The Safest Place (23 page)

‘Jane,’ he said firmly, as if calling me into consciousness.

Groggily I raised my head. ‘What?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘So you said.’

He was studying me intently, and frowning. Quickly, I looked away from the expression in his eyes.

‘I gather you’re going camping,’ he said.

‘Is that what you want to talk about? Do you have a problem with that?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

‘What, then?’

This time, when I looked at him, I saw the evidence of stress in the tightness of his face and the pallor of his skin. There were lines where I didn’t remember seeing lines before; he
looked older. It did occur to me that a man enjoying the fruits of a new love ought to look a little happier – all that sex, all that freedom. A man having his cake and eating it.

‘We need to talk about money,’ he said. ‘We need to sort things out.’

‘Money?’ I said. Money was the last thing I felt like talking about.

‘Yes,’ he said. He had one hand resting on the table in front of him, though resting is perhaps not the right word. His fingers were curled over into a semi-fist, and he was digging
away at the skin at the side of his thumbnail with the nail of his forefinger. ‘We need to sort things out . . . make a plan.’

‘Now you’re sounding like my parents,’ I said.

He swallowed. This certainly wasn’t easy for him. ‘My expenses have increased,’ he said carefully, and I laughed a short, harsh laugh. ‘I need to know what you’re
spending,’ he said, two faint blotches of colour rising high on his cheeks as if his face had been slapped. ‘I feel like I’m losing control of my finances.’ Again I laughed,
nastily, and he said, ‘For God’s sake, Jane, we’ve got to work out what we both need. I can’t afford things as they are.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I said, my voice too shrill, too loud. ‘Take my credit card away? Make the children go around in rags?’

‘No, of course not.’ He was driving that nail into his thumb now, clinging to his control. ‘But I need to budget.’

‘You can hardly accuse me of spending too much money,’ I said. ‘I’m not exactly the last of the great shoppers. I’m not getting my hair done every week.’ I
stuck my hands into the mess on my head, my fingers catching in the tangles, lifting it up and making me look, no doubt, more of a wreck than ever.

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Other women would have cleaned you out by now.’

‘Jane,’ he said. ‘Please. ’

‘Perhaps it’s just the cost of all those romantic dinners. Perhaps it’s expensive having a lover. Perhaps you should have thought of that.’

‘Jane, I am still paying the mortgage, as well as living in London—’

‘Is she charging you rent now? Are your services not enough?’

The colour in his cheeks deepened. For a long moment he said nothing and my head echoed with the sound of my own voice, goading, mean, and cheap. What a bitch I am when I’m hurting. The
joke is I didn’t care one dot about money. I could live in rags quite happily, I mean when did I last buy anything new? Perhaps if I had, he wouldn’t have left me. Perhaps if I’d
primped and groomed and put on a better show.

It was the severing I couldn’t bear. The disconnection. He was throwing out my anchor, and then what? I saw my name scrubbed off the joint account; scrubbed off everything.

The tears were burning in my eyes.

‘Jane,’ he said at last. ‘There is not enough money. We need to come to an arrangement.’

I swear, I could hear it then; the actual breaking of my heart. He must have heard it too, because he looked miserable as hell. The fabric of a marriage tears like the toughest of material; you
have to really grab hold hard and rip, and he had, and he knew that he had. All of those photos stashed in the sideboard of the two of us and the kids when they were tiny; all those piles and piles
of photos of little Sam and little Ella with us, the adoring parents. All our dreams of the future, and the sweet, binding haze of the past. All we had done, and built together and lived for . . .
it meant nothing. I looked in his eyes and I saw it. He had cast us into freefall.

We didn’t come to an arrangement, David and I, we didn’t make plans. I was too hysterical; too loud in my objections. And Sam and Ella were too close by, listening.
‘Stop fighting, please, stop fighting,’ Ella sobbed from the hallway. Sam kicked a ball against the wall of his room methodically and angrily; thud, thud, thud. You could hear it
throughout the house. David left on Sunday evening with nothing resolved, leaving behind him just the damage he had done; the ripped-up, agonizing shreds.

