The Safest Place (3 page)

‘You don’t know that it would be any better for him out there,’ he said.

‘Of course it would be! It would be so much better. You only survive here if you’re worldly and tough, and Sam isn’t. He’s so miserable here. And what about Ella?
We’ll have to go through it all again with her in a couple of years. This is our chance to really change things, David. Let’s just do it – for all of us.’

David sighed, the fingers of his hand circling rhythmically on my hip. ‘You build up a pretty picture, Jane,’ he said. ‘But it wouldn’t be easy. You know that.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it would be worth it. It would be our choice, our decision, our new life.’

It gave us something to talk about; something new and exciting, with the added edge of spontaneity, of risk. When David came home from work I greeted him eagerly, with a smile
and a glass of wine, like I hadn’t done for years. I told him every tiresome and irritating detail of my day, every worry about Sam, about the schools, but I put it to good use. I said,
‘Well at least it won’t be for long now. We’ll soon be away from all this.’

I talked about when, now, not if.

We went out for dinner with our friends Ed and Karen, to the pub down on the river. And we talked about it with them too. ‘Guess what,’ I said. ‘We’ve something to tell
you.’ And I ignored the way David looked at me, the shut up glare.

‘We’re thinking of moving to the country,’ I said.

And Karen reacted as I knew she would. She clapped her hands, said, ‘Oh my God, lucky
you
!’

And the more we talked about it the more wonderful she said it would be. ‘We’ll come and visit you,’ she said. ‘Won’t we, Ed?’

And they did come, once, that autumn after we moved.

I got the children on board. I sold it to them easily. When Sam came home tired and grumpy and screwed up with the effort of every day I comforted him. I told him how much
easier it would be at a small school, a friendly school, far, far away from bullies and crowds and struggling to blend in. No more worrying about the bigger kids at the bus stop, I said. No more
trying to be cool.

‘In the countryside, kids don’t bother with any of that,’ I said. ‘They just all get on. And when they’ve finished school they all just get out in the fields and
play.’

‘Do they?’ he asked me, so hopefully.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They climb trees and make dens. It’s safe there. And they don’t bother with all this extra tuition either,’ I added, pulling my trump card.
‘That’s simply a London thing.’

I remember his big eyes staring at me in a mixture of longing and disbelief. He could barely imagine such a place; that is what London had done to him. That is what we were doing to him, keeping
him here. My poor boy; we really had to move, if only for his sake.

To Ella I just said, ‘You’ll be able to learn to ride. There are horses everywhere in the country.’ That was all it took. She couldn’t wait to go. She started galloping
around the house, tossing back her hair. She even dug her old My Little Pony collection out from the back of her wardrobe, and brought them downstairs.

When David came home she said, ‘Will I be able to have my own pony when we move to the country? Will I? I want to have a chestnut one with white spots and call it Amber.’

How could David resist, then? How could he possibly let us all down?

So we went to see some properties.

My parents came to look after the children and I included them in on our excitement too. They could come and stay properly, when we’d moved, I said; we’d have the room. And
won’t it be so much better for the children?

Always, for the children.

‘I think it’s a wonderful idea,’ my mother said to David. ‘So much better than bringing them up here.’

My parents never liked London; our small house, the traffic, the planes. I had them on side, too.

And how strange, how intensely momentous it was, that trip, as if our whole lives hinged upon it. It was the first time we’d been there midweek and the hotel was almost
empty and so quiet without the weekenders and day trippers who always piled in for lunch on Sundays. Yet to me it felt more real because of that; living here would be quiet. But that was OK. I
wanted a true place, not just a chocolate-box cover.

I could see no wrong in anything.

And there is no wrong; not in the place itself. Not in the hills and the fields and the sleepy little villages. It is still as beautiful as it has always been.

We looked at several houses. A converted chapel in the same village as the primary school. An old farmhouse on its own on top of a hill, looking down over sheep-strewn fields. A new-build, one
of a cluster, in the sold-off grounds of a stately home.

And we found what was to be our house, a wide stone cottage in a tiny hamlet, just two miles away from the hotel.

