hand through his hair, rested his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands; all these things have endeared him to me. But at this moment my heart was locked, solid as a wall.

‘Do you want me to leave?’ he said.

And I said, ‘Is that what you want?’

He sighed. He ran both his hands through his hair. ‘I have no idea what I want,’ he said.

We sat there for longer, the silence going on and on. Eventually he said, ‘I’ll stay in London this week. I’ll come home at the weekend.’

‘The best of both worlds, then,’ I said.

‘I’ll want to see the children,’ he said.

And I said, ‘Perhaps you should have thought of that before.’

‘Jane,’ he said, ‘I love my children. You know that.’

My children, my children.

‘I thought you loved me,’ I said and there was a rock in my throat; hard, sharp edges, scratching me apart.

‘Jane, I do love you.’

‘Then how could you possibly do this to me?’ I didn’t want to cry, couldn’t bear to
feel
, but there I was, ripped open, limbs, heart, soul, strapped on a rack
with the wheel turning.

‘Jane,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make this any harder.’

‘Don’t
me
make it harder? You’re leaving me for someone else but you still expect to come here at the weekends. How do you think I feel, David?’

‘You’re hurt, I know that. You’re angry.’

‘Yes I’m hurt. Yes I’m angry. Don’t you dare make it any harder!’

‘What would you have me do, Jane? I’ll sleep in the den. I’ll keep out of your way. You won’t know that I’m here.’