The Safest Place (17 page)

I was crying now, however hard I tried not to, the tears bitter and raw on my face. ‘Do you love her?’ I said.

‘Jane,
please,
’ he said.

‘It was supposed to be our dream living here, you, me, the children. It was supposed to be our happy ever after. How could you do this – how could you just smash it all
apart?’

He sat there, with his head in his hands, saying nothing. After a while I realized he was crying, his breath coming tight and hard, his shoulders slightly trembling. Eventually he spoke, his
voice thick and low. ‘I can’t live like this,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. We should never have moved here.’

And I hated him, then. I wished him dead.

I heard him get up the next morning. I was wide awake, attuned to every sound. I heard the faint thud as he folded up the sofa bed in the den, and the hiss of the pipes as he
ran the downstairs shower. I lay there, rigid in my bed, praying, willing for him to come upstairs and say something, anything at all, to me before he left. I couldn’t bear that he would just
be gone.

Not once had he asked for forgiveness, nor begged me to let him stay. So easily he’d packed up his things for the week last night, leaving too many words unspoken. I wanted him to tell me
it was all over with her, finished, a stupid mistake. That he’d never see her again, that it was me that he wanted, that we would get through this somehow. I wanted him to plead with me; I
wanted his regrets, his fear for all that he would lose.

Yet it seemed that the fear was all mine.

I heard the click of the front door as he opened it and my whole body was screaming to go to him, to grab him, to stop him leaving. I heard the closing of the door, the crunch of his feet on the
gravel. I heard him start up the car, turning the ignition over once, twice, three times, then drive away. I listened as the sound of the car grew fainter and fainter. I listened till long after it
had gone, listened to the silence, to the unbearable hush of being alone.

I could not imagine a life without David. However hard things had been at times since we moved here, however distanced we had become, I thought he would be here for me, always.
I thought his loyalty to me was unquestioning. I took it for granted.

It was Monday, and the children were back to school. No matter how wretched I felt I had to get up and on with the usual routine: making sandwiches for Ella who wouldn’t
eat school dinners, putting out breakfast, shouting up the stairs to Sam to hurry up and get ready. Rushing round at the last minute locating books and bags and finding PE tops still at the bottom
of the washing basket, unwashed. The stresses, the complaining, the irritation of trying to start the car.

I’d had no sleep. Inside, I felt as if I’d had a layer of myself burned away. The children sat in the back of the car in silence. I looked in the mirror and saw them both staring out
of their windows, their faces solemn. David had told them he’d be staying in London this week, but that he’d see them on Saturday. How vague was that? And how empty of the reasons why?
They barely saw him in the week anyway, so what difference did it make? Yet they sensed there was more to it. Of course they did, they weren’t stupid.

I dropped Sam off and then drove on with Ella, rushed, late as usual. I pulled up outside the school gates, and she got out of the car and ran in. And I drove straight off, home to my empty
house.

The week stretched before me, hollow, without form. I felt robbed of the weight of my limbs, as if gravity had altered; I walked but I didn’t walk. I moved, but I moved without feeling.
All over my body I felt as if I’d been slapped, that ringing numbness echoing on and on. What was I to do now? I didn’t want to see anyone, or speak to anyone. I wanted just to hide
away and pretend this wasn’t real, yet I had to go about my life as usual. I put on an air of being busy, barely having time to stop and chat when I picked up Sam from Melanie’s, or ran
into her at the school gates. I avoided her in town; I avoided everyone. I phoned Ella’s school, said I couldn’t come in this week to help with art. I said I had the flu.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Diana. What did she look like? What kind of woman was she? And oh how I hated her, as I drove my kids about, cleared up after them, and dragged myself
through each day.

I felt so rejected, and that is a horrible, horrible way to feel. Self-loathing lapped at my edges. I felt utterly unloved.

David phoned me on Wednesday, from work. How strange it seemed that he should just call me up like on any other day, like we still had humdrum, safe things to say.

‘How are you?’ he said, concern, so familiar, so falsely comforting in his tone.

