The Safest Place (2 page)

‘What have you done to your hair?’ he asked, and to me that was the epitome of all that was wrong: that he could think I had chosen to cut off my hair when to me it seemed that I had
no choices, in anything at all. Suddenly it wasn’t about the hair; it was about us, about him, about the life we were trapped in.

‘No, what have you done to me?’ I wailed. ‘What have you done to my life?’ I slammed my head down on the table, my hands in my hair, clutching at the lack of it. ‘I
can’t live like this. Cooped up like this in this stupid little house!’

‘What do you want, Jane?’ he said. ‘What can I do?’

And I railed at him. I said I want this and I want that. I want a new house, a new life. I want to move, far, far away.

And he said, ‘But how can we move away, Jane? My job is in London.’

Ironically, my parents sensed we needed a break. They came to stay, and off we went, David and I, to our favourite hotel in our favourite place. And we walked the hills, and we
said, ‘What if? What if?’ But it was all a game, a fantasy. We talked the dream but the dream rang hollow.

David got a different job, as a new-business manager for the same company but no longer attached to just the one magazine. It meant a lot more hours and a lot more stress for a
little more money, though still not enough for us to move, not unless we moved further out into the suburbs or nearer to the airport, and neither of us wanted that. We trawled the estate agents,
ever more disillusioned. We could swap like for like in our area, that was all. So we replaced the boiler, did up the kitchen and got our loft converted. Sam, Ella and I spent three weeks one
summer at my parents’ house in Cambridge while builders turned our tiny attic into another tiny room. And I resigned myself to staying put.

And soon Ella followed Sam off to school, and I had time to make my cards. I even managed to sell some through a couple of local gift shops.

I enrolled Sam in tennis lessons, and Ella took up ballet.

It seemed our lives were caught and bound in London.

Yet in me, at least, the dream never died. It stayed stuck and dormant, just waiting for its time to arise. And that time came around when Sam started at secondary school.

His last year at junior school had been a dog-eat-dog nightmare for him, and for me too. The scramble to try and get a place at a decent comprehensive, the competitiveness, the elbows-out
backstabbing in the race to look out for your own. Some people we knew could afford to send their kids private, and lucky them. Others moved house to get themselves into the right catchment areas
for the right schools. Neither was an option for us; no matter how we tried to jiggle them the figures just wouldn’t add up. But the good state schools in our part of London were all
hopelessly oversubscribed, the not-so-good ones frankly terrifying. The battle for places was brutal. I don’t think there was a single kid at Sam’s junior school who wasn’t pumped
full of extra tuition of some kind; music lessons, extra maths lessons, verbal reasoning exercises, something, anything to make them shine out from the pack, not just in the hope of a scholarship
to a private school but for the Catholic schools too, and even in the slim hope of getting into a better comprehensive further across town. It was pressure, constant pressure. Sam hated it. I hated
it. Sam isn’t musical. He isn’t outstandingly clever. He is average, and there is no place for average in London.

He got a place at a vast comprehensive a four-mile bus ride away. I opened the letter informing me of this, and burst into tears.

But still, we gave it a go. After all, we didn’t have any choice.

‘He’ll be fine,’ David said, to try and reassure me. ‘If it’s good enough for the thousands of other kids that go there, it’ll be good enough for Sam
too.’

Sam was young in his year; his birthday is in July. He was a gentle boy, small like me, and sensitive. He’d be eaten alive, we both knew that. At the very least we’d lose our sweet
Sam, and be sent back a very different-natured boy in his place.

It killed me sending him off every morning. He was too young, too small, to be going off on those buses on his own, out into the world. Every day I fretted until he got home again, and when he
did come home the sight of his drawn, anxious face filled me with worry. At parents’ evening teachers looked at me blankly when I said I was the mother of Sam Berry. You could see it on their
faces: Sam Berry? Who’s he? They knew the naughty ones, the difficult ones; the ones who made a lot of noise. They knew the very bright ones too; those fortunate few who were cushioned from
the masses in their gifted-and-talented accelerator classes. But who would know Sam, who protected himself by remaining quiet and deliberately unknown? Who retreated into the oblivion of the middle
stream, where he quickly disappeared?

