Читать книгу Mainlander - Will Smith, Will Smith - Страница 7

The atmosphere was even tenser in the morning.

Colin had arrived home ready for reconciliation to find his wife had also gone out. He thought he had timed his return just right, at the cusp of where her worry at his having walked out might have turned to anger at his self-indulgence. Their senses of culpability would coincide: as his anger fell and hers rose they could have settled on mutual blame. Now it was his turn to sulk. He moped around and ate a ham sandwich while half watching an episode of Dynasty – it served as a diversion from the tastelessness of the ham and the problems with his marriage. He remembered there was a new episode of Blackadder on BBC2, but it failed to lift his mood and he turned it off before the end, then sat staring at his reflection in the screen to avoid looking at the wedding photos on top of the set.

In the large left-hand frame was a picture of him and Emma: ‘The happiest picture I’ve ever seen of her,’ her mother had said.

‘Thank you for putting a smile back on my daughter’s face,’ her father had said in his speech. ‘A bit like a Scotsman seeing the sun, I think we’d all forgotten what it looked like!’ he’d added, to a big laugh from the marquee. At the time Colin had swelled with pride at his transformative powers. When he had first met her in the last term of his teacher training in Winchester, he couldn’t understand how someone so beautiful was so diffident. He didn’t think he stood a chance with her so hadn’t been intimidated by her sourness, and saw it as a challenge just to make her laugh. She was unused to an irreverent approach from suitors and had been disarmed by him nicknaming her Crusoe (‘You come from an island and seem pretty lonely’) and his pitch for a first date: ‘You and me, midday at the canteen, I’ll treat you to a Coke and some crisps. If it goes well, I’ll step it up on the second date – square crisps.’ As this went on he began to fall in love with the romance as much as the woman.

Now when he thought of his father-in-law’s quip, he wondered if Emma’s smile was a rare phenomenon that had simply reappeared independent of his influence. She was smiling, too, in the smaller pictures on the right-hand side of the frame. She was definitely smiling in the picture he was keenest to avoid looking at, the one of them with Rob and Sally. He and Sally on the edges, Rob and Emma in the middle, as if they were the happy couple. As he sat on the sofa, stubbornly avoiding the picture, yet in thrall to its dark message, it felt to him like a tableau that illustrated how he had always felt. Even on his wedding day, he had been an outsider.

He’d felt dislocated from the children on the street where he grew up because he had gone to the grammar school; he had felt different from the other boys at school because they’d had fathers; and he had felt different at Cambridge because he didn’t have money. He had had several short-term girlfriends at university, but never lost the sense that he was on probation as one half of a potential power couple. Throughout all this he had learnt to cover his awkwardness by being a listener rather than a talker.

He grew cold, but was unwilling to turn on the electric heater under the mantelpiece. There was no magic in glowing orange coils set before a curved reflective surface. He’d wanted a cliff-top cottage with an open fire, but had been shocked to find that property prices in Jersey rivalled London’s. So they had a one-bedroom flat in the capital, St Helier, in a small seventies block. It was mockingly surrounded by the grand Regency buildings that had rippled out from the harbour in the mid-nineteenth century to accommodate the influx of English-speakers, lured by peace with France and the improved communications that came with the new steamships. He wondered whether those earlier Mainlanders had found it as hard to blend in as he had. He’d done his dissertation on nineteenth-century French literature, and had felt an initial connection with the island where Victor Hugo had spent part of his exile, and where a background hum of Frenchness seeped through in place and surnames. But he found he struck a dissonant note amid the hum.

Emma returned at half past ten. He was finally in bed, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of knowing she had won this battle of shammed indifference. If her evening could continue without him, so could his without her. He feigned sleep, hoping she would wake him with the kisses and caresses of an emotional truce.

Instead she got ready for bed and climbed in beside him, her body kept reproachfully apart from his. As she turned off her bedside light his eyes snapped open. He was wide awake. The more he tried to relax, the more trapped he felt in a mode of outward nonchalance and inward rigidity. He turned over, hoping that the movement might stimulate her into some sort of contact, or an enquiry as to whether or not he was asleep. Nothing. She didn’t move. Five minutes later he heard her breathing slow into a faint snore.

He went back to the small sitting room, which opened on to the kitchen, and used his sleeplessness to get on with some marking. His dark mood meant he approached it with an uncharacteristic harshness, which began to swell as he noted loose parallels between his own situation and that of the protagonists of Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit’, a short story he had asked his pupils to read, then to comment upon the role of Fate. He realised his hackles rose when anyone expressed sympathy for Edith, who writes letters to Charles on behalf of her illiterate serving girl Anna, thereby leading him to fall in love with and marry the wrong person.

