Besides, I didn’t want to get away from our home. It wasn’t the place that I needed a break from; it was what it was doing to us. To David and me.
I had this idea. At the time it seemed a little crazy, but in a good way; in a wild, spontaneous, let’s-just-do-it kind of way. We needed not to go away as such, David and I, but to go away together right here, to stay in the hotel in the village again, and retrace the very steps that had led us to wanting to live here in the first place. We’d see it all with those eyes again, renewed.
How brilliant my idea seemed. It fizzed inside me like angel dust and I paced the solitude of my house, unable to be still. And oh how I plotted and schemed. I would arrange it all in secret; I would book the hotel, pack the bags. And I wouldn’t tell David till the very last minute – it would be the perfect surprise. I clapped my hands together at the thought of how thrilled he would be.
‘I’ve got something to ask you,’ I said to Melanie at the school gates the following morning. I’d made sure I was early dropping Ella off, in order to catch her. ‘Oh?’ she said, curious.
‘Not here,’ I said. ‘You got time for a coffee?’ Melanie loved a mystery. ‘Meet me back at mine,’ she said straight away, as I knew she would. And I got back into my car and she got into hers, and I followed her all the way to the town, just like I had on the first day that I met her.
Jake was lying on the floor on his mattress when we got back to her house, watching TV and eating Jaffa Cakes from the box. Melanie pushed open the front door and it hit the mattress, blocking our way. ‘Hey!’ he called from the other side of the door. ‘Careful!’
She shoved the door harder and we squeezed in. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’ she said. ‘I thought you’d be gone by now.’
‘Don’t have to be in till ten,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the TV. He was watching some children’s puppet cartoon and clearly loving it.
‘It’s nearly ten now,’ Melanie said, ripping the duvet off him, and switching off the TV.
Jake was wearing just his boxer shorts. ‘Mum!’ he yelped, grabbing back the duvet, and going bright red.
Melanie laughed. ‘That’ll teach you to lie in bed when I’m bringing home guests!’ she said.
He slammed upstairs with the duvet wrapped around him, then slammed down again five minutes later fully dressed and headed for the door.
‘Bye, my lovely boy,’ Melanie said, grabbing him in a hug on his way past, and planting a kiss on his cheek that made him blush again. When he’d gone she said to me, ‘Right. Now we can talk in peace. What’s the big secret?’
But I waited until she’d made the coffee, shoving the breakfast bowls and cereal boxes out of the way to make room on the counter for the cups. I loitered in the doorway, thinking maybe we should have gone back to mine. I wasn’t sure where to sit. Jake had left the mattress and his clothes from yesterday on the floor, and what looked like the week’s dirty washing was piled up on the sofa. If it had been my house I’d be rushing around, embarrassed, doing a quick tidy-up. But not Melanie. You took Melanie as you found her.
‘Here,’ she said and she handed me the coffee cups. Then she grabbed that heap of clothes, dropped them on the mattress and settled herself into one corner of the sofa, legs curled up cat-like underneath her. She took her coffee and looked at me expectantly. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘I need to ask you a favour,’ I said, sitting down next to her. But suddenly I was having doubts. Suddenly, sitting there in the chaos of Melanie’s living room it didn’t seem like quite such a good idea. ‘I was wondering if you would look after Sam and Ella for the weekend.’
‘This weekend?’
‘No, no. Sometime soon. I haven’t booked it yet.’
‘Haven’t booked what?’ she asked impatiently. ‘You’re being very mysterious.’
‘I was thinking of booking a weekend away with David.’
‘Ah!’ she said, really interested now.
‘So I wondered if you wouldn’t mind having Sam and Ella. But it’s a lot to ask,’ I said, half-hoping she’d say no.
‘Of course I’ll have them,’ she said straight away. ‘You know that. Where are you going to go?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You know David and I used to come out here for weekends sometimes before we moved here? I want to do that again. I want us to stay in the same hotel.’
