The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  And we had that garden, filled with flowers and trees and so much space. Already the children were out there; through the open windows I could hear Ella whooping and every two seconds Sam crying, ‘Wow!’ and ‘Look, Ella, look at this!’ It was overwhelming; the elation, the slow dawning that this was real. That this was ours.

  That summer was like a dream. I look back and I see us all, hazy, blurred around the edges like figures on an old cine film. I see as though I am staring into the sun; it hurts my eyes. I see David, with his shirt stripped off in the heat, arms raised, battling to pin the wild, spindly roses by the front door back behind their trellis; I see him again, standing outside the front of the house late in the day with a beer in his hand, just looking at the view. He loved it here. He did. He loved it just as much as I did. And I see my children, sometimes near, their faces bright and animated, saying look at this and look at that, and sometimes in the distance, running, climbing. I see them playing in the field that rises up gently from the back of our house then steepens into a hill, dotted with gorse and trees; I see their tiny figures, arms outstretched, spinning round and round, till they collapse, dizzy on the ground.

  To the front of the house, just a little way up the lane, there is a small pond that often spills over into the grass around it during the rainier months of autumn and winter, and then shrinks back again with the arrival of spring. That summer it had shrunk to almost nothing, and the ducks and moorhens that nested there jostled and squawked for space, splashing their wings dramatically in the water, and chasing each other away through the grass. Sometimes the ducks wandered as far as our garden. Always, always, I will remember Sam tiptoeing up the lane after them in the impossible pursuit of catching one, just one, so that he might, for just a moment, hold it in his arms.

  If I paint an idyllic picture it’s because it was idyllic. David took two weeks off work and we decorated the rooms, scrubbed down the floorboards, hung curtains, and gradually sorted through our things. The furniture was in place, and the boxes eventually unpacked. We met our neighbours; the sweet old couple in the house next to ours and the man from down the lane who walked his dog past our house every morning and always stopped to say hello and check on our progress. And we found our way around locally. It was about a forty-minute walk across footpaths and fields into the village and this we did, quite often, to buy bread and basic supplies. We even had lunch at the hotel a couple of times, that first summer. The local town was a twenty-minute drive away, where there was a supermarket, several shops and even a Saturday market. And a couple of cafés, three pubs and Sam’s new school, set back off the main road out the other side.

  I felt like I was living on holiday. Even shopping for food became fun. The supermarket in town wasn’t up to much but there was a butcher’s selling local meat and the market was amazing; lots of suppliers from the area selling locally grown produce. It was such a far cry from London. I could even buy fresh eggs from a farm half a mile from our house.

  We got a sofa bed for the spare room downstairs – the den, as we now liked to call it – and over the summer we had a succession of visitors; my parents, David’s father, his sister and her kids. There was always something going on, and we were busy, so busy, but happily so; so proud to show off what we had come to. And although David was back at work the weekends were just as I imagined they would be, with long walks and long lunches and lazy afternoons. We had done the right thing. We had.

  Even David’s commute to work wasn’t a problem, not at first. The novelty made it worth it. It took him fifteen minutes to drive through country lanes from our tiny hamlet to the station, if he put his foot down. And trains were hourly, two hours and twelve minutes to Paddington, as long as they ran without delay. At first, it was worth getting up at 5.30 every morning to catch the 6.15 train, and not getting home again until nearly ten o’clock at night. It was worth it because we’d moved in summer, and those early mornings were beautiful, the air outside our front door so incredibly soft and peaceful. I’d get up with him, at first, to make him coffee, and see him off. And when he’d gone I’d walk about my garden in my nightdress, revelling in the contrast between this place, this life, and the one we had left behind.

  Getting home so late wasn’t a problem either, at first, even though he could never leave work in time to make it across London to catch the 6.20 train from Paddington, and therefore had to get the next one a whole hour later. I’d have supper ready, and a bottle of wine open and poured for him. And because our kitchen was so big and our new oak table so big too, and because this was the country and this our new idyllic life it wouldn’t be just any old supper. I’d cook something special with meat from the butcher’s and vegetables from the market; I’d put flowers on the table – wild flowers, picked from the garden and stuck artfully into an earthenware jug instead of a vase, and a basket of bread. Often, I’d make a cake. I didn’t have an AGA yet, but it was just a matter of time. And I’d sit with David while he ate, and drink wine with him, and talk with him, and laugh with him and I loved him. I loved him, because he was doing this for us.

  And if, over time, the novelty wore off a little, that was only to be expected. The children missed their old friends. They settled into their new schools fairly well, considering, but still it was hard, especially for Sam, who is naturally shy. It was hard for all of us. I missed my friends too; conversations on the phone and promises to visit left me painfully aware of the wrench I had made. Sometimes, particularly on rainy days, when David was at work and the children were at school and I was in the house for hours on my own, I felt horribly alone. I missed the presence of other people, and, in truth, the shops. And for David, getting up so early on dark winter mornings soon lost its appeal, as did driving back again on wet, black nights. When he was at home, he was tired. Quite often, meetings kept him late at work and he wouldn’t be back till nearly midnight. I stopped waiting up for him. I stopped getting up in the mornings too. Sometimes I’d be asleep when he left the house and asleep when he came home again. Some weeks I hardly saw him at all.