‘Oh I’m fine,’ I said, my voice brittle and sharp as cracked glass.

‘And the children?’

Cruelly, I said, ‘They haven’t even noticed you’ve gone.’

He paused for just a second. ‘How have they been back at school?’ he asked.

And I said, ‘I’m sorry, did you phone up for a report?’

He was silent then. I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear, listening to the beating of my heart. I wanted to hang up on him, but I couldn’t. Nor could I say stupid, measly
things like how are you
?
I wanted him to be hurting like I was hurting. I wanted him to be tormented by what he had done.

‘This isn’t easy for either of us, Jane,’ he said, and the sheer unfairness of his words made my head buzz.

‘This is your fault!’ I said, and I did hang up then, slamming the phone down so hard on the table that its battery fell out.

It crossed my mind that I could try to stop him coming home at the weekend. How cruel I could be, if I put my mind to it. ‘You’ve made your bed,’ I could say;
‘now lie in it.’ But the thought of not seeing him at all filled me with cold fear, the finality of an ending. How do you sever a marriage? How do you just turn your back?

I still hoped that he would turn up at the weekend and that somehow, like the needle on an ancient record-player scratching backwards, this could all be erased. He could not love his Diana. He
could not choose her over me.

If he turned up on Saturday morning full of regret, I could face this somehow. Otherwise life reared before me, without focus, unbound.

On Thursday evening, Melanie phoned me.

‘You’ve been avoiding me all week,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said automatically.

‘Mm,’ she said.

‘I’ve just been busy.’

‘Right.’

I could feel my heart swelling up, the need to talk, and yet the dread of it, brimming in my chest. ‘I had a row with David,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you pick up the girls tomorrow, and I’ll bring the boys and we’ll have a bottle of wine at yours?’

Melanie didn’t like David, any more than he liked her. She never said as much; she didn’t need to. It was all there in the look, and in the unspoken.

Several times, when I was first getting to know her, she suggested that we come to the pub in town with Colin and her and some other people that she’d known forever; locals, happy to play
darts and have a laugh. On Saturday nights they had karaoke.

‘Come and join us,’ she said to me. ‘Bring your David with you. We’ll show him how to have a good time. Loosen him up a bit.’ She laughed when she said it, of
course.

But how out of place David would have been; how out of
Lon
don. And how hard it would have been for me to pretend that I was otherwise with him there by my side. So I never asked him. I
never gave him the choice.

Our bottle of wine turned into two. I drank most of it, because she was driving.

‘You need it,’ she said, as I sat there sobbing out my heart.

I told her too much, with the alcohol hot in my face, loose on my tongue. I told her about his woman, about all those nights I thought he was stuck in London because of work, when really, he was
seeing someone else; about how he’d made me feel guilty about the trains and the hardship of his journey when all the time it was he who was guilty. And how loose, how clichéd a
picture I painted, glass in hand, for Melanie. The staying late after work; the shifty, double life.

She nodded her head as I spoke. ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘What did you think would happen with him staying in London so much?’

I realize that I played to her. Even in my heartbreak, I described what had happened as she would understand it. I portrayed David as she expected him to be. As a two-faced, devious,
London-bound cheat, as shallow as she’d ever imagined.

But did I paint him that way for her benefit or mine?

I didn’t tell her that I’d pushed him into moving here; that on my account he’d had to endure a good five hours travelling each day on stuffy, crowded trains, never mind the
drive either side. That for him, it had been day in, day out unrelenting grind, compounded with the subtle, progressive exclusion from his family. That he’d moved here for me; and that
because of me, he’d gone from loving this place to hating it. I didn’t tell her any of that, because I couldn’t acknowledge it to myself.

As on most Saturdays, I was up and out early with the children, taking Ella to the stables, going on into town to drop Sam at the rec, then going back for Ella and back again
into town for shopping. I could have hurried. I could have called Sam on his phone and given him an earlier time to be collected but instead I dragged it out. I knew David would be at home, waiting
for us to get back. Well, let him wait. I picked up some bread and cheese at the shops and phoned Melanie; she was only too pleased to have the three of us meet round at hers for a late, impromptu
lunch. And there I watched the clock, nervous, prickling up with dread. How slowly time passed.