He came to Duncan’s essay. It was lucidly argued and strewn with apposite quotes, easily worthy of an A minus, the minus being applied only because of a misreading that Colin found troubling: Hardy wrote that ‘character is fate’. Because of his flaws, Charles can fight his destiny no more than the train on which he meets Anna can leap its tracks.

‘Too pessimistic,’ Colin scrawled in the margin. ‘His “flaw” was that he was trusting; he would be unlikely to make a similar mistake in future, thus transcending his “fate”.’ He worried suddenly that Hardy’s morose determinism might not be the best choice for emotionally unbalanced teenagers to read in depth.

He awoke the next day to the sound of Emma in the shower, finding himself with a chestful of essays, a chinful of dribble and an ache in his neck from lolling on the armrest of the two-person sofa. He fought an impulse to join her in the shower, or to be waiting on the bed in a humorous position of mock-repentance when she returned. He retained a prideful conviction that he was the wronged party, quelling the thought that he was now prolonging the row.

Emma was out of the shower. He heard her walking back down the corridor into the bedroom. He just lay there, listening to her dressing, then drying her hair. She hadn’t come out to see where he was so why should he go in to make amends? In fact, why was he lying out there, feeling like the exiled guilty party? He wasn’t the one who had suspiciously withheld information about former lovers. She should be apologising to him.

The bedroom door opened and he heard her walking towards him. Before he knew what he was doing he had shut his eyes and was once more pretending to be asleep, whether to punish her with further isolation or to avoid continued confrontation he didn’t know. He was by now tactically awry. He told himself she would no doubt wake him before she had breakfast: it would be a good way of starting again. His fake grogginess could throw a shroud over the row. A wiping of the slate, delayed from last night.

He heard her open the front door. He opened his eyes. She was dressed and ready for work, about to leave. He faked a yawn and a stretch so that she turned round.

‘Morning,’ he said.

‘Morning,’ she replied.

‘You not having breakfast?’

‘I’ve got to be in early. I’ll grab something on the way.’

He refused to take the bait, adding a smile-less ‘See you later, then.’ They might have been speaking in code.

As she shut the door he banged his head against the armrest. Brilliant. He’d come home ready to make peace but seemed to be lumbering towards some sort of Cold War stand-off. He looked at the clock on the wall of the open-plan kitchen. Eight. Just enough time for a quick shower and a bowl of Alpen eaten over the sink.

‘Good morning, Mr Bygate.’

‘Morning, Mrs Le Boutillier. Here, let me help you down the stairs.’

Colin’s departure time of eight fifteen was also the clockwork moment that his and Emma’s seventy-two-year-old arthritic landing neighbour began her thrice-weekly toil to the Central Market in the heart of the town. At these encounters there was normally a bit of to and fro between them. Some ‘I don’t want to be a bother’ countered by a ‘Not at all’, which would in turn be parried by ‘No, no, you need to get to school’ that would itself be matched with ‘It’s really no bother’ until Colin finally dismissed Mrs Le Boutillier’s feigned opposition, picked up her shopping trolley and offered his arm as they descended the steps. This morning he lacked the patience for their ritual so he simply picked up the shopping trolley and guided her to the top of the steps, readying himself to supply the usual murmurs of assent to their predictable conversation.

Step 1 – Got to get to the market for nine. Otherwise the best fruit and veg is always gone.

Step 2 – I don’t like my spuds too spongy. And cabbage wilts so quick once it’s picked.

Step 3 – Of course, in the war we hardly had any good vegetables at all. They all went to the Jerries. Cruel people the Jerries …

Step 4 – You probably don’t remember the war, do you? How old are you now?

Step 5 – Twenty-seven? Well I never. You look to me like you haven’t started shaving yet.

Step 6 – My boy Bradley’s your age, but I hardly see him. He’s at St Ouen’s on the other side of the Island.

This morning, however, Mrs Le Boutillier remained curiously tight-lipped, and Colin was perplexed. Then he remembered. ‘I’m so sorry. I said I was going to come and change your light-bulb for you last night.’

‘Oh, no bother, no bother.’ It clearly was a bother, though.

‘I’ll come and do it this evening, I promise. Can’t have you cooking in the dark, what with the nights drawing in.’

