The Safest Place Read online

  We needed to be near a mainline station, and schools. I readjusted my search, made it a ten-mile radius from the station. And I looked for schools within that scope too, graphing it all out on a little map, showing this village and this village, the one and only secondary school in the area, the two primaries, and the station. I drew these markers on a piece of paper, then I got a bigger piece of paper, and drew them out again. And I added more villages. I scaled out the likely travelling times between each place.

  I looked up every piece of information I could find about the schools; the two primaries and the comprehensive. To me they looked idyllic, and the fact that there was no choice when it came to secondary school struck me as a good thing; there’d be none of that vicious competing, no good-school-versus-bad-school and all the snobbery that that entailed. No lying about where you lived, no stamping on other people to try and squeeze your child a place elsewhere, like you got in London. If there was just the one school it stood to reason that it would be a good school, and that all the local children would go there. That was what I wanted for my children. Even better still, it was a mere fraction of the size of the place Sam was at.

  So once I had worked out where the schools were, and the station, I really knew the vicinity in which to search for a house. A home. I scrutinized the estate agents’ websites. For the value of our little house in London, we could afford so much more. I looked at those little pictures of grey-stoned village houses and wide low cottages, and I fantasized about living there. My dream took on a new fervour. And when I’d finally narrowed down my search, I phoned the estate agents and got them to send me the details.

  And then I showed them to David.

  I waited till both the kids were in bed. Unusually for me, these days, I’d cooked, not just pasta but a proper meal with chicken and rice and salad. I’d set the table, clearing all the junk and piled-up papers away and sticking them on one of the chairs, out of sight. And I’d changed out of the messy clothes I’d been wearing all day into something clean and pretty.

  I waited till he’d eaten, and until he’d drunk a good few glasses of wine. And then I said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  He thought I was pregnant. I saw it in his eyes; that double-take, the uncertainty whether to look pleased or just plain petrified. I knew he’d think that of course, and I knew how much easier it would be then for him to accept the idea of a new house that we could afford rather than a new child that we couldn’t.

  I could barely contain myself. I said, ‘I’ve found us a house,’ and relief and then suspicion eased into his eyes. ‘Well, three houses actually.’

  It’s a good number, three. Manageable. I’d spent a lot of time narrowing it down. I fetched the details and handed them to him, and watched the surprise register on his face as he realized that these were not local houses. He smiled a curious, though somewhat closed, non-committal smile. An indulgent smile, but he kept on looking.

  And I talked as he looked. I said ‘This one is in a village, this one next to open fields. And this one is this far from the station, this one’s this far. It takes two hours, twelve minutes into Paddington.’

  I talked in a fast, high-pitched voice, persistent. I could hear myself, as excited as a child.

  David took his time looking at the details. How thoroughly he read every word, turning the pages over, and over again. I saw the possibility, however slight, however fanciful, drawing him in. This was, after all, a dream we’d both shared before we were too tired, and too weighed down, to dream at all.

  ‘You’ve been very busy,’ he said, when at last he spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Look.’ I cleared a space on the table and laid out the map that I’d made, clearly marked with the schools, the station and perhaps not quite so clearly with the position of the houses I was showing him. I’d sketched them in, complete with trees and old stone walls. David’s a marketing man; he likes that sort of thing. ‘I’ve looked up the schools,’ I said. ‘All the local kids go to them. The comprehensive is a quarter of the size of Sam’s. They’d know who he was there. He wouldn’t just get lost behind everyone else.’ David looked at me, but before he could speak, I said, ‘And just think, when you come home from work you’ll come home to space, fresh air . . . we’ll have room to move, we’ll be able to go for walks, to really enjoy our lives.’

  ‘You paint a very tempting picture,’ he said. I knew he wasn’t convinced, but that was OK; I hadn’t expected him to be convinced at once.

  I opened another bottle of wine. We talked late. In fact I talked, mostly, till my head was sore and throbbing. I wanted this like my life depended on it.

  David listened, and he smiled, but he shook his head. ‘It would be a massive change, Jane,’ he said. ‘You can’t just pack up your life and move.’

  He didn’t dismiss it out of hand, though. Not that it would have made any difference if he had. I still wouldn’t have given up.

  For weeks I chipped away at him. For every negative he came up with I had an answer.

  ‘You complain when I’m late home from work living here,’ he said. ‘I’d be late home every night if we lived there.’

  ‘Yes, but you’d be late for a good reason, and not just because you’d taken hours getting home because of some delay on the underground or because you’d got stuck on a slow train out of Waterloo.’

  ‘I might get stuck on a slow train out of Paddington.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. It’s the suburban lines that get delayed and cancelled all the time, just because of the sheer quantity of them.’

  He raised his eyebrows at this.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said, though I didn’t know if it really was or not. It just sounded true, to me. ‘You’ll know what train you need to get every night, you’ll get it, then you’ll come speeding home to us, waiting for you in our country retreat. And we will be so, so pleased to see you.’

  He raised his eyebrows a little higher, and he laughed.

  ‘I’ll still have to get the tube, to get to Paddington,’ he said, but I could tell he was weakening.

  ‘Yes but you’ll make sure you leave your office in plenty of time. You’ll be looking forward to going home.’

  We lay awake at night, talking it over. The whole idea took on a dream-like quality again in the dark, with sleep lapping at the edges of our minds. I lay in his arms, warm, close to him.

  ‘I don’t know, Jane,’ he said. ‘It would be a hell of a commute.’

  ‘But don’t you long for space and peace?’ I whispered. ‘For weekends that really are weekends instead of just a stressful continuation of a stressful week?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ His chest vibrated under my ear as he spoke. ‘But couldn’t we look at somewhere a little nearer? Somewhere still out of London but with less of a commute; somewhere in Surrey perhaps. There are loads of pretty villages in Surrey.’

  ‘I don’t want to live just in Surrey.’ I turned to face him, leaning up on my elbow. ‘I don’t want to live in any old pretty village. It isn’t about that. It’s about us living where we’ve always wanted to live, and we’ve always wanted to live there, where we’ve been so happy. Haven’t we, David? If we move, I want us to move properly, not to some halfway compromise. Let’s really live our lives as we want to. This is what we’ve dreamed about. Just imagine it: our time at home would be so special. We’d go for walks. You’d have time to really relax. And think how much better it would be for the children – for Sam especially. He’ll be destroyed if he stays where he is.’

  ‘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 rhythmical
ly 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.

  THREE

  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.