The Safest Place (18 page)

‘But you’ve made it up now, haven’t you?’ Ella said, looking at me. ‘Dad won’t stay in London this week?’

I avoided her stare and said to Sam, ‘Eat your food.’

David carried on making his sandwich, slicing the bread I had bought that morning, using up all of the ham. ‘Don’t you worry about me, Ella,’ he said over his shoulder, his
voice so calm and easy. ‘I often have to stay in London. You know that.’ He turned around, sandwich completed. ‘I’m here now though. All right if I sit down?’

The three of them looked at me, waiting for a response.

‘No,’ I wanted to scream, ‘it isn’t all right.’ The hurt he had done me loomed over me, an engulfing monster of a shadow. I could not pretend. I pushed back my
chair, left my plate where it was and walked out.

He spent the evening in the den with the children, watching some programme on TV while I drifted from the kitchen to the living room to the kitchen again, excluded. Later, when
Ella had gone to bed and Sam too was making his way up, he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.

‘I don’t want you here,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, misunderstanding. ‘I just want to get a drink.’

‘I mean I don’t want you here, at all. Not just in my kitchen – I don’t want you here in the house. I don’t want you
sleeping here
!’ I’d wanted
to stay calm but my voice rose with every word, too loud, too shrill in the quiet of the house.

He stopped on his way to the sink, suddenly, like an animal caught in the lights, and spread his hands out helplessly. ‘Jane, it’s nearly eleven. I’m not going to get a train
back to London now.’

‘Then stay in a hotel! But just go!’

He stared at me, the colour rising in his face. ‘I’m not going anywhere now,’ he said.

‘You can’t stay here!’ I shouted at him. ‘You can’t be here! I want you out!’

‘Jane, this is my house too. And I came to see my children.’

‘That’s too bad.’ I was crying now. ‘You can’t do this to me.’

‘Jane, I’m not trying to do anything to you. I’m here to see Sam and Ella, that’s all.’

‘You can’t be here! You can’t come from her to me! You can’t be in this house, acting like everything is normal!’

‘Then what would you have me do, Jane?’ he said, raising his voice now too. ‘Not see my children?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care!’ I screamed, and instantly I heard Sam slamming a door upstairs.

‘Look,’ he said, quietly now, lest Sam should hear more. ‘I am sorry for all of this and I will try harder to stay out of your way. But you are not stopping me from seeing my
children.’

And so it was and so it would be for all the miserable weeks that followed. He turned up on Saturdays and we bristled around each other, and always we ended up fighting. He
wanted to stay over to keep things normal for the children, he said, to make it easier for them, but in fact we made it hell.

I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand him sleeping down there in the den, while I was upstairs, too tense, too tormented to sleep at all.

We tried to talk, on those wretched Saturday evenings when the kids were in bed. Late, late into the night we talked, getting nowhere, getting more and more upset. He missed us, he said; he
still cared about us, about me. But how could he care about me when he was still seeing her? When he was living with her, now, more or less?

‘I’m not living with her in that way,’ he said. ‘I’m staying in her flat. She’s a colleague. It’s an arrangement.’

‘You’re sleeping with her,’ I said. ‘You’re staying in her flat. You’re living with her.’

‘Jane, this is still my home,’ he said with his head in his hands. ‘You, the children, are still my family.’

‘You want us both then?’

‘I don’t know what I want,’ he said, the guilt, the anguish, clearly eating him up.

Well, let it eat away. Let him suffer. After all, what had he done to me?

One Saturday night we were sniping at each other in the kitchen when Sam burst in. He stood in front of me, fists clenched at his sides and shouted, ‘Why do you keep going on at
Dad?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘All you do – you go on and on. Rowing with him all the time. Why can’t you just leave him alone? No wonder he doesn’t come home much any more.’

I looked at Sam with his face all puffed up and angry and the utter injustice was like a slap in the face. How could he blame me, automatically and without knowing? And clearly he did blame me.
Clearly he’d been stewing on that blame for quite some time.

‘Sam,’ I said, so calmly now, so coldly, ‘do you want to know why your father and I are, as you put it, rowing all the time?’

‘Jane—’

‘Do you want to know why he doesn’t come home much any more?’

