The Safest Place Read online

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  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:

  JANE 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 w
anted 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.

  ‘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. Ever
y 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.

  TWO

  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.