  I told myself that was just the price we had to pay. After all, nothing is ever completely perfect. Life is not a dream.

  FOUR

  I met Melanie that first autumn, just outside the main entrance of Ella’s new school. It was a damp, misty morning and she was coming out of the school gates just as I was rushing in with a tearful, anxious Ella in tow, ten minutes late because the ‘new’ car wouldn’t start again. I’d seen Melanie before, briefly and in passing. I’d seen lots of the other mothers briefly and in passing, but until then I’d managed little more than the exchange of a smile, a quick hello.

  I hadn’t appreciated how difficult it would be to make new friends, especially in a place where everyone is spread out so. There were no people with same-age kids just up the road or just around the corner. I didn’t properly consider how incredibly hard it is to uproot your whole life and come into a place an outsider, knowing no one. I’d simply seen the four of us, transported as a unit, complete in our idyll, and I’d assumed everything else would just fall into place.

  I knew that the school playground was the most likely place to meet people, for both me and the children, and I knew also that it would take time. But what I hadn’t factored in was the sheer rush it would be every morning and every afternoon getting Sam and Ella delivered and collected from their separate schools on time when those schools were located a good four miles apart. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be traffic, not on country roads.

  We’d had to buy a second car. We hadn’t thought of this, either; hadn’t budgeted for it, in the general excitement of moving. But David had to drive to the station, and there our car languished all day, no use to anyone. We’d tried to see a way around it, but ended up arguing instead.

  ‘You could give me a lift in the mornings,’ David said. ‘And pick me up again at night.’

  And I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. What about the children? I’m not leaving them on
their own every day, especially at night.’

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Sam’s old enough.’

  ‘But Ella isn’t.’

  ‘You’ll have to bring her with you then,’ he said.

  ‘Oh come on, David, she’ll be asleep!’

  ‘Jane, I’m telling you that we can’t afford another car,’ David said again, emphasizing the words as if it would make a difference somehow.

  ‘I heard you the first time,’ I said. ‘And I’m telling you we have no choice.’

  So we bought one, reluctantly, and in too much haste, from a second-hand dealer two villages away; just a small, cheap old thing that would do for getting David to the station and back. Within weeks the cam belt went and the exhaust needed replacing. And on cold and damp mornings it took forever to get it started. I’d lie in bed in the dark listening to David trying desperately to rev it up while the engine repeatedly choked and spluttered and failed. And then I’d hear him get out of the car again, slam the door, swear and curse the day that we’d ever moved, and take the Renault instead.

  And so, more often than not once the weather turned colder, I was stuck with that old banger to drive the kids to school in, which meant that it was my bad luck to have the battle of getting it started. And I cursed David for his impatience, and his selfishness in taking the Renault, and leaving me to this. And the children would become agitated and I would get stressed and we never left the house on time. I’d thought country roads would be quiet but at rush hour in the morning the one road that ran through the town was solid with traffic because it was just that, the one road. I had to drop Sam off first at 8.45 but his school was right through the town and out the other side; even if I managed to get him there on time I still had to contend with the traffic coming back through again to get Ella to her school which was, ironically, in the same village as the garage that the godforsaken car came from. For her, school started at nine, and that should have been fine but it never was, not in the traffic. I usually ended up pulling up outside the gates in the car and letting her out just as the bell went and the other kids were all going in. At best, I’d manage to park up somewhat haphazardly round the corner and rush her there on foot, but it was never easy, it was never the relaxed and tranquil experience that I had dreamed of and so wanted it to be. Every morning we parted tense and fraught. The smile that I pinned to my face in the hope of making friends among the other women coming and going probably looked more like a grimace, and anyway, there was certainly no time to stop and chat to anyone.

  Sometimes, when I pulled up in the car, there’d be a group of women still clustered around the gates, but they’d have dispersed by the time I actually came along, on foot, in the hope of meeting them. And to be really honest, women clustered in groups have never been my thing. Here, in the country, they looked just the same as they had in London; huddled against the weather in their ill-fitting clothes, bored, gossiping. I couldn’t help thinking they were gossiping about me, the newcomer, always last, always parking the car so badly on the corner, delivering that poor child, late again, into school.

  Afternoons were no better. For Ella the school day ended at 3.15, for Sam it was 3.30. The caretaker at Ella’s school opened the playground gates when the bell went, and not a moment before, and the small mob of women congregating outside would shuffle their way through just as the children started exiting the building. This section of the playground was ridiculously narrow; more like an alleyway up the side of the school, and at home-time even a handful of people made it seem crowded and chaotic as small children dressed in bright blue sweatshirts swarmed among the dawdling bulk of mothers, locating their own. At least that is how it felt to Ella and me, to whom all this was still new. She panicked if she couldn’t find me, and I panicked too, knowing that she would be upset, and knowing also that we would be late picking up Sam. Often, I wouldn’t find Ella till the crowd had cleared, and she’d be standing there on her own or with the teacher, and I would have to comfort her and console her, making us later still.