‘Well, that would be lovely. I’ll get some Jersey Wonders from the market for you.’

‘Oh, no, I’m happy to do it.’ It wasn’t so much the thought of what a plateful of the local twisted doughnut would do to his waistline but what the time spent chatting might do to his marriage. Given the current froideur it might not make much difference, but he didn’t want to be accused of trying to avoid his wife. Emma had never been well disposed to their neighbour: her aunt had insinuated she was the same Edna Le Boutillier who had been labelled a ‘Jerry Bag’ after the war for consorting with the enemy. That aside, she had gradually taken exception to Mrs Le Boutillier’s semi-regular incursions into their flat and Colin’s into hers. At first it had been something of a joke, Emma referring to Mrs Le Boutillier as ‘the other woman’, but it was now another reason why Emma wanted to move. ‘You’re too nice to tell her to get lost,’ she had said, ‘so next place we move to we keep the interaction with our neighbours cursory. Nods over the fence, maybe a Christmas card, that’s it.’ She was right: Colin was too nice to ignore the woman, and he was also plagued with guilt.

As the only child of a widow he had been the centre of his mother’s life. She hadn’t so much as lunched with another man, let alone remarried, maintaining that no one could measure up to his father. Besides, her unshakeable Christian belief meant that she was sure they would meet again, and the presence of a second husband in the afterlife would only complicate it. He had been taken aback by her mixed reaction to his acceptance of an offer from Cambridge. There was pride, obviously, but it was tempered with regret that he would turn down the place at his hometown university of Bristol. He was confused as to why she had reacted like that so late in the process – he would always have taken the Cambridge place if he was lucky enough to secure it. It did little for their relationship when she confessed that she hadn’t expected him to get in. He had found himself going back every other weekend for the first year. It was that, or she would come up to stay in Cambridge. Her presence and his absence limited the social impact he had made in that first year, which was already shaky, given how culturally and financially eclipsed he had felt by the people around him. He had stretched his visits to monthly by the end of university but, as a man who shrank from emotional confrontation, he couldn’t bear to tell her she was suffocating him. A small but significant part of Jersey’s appeal had been that it put 157 miles between him and his mother, including 105 miles of sea.

He couldn’t help feeling that to punish him for his callous ingratitude towards the mother who had raised him alone, God had installed a replica of her in the adjoining flat, a woman who felt neglected by her own son and had latched on to him. Mrs Le Boutillier would sit at their kitchen table drinking tea and eating biscuits, and Colin would zone out, then cycle through annoyance, boredom and guilt. Mrs Le Boutillier always seemed to say, ‘Dearie me, I must be boring you so,’ at the very moment she was boring him most, which made him cover it with denial and the immediate refilling of the kettle, as Emma sucked in her cheeks in fury at what she saw as his pathetic need to please.

He held open the door to the front of the block and thought of how to approach Duncan, while Mrs Le Boutillier cooed at a ginger cat on the wall. ‘There’s my lovely boy! How are you, Puss-puss?’

How on earth could he ask subtly if the boy had intended to jump off the cliff? That was the sort of question you either asked directly or not at all. And if you were going to ask it, you had to ask it at the relevant moment. To ask afterwards implied you didn’t really care, but simply wanted your curiosity satisfied. Colin needed to know that, if the boy had been building up to a jump, it had been a flash of madness from which he had moved on.

He manoeuvred the shopping trolley on to the pavement, deciding he would assess the boy’s mood in class.

‘He’s looking thin, don’t you think? Probably hasn’t had breakfast!’ The cat, Marmalade, belonged to the Ozoufs, a middle-aged couple in the ground-floor flat. Mrs Le Boutillier was often coaxing it upstairs for a snooze on her lap in exchange for some raw chicken, a source of tension with the cat’s owners. Colin tried to stay out of it. ‘You get on, my dear, I’ll stay and have a chat with my second favourite boy in the block. Poor thing, they don’t feed him enough.’ Mrs Le Boutillier started tickling the cat under the chin as he stretched his paws in front of her. ‘I’ll bring back some bacon, my furry love.’

‘Have a good day, and I’ll pop in later to fix the light, promise.’ Colin took the get-out. On the occasions he’d walked with her to the market, what would have been ten minutes on his own or twenty with Emma had taken forty. Mrs Le Boutillier, who would need to pause to get her breath, or put on or take off her hat or her coat, and stow or retrieve it from her shopping trolley, would treat the walk as a guided tour, interspersing it with lengthy anecdotes of frankly unstartling local history. All was delivered in the peculiar flat vowels and nasal drone of the indigenous Jersey-French patois that to Colin rendered the accent bizarrely akin to South African.

