The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘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 t
here 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.’

  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.

  SIXTEEN

  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 London. And how hard it would have been for me to pretend that I w
as 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.