The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  Yet there is a memory from this time that flickers in my head, bothering me. I cannot shut it out. It’s of the Saturday morning before the football tournament, and the first time that David met Melanie and her children. Max and Abbie had both slept over the night before, and Max and Sam were already outside playing football when David eventually got up and came down to the kitchen, where I had been for quite some time, slicing up tomatoes to go with the burgers for tomorrow.

  ‘Who’s that?’ David said, watching them through the window.

  ‘That’s Max,’ I said without looking up. ‘Sam’s friend. He stayed over.’ David had come home late last night, on the last train out of London. All of us, Ella, Abbie, Sam, Max and me, were asleep when he got in, though surely he would have noticed the extra shoes in the hall.

  ‘You didn’t tell me Sam had a friend staying,’ David said, a faint note of accusation in his voice.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ I said.

  David was watching the boys intently. I followed his gaze, out to where Max was kicking the ball at Sam, who was in goal. Max was big and strong; he slammed that ball at Sam repeatedly. Sometimes Sam saved it, sometimes he didn’t, and when he didn’t Max laughed at him, a high-pitched drill of a laugh that split through the morning quiet. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Sam,’ he yelled. ‘How could you miss that one?’

  It was just banter; it was just what boys do. Sam didn’t seem to mind too much. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and braced himself for the next one.

  ‘Doesn’t seem much of a friend,’ David said, and I took this personally. I took it as criticism.

  ‘Well he is,’ I said. ‘And Sam’s lucky to have him. He wouldn’t have any friends at all if it was left down to him.’

  David looked at me. He was about to speak but just then Ella and Abbie came running in, chattering, clattering about as they opened the fridge, ran the tap, grabbed cups, poured drinks.

  ‘Hello, Ella,’ David said, but Ella didn’t hear him. ‘Hello, Ella,’ he said again. ‘And who’s this?’

  Ella glanced at him, and giggled, and Abbie giggled too, and they scampered off again, bursting into laughter in the hall.

  ‘Well that’s a nice welcome,’ David said.

  ‘What do you expect?’ I said. ‘She’s got her friend with her.’

  ‘So I see. She might say hello to her dad, though. I haven’t seen her all week.’

  ‘That’s not her fault.’

  David picked up the kettle, shook it to check for water, put it back down and flicked on the switch. ‘You’re in a bad mood,’ he said.

  And I said, ‘It’s not me, it’s you. You seem to object to the fact that the children have got friends. I thought you would be pleased.’

  ‘Of course I’m pleased they’ve got friends. I’d just like to know who’s staying in my house, that’s all.’

  ‘If you’d come home earlier last night you would have known.’

  ‘Jane, I couldn’t come home earlier. I had work to finish.’

  ‘You’ve been late all week,’ I said. ‘I hoped that last night, for the beginning of the weekend, you’d be home a bit earlier.’ I could hear myself, petulant, complaining. How had it come to be like that? And yet it had, too often, too soon; the strain of waiting for David to come home, the disappointment that waiting entailed.

  ‘So did I,’ he said. ‘I’m completely shattered.’

  Just then, there was a howl of pain from outside. Sam was crouched on the grass, head in his hands. I could see blood from his nose seeping between his fingers. Max had hit him smack in the face with the ball.

  ‘Jesus – ’ David said and flung open the back door. ‘You there,’ he shouted at Max. ‘Enough!’

  ‘David,’ I called, running out after him. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘That boy has kicked that ball non-stop at my son,’ David said. ‘That is not what I put that net up for.’ He said it to me, but Max could hear him well enough. He stared at David, and stepped back as we approached.

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s all right, Max,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s not all right,’ David said and he bent down to help Sam to his feet. Sam was crying properly now, and the blood was mixing with the snot, and running down his chin. David led him in to the kitchen, and I followed with a reluctant Max.