‘This Le Brun’s here used to be a haberdasher’s back in the fifties … The Midland Bank where your wife works used to be the post office … Used to see some of the postmen coming back from their rounds in the east of the Island, with fresh lobsters from the pots. This was before we started getting overrun with grockles, what we call tourists … Of course, back then there was a train that ran from Gorey to Corbière …’

He normally walked to school from the flat, along the main shopping precinct of King Street, with its mix of local outlets, the odd mainland chain, such as Woolworths, and tourist tat shops peddling ‘Damn Seagulls’ baseball caps streaked with fake guano. It was empty enough at that time of the morning for him to hit a long, pounding stride, unlike during the tourist season when aimless milling led to frustrating stop-start manoeuvres. He liked to walk with purpose; Emma liked to mooch. From King Street he would make his way to the bottom gates of the school grounds and up alongside Conqueror’s Lawn on a wooded path leading to the top of Mont Millais, where Normandy College presided over St Helier, like the castle of a local baron. He enjoyed the walk – it cleared his mind for the day. Today, though, he was now running slightly late, thanks to Mrs Le Boutillier, and this, coupled with the hollow dread of needing to know that Duncan was okay, meant that he drove.

As he sat in the glacially paced traffic he remembered the other reason he usually chose to walk: it was quicker. The Island had the world’s highest number of cars per head of population. This was due to a bus service that was patchy in its reach and erratic in its timetable, and also a culture of flaunting, stoked by the mainly illusory belief that the inhabitants basked in a near-Mediterranean climate, which justified the ownership of multiple cabriolets. Colin was stuck in Hill Street, known locally as the Street of Forty Thieves, although he was sure the brass plates of law firms numbered higher than that. He looked around. His car was the cheapest, boxed in by BMWs, Mercedes, the odd Porsche, and other pointlessly overpowered makes. Even the less exclusive vehicles, the Fords, the Peugeots, the Renaults, were models with that extra i to the name, which the owner hoped would suggest wealth and sexual potency. It was a sunny day, bright rather than warm, but the air was fresh so windows were open, hoods were down, sunglasses were on, music was blaring. A man next to him in red-rimmed glasses was beating time on the roof of his Mazda RX-7 as he sang along loudly to ‘Living in a Box’. Colin was certain that the man’s abode was considerably more opulent than a box. He wound up his window and opted for Today.

A sixty-four-year-old man has been shot dead in front of his family in Belfast …

He felt relief when he lost the signal as he crawled through the short tunnel that went under Mount Bingham and the Fort Regent Leisure Centre, which billowed on top of it, like a huge white tent. The tunnel cut off a loop round the harbour and supposedly shortened the journey. It didn’t seem that way this morning. He snapped The Joshua Tree into the stereo halfway through ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’.

He’d thought he had. Now he wasn’t so sure. He rewound the track, as though it would bring him clarity. The traffic suddenly freed up. He kept rewinding and listening as he made his way up the hill to the school. Bono’s full-throated determination to spin disappointment into hope and joy chimed with his own feelings of melancholy. He loved how Adam Clayton’s bass just kept walking as the Edge’s guitars flicked ever upwards like the corners of a smile, while Larry Mullen Jr’s drums clattered away, always coming down with a hammer blow at the end of each line. As he neared the school he let the album run into ‘With or Without You’, and he felt a surge of doubt and regret. As he parked, all optimism faded as he remembered the events of the night before. A pupil poised to jump off the edge of a cliff, a husband and wife wrangling over a marriage sliding away.

He switched off the engine and the music, and heard a tap on his window. He turned to see Debbie’s impish face smiling at him with a heart-stopping openness. He wound down the window as casually as he could, which took some doing – the handle always stiffened on the second forty-five degrees of the turn. The effort involved always left him feeling as if he was trying to crank-start a car in a silent movie.

‘You could just open the door,’ she said teasingly. ‘I mean, you are getting out, aren’t you?’

‘Sorry, not thinking straight. Bit out of it this morning.’

‘Oh, no, not coming down with something, are you?’

‘No, no, just a bit tired. I slept badly.’ As he said this, he realised she might construe this as a confession of marital discord, which would have felt disloyal to Emma, or a night of monogamous sex, which bizarrely would have felt disloyal to Debbie. She ignored or failed to pick up on either possibility.

