Free The Safest Place by Suzanne Bugler Page B

the side of the road, right up into the bushes. And there he left it. I watched him
get out of the car, slam the door, and start crunching his way back to the house. I ran downstairs to meet him.
    ‘We should have got a four-wheel drive,’ he snapped at me, forgetting he hadn’t wanted to get a second car at all. ‘Why didn’t we get a four-wheel drive?’
    He stamped the snow off his shoes, shook it off his head.
    I put my hand on his arm and wiped the snow from his coat. ‘There’s no point in trying to go anywhere in this,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we just go back to
bed?’
    ‘I can’t go back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get to work somehow. I’ve got a big meeting today.’
    ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I doubt if the trains will be running anyway.’
    David stared out at the snow, his face tight with frustration. ‘God,’ he said. ‘This is impossible.’
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Can’t you just stay at home and enjoy it?’ I said. ‘It’s only one day.’
    But it wasn’t one day, it was several. Each day, with increasing agitation, David got up and walked down the lane, inspecting the road. The snow had fallen a good ten
inches deep, and it was frozen solid. It would be madness to try and drive anywhere. It was fine for me and the children; we all thought it was huge fun, setting off on expeditions across white,
untrodden fields to the village to buy provisions, like explorers across the Antarctic. We really loved it. But for David it was hell. I did understand his anxiety. His is the kind of profession
where it is important to be seen, more so than ever these days. Be missing from your desk too long and there is always the danger that someone else might fill your place. He worked from home as
much as he could, using the computer and the phone and getting irritated if anyone accidentally interrupted him with their presence, but it wasn’t the same as being there in the office.
    And the novelty of having him at home quickly wore off when he was so irritable and on edge all the time. When he wasn’t working he prowled around the house as though caged, or stood
outside just staring up the lane at the snow, as if willing it to disappear.
    I felt blamed in some way, as if it was my fault that it had snowed; as if it was my fault that he was stuck at home, trapped. After all, although he never quite spelled it out, it had been my
idea to move here.
    After the snow came the ice, and in many ways that was so much worse. The main roads were pretty much clear but the smaller roads, such as the roads around our house, were
treacherous. Between our house and the main road were a good three miles of twisting, narrow, unlit lanes made deadly by black ice, especially early in the morning and late at night. When I went
out, I drove at a crawl, but David, of course, was in a hurry every morning, rushing to catch that train. I’d listen to him leave, to the car disappearing, too fast, up the road and my heart
would tense, and stay tense all day. I worried about him getting to the station in the morning, and I worried about him again coming home at night, and I assume that he worried about me, too,
driving the children back and forth to school. Yet when I spoke to him at work, that concern did not properly manifest itself. Our conversations felt distant, perfunctory, like him, back there in
the land of the sharp-suited marketing man, the land that I had long left behind. He sounded a million miles away. Down the phone I could hear the background throb of the office; the occasional
raised voice; laughter. Sometimes he would have to break off from me, to speak to someone else. And when I put the phone back down after saying goodbye, the silence of my home slapped against me,
thick in my ears.
    Several times, that winter, David couldn’t get home at all.
    The snow had spread from us to London and the trains were running a reduced service, with frequent cancellations. He did get to work,