  There was no harm done, not really. Sam’s nose wasn’t broken. I cleaned his face up at the sink and if David hadn’t been there that would have been that. It was an accident; Sam knew that, I knew that. The boys would have got over it and got on. But David was there, making a bad situation worse, and the tension between us caught and flared.

  ‘It was an accident, David,’ I said. ‘Just an accident.’

  ‘Yes, I know it was an accident.’

  ‘Then why are you making it into such an issue?’

  ‘I am not making it into an issue.’

  ‘The poor boy’s mortified.’

  ‘I haven’t even heard him say sorry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Max said.

  And Sam, who really was mortified by hearing his father tick off his friend, wailed, ‘Dad!’

  The girls came running in to see what was going on. They crowded around us, gawping at Sam’s face, squealing at the blood.

  ‘What happened? Let’s see. Is Sam OK?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s OK.’

  ‘Did Max do that?’ Abbie said.

  And yet again I said, ‘It was an accident.’

  Then into this atmosphere Melanie arrived to pick up her children. She came around the back, tapped on the back door and walked straight into the kitchen. This was normal practice for Melanie, as it is for many people around here. The front door is for delivery men and strangers, unless of course, you live in the town. But it wasn’t normal practice for David. He stared at her, appalled.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said brightly, wiping my hands on my thighs and sticking a smile on my face. ‘Come on in.’

  In one glance Melanie took in the room, her eyes both watchful and amused. And straight away her kids went to her, like cubs to a mummy bear, wrapping themselves around her body, even Max, who was a good foot taller than her, and had to stoop to fit under her arm. Melanie looked at David, and then at me, curious.

  Quickly, I said, ‘This is David. My husband.’

  I could feel the tension coming off him in waves.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, somewhat curtly.

  ‘And this is Melanie.’

  ‘Hello,’ Melanie said cheerfully. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Max kicked a ball in Sam’s face,’ said Abbie in a stage whisper.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Max said.

  Melanie laughed. ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look at you then, Sam.’

  Sam, who was still holding a bloodstained tissue to his nose, did his best to smile.

  ‘Oh you’ll be fine by tomorrow, won’t you, Sam?’ she said. And to me she said, ‘Kids, eh?’ and again she laughed.

  And I laughed too, probably too loudly.

  ‘Did you have to be so rude?’ I said, the minute Melanie, Max and Abbie had gone.

  ‘I wasn’t rude,’ David said.

  ‘Yes you were. I was so embarrassed!’

  ‘She walked straight in through the door to our kitchen,’ David said. ‘As far as I’m concerned that’s rude.’

  ‘She’s my friend,’ I said. ‘That’s what friends do here.’

  It was lunchtime now. The children, who had disappeared to escape the atmosphere, came back in search of food, then changed their minds and skulked off again.

  ‘Can we not argue,’ David said. ‘Please can we not?’

  ‘We’re not arguing.’

  ‘I just want to be at home at the weekend and relax with my family, that’s all. Can we please not spoil it?’

  But it was already
spoilt. The tension lingered around us, unspent.

  The next day was as bad. Sam’s nose was swollen, and a bruise had appeared half-moon-shaped under his left eye.

  ‘I can’t play!’ Sam wailed at breakfast. ‘Everyone will laugh at me.’

  ‘No they won’t,’ I said, and I tried chivvying him up like I used to when he was younger. ‘Think of it as a war wound,’ I said. ‘Real football players get bashed all the time. You look like a proper player now. Like – ’ I searched my head for the only footballer I could think of ‘ – David Beckham.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ Sam said, and his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Eat some food, Sam,’ I said. ‘You can’t play on an empty stomach.’

  ‘I don’t want to play. And I can’t eat.’

  ‘Maybe we should have got him looked at,’ David said, as Sam dabbled his spoon about in his uneaten cornflakes.

  ‘Where?’ I snapped. The nearest hospital was thirty miles away. There was no handy walk-in centre nearby, like we’d been used to before. ‘It isn’t broken. It would be a lot more bruised than that if it was broken.’