‘So, you coming? Or are you going to leave me feeling like I’m taking your order at a drive-in?’

‘No, yes, coming …’ He rewound the window as quickly as he could, then tried to get out with his seatbelt still done up. Debbie shook her head. He opened the door. ‘I meant to do that,’ he said, with comic severity. ‘It’s important to test the mechanism.’

‘Hurry up, you clown.’

The seatbelt removed, he got out, grabbed his ever-present brown moleskin jacket and swung it on as he nudged the door shut with his left knee. He was on a continual lookout for a new jacket, but the Island shops had a limited range and he was an unusual size, tall and narrow. In this jacket, what he gained in length he gained also in width, leaving it hanging off his shoulders.

Emma had offered to have a jacket made for him by Hamptonne’s, the local bespoke tailor, but he had baulked at the price. Debbie had suggested she take it to her uncle, who ran an alterations service, but he clung to a stubborn and no doubt groundless paranoia that such meddling might make things worse and force him to come to school underdressed in a V-neck sweater. Beneath all of this he felt a mild annoyance that the women felt he couldn’t dress himself, which Debbie was presently reinforcing as she reached up to unfurl his collar.

‘You don’t normally drive.’

‘I was running late.’

‘Should have taken your time – you might have missed Le Brocq’s assembly.’

‘Oh, God, is it him today?’ The headmaster was giving one of his occasional addresses.

‘You should be happy, given you need to catch up on sleep.’

They made for an odd sight as they went in together, he with his lolloping gait, she pattering along beside him, sometimes turning to walk sideways with puppyish enthusiasm, before the presence and attention of colleagues and pupils demanded a more professional bearing.

The youngest members of staff, their friendship had started on his first day at the school. The austerity of the majority of his new colleagues and the body odour of his overweight head of department meant he had bolted from the staffroom into the playgrounds and corridors to get his bearings. Debbie had found him wandering through the main building, wondering at the names on the doors of the classrooms.

‘It’s pronounced “On-ke-teel”,’ she’d said, sidling up to him. ‘As in François Anquetil, who left here aged eighteen, and died on his nineteenth birthday at Passchendaele. All these old rooms are named after prominent former teachers and pupils.’

‘That would be the room to teach war poetry in, then. I’m Colin Bygate, the new English teacher.’

‘I’m Debbie Hamon, history. If only we had the choice of classrooms! We’re stuck in rooms with romantic names like A1 and A2. Do you want the tour of our rather uninspiring arts block?’

‘Mr Le Brocq already took me round, but not much went in.’

‘He does have that effect. Come on, I can tell you who to avoid sitting next to in the staffroom too.’

She had been his guide round the school, and latterly his guide round the Island. He had been surprised and confused at his first wedding anniversary dinner when Emma had told him she didn’t want them to turn into one of those insufferable couples who did everything together, and that it would be healthy occasionally to do different things at weekends. This had left him at several loose ends. Emma took herself off to try out a variety of short-lived hobbies, such as yoga (‘boring’), embroidery (‘full of old farts’), and ballroom dancing (‘too many creepy men’). She’d laughed when Colin had suggested he could come to the dance lessons to offer a better class of partner.

‘I love you, darling, but you’re not a dancer.’

‘But I’d learn. That’s the point.’

‘No. I already have a base level and you’d take ages to get up to that. Besides, the point is we’re supposed to have our own things.’

Her ‘own things’ had ended up as shopping and lunching, usually with Sally. His ‘thing’ had started as exploring places with intriguing names. One day while he was ambling down to Wolf’s Caves he’d bumped into Debbie giving a talk about the eighteenth-century smugglers who’d used them. He’d tagged along, and after that had gone along to her monthly Sunday history walks. Gradually they began meeting before and hanging out after. He realised after a while that he’d only ever told Emma that he was going to history talks, omitting to mention Debbie’s presence. He told himself this was an innocent oversight, in no way to be taken as an admission of anything untoward, and told her casually that Debbie, whom he worked with, was one of the key organisers. Emma remembered her from the year below her at school.

‘Oh, my God, Velma?’

‘Debbie.’

‘Short, with glasses?’

‘Shortish.’

‘I’m not saying she’s a dwarf, Colin, I’m saying she’s a short girl with glasses. That’s why we used to call her Velma, from Scooby-Doo.’

‘I think the kids do too, although it won’t last long. She wears contacts now.’

‘So she’s still banging on about local history?’