I couldn’t sleep for worrying about Sam. Something had to be done, but what? We couldn’t afford to send him private; we couldn’t afford to move anywhere else, at least not
anywhere better, in London. The madness of living where we lived, as we lived, consumed me every moment of every day. And that dream of mine, it curled around the edges of my mind, tormenting me.
Oh what a better life we could have, elsewhere.

We stuck it for a year and a half. Just before Christmas, when Sam was in Year 8, some boys from his year lynched him at the bus stop. He wouldn’t have told us, as he did not tell us
anything if he could help it. We would not have known at all but for the fact they took his bag with all his books in it, and his phone, and even the shoes off his feet, and threw them in the
river. He came home sobbing and barefoot, but also angry, that now we would know how awful his life had become.

‘Don’t tell the school,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t. You’ll make it worse.’

We sat at home, helpless. How had this happened to us, to our child? We did tell the school, of course. We made an appointment to see the headmaster and David took the morning off work.
‘We are the parents of Sam Berry,’ we said, and we saw it on the headmaster’s face: Sam
who
?

I planned our escape.

I went about my plan with the same precision and determination that other women I knew had set about securing their child a desired-school place. I gave it my all; no chance of
failing this time. I trawled the internet, looking up all the estate agents within a ten-mile radius of the village where we so liked to stay. I scrolled down the lists of property for sale,
picking over the details, seeing what we might afford. There weren’t that many houses to choose from out there, and those that there were varied hugely depending on obvious things such as
style and size, and, less obvious to me, location. I didn’t know the name of every little hamlet in the area, and struggled to picture them all in my head.

We needed to be near a mainline station, and schools. I readjusted my search, made it a ten-mile radius from the station. And I looked for schools within that scope too, graphing it all out on a
little map, showing this village and this village, the one and only secondary school in the area, the two primaries, and the station. I drew these markers on a piece of paper, then I got a bigger
piece of paper, and drew them out again. And I added more villages. I scaled out the likely travelling times between each place.

I looked up every piece of information I could find about the schools; the two primaries and the comprehensive. To me they looked idyllic, and the fact that there was no choice when it came to
secondary school struck me as a good thing; there’d be none of that vicious competing, no good-school-versus-bad-school and all the snobbery that that entailed. No lying about where you
lived, no stamping on other people to try and squeeze your child a place elsewhere, like you got in London. If there was just the one school it stood to reason that it would be a good school, and
that all the local children would go there. That was what I wanted for my children. Even better still, it was a mere fraction of the size of the place Sam was at.

So once I had worked out where the schools were, and the station, I really knew the vicinity in which to search for a house. A
home
. I scrutinized the estate agents’ websites. For
the value of our little house in London, we could afford so much more. I looked at those little pictures of grey-stoned village houses and wide low cottages, and I fantasized about living there. My
dream took on a new fervour. And when I’d finally narrowed down my search, I phoned the estate agents and got them to send me the details.

And then I showed them to David.

I waited till both the kids were in bed. Unusually for me, these days, I’d cooked, not just pasta but a proper meal with chicken and rice and salad. I’d set the table, clearing all
the junk and piled-up papers away and sticking them on one of the chairs, out of sight. And I’d changed out of the messy clothes I’d been wearing all day into something clean and
pretty.

I waited till he’d eaten, and until he’d drunk a good few glasses of wine. And then I said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

He thought I was pregnant. I saw it in his eyes; that double-take, the uncertainty whether to look pleased or just plain petrified. I knew he’d think that of course, and I knew how much
easier it would be then for him to accept the idea of a new house that we could afford rather than a new child that we couldn’t.

I could barely contain myself. I said, ‘I’ve found us a house,’ and relief and then suspicion eased into his eyes. ‘Well, three houses actually.’

It’s a good number, three. Manageable. I’d spent a lot of time narrowing it down. I fetched the details and handed them to him, and watched the surprise register on his face as he
realized that these were not local houses. He smiled a curious, though somewhat closed, non-committal smile. An indulgent smile, but he kept on looking.