‘Jane!’ David said again, much louder, and I heard the warning in his voice. I heard it, and ignored it.

‘It’s because he’s seeing someone else.’

The colour fell from Sam’s face. Now it was he who looked like he’d been slapped. And right then I didn’t care. I was too hurt that my son had automatically sided with his
father.

‘Sam, listen,’ David said and he reached out an arm to Sam but Sam stepped away.

He looked from me to David and back at me again with such horror, such
disgust
in his eyes. His bottom lip turned right down in an arc, like it used to when he was younger and about to
cry. But he didn’t cry; he ran out of the kitchen, stormed upstairs and slammed his bedroom door behind him.

‘Why on earth did you have to do that?’ David turned on me, furious.

Equally furious, I said, ‘It’s not me, I didn’t do anything.’

‘How could you possibly say that to him?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘You mean it’s OK for you to sleep with someone else but not for me to tell him?’

‘He didn’t need to know,’ David said, his face flushed with anger. ‘You should not have told him like that!’

The next day I saw David try to talk to Sam, but Sam walked away from him out into the garden. I watched from the kitchen window as Sam kicked at the ground, kicking at sticks, imaginary or
real. He looked caged, even out there. David followed him around the garden, his hands outstretched, beseeching. Sometimes, when they raised their voices I could catch what they were saying. I
could just about make out David pleading ‘You must understand . . . it makes no difference to us . . . to you and me and Ella.’ Far more clearly I heard Sam say ‘I don’t
want to know.’

Ella came into the kitchen and sidled up to me. ‘What’s the matter with Sam and Daddy?’ she said.

And I lied, as I should have lied to Sam. ‘Oh don’t worry. It’s nothing.’

‘I hate everyone arguing all the time,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I put my arm around her to hug her but she slipped out from my grip, and left the room.

Long after Sam came back in David stayed out there, sitting on the bench with his head in his hands. As I watched, he looked up, as though pleading to the heavens, and I realized that he was
crying. And I wanted to be pleased. I wanted to be glad that he was hurting too but I wasn’t. I felt more wretched than ever.

Things changed then. They were never going to get better, but how quickly they went from bad to worse. His visits were agony, for me, for the children, for all of us. We told Sam and Ella we
still loved them, that what was going on between us was no reflection on them. We were both there for them, as always, we said. We were still a family.

But still they were screwed up with it all. It was like we’d taken the ground from beneath them and thrown it into the air as freely as dust. Ella started having nightmares. Sam retreated
into himself. Sam, my once sweet-natured, tender boy, pulled away from us both.

David reduced his weekend visits to a day; he’d come on Saturday morning, and leave again in the evening, going back to London and to her. It killed me to think of them spending Sundays
together in London, going for walks along the Thames and for lunch in Soho or Covent Garden, doing things that we used to do. So the rows were even worse on Saturdays, two days’ worth
condensed into one. He wanted us to be here when he came on Saturdays and got agitated and anxious if we weren’t. But why should we drop everything? Why should we change our plans? Of course
the children wanted to see their dad, desperately, much more than they would admit and certainly more than I would ever acknowledge, but it altered the course of our Saturdays. No more trips to the
market, no more seeing our friends. For Sam and Ella, just the bittersweet pressure of their father coming to visit, and with it the reminder of all that that meant.

So he switched his visits to Sundays. To fit in with us, he said, but to me that was worse. The thought of Sunday clouded Saturday; it shadowed the whole week. The ridiculous thing was that
after all this time of looking forward to the weekend, to having David home and being a family, some tiny part of me still did look forward to seeing him, as if I was programmed that way, like a
dumb dog, unable to change its ways. And it hurt and it hurt, the cruellest pain.

There was always something to do on Saturdays, so I could fill the space easily. I could avoid seeing him for much of the time. But Sundays dragged, an interminable pause. For the children it
was better that he should come on a Sunday, but it wasn’t for me. For me there was no escape; it was unbearable.

And because there were no trains to speak of on Sundays, he needed his car. He came by train one Saturday, and slept on the sofa bed for what I assumed would be the last time. And on the Sunday
he packed up his car with the last of his stuff, and drove back to London.

And then I knew that he’d really left me.