‘That’s a bit harsh. I find it quite interesting. It’s very layered, the Island – Neolithic sites, fortifications from the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, German bunkers from the Second World War.’

‘Stop! You’re sending me into a coma.’

‘You don’t mind us being friends, though?’

‘God, no, she could do with a few.’

His friendship with Debbie had continued to bloom, until he’d been plunged into a tailspin of guilt and panic when Emma had spotted her at a school social function at the end of the last summer term.

‘Velma’s sexed herself up a bit. Trying to look more like Daphne.’

‘You think so?’

‘You said she’d ditched the glasses, but that’s a whole new look. She used to be quite the frump.’

Maybe because it had been gradual and he hadn’t noticed, maybe because he hadn’t wanted to notice or maybe because he’d secretly enjoyed noticing too much, Colin had chosen to let Debbie’s transformation pass him by. The glasses had indeed gone, the mop of hair had been styled and highlighted, the blouses were now fitted, and the skirts had gone from calf-length to above the knee. And it hadn’t just been visual. There had been other signs: the unspoken understanding that they would always sit together in the staffroom, the way she caught his eye in meetings, the handmade invitations to her history talks, but these were signs he chose to enjoy in the moment, ignoring their implications.

‘Who’s she seeing now?’

‘No one, as far as I know.’

‘Well, she must be after someone. Maybe you. Don’t blush, darling – I was only joking. Although it’s weird that she’s avoided you tonight. Maybe it’s because I’m here.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’re reading too much into it.’

‘And you’re being too defensive. Relax! I’d be surprised if she didn’t like you, but I trust you. You’re too good to stray. And if you did leave me I hope it would be for someone hotter. She can’t quite carry off that look …’

Luckily the deputy head had come over at that point to ask Colin’s opinion on Jack Higgins, the Island’s most famous resident author, and neither he nor Emma had raised the subject again. He had initially dismissed Emma’s suspicions, not allowing anything to threaten the fairy-tale narrative he had constructed between him and his wife. Wife. Divorce was unthinkable to a man whose mother had stayed faithful to the ghost of his father. But why was he thinking of reasons not to divorce? And why, as they walked side by side into the main quadrangle of the school towards the staffroom, was he having to fight an urge to put an arm around Debbie, draw her closer and pour out his heart?

Thankfully, she was chatting away, leaving few gaps, about that night’s stay at St Aubin’s Fort with her first-year history class.

‘The only thing I’m not looking forward to is sleeping in the same building as Mike Touzel. He keeps making cracks about our “dirty weekend”. I mean, please, the idea of him makes me gag.’

Fair enough, thought Colin. Mike Touzel had an unfathomable belief in his own attractiveness to women. He had once told Colin that he wore a fake wedding ring at weekends to repel some of the she-beasts who inevitably lumbered over to him during a night at Bonaparte’s, one of the Island’s top nightspots. Colin had been there once, for about five minutes.

‘That said, he probably is the most eligible man in your department,’ offered Colin, the other members being Reg Le Marais, a bumbling old fellow in his sixties, with more hair in his ears than on his head, and Frank Ecobichon, who was so right-wing Colin wondered whether he might secretly long for the good old days of the German Occupation.

At that moment Touzel sauntered past, his gait suggesting he had ‘Stayin’ Alive’ on a loop in his head. ‘Morning, Colin,’ he said, turning to walk backwards as he passed. ‘Saw your good lady wife last night. Damn, you’ve done well, man!’

With what might have been a wink at Debbie, he whipped round and continued on his way. It already rankled with Colin that the man was getting to spend the night with Debbie, and he smarted that Touzel knew more of Emma’s movements the previous evening than he did. Everything felt wrong. This morning the world had woken up back to front.

‘God, tonight’s going to be awful,’ said Debbie, with a roll of her eyes. ‘How are you fixed tomorrow?’ she added, with a quick touch of his arm. ‘Maybe we could finally do Bouley Bay to Bonne Nuit. It would be nice to have some pleasant memories at the end of the weekend.’

‘I’d love to, but we’ve got a big lunch with some friends of Emma’s.’

There were few things Colin could imagine being more awkward than his duty-bound chat with Duncan Labey, but one was the recurring request for a follow-up walk with Debbie. The north coast of the Island was wondrous: purple-heathered granite cliffs, bursting with green bracken in the spring that switched to ruddy-brown in the autumn. He loved walking its paths. Emma didn’t. She’d been dragged there enough as a child and it had completely lost its allure, if it had ever had any for someone who wanted to spend her weekends at her friend’s house, so she could bitch later about how much more tastefully she’d have decorated it, given the money, which Colin now interpreted as ‘husband’. He and Debbie had agreed to do the full walk in stages, but hadn’t made any progress since June when they had walked from Rozel to Bouley Bay.