I cried when we found it. Suddenly it was down to David to be the strong one, the sure one. He was the one talking to the estate agent, working out figures and details, churning it away in his
head. How far were we from the station? How long would it take to drive?

I walked through the rooms and I knew it was where we were meant to be. The current owners had two children, a boy and a girl, just like us; they were relocating nearer to family, in Wales. So
there was a bedroom for Sam and a bedroom for Ella, both ready for them to move in their things. Our bedroom was huge with two windows, one overlooking the front and another at the back, both with
their beautiful views. Downstairs past the lounge there was a sort of annexe with its own bathroom, perfect for visiting parents, or as a den for the kids. And a huge kitchen, all long and low and
fitted out with wood. A real country kitchen. It was this that made me cry. The windows looked out across the garden and the garden looked out across the fields, separated only by hedgerows and
flowers. There was even a swing. And space, open, green space, for as far as the eye could see. Even when dreaming of my house in the country, I had not dreamed of this.

That night, over dinner, we talked it through in earnest. The only other people in the hotel restaurant were a couple of middle-aged American women and the one spotty young
waiter who hovered nervously between our two tables. We talked quietly, almost whispering, and my eyes prickled with the constant threat of tears.

‘I liked the house,’ David said, as he had said already many times since we’d seen it that afternoon. ‘I like it very much.’ Yet the reservation was still there in
his voice.

‘We’ve got to do this,’ I insisted. ‘We cannot carry on living as we are. It’s mad staying in London, spending all that money to live in a tiny house, breathing in
all those traffic fumes, worrying about the kids’ schools all the time. We do need to move here, for all of us.’

‘I am worried about the commute,’ he said. ‘It would be really hard, Jane. It would be well over two hours altogether, each way.’

And I said, ‘You cannot keep us all in London because of that. We cannot be your prisoners.’

I wonder how I could have said such a thing. I thought, at the time, that I loved David more at that moment than I had ever loved him; that it was like when we first met, and yet more so. Like
starting over; the intensity, the fear of everything to lose.

But the truth is that I didn’t really care what David felt. I can admit that now, to myself at least.

We moved in early July, when Ella was nine and Sam had just turned thirteen. I took them out of school a week before term ended, and how unreal it all seemed. I collected Ella
from school and we left the playground in a fanfare of hugs and good-luck cards and tearful goodbyes. We walked back to the packed-up house clutching armfuls of artwork and exercise books and
little, folded-up notes, the two of us so strangely, so giddily unbound.

‘I will come back, won’t I, to play with Rosie?’ Ella kept saying, over and over. ‘She will still be my best friend.’

When Sam came home he dropped his school bag in the living room, shrugged off his blazer, and tugged off his tie.

‘You won’t be needing those any more,’ I said.

He looked at me with his wide blue eyes and said nothing at all.

I thought of all the people I had seen to say goodbye to, and then of those that I had somehow managed to miss; the familiar, everyday faces, the neighbours, the mums from school. There are so
many people in London; they float past you like a tide. Each day, so many people, and I had lived here among them, in my own little corner, for the last sixteen years. Of course I was nervous, of
course I had doubts.

We followed the van for the first part of the journey, but soon overtook it on the motorway, which meant we arrived at the house first. I’ll never forget it, that first
sighting, with all of us in the car, together. The anticipation; the communal in-drawn breath. David drove the last couple of miles slowly; the house was down a narrow lane, easy to miss. And he
did miss it, and had to double back, turning and revving the car in the tightest of spaces, while the children complained in the back, their faces pressed against the windows, waiting, watching. It
seemed further from the village than I remembered, and I sat next to David tense, with my heart hammering. Then we turned a corner and suddenly there it was, just ahead: our new home, nestling low
and golden in the sunlight behind a profusion of climbing roses and cornflowers.

‘Ha!’ David said, and he looked at me, and smiled.

