The Safest Place (22 page)

I looked around my kitchen at the trappings of my life and I hated everything. The rustically painted blue cupboard doors, the overblown sideboard stacked with crockery and these days God knows
what other crap, the AGA, and all the other either helpful or just plain pretentious symbols of the country idyll. What was the point of any of it? Who was I trying to kid? Who was still there to
kid? The life I’d so wanted was now stifling me, slapping itself in my face, rubbing my nose in it as my mother would say.

An image of David ripped through my head, sudden, unwanted. I could see him as clearly as if he was there, his handsome face so relaxed, so free of us. I thought of him in London, enjoying all
the delights of the city on this fine summer’s day, with the other woman, so unencumbered.

I got up from the table. I opened a bottle of wine, and within the next fifteen minutes or so I had drunk it. Do you know how quiet it is in the country? It was a Saturday, for God’s sake;
a day for shopping and getting out and about, for seeing friends, going to sports matches, cafés, the cinema, for enjoying your precious, hard-earned weekend in your precious and oh-so-short
life. I sat at my table, spent from tears and alcohol, and my world was filled with utter silence.

Then the phone rang, cutting into my misery. I ignored it at first because I was too suddenly drunk and too numb to do otherwise. But it rang and it rang. Eventually I pushed back my chair and
stumbled over to the dresser to answer it.

‘Hello,’ I said, the demands of the real world pulling me up, sharp.

It was Melanie, though it took a while for me to know it. It took her a while to speak. I imagine she was taking in the many layers of my hello. I held the phone against my ear and the silence
batted in my head. And then she spoke, like a saviour, my only friend in all the world.

‘I’m coming over,’ she said.

She brought Max and Ella with her, two bottles of wine, a packet of biscuits and some sausages.

‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Bet you haven’t had any.’ Lunch turned out to be dinner by the time we got round to making it, finding a few old potatoes to bake in the Aga
along with the sausages, a tin of baked beans and some pasta that we mixed with a jar of pesto from the back of the cupboard. We’d drunk one of the bottles of wine by then and I’d moved
on from drunkenness into that thin altered state in which you can drink and drink and never feel the escape again. I functioned robotically, doling out food for the kids, shoving some into myself.
We sat out at the table on the patio, Melanie and me, sat there as the sun went down, talking, drinking, and in my case, intermittently crying.

‘Don’t let him do this to you,’ Melanie said. ‘You’ve got to be strong.’

But I didn’t feel strong. I felt trampled, utterly ground into the dirt.

The girls came out for a while, hanging around us as girls do when there’s an adult drama to behold; they played on the swing, surreptitiously listening and watching, until they got bored
and wandered off to climb up the hill. We could see them from where we sat, two little stick figures silhouetted against the dusk. The boys were in the house; through the open windows came the
fairground crackle and blare of some Xbox game or other, and the tinny guitaring of Sam’s latest CD, played over and over.

At some point, when it was almost dark, Max came out and joined us. He’d got himself a beer from the fridge, and he sat himself down at the table with us to drink it, quite at ease in our
company in a way in which Sam could never be.

‘What’s Sam doing?’ I asked.

‘Sulking probably,’ he said with a grin. ‘I just thrashed him at Halo.’

‘Go and get the girls down, will you, Max?’ Melanie said.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘In a minute.’

He expected us to carry on talking while he was there, and Melanie did so, including him in our conversation as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I wished my kids were like that;
that they’d sit down and join in instead of being so separate. I especially wished Sam was like that. But it was just one irony in a long list of cruel ironies that the more I craved
Sam’s company, the less he wanted mine.

‘Jane needs to get out more now, doesn’t she, Max?’ Melanie said. ‘She doesn’t want to be stuck out here moping on her own.’

‘That’s right,’ Max said.

‘Need the loo,’ Melanie said, and she went off inside.

When she was gone Max leant over and rubbed my arm.

‘You’ll be all right, Jane,’ he said.

The contact startled me, the gesture itself. Sam would never do anything like that. Sam would never sympathize or empathize with me, or offer me comfort. Sam would not even talk to me. I looked
at Max and he grinned at me, not the least embarrassed.

When Melanie came back out she said, ‘You know what you need? You need a holiday.’

‘Oh sure,’ I said shakily. ‘I can really manage that.’

