The Safest Place
Authors: Suzanne Bugler
ONE
When I imagined us moving to the country I pictured a low, stone house with a garden filled with wild flowers and an apple tree, and beyond that, for as far as the eye could
see, fields in which the children could roam at will. I dreamed of space, in which they would develop and grow, away from the constraints of city life. I pictured rosy cheeks and muddy knees, and
more of the things that really mattered to us instead of the constant pressures of the south-west London parent trap. No more obsessing about schools and music lessons and property prices; I
pictured us simply packing up our stuff and moving away to a better life. I saw the smiles, spreading across our faces. I felt the freedom, lightening up our hearts. It would be an adventure. For
David it would be a bolt-hole, a Friday-night escape from the stresses of work. Our weekends would be like holidays, our time together precious.
That’s how I imagined it would be. And that’s how it was, at first.
We used to come here for short holidays, and stay in the hotel in the village. Quite often, when there were just the two of us; less so after the children were born. But still
we came when we could, snatching the occasional, precious weekend away on our own, when my parents could come down to London and look after the children.
It was our favourite place in the world.
We’d walk for miles. Across gentle hills and fields so soft and untrammelled it was as if no man since God had ever walked the earth. We’d walk and see sheep, and rabbits and
squirrels and deer – but no people, for miles and miles no people. And then in the distance, suddenly, through the trees, the grey stone of a village, the smell of wood smoke in the air.
The walk we loved the most took us from one sleepy village to another alongside a fast, gurgling stream, over a bridge and up a hill, rising steeply above the allotments of the village below
laid out in glorious, celebratory rows of pumpkins, and sunflowers, and jack-and-the-beanstalk beans running green and red up their sticks – past all of this into fields of corn, where we
would stop, and look back and down across the rooftops nestling below.
And we talked, and we dreamed.
‘What would it be like to live here?’ we wondered.
‘I would make jam,’ I said. ‘I would pick fruit from my garden and make jam.’
And David said, ‘I wonder how far it is to the station? I wonder how long it takes to get into town?’
And at night, back at the hotel, drowsy in front of the log fire, our faces glowing from the fresh air and good food, and good wine, we’d dream again.
‘What if?’ we said. ‘What if?’
And it was that dream that sustained me through those tough, early years of small children. It played through my head on a constant, background reel, fantasy-like, as I
manoeuvred my way around the pushchair blocking the hall, the highchair squeezed into our minuscule kitchen, the stair-gates, and the endless, endless washing, heaped up all over the place, taking
forever to get dry. We lived in a desirable corner of south-west London, in a two-up, two-down-plus-bathroom Victorian terraced house that we’d paid a fortune for, before the children were
born. We’d liked living there when there were just the two of us, in our quaint little street full of quaint and over-priced homes. We liked the look of the window boxes bursting with colour
beneath sash windows, the deli on the corner, and the other young, professional and trendy-looking couples hurrying for the train in the morning.
But then Sam came along, and I started liking it a little bit less. I had nightmares about dropping him down the ridiculously steep stairs and smashing his head on the
unforgiving slate tiles of the floor. I noticed the damp, made worse by the constant washing draped over the clothes drier that we had to keep in the living room because there was no room for it
anywhere else. The cranky heating system was no longer endearing, the downstairs bathroom a total pain. And I longed for a garden, a proper garden with a patch of grass on which Sam could play,
instead of our poor excuse for a patio, poorly laid with ill-fitting stones, no good for anything other than a learning-to-walk toddler to trip himself up on.
When Sam was six months old I went back to work for three days a week, but most of the money I earned was used up just paying for his nursery fees. I worked for a magazine
company in Soho, as a designer in the advertising department of an upmarket glossy. It was my job to create the small, house-style adverts for those old-fashioned clients who preferred not to use
agencies – the specialist perfumers and family-run jewellers – and to style the layout for the property classified pages and the twice-a-year interiors spread. I loved my job but it
hadn’t paid very much before and paid even less part-time.
David worked for the same company, as a marketing executive on a different magazine. That’s how we met. How trendy we thought ourselves back then; how smug, in our arty, media way, living
our arty, media lives. And what a bolt through it all to find our income and our aspirations so slashed by the arrival of Sam. I used to wheel him down the high street in his pushchair on my days
off, and look in all the estate agents’ windows. How would we ever afford a bigger house around here? We couldn’t even afford to get the boiler replaced.
But still, I had my dream. I pictured the magazine coverage, the spread in a Sunday supplement:
J
ANE BERRY MOVES TO THE COUNTRY.
AT HOME WITH JANE BERRY IN HER IDYLLIC COUNTRY RETREAT.
JANE BERRY LEARNS THE TRADITIONAL ART OF JAM-MAKING.
I saw it all.