She burst out laughing, spluttering coffee down her chin. ‘What would you want to do that for?’ she said. ‘Oh my God, I thought you were going to say Rome or Venice. New York perhaps. Not the local hotel, ten minutes up the road!’
I looked at her looking at me, her dark eyes so incredulous. And at that moment I felt a million miles from everything familiar. A multitude of images clocked through my head like photos on a reel: the nursery that Sam used to go to in London with the length of string draped across the window onto which the children’s finger paintings were pegged to dry; the café that David and I used to walk to for brunch on Sundays, where we’d prop Sam up in the wooden high-chair and feed him croissants; those blissful nights when the kids were a little older and we could leave them easily with a babysitter and go out to any one of so many restaurants nearby; and, bizarrely, the view from the A4 on our route back home after a weekend spent here, the cars and buildings crowding in, the billboards, the concrete rise of the flyover.
What was I actually doing here?
I opened my mouth to speak but there was a rock in my throat, blocking the words. My whole head was swimming with tears.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Melanie said and she grabbed my arm. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. Stay at that hotel if you want. I hear it’s very nice.’
I shook my head. I tried to smile but couldn’t.
Melanie looked around. She picked up a T-shirt from the pile of clothes on the mattress and gave it to me. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Use this.’
And I wiped my eyes on it, and again I tried, and failed, to smile.
She moved closer to me and stroked my arm, gently, as if I was one of her children. ‘Now then,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ I managed to say. ‘It’s just since we moved here things aren’t the same – between me and David, I mean. It was fine at first. It was really perfect at first; we were so happy . . . but lately . . . it’s probably just because of his work, but even at weekends . . .’
I rambled on.
And she listened, and she sympathized. And even though I knew full well what she thought of David with her view of city types, and that she and Colin probably had a laugh about him when they were out together down the pub, she didn’t pass judgement. She just said, ‘It sounds a great idea, then. Dead romantic. It’ll be just what you both need. And of course I’ll look after your kids. Don’t you worry about that.’
ELEVEN
Our wedding anniversary is at the end of May, and that year it fell on the Friday of the bank-holiday weekend, before half term. I phoned the hotel and managed to get us a two night booking for the Friday and the Saturday, and I cannot tell you how excited I felt, hanging up the phone. What could be more perfect? I had two weeks to keep it secret, to plan every detail, to make sure David would come home early from work.
He was working so hard. Not a week went by when he didn’t have to stay in London at least once. Usually he’d stay there on a Tuesday, when they had their team meeting in the late afternoon which would invariably overrun, but quite often he’d stay on Thursdays too, if there were projects to be finished, or drinks to be had with clients. I’d got used to it. I really didn’t like it. I especially didn’t like the loneliness of sleeping in the quiet, dark house without him there, but what difference did it make when most nights I’d be asleep before he got home anyway? At least he didn’t complain so much about the travelling any more.
The weekend before, I told him I’d booked the hotel just for dinner. ‘For our wedding anniversary,’ I said, in case he needed reminding.
‘I thought we might g
o out on Saturday,’ he said.
‘But our anniversary’s on Friday.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just thought Saturday would be less of a rush.’
‘But you could come home from work early,’ I said. ‘I thought we could make it really special.’
He hesitated. ‘I’ve got a presentation at two,’ he said.
‘But that won’t go on all afternoon, will it?’ I said. ‘You could leave straight after. You could come home a bit early, couldn’t you, just this once?’
He looked at me, and I stared back, willing him to say, ‘Of course my darling, I’ll come racing home, for that, for you.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said after too long a moment.
The dread of him not coming home in time hovered over me all week.
‘You will be home, won’t you?’ I said to him again, and again, when I spoke to him. ‘I’ve booked the table for eight. We can’t be late.’
I could hear the threat in my voice; the fear of being let down. I heard it in his weary replies too.
‘I will do my best,’ he said. ‘I can’t do any better than that.’
It took the shine off a little. It became yet another pressure between us.