‘Of course you can. We’ll all go. We’ll go camping.’

‘Camping?’ I said, my head so groggy, so slow to follow.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Next week. Last week of the holidays.’

‘Cool,’ Max said.

‘We’ll have a right laugh,’ Melanie said.

‘But we haven’t booked anywhere,’ I said, and Melanie and Max both looked at me like the out-of-Londoner that I was.

‘We don’t need to
book
,’ Melanie said. ‘We’ll just pitch up. We’ll drive down to Dorset. ’

‘We haven’t even got a tent,’ I said.

‘Never mind that,’ Melanie said. ‘We’ve got a couple, haven’t we, Max? Three if we take Jake’s. Let’s just pack up tomorrow and go.’

‘David’s coming tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Well can’t you tell him not to? Can’t you tell him you’re going on holiday?’

‘I don’t know. The children want to see him.’

‘The children want to see him?’ Melanie said, her voice too sharp.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can’t just cancel him.’

‘You could if you wanted to.’

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘OK then,’ she said tightly.

‘Right,’ Max said. ‘Think I’ll go and fetch the girls down.’

‘You do that,’ Melanie said.

Now
she
was annoyed with me. I felt like I was drowning. Nothing was solid. Nothing was sure.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I do want to go camping. It’s a great idea. Just not tomorrow.’

‘Fine,’ Melanie said. ‘Then we’ll go on Monday.’

Melanie, Max and Ella all stayed over that night. Melanie slept next to me on top of my bed in an old T-shirt of mine. It was oppressively hot, even with the windows wide open.
I’d had far too much to drink but still I couldn’t sleep. The wine had made my heart race and I felt too tense, touched with irrational anxiety. I’d downed two large glasses of
water before coming upstairs, but my whole body was still horribly dehydrated, my insides pinched and dry.

Beside me, Melanie slept easily, her breath coming in short, faint snores. She’d collapsed back onto the bed and fallen asleep almost instantly, untroubled by all the issues that bothered
me. I have never been able to just crash down anywhere, sleeping wherever and alongside whoever; not even back in my student days. I guard my privacy too tightly. And although this was my bed it
didn’t feel like it, with Melanie there, and with the scent of my parents still clinging to the sheets. I could smell the stuff my mother used on her hair on my pillow, and around me the
familiar man-smell of my dad. And I felt hollowed out with loneliness.

I missed David. I missed the smell of him and the sound of him; I missed the security of the known. Memories of our time together before we moved here haunted me, and how very fine it all seemed
now in retrospect, our shared life in our little house in our little street in London, especially those years back when Sam was small. We got by. We were happy then, before the demands for a better
life started adding up. I’d been so quick to reject it all but now look at all that I’d lost. I’d been so sure of what I wanted when we moved here, but now I’d have given
anything to wind the clock back. Yet who could I ever confess that to? Not my parents, whom I’d sent so miserably packing. I was far too proud. And not those friends back in London I’d
too quickly lost touch with; how they would gloat now, if they knew about David and me. The last time I’d seen Karen I’d practically rammed it down her throat how blissfully happy we
were out here; how could I tell her it had all gone so wrong?

But nor could I tell Melanie. It was a very particular picture I painted for Melanie but it was the picture that she wanted to see. David was all evil in her eyes; I was better off without him.
She rallied me, supported me and she kept me going. Without Melanie my loneliness would have swallowed me whole. But I couldn’t tell her that I missed David. Nor that I wished we’d
never left London now. Oh no. She wouldn’t have been quite so understanding then; I sensed that well enough.

Melanie and her kids were still here when David turned up on Sunday. She and I were hunting through the house for anything that might be useful to take with us, and stuffing it
into my car. We are a family ill-equipped for camping, having only ever stayed in those ready-erected home-from-home tents on purpose-built sites in France, and that was just a few times, years ago
when the kids were small. We’d a couple of sleeping bags, a torch, and some picnic plates and that was about it. Oh, and the infuriatingly hard-to-put-together camp beds that the kids slept
on when Nicola and her family occasionally came to stay.

‘Jesus,’ Melanie said when she saw me lugging them down the stairs, their various poles sticking out of their too-tight sacks. ‘What do you want them for?’

‘I’m not sleeping on the ground,’ I said.