On the rush back from work to pick up Sam from his nursery, squashed onto the train with a million other people, hot and anxious. On rainy days at home, trapped in our living room building
endless towers out of Duplo, while condensation clouded up the windows. And when I got dog shit from the street all over the wheels of the pushchair and didn’t realize until I’d wheeled
it indoors and found Sam drawing his fingers along the tram lines on the floor.
I dreamed my dream; the roses around the door, the space, the better life.
And sometimes, late, on summer evenings after Sam was asleep, David and I would sit on the tiny metal bench in our tiny patio garden, and drink wine, and dream together. ‘What if?’
we said again. ‘What if?’
But before Sam was even three I fell pregnant again, and when Ella was born the following January there was no more time to dream. The reality of daily life bore down on me;
the sheer weight of it an unremitting burden. Sam was an easy baby and an easy toddler too; sweet-natured and passive. But then one child really is easy; two is a completely different story. And
Ella was impatient and inquisitive; at six months she was crawling, at nine she could walk, lifting herself up from the floor by pulling down everything within grabbing height; the clothes dryer,
the kettle, the CD collection – which she took to hurling around the room like a selection of frisbees.
I didn’t go back to work after Ella was born. It just didn’t seem viable. All the money I earned would be spent on paying someone else to look after my children, and I didn’t
want someone else looking after my children. I wanted to be the one painting pictures with them, taking them to the park, picking them up from school. So I hatched a plan. Money was short and would
be shorter still without me working but I would do my own thing, put my creative skills to real, artistic use. I’d make cards; birthday cards, Christmas cards, unique one-off, hand-made
cards, and sell them to the local gift shops. I bought the stuff I’d need, the card, the miniature brushes, the little pots of paint and glitter. I imagined sitting at the table with Ella
when Sam was at school, the two of us painting and sticking together. What could be more idyllic?
But Ella scribbled all over my cards. She threw my glitter up in the air, and watched it fall, and screamed hysterically when flecks of it landed in her eyes. She stuck her fingers in my paint
pots, and daubed paint on the walls.
I used to have long hair, so long that I could sit on it if I tipped my head back far enough. I wore it centre-parted, hanging straight down my back. It was statement hair, and
being short as I am, I needed a statement, something to get me noticed. I didn’t bother much with clothes or make-up; I didn’t need to, I had my hair. It was the first thing that David
noticed about me. He loved it. He was always stroking it, without even knowing that he was, and twisting it around his fingers. The children loved it too, tugging at it with their little fists,
rubbing it across their faces. But one day, when I was sitting at the table with Ella, trying to make my cards, she picked up my scissors, opened them, stuck them at an angle into the length of my
hair, and cut. It happened so quickly, the grating of the blade, the pull against my scalp. I dared not move, not at first. I did not want to believe it had happened.
When I did turn, slowly, carefully, as if I had eggs balanced on top of my head, Ella was holding up a great fistful of my hair, clutched in her chubby hand like a horse’s tail. She held
it out to me, like a prize. Here you are, Mummy. This is what you get. Her blue eyes looked at her offering, then they looked at me, innocent, uncomprehending. She giggled. She opened her fingers
and then there was hair everywhere, wafting about the place like the legs of so many spiders, over-sized, grotesque. Hair on the head is beautiful; off the head it is as repellent as flies. I
raised my hand to the gap and felt the shorn tufts, so close to my head. They bristled under my fingers, like rabbit’s fur, stroked the wrong way.
I started crying, teeth-chattering, shocked crying. Then Ella started crying too; I remember her soft face crumpling with fear. She started crawling about on the floor gathering up strands of
hair, and tried to push them back onto my head.
‘Put them back, Mummy. Put them back,’ she wailed.
I slapped her hands away. I screamed at her to get off me. And I ran to the bathroom and shut myself in and howled in front of the mirror at the damage, while Ella whimpered and scraped at the
door like a puppy.
I’d no choice but to cut the rest off, and cut it off I did, hacking away at it over the sink, staring at myself in the mirror as I did so, watching myself disappear. Long, my hair was
honey-coloured. Now it was short, it was mouse.
I didn’t stop crying, and nor did Ella. We arrived late at the school to pick up Sam, and when he saw me he started crying too. And when we got home he wouldn’t eat or look at me, he
wouldn’t even let me touch him. ‘I want my old mummy back,’ he sobbed, shutting himself in his room.
And David – I remember the look on his face when he came home from work. How could I not remember? He opened the front door, called hi, dropped his briefcase down by the pushchair, took
the few steps into the living room and stopped. I was sitting at the table, sideways to him, with my head bowed. Both children were now crying upstairs, the sound pitiful and muffled through their
closed door.
‘Jane?’ David said. He wasn’t even sure it was me.
My heart squeezed out its beats in my chest, clogged with misery.
‘Jane?’ he said again, still uncertain.
And then I turned, and I saw his face. I saw him recoil.