It had been a glorious baking blue day, which had culminated with Debbie goading him into a pier jump. In that brief moment of suspension with the bluest sky above and the bluest sea below, and a legitimate excuse for Debbie’s hand to be in his, namely that he was too scared to jump on his own, he had experienced some kind of ecstasy. For those brief seconds the universe had made sense. Her hand in his had felt like the missing piece of a puzzle. But that had been before Emma had spotted what Colin had partly longed for and partly dreaded, that Debbie felt the same about him as he did about her. So the puzzle had had to be smashed and the pieces scattered. Once he had realised which road he and Debbie were on, he had flailed against it, terrified he wouldn’t be able to resist, that he would fall from grace. He kept to a credo that Debbie, like Emma, had imperfections that would surface if they were locked together, but when he was with her, his credo was in danger of being disproved, which was why he had to pull away, and had deployed multiple excuses not to see her over the last few months. He and Debbie had so much in common, temperamentally, culturally, politically and emotionally. He couldn’t stomach any more sense of kinship: he didn’t want there to be any more proof of the notion, which he repressed, that maybe he had married the wrong woman too quickly. And that maybe the right woman was the one who wanted to walk up and down cliff paths with him, debating differing interpretations of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.

‘I can’t believe you’re standing me up to hear a bunch of men boast about boats.’ She gave him a playful nudge with her elbow, to which he was rigidly unresponsive.

‘I’m not standing you up. I mean, I’m not your boyfriend, Debbie.’ This was not a morning on which to flirt.

Debbie stopped, and he turned towards her, bewildered that he seemed to have stumbled into another major row within a mere twenty-four hours. This time, though, he could see there would be no row. Not just because they were surrounded by pupils and staff but because she had turned pale and seemed to crumple, not knowing where to look.

‘What? Where did that come from?’

He froze as she all but limped off, wishing away the words, wishing away the people around them, wishing he could explain that his lashing out had stemmed from his anger at his own desire, that she had done nothing he had not encouraged, that she felt nothing that he did not feel a hundredfold, and that he would rather hurl himself off a cliff than hurt her as he had just done.

Colin’s stupor was interrupted as Aidan Blampied roared into the quadrangle in his open-top Jaguar E-type, using the odd rev of the throaty engine and toot of the horn to clear a path through the throng of students loitering towards registration. He cut a cool dash in aviation shades as he parked, but Colin found him a supercilious, selfish jerk. Not just because he usually turned up late, wanting to be noticed. At last summer’s Activities Week Blampied had run a course titled ‘Boat Maintenance’, in which eager pupils had given his modest yacht a new coat of varnish.

Colin approached him. He wasn’t his first choice of counsel when it came to Duncan’s well-being, but he had to unburden himself and get a second opinion, and Blampied was the boy’s form teacher. It was the appropriate place to start.

‘Morning, Aidan. Have you got a moment?’

‘That depends,’ came the surly reply, as Blampied looked at the sky. ‘Running late, but what do you reckon? Looks like rain?’

‘Um, the forecast says not, but those clouds look like they might be heading over.’

‘Give me a hand, will you?’

As Colin helped heave the canvas roof back on and line up the poppers, he pushed on with his enquiries. ‘How do you find Duncan Labey?’

‘Good kid. You’ve got him for English, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any problems?’

‘No, he’s a very capable student. It’s just I bumped into him last night …’

The roof was reattached and Blampied had walked round and was now face to face with Colin, but the sunglasses made him feel as if he was being unfavourably observed. He couldn’t read Blampied’s eyes.

‘Where?’

‘Grosnez?’

‘Grosnez? What were you doing there? Arsehole of the Island, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t you mean the nose? Big nose. That’s what it means.’

‘All right, Mainlander, you’ve done your research. What were you doing there?’

‘I was looking at the sunset. So was he.’ Colin looked around. The last stragglers were entering their classes. He would be late, but this was important, and no one was around to overhear. ‘He was acting strangely.’

‘Strangely?’

‘He was near the edge of the cliff.’

‘So? He’s a teenage boy. That’s the sort of thing they do. They like going fast down hills and leaning out from heights.’

