Free The Safest Place by Suzanne Bugler Page A

children gauche. They’d be too boisterous, too shrill in their excitement,
clambering all over David when he was tired, fighting for his attention. He’d snap at them and they’d retreat, wounded, like actors off a stage.
    ‘Just give me a minute,’ he’d say, guilty then. But what use was a minute to Sam and Ella, who’d waited all week just to see him?
    I missed him too. I missed the closeness we used to have; the chats late into the night. He slept beside me but I hardly ever saw him awake. There is something odd, something invasive about
having a person creep into your bed at night and then out of it again in the morning, ghost-like, without you even knowing they are there, even if that person is your husband. It made me cool
towards him. I missed the affection, the closeness, of falling asleep in his arms. Most nights he saw me sleeping, naked, vulnerable. I saw him not at all.
    On the rare occasions that I did still wait up for him he would come in smelling of the train and the city – a smell both familiar and alien to me now – and I’d see him moving
about my kitchen in his suit, still a part of the world I had left behind, and he seemed like a stranger. At times I felt awkward in his presence. It was too difficult to keep adjusting, and
adjusting back again. By the weekend I’d have a thousand things I wanted to talk to him about, just little snippets stored up through the week that I wanted to pass on, or gossip to share,
but when it came to it I found myself oddly silent. He was too tired; too preoccupied with his own concerns. Some weekends we’d end up barely talking at all, our time snatched away before we
had the chance to properly reconnect.

EIGHT
    Our first winter here the worst of the weather came in the form of rain and sleet and fog, bad enough to deal with on dark country roads, but last year it snowed, hard. The
first fall came one night in mid-December, and so tenderly I look back and see my children yelping with delight in the morning, hurling themselves out into the fairytale whiteness of an untouched,
blanketed day. Theirs were not just the first footprints crunching into the snow down our lane, they were the only footprints. Ella stamped out her name; Sam ran in random circles, shaking off the
constraints of adolescence, and finally throwing himself to the ground and rolling like a puppy. They climbed the hill, with much difficulty, and skidded back down again, using the dustbin lids as
sledges, the pitch of their voices so excited, so full of delight, knifing through the stillness. They had never seen snow on such a scale before. There was no chance of school, no chance of going
anywhere in the car. For them it was wonderful.
    But not for David.
    Doggedly, he got up at the crack of dawn as usual while the snow was still falling, went out to get the spade from the garden shed, and tried to clear the area beside the house where the cars
were parked. I watched him from our bedroom window. With futile, angry determination he shovelled the snow away from the front wheels of the Renault, trying to dig a path down onto the road, while
the flakes kept on falling, settling on him, and still settling, almost as fast as he cleared it, on the ground. He looked so comical with snow all over his head and his shoulders, one man and his
spade against nature. Eventually he flung the spade down to the side and stood there, defeated, just staring out at the snow. Then he got in the car and started it, the engine juddering coldly,
unwillingly; the sound so at odds with the stillness of the morning. He got back out, wiped the snow off the windows, then got in again, and, incredibly, started rolling the car down onto the road.
I watched this with disbelief. He so obviously wouldn’t get very far. As well as our drive, he would have to clear the lane, and all the roads beyond.
    He made it perhaps five hundred yards up the lane. Then perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, he slid the car to