‘Our tent’s going to be like the fucking Hilton,’ she muttered, and Max, who’d just wandered out of the kitchen eating a piece of toast, smirked.

I wished I could do it better, the whole spontaneity thing. But I’d a thumping hangover, and I was just too wretched to do a convincing job of pretending otherwise.

‘I’ll just grab the pillows off our beds in the morning,’ I said. ‘And my duvet.’

‘If you must,’ Melanie said. ‘Or I could lend you some sleeping bags.’

‘Oh, OK. Thanks.’ I’d rather have had my duvet, but perhaps sleeping bags would be better. ‘What about food?’ I said, trying to summon a little more enthusiasm.

‘We can stop off on the way,’ she said. ‘Pick up one of those little barbecues.’

‘I’ve got a cold bag somewhere,’ I said.

And she said, ‘Excellent.’

I felt like a child, trying to please her. I told myself I was doing this for my children, but in truth I was doing it because Melanie had said I should do it, because she had said it would be
fun, and I was too weak, vulnerable and lonely to ever disagree with Melanie.

‘Not much of a camper, is she, your mum?’ Melanie said to Sam when he too came shuffling out of the kitchen, Max’s pale and latent shadow. ‘We’ll have to show her
how to have a good time, won’t we, eh?’

And Sam smiled, nervously.

‘Guess what, kids,’ I’d bellowed at them late last night, the drink and its deceitful, miserable effects distorting my world and everything in it. ‘We’re going
camping!’

Were they thrilled? Ella had seemed happy enough, but Sam, he looked just as I felt. Pinned against a wall. ‘You will have a good time!’ I’d thrust it upon him just as Melanie
had thrust it upon me.

When I heard David’s car drawing up outside I felt stupidly uneasy, with Melanie still there. I’d wanted her to be gone when he arrived. Like Sam, I found it too difficult to mix
such opposite sides of my life.

‘That’s everything for now, I suppose,’ I said, hoping she’d take it as a hint to leave. ‘If I think of anything else I’ll just stick it in the
car.’

David’s feet were on the gravel, his key in the door.

‘He still has a key?’ Melanie said, staring at me in disbelief. ‘I’d have changed the fucking locks.’

And she ignored him when he walked in.

‘Oh. Hello,’ he said, clearly not thrilled to see her either.

‘I’ll sort out the tents,’ she said to me, blanking him totally. ‘Get over to mine early and I’ll stick one in your car. You need to go back to sleep,’ she
said, putting her hand on my arm proprietarily. Then she laughed, loudly, flashing her strong, white teeth. ‘We’re going to have such a laugh.’

‘Going somewhere?’ David asked.

‘Sure are,’ Melanie said without looking at him.

Our hall was too crowded with the three of us. Awkwardly, David squeezed his way past us and wandered first into the kitchen and then the living room, in search of his children. My senses
followed him. Max and Sam must have gone back into the den. Soon I heard David’s voice. ‘Hello, Sam, how are you?’ So hopeful, so trying to be normal. I could not hear Sam’s
reply.

‘Right, then,’ Melanie said at last. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And she yelled, ‘Max! Abbie! Think it’s time we went home!’

‘I’m not chasing you away,’ I said quickly, and she gave me the strangest look, part pity, part challenge.

‘Just you be strong,’ she said. And not even bothering to keep her voice down, ‘Stand up to him.’

It was another ten minutes before they finally left. I went straight into my empty kitchen and sat down at the table, exhausted, expecting to be left alone. But almost straight away, David came
in.

‘She’s as charming as ever,’ he said.

‘She’s my friend,’ I said. ‘She’s just protective.’

‘What does she think I’m going to do?’ he said. ‘Beat you up or something?’

I rested my head in my hands and mumbled through my fingers, ‘Did you want something? Only I have got a headache.’

He pulled out a chair and sat down. I wished he wouldn’t. I wished he would leave me alone.

‘We need to talk,’ he said.

I think I must have groaned. I could feel him looking at me, and what did he see, I wonder, as I sat there slumped in just an old oversized, baggy T-shirt that I tried to pass off as a dress,
and with my hair all wild and everywhere? I hadn’t washed since yesterday morning, and even I could smell the wine from all those empty bottles cluttered by the door.