And so Sam, Ella and I drove over to Melanie’s house on Monday morning with whatever we’d remembered packed into the car and whatever we’d forgotten, not; our hearts just so
not in it. It felt just like something else to be got through. We didn’t want even to be together, never mind together with anyone else.

I forced a smile on to my face for Melanie’s benefit. I put on a bright, chirpy voice when I spoke to her that had Sam tutting beside me in disgust; I laughed a fun laugh that had him
tutting even more. I made an effort; what else could I do?

Melanie was in fine spirits. The boot of her little car was crammed to the hilt with God knows what; every space filled with something useful, be it a cup or a loo roll or a stray pair of jeans.
The red plastic bowl from her kitchen sink was stuck on top of a load of other stuff and wedged down so hard it was starting to split. Max and Abbie were strapping a tent onto the car roof,
threading a length of rope through the open car windows, and up and over and round. It was not, exactly, secure. The other tent I stuck across the footwell in the back of my car, for Sam and Ella
to complain about for the whole journey. There was no third tent; Jake had left it at Kelly’s parents’. We were going to be very cosy.

‘All set?’ said Melanie as she forced shut the boot of her car. ‘You lot certainly look like you need a holiday.’

We drove southwards in a convoy, Melanie in front, me behind her with my eye on that tent. I tried to keep a safe distance in case it came shooting off her roof and straight through my
windscreen, but every time I pulled back she did too, honking her horn or flashing her lights; several times Max wound down his window and leant right out to yell at us, the wind whipping back his
hair and his words.

‘What’s the matter?’ Melanie kept texting on her phone, car veering from side to side as she did so. ‘What do you keep slowing down for? Won’t be there till next
week at this rate.’

I didn’t know where we were going. Dorset, she’d said, vaguely, but where in Dorset? Once, years ago before we were married, David and I spent a weekend in Lyme Regis. I remembered
it well; the little watermill and the pretty houses, the hotel overlooking the sea. He bought me a pair of earrings, silver drops with jade stones in the middle. I still have them, somewhere.

‘How far is it?’ Ella asked from the back but I hadn’t a clue. When David and I had gone to Dorset we’d driven straight down the A303 from London. It seemed an awful lot
further from where I lived now, travelling along unfamiliar roads. Several times we stopped, for the loo, for food, to tie that tent back down on Melanie’s car. I’d assumed Melanie knew
where we were going; between us we’d no map. It turned out to be guess-work: that way was Dorset, and that way the sea. For miles we wove down winding roads searching for a campsite,
glimpsing the sea in the distance and then losing it again. It was late afternoon before we finally found somewhere; much later still when we’d put up the tents.

I am struggling here. I would like to say what a laugh it was, putting up those tents, trying to work out which pole went where, realizing we’d no hammer with which to
bang in the hooks. Sending the kids to buy chips from the hut at the campsite entrance, getting steadily pissed on the cheap wine we’d stopped off to buy. Rigging one tent up eventually, with
Max smashing the hooks into the ground with a rock, and laughing at Sam’s attempts to do the same and banging his thumb instead, then finding out that the other tent, the smaller one, had a
whopping great tear in the side of it, that we had to cover all week with a towel. Oh yes, how funny it was every time the girls poked their heads out of that hole like it was a window, saying
hello in silly voices, especially later on in the week, when it rained. And what fun too when the wind blew in off the sea at night, straight through those worn inadequate sleeping bags. Melanie
and I, we drank and drank. We had to, just to keep warm.

Perhaps it would have been fun, in a different time, a different place; if I had been different. But that camping trip sticks in my memory, a painful, shameful blot.

The first night I cried just a little, as you do after too much wine. The boys were just up the field, kicking a ball at each other in that slightly goading, aggressive way
that seemed to be the way with boys, and the girls had gone off to the little playground next to the shop. Melanie wanted to know what had happened yesterday with David and I told her, about how
things were starting to hurt him, now that he was feeling it in his wallet.

‘You mustn’t be the one to pay,’ she said, and I remember nodding, agreeing wholeheartedly through the great fog in my head.