  ‘You know I’ll be here,’ I’d say to her. ‘Why don’t you just wait with your friends?’

  To which she would tearfully reply, ‘Because I don’t have any friends.’ Or, worse still, ‘Because my friends are all at St Mary’s,’ which was her old school, back in London.

  I knew she was exaggerating. I knew she was just playing up the whole situation to make me feel bad, and I really did feel bad. After all, I had uprooted her, and put her here in this strange place. And of course it takes time to make new friends. But I also knew that it would happen, for Ella at least. She is a lively, outgoing child. And she is a girl; she knows how to fit in.

  It was Sam I worried about.

  By the time we got to his school everyone else would be gone. I’d see him in the distance as we drove up, loitering outside the school by the roadside railings. Sometimes he’d be leaning against those railings, staring at the ground, or idly kicking at his bag. And sometimes he’d be peering into the oncoming traffic, looking out for our car and I’d see his face, anxious, his eyes pinched, straining to see. He seemed so small and forlorn and my heart ached for him. And when he saw that it was us he’d look so relieved that I wanted to cry. I wanted to wrap him up and put him away, safe. He’d pick up his bag and bundle himself into the back of the car, saying nothing while Ella would still be going on about the awfulness of her day or her mother or something or other, non-stop, relentless.

  I’d look at Sam in the rear-view mirror, slumped down, face to the window. I could smell him, the mustiness of the damp air clinging to his hair and his jacket, and beneath that the warm, precious scent of boy.

  ‘You OK, Sam?’ I’d ask

  ‘Yes,’ he’d say, automatically.

  ‘Good day at school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  That was all he ever said, and he said it not so much because he knew it was what I wanted to hear, but because it put an end to further questions. And while Ella would complain all the way home he would stay silent.

  I worried about Sam constantly. I have always worried about him. With girls, in many ways, it is so much easier. I have been a girl; I know what it’s like, what to expect. Girls are so much more socially aware, at least Ella certainly is. She is more communicative about her emotions too; I always know what is going on with her. If she isn’t happy about something she doesn’t hold back in telling me about it. And although it was taking time, I knew that she would make friends. She would find her place among her peers, and settle in.

  But Sam is so quiet, so shy. Again and again I told myself that we had done the right thing in moving; that he would fare infinitely better in this smaller school, away from what I had come to perceive as the social thuggery of the London school system; first the competitiveness of getting a place, and then the strain of simply surviving under the opposing threats of either hot-housing or failure. In my head, the flaws in all that we had left behind were magnified. How else could I justify what we had done; what I myself had made us do, in moving here? There was no point in looking back, nothing to be gained from regret. And anyway, wasn’t it worth enduring the inevitable struggle to begin with in order to live in such a beautiful place?

  And I’d always only wanted what was best for Sam, my dear, sweet, darling Sam. That was all I ever wanted; to do my best. I say this now and my heart is clamped, tight as a vice.

  I did not stop to think that the transition to secondary school was always going to be a struggle for a boy like Sam, or that maybe he would have adjusted, given time back in London. That at least there he had some friends; in fact a good number of kids from his year at juniors had gone on to the same comprehensive as him. I did not consider the possibility that by moving him away to a place where nothing and no one was familiar I might actually have made things harder for him. That in effect, I was making him go through it all again, only this time he was on his own. I didn’t think of that at all.

  And so the school run, both morning a
nd afternoon, was stressful and fraught. The anxiety of it took up the bulk of my day; worrying about it, worrying about the children. In the hours in between I shopped for food, I tended the house and the chores and became accustomed to my own unanticipated and prickling loneliness.

  Most days, I made sure to get to Ella’s school before 3.15, with the intention of infiltrating those groups of women gathered at the gates, yet getting to really know anyone proved a painfully slow process. It is not easy for me to go up to strangers and introduce myself. I am not the most outgoing of people. Like Sam, I am shy, and shyness is both an excuse and a prop. I loathe it; it infuriates me, in both Sam and myself. And those women all knew each other, and they stood so close together, talking so busily. I could feel the curiosity in the glances thrown my way. I forced myself to smile; I made every effort to be friendly. And sure, they were friendly enough back. ‘Hello,’ they said. ‘How are you? Are you settling in?’ But it never seemed to go any further.

  Meeting Melanie changed everything.

  She was still there when I came back out of the school that morning after taking Ella in. She’d waited for me.

  ‘You’re the new girl’s mum, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Hi. I’m Jane.’

  ‘I’m Melanie,’ she said. ‘Your daughter’s in my Abbie’s class. I hear you’re from London.’ She said it like that, with the emphasis on the first syllable. I wasn’t sure if she was impressed or mocking me. I wasn’t sure about a lot of things, when I first met Melanie.

  ‘Afraid so,’ I said.

  She pushed her fringe back from her face and looked at me intently for a moment, brown eyes narrowed. It made me a little uncomfortable. But then she smiled. ‘So do you like it here, then?’