‘I might be wrong – it was getting dark – but it looked like he was going to jump. I wanted to let you know in case he’d been acting in any way out of the ordinary.’

‘Other than looking at sunsets, no. I see him for five minutes at the beginning of the day. You see more of him than I do. How does he seem to you?’

‘Fine. He’s a good student.’

‘Did you say anything to him?’

‘It didn’t feel right.’

‘Then trust your instincts. If you really had seen someone about to do a header off a cliff, you’d know.’

‘How?’

‘Well, they’d probably have done it. I’m guessing they don’t normally pause to enjoy the view.’

‘Will you speak to him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I just think we have a duty of care to do something.’

‘This school is full of hormonally rampant adolescents. The thought of topping themselves probably pops into their brains once a week because their football team’s gone down, or they’re late with homework and can’t avoid a detention, or their parents won’t let them watch late-night films on Channel 4. They’re not going to do anything about it.’

‘Is it worth taking the risk?’

‘There’s no risk, trust me. Duncan Labey is fine.’

They started walking towards their classes.

‘What about you?’ continued Blampied.

‘Me?’

‘What were you doing out there?’

‘I told you, looking at the sunset.’

‘But why? Everything okay with you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘There you go. That’s what he’d say too. Trust me, he’s fine.’

After registration Colin and his form made their way up to the main school assembly, which, as predicted, was a monotonous affair. The headmaster, Gerald Le Brocq, gave two addresses each term, the rest being delivered by other members of staff, local vicars and pupils. He tended to draw from one of three rotating talks, and today’s was a humdinger about how Jesus was like an invisible parachute we were all unwittingly wearing. Colin was getting close to memorising the addresses verbatim, the other two being a self-penned parable about a bear sharing his food with a field mouse, and an anecdote about the time Le Brocq had sat next to Jeffrey Archer on a train, which he tried to stretch into a lesson about fate: ‘If my wife had not burnt my toast that morning, I would not have missed my usual train and I would not have had the pleasure of sitting next to the Dickens of our time and drinking deep of his wit and wisdom.’ Colin occasionally performed versions of these for Debbie’s amusement. He’d ridiculed the Jeffrey Archer story to Emma, but she had missed the point and wanted to know the details of the encounter, whether or not Archer and Le Brocq were still in touch, and whether he could get a signed copy of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less for her father, who was a huge fan and believed the author would make a great future prime minister, having come through the recent libel trial with his integrity restored.

Depressingly he noticed that Debbie was sitting next to Touzel at the other end of the back row.

He scanned the hall for Duncan. It was impossible to pick him out in the massed rows. Although he had distinctive ash-blond hair, Colin reasoned that, since he was of average height, he could be lurking in front of a freakishly outsized pupil, of which there were a few. The boys rose for the headmaster’s exit, followed by the staff. Colin hung back to look over the room and stifle a mild but insistent sense of alarm that would not settle until he saw Duncan’s face.

His failure to spot the boy meant he was distracted at the start of his first lesson. He began by playing a Chuck Berry song, which loosened the atmosphere and gave him time to gather himself. His mood was lifted by the excitement and interest he generated in explaining the connection between the song and the text – Berry sang of the teenage experience, and The Catcher in the Rye was the first novel to give that demographic a literary voice.

He was walking to his A-level class in the sixth-form block when he saw Debbie ahead. He quickened his pace but then slowed. What was there to say? As she headed to the staffroom on the right, he peeled off to the large granite steps that led up to the back of the High Hall. As he walked through it, past walls filled with portraits of previous headmasters, plaques of sporting victory, and lists of pupils fallen in the Boer, First and Second World Wars, his residual unease was supplanted by dread that Duncan would not be in his class. And then what would he do? Wait till Monday and hope the boy returned with a sick note explaining his Friday absence? Or find an excuse to break protocol and get the school to contact the parents now? Colin was hit with waves of anxiety: what if the boy had found another way of ending his life? What if his body was waiting to be found by a dog walker, washed up on one of the eastern beaches, or had been claimed by the tides, never to be found, or was hanging from a beam in the garage into which Colin had seen him disappear last night? The potential enormity struck him like one of the Atlantic rollers he had watched pound against the foundations of the Island. Merely delivering the boy to his front door now struck him as cowardly and futile. Blampied would help to damn Colin, placing him at the scene of the first attempt and forgetting his own dismissive lack of care. Colin would appear a weak, guilty man, who, by his inaction, had as good as pushed the boy off the cliff.

Twelve pupils showed up to his next class. Duncan was not among them.