I wanted him to catch the 5.20 from Paddington. I’d planned to meet him at the station, with our bags packed, though he didn’t know that, of course. He thought he would be rushing home to get showered and changed to go out for dinner. On the day, I had things organized like clockwork. I packed a case for us both, picking out the shirts for him to wear for dinner, remembering to put in his pants and socks. The night before he had stayed in London, the better to finish things up at work so that he could leave earlier that day, and so he had with him his overnight bag containing among other things his toothbrush and shaver. I packed shorts for us to wear walking, and dug out the old backpack he used to wear to carry our drinks in. For myself, I took a long time planning what to wear. I did not exactly have a huge choice; I’d hardly bought anything new since we moved here.
I packed up the children’s weekend things too, and their sleeping bags, and put them in the car. And in the afternoon I drove to Ella’s school to collect her and Abbie, and went straight on to Melanie’s. The girls chattered in the back of the car all the way there, and as soon as we arrived they ran straight upstairs to Abbie’s room to carry on.
‘All ready to go?’ Melanie asked. ‘Have you got time for a cup of tea?’
‘No, not really.’ I said. ‘I’ll just wait to see Sam. Thank you so much for having them.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ Melanie said. ‘You know that.’
Suddenly I was nervous, my stomach massing up with prickles. It was silly; the kids had stayed at Melanie’s before, though not for two nights. They’d be OK; I knew that. What difference was an extra night?
‘Relax,’ Melanie said, astute as ever. ‘The kids will be fine. They’ll have a great time. And so will you.’
When Sam and Max got back I looked too intently at Sam’s face, as I always did, searching for some new ease of being in his features that would tell me that he was OK, and that I could leave him freely for these two nights at Melanie’s, without any need for guilt. But I didn’t see it there; I never did. Guilt, it seemed to me, had always been at the centre of my relationship with Sam; the guilt of a mother for the anxieties of her son. Guilt over his struggles to fit in at school and with his peers; over the fact that he was too small, too shy, too sensitive. I worried, he worried, and thus came the guilt. And what a vicious circle that can become.
He never voiced his concerns, my Sam; nor his doubts, or his fears, about anything. He just hoarded them up in those wide blue eyes for the rest of the world to see, and that made it worse. At times it frustrated me, at other times it simply broke my heart.
‘Hi, darling,’ I said brightly when he walked in, hot and tired under the weight of his school bag. ‘How was school?’
He mumbled a typical, nothing reply. And he wouldn’t meet my eye. He never did when Max was there.
Melanie asked Max much the same, and Max replied with long, drawn-out detail; the two of them instantly launched into conversation, leaving the silence between Sam and me so much more intense, and painful. How I longed to have him to myself. How I longed to have him 4 years old again, when he was so blissfully free of his awareness of the world.
‘You’ll be all right, won’t you, Sam?’ I said, and Sam scowled, hating me for asking.
Melanie answered for him, disturbingly able as she was to listen in on us as well as talk to Max. ‘Of course he will,’ she said. ‘Max will look after him.’
Sam’s cheeks flushed, agonizingly red. Still he wouldn’t look at me. And I could say nothing else. But how torn I felt between my desire to protect him, and my desire to have him not be like this at all. Surely he would be OK. He liked Max, or liked him well enough. If it wasn’t for Max Sam wouldn’t know anyone. His life here would be hell; he had to be as aware of that as I was. Yet there would be no break, staying here for two nights and two days. He would be in Max’s charge, full on.
I fussed about, knowing that I shouldn’t. I made too much of passing over their things, their sleeping bags, and of telling Melanie to call me if she needed me while all the time she watched me with somewhat amused, tolerant eyes. And finally, I had to leave.
‘You could have had that cup of tea after all,’ Melanie said.
I called upstairs to Ella. ‘Bye, sweetie, I’m going now.’
Vaguely, over their general giggling, Ella called back ‘Bye’ in reply. Suddenly, stupidly, Melanie’s lack of a smoke detector and the sheer steepness of her stairs leapt into my head to taunt me. But this was how I punished myself. This guilt at letting go.