Inside, the house was strangely cold for such a warm summer’s day, and bereft, without the previous owners’ things. I felt like an intruder; I’d say that we
all did. Sam and Ella roamed through the rooms, unsure. We’d stayed in cottages for holidays before, and somehow, I think, we’d expected it to be like that. The plate of cookies in the
kitchen, the welcome note and the luxury soap in the bathroom; all this was missing. The place was stripped, right down to the absent shelves on the walls and the light shades. Throughout, there
were shadows on the painted walls and chips of plaster missing where pictures and mirrors had been taken down, and ghostly yellowing stains marking where furniture had stood. The walls in the
children’s rooms were speckled with Blu-Tack and the half-scratched-off remains of posters. But it would all be all right when it had been painted; I knew that. We’d move our stuff in;
make it ours. We had time to do this. We had for ever.

And we had that garden, filled with flowers and trees and so much space. Already the children were out there; through the open windows I could hear Ella whooping and every two seconds Sam
crying, ‘Wow!’ and ‘Look, Ella, look at this!’ It was overwhelming; the elation, the slow dawning that this was real. That this was ours.

That summer was like a dream. I look back and I see us all, hazy, blurred around the edges like figures on an old cine film. I see as though I am staring into the sun; it hurts
my eyes. I see David, with his shirt stripped off in the heat, arms raised, battling to pin the wild, spindly roses by the front door back behind their trellis; I see him again, standing outside
the front of the house late in the day with a beer in his hand, just looking at the view. He loved it here. He did. He loved it just as much as I did. And I see my children, sometimes near, their
faces bright and animated, saying look at this and look at that, and sometimes in the distance, running, climbing. I see them playing in the field that rises up gently from the back of our house
then steepens into a hill, dotted with gorse and trees; I see their tiny figures, arms outstretched, spinning round and round, till they collapse, dizzy on the ground.

To the front of the house, just a little way up the lane, there is a small pond that often spills over into the grass around it during the rainier months of autumn and winter, and then shrinks
back again with the arrival of spring. That summer it had shrunk to almost nothing, and the ducks and moorhens that nested there jostled and squawked for space, splashing their wings dramatically
in the water, and chasing each other away through the grass. Sometimes the ducks wandered as far as our garden. Always, always, I will remember Sam tiptoeing up the lane after them in the
impossible pursuit of catching one, just one, so that he might, for just a moment, hold it in his arms.

If I paint an idyllic picture it’s because it was idyllic. David took two weeks off work and we decorated the rooms, scrubbed down the floorboards, hung curtains, and
gradually sorted through our things. The furniture was in place, and the boxes eventually unpacked. We met our neighbours; the sweet old couple in the house next to ours and the man from down the
lane who walked his dog past our house every morning and always stopped to say hello and check on our progress. And we found our way around locally. It was about a forty-minute walk across
footpaths and fields into the village and this we did, quite often, to buy bread and basic supplies. We even had lunch at the hotel a couple of times, that first summer. The local town was a
twenty-minute drive away, where there was a supermarket, several shops and even a Saturday market. And a couple of cafés, three pubs and Sam’s new school, set back off the main road
out the other side.

I felt like I was living on holiday. Even shopping for food became fun. The supermarket in town wasn’t up to much but there was a butcher’s selling local meat and the market was
amazing; lots of suppliers from the area selling locally grown produce. It was such a far cry from London. I could even buy fresh eggs from a farm half a mile from our house.

We got a sofa bed for the spare room downstairs – the den, as we now liked to call it – and over the summer we had a succession of visitors; my parents, David’s father, his
sister and her kids. There was always something going on, and we were busy, so busy, but happily so; so proud to show off what we had come to. And although David was back at work the weekends were
just as I imagined they would be, with long walks and long lunches and lazy afternoons. We had done the right thing. We had.

Even David’s commute to work wasn’t a problem, not at first. The novelty made it worth it. It took him fifteen minutes to drive through country lanes from our tiny
hamlet to the station, if he put his foot down. And trains were hourly, two hours and twelve minutes to Paddington, as long as they ran without delay. At first, it was worth getting up at 5.30
every morning to catch the 6.15 train, and not getting home again until nearly ten o’clock at night. It was worth it because we’d moved in summer, and those early mornings were
beautiful, the air outside our front door so incredibly soft and peaceful. I’d get up with him, at first, to make him coffee, and see him off. And when he’d gone I’d walk about my
garden in my nightdress, revelling in the contrast between this place, this life, and the one we had left behind.