I hardly slept at all on the cold, hard ground. We persuaded the boys to take the little tent with the hole in its side, which left the rest of us to squeeze into the other one. Our tent
wasn’t much bigger than the boys’, but at least it divided into two, so the girls could go in one side and Melanie and I in the other. There was no room for my camp beds though, not by
the time I’d struggled to put their legs on. Melanie and I ended up sleeping on just the top parts of the camp beds, the hammock part if you like, which was just a layer of heavy canvas, and
the kids had her motley collection of old mats to lie on. I don’t know which was most uncomfortable. And the girls chattered way into the early hours, no matter how many times I hissed at
them to be quiet, and far, far too early the combined assault of birdsong, the cold, and my stiff, sore body forced me awake to a pounding headache.

All the next day Melanie and I sat outside our tent in her wonky old deckchairs. Now and again the kids appeared wanting food, and we sent them off to the takeaway or the shop. At some point I
remember Sam coming back and loitering by the tent, doing his best not to look too tired, or bored, or lonely. He sat on the grass, pretending to be busy with his phone.

‘Where’s Max, Sam?’ Melanie asked him.

‘Oh, he’s gone off for a walk with some other boys,’ Sam said nonchalantly. ‘To find the beach, I think.’

‘They’ll have a long walk then!’ Melanie laughed.

And I said, ‘Didn’t you want to go with them, then?’

He shrugged, avoiding my eye. Carefully, he said, ‘I might have done.’

And my heart sank. I knew exactly what had happened. Max had found some other cooler and therefore more interesting boys to hang around with and dropped my Sam like a hot brick. It was the story
of Sam’s life. If we’d been at home I’d probably have made some attempt at comforting him. I’d have said, ‘Never mind, Sam,’ or, ‘Don’t let them push
you out’ – I’d have given him a safe refuge, at least. But we weren’t at home, we were with Melanie. I’m ashamed to admit that my overriding concern was just that Sam
shouldn’t spoil things, that he shouldn’t make things unbearably awkward, by not getting on with Max.

‘Well go and catch them up,’ Melanie said. ‘Surely you don’t want to sit around here with us?’ And when Sam mumbled his excuses about wanting a rest and not knowing
which way they’d gone, his face painfully pink, she laughed and said, ‘God, you are a funny one, Sam.’

That night I drank to escape, to set myself free. And then I drank a whole lot more. You get used to it after a while; you need more. And I did want to enjoy myself. After all,
wasn’t that why I was there?

‘Your mum needs to relax,’ Melanie said to my kids, to Sam in particular, who watched me all evening, never letting his eyes off me for a second, never giving me any space.
‘She’s had it bloody hard. You want to cut her some slack.’

We barely left the campsite. We were actually quite a distance from the beach. Once, we all made it down there, late one afternoon when the tide was in and we had a mere strip
of shingle to perch ourselves on. Other than that we didn’t bother. We were too tired by day from the lack of sleep at night to want to do anything much. Besides, we had the shop at the front
of the campsite, and that takeaway, and fields for miles for the kids to play in; we had everything we needed. And the weather was fairly good, the first few days, if somewhat cold at night. The
kids roamed wild, forced to entertain themselves without computers or TVs. That was what camping was all about, Melanie said. Just relaxing. Just letting go.

On Thursday the weather changed. The wind picked up, bringing in the clouds from the sea and with them the threat of rain. In the evening we huddled around our tents, with
nothing more than the remains of our throw-away barbecue to warm ourselves by. The girls brought out their sleeping bags and wrapped them around their shoulders; soon they retreated into the
boys’ tent, whispering, giggling, sticking their heads out of that stupid tear of a window to repeatedly squeal hello. The boys had had a few beers and were now hanging about, listless. Max
lay sprawled out on his side on the grass, seemingly oblivious to the drizzle driving in and coating us all with its slow, creeping dampness. He reminded me of a lion, so apparently relaxed, yet
also so alert, listening, watching. He was listening to Melanie and me. His expression changed as we talked, now that smile, now that raised eyebrow of agreement as he followed our conversation. My
Sam sat cross-legged in the entrance of his tent, part in, part out. He tugged at the grass, pulling it out with agitated hands, getting angry with the girls every time one of them squealed too
loudly behind him, or accidently kicked him, or just generally crowded into his space.

‘For God’s sake, Sam,’ Melanie said. ‘Why don’t you just move?’