  ‘Eat up, Sam,’ David said. ‘We need to get going.’

  ‘I can’t do it, Mum.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Sam,’ I said. ‘Stop making such a fuss and eat your breakfast. You can’t pull out now. I’m doing the burgers with Melanie.’

  I did not see Sam playing football. I was busy putting burgers into buns. Nor did I see him shivering on the sideline between games, quivering with the cold, and with fear, his pale face forever close to tears. I did not see, but I could imagine it well enough. I did, however, catch him at lunchtime. I left Melanie for a minute and sought him out, to make sure he had something to eat. I took a tray of burgers, and found him standing on the edge of a small group of boys, looking as miserable as I’d feared.

  ‘Burger anyone?’ I asked holding out my tray like a waitress.

  Several grubby hands reached out and snatched at the burgers, but not Sam’s.

  ‘Wait!’ I laughed. ‘Leave one for Sam,’ though no one did. I had to grab one back, from a boy who’d taken two. ‘Here you are, Sam,’ I said, holding it out to him. I said it gently, kindly, and he looked at me warily with his anxious blue eyes, the left one now as bruised as if he’d been thumped. ‘Take it,’ I said, and like the good boy that he is, he took it. I wanted to cry for him. I wanted to cry so much that there were needles stinging my eyes and a lump the size of a fist throbbing in my throat. ‘See you later,’ I forced myself to say brightly, and I quickly turned and walked away.

  Melanie’s on-off partner Colin came along to the football tournament. I had met him before, once, at Melanie’s house, but David obviously hadn’t. Colin was a carpenter by trade and came to watch the football in his dusty work clothes, with a beanie hat pulled down low on his forehead, and fingerless gloves that left his fingers free to constantly twist and smoke his roll-ups. He was a quiet man, not shy so much as brooding. That day, he stood near David on the touchline, while Melanie and I tended to the burgers, though they didn’t speak to each other much. They were brought into proximity because of Ella and Abbie, who’d wanted to meet up, and had since run off to play with the other younger kids, across the field, leaving their fathers alone. I imagine that David took one look at Colin, and realized immediately that they’d have absolutely nothing in common and would probably never see each other again anyway, which, as it turned out, was true. And I imagine Colin looked at David with his neat hair and his pristine wax jacket and thought the same. But it was awkward, or so it seemed to me. When Melanie and I joined them we stood between them; two women chatting between their unsociable men. Not that Melanie seemed to care; if anything she found it amusing. But I was still embarrassed, after yesterday. It’s not that David wasn’t polite; he was, to Colin, to Melanie, to me, unfailingly so. It’s just that whereas I had regarded the football tournament as an exercise in furthering friendships for myself and our children, for David it was about Sam. He was there to watch Sam play football. It was as simple as that.

  SIX

  At the end of January we signed Ella up for riding lessons at the local stables, just a few miles away across country lanes. It was her tenth birthday on the nineteenth and we’d given her the hat, the boots and the jodhpurs for her presents. I will never forget the utter delight on her face when she put them on for the first time. How proud she looked, and how proud we were of our fine little girl.

  David and I both went with her for her first lesson. It was a cold, crisp Saturday, the sun slow to rise. The stables were part of a farm, accessible up a long, sloping track, a good mile away from the road. David bumped the car over stones and pot holes, the engine grinding in second gear, and all around us we could see field upon field shrouded in a low, floating mist. In the weak morning sunlight it was surreally, almost spookily, beautiful.

  The farm was on quite high ground; we could see it as we approached, and the stables, too, across the courtyard. Beyond, they’d a huge field set up with jumps and flagpoles, as if for a gymkhana.

  ‘Will I be doing that?’ Ella asked eagerly from the back of the car. ‘Will I be jumping?’

  ‘Perhaps not straight away, sweetie,’ I said, and beside me David laughed.

  ‘Better learn to sit on a horse first, don’t you think?’ he said.