I could feel Melanie watching me, reading my every thought. She made no secret about her opinion that I came from that middle-class place that is somewhere in London, where we agonized over our children’s chances of reaching grade eight on the piano, but wouldn’t so much as let them walk to the shop round the corner on their own. Where we fretted if the juice in their lunch boxes wasn’t organic, but wouldn’t let them loose in the kitchen to cook whatever they wanted, however they wanted, with all those sharp knives around. She made such observations with a laugh, of course, saying, ‘I know you’re not like that, but . . .’ and so I made desperately sure that I wasn’t like that, at least not when I was with her. The details that bothered me were superfluous to Melanie; they distracted from the real purpose of actually loving your kids, and simply letting them be. Yet if I was uptight, she really was quite lax, though I would never have dared to judge her as such. She loved her children, I’ve no doubt about that, just as I loved mine. But the leash by which she reined them in was elastic beyond belief.
‘Bye, darling,’ I said to Sam. ‘See you Sunday.’ And I went to kiss him – he was taller than me now, by a good couple of inches, though still the shortest among his peers.
He tipped his head away, but not quickly enough, and beside us Max coughed on a laugh.
I drove back to my empty house, to shower, wash my hair and get dressed. I wanted to be ready for the evening when I met David, to save time. But my anxieties about leaving my children were combining now with my anxieties about David getting back in time. It was just after half-past five; hopefully he would be on that train. Yet when I called his mobile he failed to answer. I called his office number, but he didn’t answer that. Either he was on his way home, or he was still stuck in that presentation. And I swear, from the leaden sinking of my stomach, I knew which it was. I left him messages. ‘Where are you? Just checking you’re on your way home.’ And I got myself ready, taking my time as I had planned to. In the week I’d had my hair done, at the only place in town; a much-needed trim, and I’d had proper hi-lights put in, for the first time ever. David hadn’t seen it yet; he hadn’t seen me, awake, all week. I carefully blow-dried my hair; I polished and I preened. And intermittently I phoned him, and still he wasn’t there.
In my heart of hearts I knew this would happen; that was the worst part of it. I called him and called him again, my stomach churning with apprehension. I was ready to go by six-thirty. I had more than half an hour to spare before I had to leave to meet him off the train, if he was on it at all. So I made a cup of tea, and watched the clock as I drank it. And then he rang me.
‘Jane,’ he said, his voice weary and defensive and distant against the background noise from the train, ‘I couldn’t get away. And there was a delay on the bloody underground – I nearly missed this train too. I had to run all the way to the platform and now there’s nowhere to sit.’
‘You said you’d catch the 5.20,’ I said.
‘I tried,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get away in time. I had to rush to get this train.’
‘But you’ll be an hour late,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you phone me?’
‘Because I was hurrying for the train.’
‘But earlier; you could have phoned earlier.’
‘I was in the middle of a presentation,’ he said. ‘I left as soon as I could.’ He sighed in my ear, his breath crackling down the phone. In the background I could hear some other man, talking into his phone, presumably to his wife. ‘See you in an hour or so,’ I heard him saying. ‘OK, darling. Sounds good. See you then.’
Tears stung my eyes.
‘Look,’ David said, ‘just call them and put back the table. Please, don’t make this any worse than it is.’
He didn’t know that I was going to meet him at the station. That was part of the grand surprise.
I’d had it all planned. I was wearing a dress – just a simple dark blue thing, straight up and down with thin straps on the shoulders, but a dress nevertheless. I’d be standing there on the platform with our suitcase beside me when David got off the train. In my dreams of course I’d spun us back a few decades, half a century at least. My dress would have been tighter, my heels higher, my lips painted a bright vermillion red. He’d step off the train to the sound of the whistle, banging the door behind him, and as the steam from the engine cleared he’d see me. He’d take the trilby off his head, drop the leather briefcase from his hand, and wrap me in his tender arms.
The Safest Place Page 9