‘You should relax,’ Melanie said to me, though there was no chance of that. ‘Why hurry home?’ she said. ‘He can’t expect you to put yourself out for him now.
Make him sweat, I would.’

He rang my mobile three times while I was there, but I didn’t answer. I would have stayed at Melanie’s all day but for Ella’s anxious, ‘Will Dad be at home
yet?’

We got back late afternoon, and there was his car on the drive. I unlocked the front door with my heart thumping, all my senses on the defensive. He was sitting in the chair just inside the
living room, by the window. Just sitting there, waiting, as if he’d been sitting there waiting for hours. Well, good, I thought.

He said hello to the children, and they to him, and that took all of two minutes before they escaped and disappeared to their rooms. Children don’t want to be around when there’s an
atmosphere, he’d learn that quickly enough. We both would. Sam and Ella wanted to know that their dad was there, but they didn’t want to spend enforced time talking to him. ‘What
have you been up to, Sam?’ David asked. And, ‘How was school this week, Ella?’ But all he got was a shrug, perhaps a mumble, in reply. How quickly children pick up on tension.
David would be more of an outsider on their lives now than he’d ever been before; I saw the realization of that cross his face and age him a decade. And again I thought, Good.

He followed me into the kitchen, where I had started putting away my shopping.

‘I tried to phone you,’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘Did you?’

He stood there, awkward in his own house.

‘I was here just after eleven,’ he said, accusation sharp in his voice. ‘I wanted to see the children.’

‘Well now you’ve seen them.’

I could feel him watching me. And I could feel his anger, but what right had he to feel angry? The way I saw it, he’d forfeited all rights. I filled the kettle with water, took a single
cup from the cupboard to make a single cup of tea.

‘You knew I was coming,’ he said. ‘Why were you out for so long?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Did you expect me to drop everything on your account?’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him push a hand back through his hair in frustration. ‘Why do you do this?’ he said. ‘Why do you always, always do this?’

‘If you remember, I haven’t done anything,’ I reminded him.

‘You cut me out. You push me away.’

‘You cut yourself out!’ I snapped, glaring at him now. ‘When you went off with
her
!’

‘Well maybe I wouldn’t have gone off with her at all if I thought I was wanted around here!’

The heat burst into my face, the blood roaring in my ears. I turned away from him, picked up the kettle and poured boiling water into my cup, spilling it all over the place.

‘Look,’ he said, deliberately calmer, and quieter now. ‘Can we at least be civil to each other? Please. For the sake of the children, if nothing else.’

I ignored him, and poked at my tea bag with a spoon, tears burning behind my eyes.

Stiltedly he said, ‘I’ve put my bag in the den. If it’s all right with you I’ll go upstairs and get some different clothes. I’ll make up my bed later.’

‘Don’t think you can leave me your washing,’ I shouted after him as he walked out of the room, ‘nor your dirty sheets!’

Later, I cooked pasta for Sam, Ella and me, with my emotions still raging inside me, and then we three sat at the kitchen table to eat while David sat in the living room, left
out.

‘Why isn’t Dad eating with us?’ Sam asked, miserably prodding his fork about in his food.

‘Because he’s not,’ I said.

‘When will he eat then?’ Ella asked anxiously.

They’d both stopped eating, and were looking at me, making it my concern, my problem.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, irritated. ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

Then David came into the kitchen, and started rummaging around in the fridge.

‘Is it all right if I get myself a sandwich?’ he said.

‘Do what you like,’ I said.

Sam stared back down at his plate, poking his food around with that fork again. Ella switched her gaze from me to David, frowning.

‘Why aren’t you having pasta?’ she asked him.

He stroked her hair as he moved from fridge to counter. ‘Oh, a sandwich is fine for me,’ he said.

‘They had a fight, stupid,’ Sam mumbled, raising his eyes just enough to glare at Ella across the table. ‘Why else do you think Dad hasn’t been here all week?’