On those many, many nights alone, with nothing but a bottle of wine for company, I had plenty of time to take a good long look at myself. I thought I was lonely before, but it
was nothing to this. At least before I knew David would eventually come home, if not every night then certainly most, and always at weekends. His presence punctuated our lives, gave us structure. I
am loath to admit it, but I was like a three-legged table without him; unstable, and unable to be stable for my children. The days stretched before me, all of them the same, as vast and endless as
the sea.

I looked backwards, critically. I saw myself wanting the right house, the right schools, like any woman, wanting what’s right for her kids. Wanting, wanting, as if it was my due. I
realized that the dreams that David and I shared were, for him, only ever that: dreams, a fantasy, a counter to reality. I could see that he’d never really wanted to move here, but then I
gave him no choice. I wanted it, so I would have it, but at what cost to us all.

I had plenty of time for analysis on those long, long evenings, and plenty of time for regrets. But what do you do when faced with such a painful view of yourself? You turn away from it. You
close your eyes.

I veered from anger to regret to utter despair and back again. There were days I couldn’t face getting up in the morning, other days I couldn’t bear to go to bed.
Several times my kids missed school because I couldn’t force myself to get up and take them. Sometimes I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Sam and Ella because in their faces I saw
David and the failure of my marriage. I resented their demands and their childish selfishness, always needing this, wanting that. Let them get their own meals, see to their own things. I saw no
point now in keeping an orderly house. No point in maintaining the dream.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about the other woman: about Diana.

In my head she was perfect, in a glossy, over-polished sort of way. She was my opposite. Not just physically, not just tall and dark and graceful, but in the abstract too. She was patient,
understanding, amused at all his jokes. She tended his ego, soothed his treacherous brow. She was everything that I wasn’t, nor wanted to be.

But she was with him.

Sam and Ella were distraught. In each of them, it manifested itself in different ways. Ella became clingy and whiny, making the biggest fuss about everything. Sam was more
sullen than ever. I thought that now he knew about his father’s affair he would be nicer to me, sympathetic even, but instead I felt unfairly judged by him. I wanted his support, but he was a
child and he needed mine. They both did, but I couldn’t cope with them. I couldn’t face their grief and their worries as well as my own.

When your children are small you deal with their anxieties so easily; a cuddle for a nightmare, a plaster and a kiss for a sore knee. I treated them much the same in the face of this adult
crisis. I relaxed rules, totally, for all of us. We ate pizza, and chips, from the freezer, and we ate when and where we wanted to eat. I had no space in my head for planning meals, nor could I
bear their miserable faces around the table. Why force more misery upon them by making them eat vegetables when they didn’t want to? What good was a bit of broccoli to us now? What was the
point of enforcing structure, purely for structure’s sake?

I let them stay up as late as they wanted, Ella as well as Sam. If I sent Ella to bed at her usual time she’d only keep coming back down again, wanting a glass of water, wanting comfort,
like a small child again, fearing the dark. I stopped nagging about schoolwork, about getting off the computer, about tidying up. I stopped nagging full stop, and thus, all arguments with my
children stopped too. In my head I could almost hear David saying to Sam, ‘Have you done your homework, you’ve got GCSEs next year, don’t forget,’ just as I, deliberately,
didn’t say it.

And do you know what? I found life so much easier once I stepped back like this. Once I took my foot right off the parent pedal.

How zealous I had been before, how much energy I had wasted, fretting about everything. Now, I saw motherhood, and wifehood, and the whole great con of domestic sacrifice, as nothing but angst
and failure. All that striving, and all that worrying, and for what?

I moved from day to day, numb. But within that numbness, in fact part of it, was a new freedom. The time of day no longer mattered, beyond the necessity of getting the kids to school and back
but even there I stopped worrying about being late. ‘Be grateful that I’m giving you a lift at all,’ I said, if either of them complained. Most mornings we were late on their
account anyway; the difference was that I no longer chased them. I couldn’t care less if they couldn’t find their books/PE kits/forgot their homework. That was their problem, not theirs
to dump on me. I’d had enough of carrying everyone else’s woes. I made Ella’s packed lunch, and I drove them both to school. I collected them again. I fed them, sort of. That was
it. I backed off completely. I felt the lightness in my hands. Numb. Free.