  We’d brought the camera, and a flask of tea. I remember jiggling from one foot to the other with my hands clasped around my plastic cup of stewed tea, trying to keep warm, while David took photo after photo. I remember Ella’s face alternately petrified and euphoric as she first led her small horse from the stables, and was then helped up on to it, gripping the reins with all her might, her breath fogging out in front of her face in short, fierce puffs. There were about eight girls there that morning, of various ages. The woman running the lesson was a caricature of everything I’d ever imagined a riding mistress to be; tall, thin, with a large, prominent jaw, huge brown eyes and a deep whinny of a voice that I swear you could hear right across those fields. I tried not to laugh. I looked at David, hiding behind his camera, and I knew that he was trying not to laugh too.

  We watched as Ella was led away by one of the older girls to a nearby field – not, thankfully, the one set up with jumps. She tried to look back as she went, to smile at us, and nearly slid off her horse.

  ‘Ella!’ I yelled, before I could stop myself.

  ‘Eyes on the road,’ called David. ‘Eyes on the road.’

  Ella clutched at that horse, her little bottom sticking up behind her.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said as I watched her go. ‘How many broken bones do you think this will end with?’

  ‘None,’ David said. ‘She’ll be fine.’

  Ella could only have been on that horse for fifteen minutes at the most. The rest of the time she was in the stables, learning the etiquette, the things to do, and not to do. Don’t enter the stables if the horse has his tail to you, don’t run, hold your arm out straight when you lead him; that sort of thing. David and I stayed there the whole hour, though we saw little of Ella. It didn’t matter; we were glad of the excuse just to be there. We wandered over to the far side of the courtyard, with that view stretched out around us. What a place to spend a Saturday morning. This was what it was all about, moving here. David’s long commute, the hours we spent apart, it was worth it just for this.

  It is a strange thing, when you finally achieve something that you have always wanted; when you are in the place you have always wanted to be. You are balanced on a peak. You daren’t look down lest you fall. Is this it, you ask yourself, again and again. Are we really here?

  Those Saturday nights during our first winter here, when our children were safe inside the house, and we, David and I, were curled up in front of the fire, were some of the happiest of my life. Sometimes I would go to the kitchen to fetch us some wine or make us some tea, and open the back door for a moment and put my head out into the cold night air, just to feel the contrast
, the stark graveyard chill of the silent, black night outside, when we were so snug, so cosy within.

  That first year, we had a whole stream of guests; at Christmas, at Easter and all through the long summer holidays.

  ‘Come up,’ I’d say on the phone to my friends back in London, and to family. ‘You must come and stay.’

  I bought in extra food, and towels and linen in soft cotton checks of yellow and blue. I placed eggs from the farm in a ceramic dish on the side in the kitchen, and arranged apples from our tree in another. At the front door I lined up our wellies, along with a couple of spare pairs for other people, and I stacked chopped wood in the living room beside the fire. At Christmas I decorated the house with holly from the garden and twigs that I collected myself and painted red and silver and gold. I planned; I created the dream. It hurts me now, to think of it. I see myself, before guests arrived, putting out a cake or fresh bread on the table, pouring milk from its supermarket carton into a white, old-fashioned jug. I wanted it all just so. It was imperative that people should see what a great life we had here. I wanted to send them home again wistful, envious even; such reactions reassured us that we really had done the right thing in moving. David played his part too. He took the men outside, showed them around. He said how great it was to be out of town every weekend, to wake up to just the sound of the birds, with no planes, no cars driving by. He even made jokes about catching up on his sleep on the train.

  I remember my friend Karen, on the one and only time that she and Ed came to stay with their children, saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re so lucky. It’s just so gorgeous here.’

  We were sitting in the living room with a glass of wine at the time, in front of the fire which I’d lit though we really didn’t need it. The children were still playing outside with their fathers. We could hear them calling to each other from far out in the fields; the sweet carry of childish laughter.

  ‘I know,’ I said, and how pleased with myself I felt, back then. How content. ‘I could never go back to London. Not now.’