And I talked as he looked. I said ‘This one is in a village, this one next to open fields. And this one is this far from the station, this one’s this far. It takes two hours, twelve
minutes into Paddington.’

I talked in a fast, high-pitched voice, persistent. I could hear myself, as excited as a child.

David took his time looking at the details. How thoroughly he read every word, turning the pages over, and over again. I saw the possibility, however slight, however fanciful, drawing him in.
This was, after all, a dream we’d both shared before we were too tired, and too weighed down, to dream at all.

‘You’ve been very busy,’ he said, when at last he spoke.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Look.’ I cleared a space on the table and laid out the map that I’d made, clearly marked with the schools, the station and perhaps not quite so
clearly with the position of the houses I was showing him. I’d sketched them in, complete with trees and old stone walls. David’s a marketing man; he likes that sort of thing.
‘I’ve looked up the schools,’ I said. ‘All the local kids go to them. The comprehensive is a quarter of the size of Sam’s. They’d know who he was there. He
wouldn’t just get lost behind everyone else.’ David looked at me, but before he could speak, I said, ‘And just think, when you come home from work you’ll come home to space,
fresh air . . . we’ll have room to move, we’ll be able to go for walks, to really enjoy our lives.’

‘You paint a very tempting picture,’ he said. I knew he wasn’t convinced, but that was OK; I hadn’t expected him to be convinced at once.

I opened another bottle of wine. We talked late. In fact I talked, mostly, till my head was sore and throbbing. I wanted this like my life depended on it.

David listened, and he smiled, but he shook his head. ‘It would be a massive change, Jane,’ he said. ‘You can’t just pack up your life and move.’

He didn’t dismiss it out of hand, though. Not that it would have made any difference if he had. I still wouldn’t have given up.

For weeks I chipped away at him. For every negative he came up with I had an answer.

‘You complain when I’m late home from work living here,’ he said. ‘I’d be late home every night if we lived there.’

‘Yes, but you’d be late for a good reason, and not just because you’d taken hours getting home because of some delay on the underground or because you’d got stuck on a
slow train out of Waterloo.’

‘I might get stuck on a slow train out of Paddington.’

‘No you wouldn’t. It’s the suburban lines that get delayed and cancelled all the time, just because of the sheer quantity of them.’

He raised his eyebrows at this.

‘It’s true,’ I said, though I didn’t know if it really was or not. It just sounded true, to me. ‘You’ll know what train you need to get every night,
you’ll get it, then you’ll come speeding home to us, waiting for you in our country retreat. And we will be so, so pleased to see you.’

He raised his eyebrows a little higher, and he laughed.

‘I’ll still have to get the tube, to get to Paddington,’ he said, but I could tell he was weakening.

‘Yes but you’ll make sure you leave your office in plenty of time. You’ll be looking forward to going home.’

We lay awake at night, talking it over. The whole idea took on a dream-like quality again in the dark, with sleep lapping at the edges of our minds. I lay in his arms, warm,
close to him.

‘I don’t know, Jane,’ he said. ‘It would be a hell of a commute.’

‘But don’t you long for space and peace?’ I whispered. ‘For weekends that really are weekends instead of just a stressful continuation of a stressful week?’

‘Of course I do.’ His chest vibrated under my ear as he spoke. ‘But couldn’t we look at somewhere a little nearer? Somewhere still out of London but with less of a
commute; somewhere in Surrey perhaps. There are loads of pretty villages in Surrey.’

‘I don’t want to live just in Surrey.’ I turned to face him, leaning up on my elbow. ‘I don’t want to live in any old pretty village. It isn’t about that.
It’s about us living where we’ve always wanted to live, and we’ve always wanted to live there, where we’ve been so happy. Haven’t we, David? If we move, I want us to
move properly, not to some halfway compromise. Let’s really live our lives as we want to. This is what we’ve dreamed about. Just imagine it: our time at home would be so special.
We’d go for walks. You’d have time to really relax. And think how much better it would be for the children – for Sam especially. He’ll be destroyed if he stays where he
is.’