Mainlander

‘I don’t understand that lyric,’ said Duncan, out of nowhere. ‘The one about “lasers in the jungle”?’

‘I think he’s talking about the double-edged sword of technological expansion. How it affects every area of life, often with a detrimental effect. How we might gain in science, but lose in nature.’

‘I like “a distant constellation, that’s dying in the corner of the sky”.’

‘Yes, it’s beautiful.’

‘Makes you feel dwarfed by the futility of it all.’

‘Well, I suppose it has a poignancy, but that’s quite a bleak way of looking at it …’ Colin glanced across as he was speaking and thought he could see tears glistening on Duncan’s cheeks in the staccato glare of the street lights as they headed to the centre of the Island. He was about to stop the car and comfort him, when out of the corner of his eye he saw him wipe his face. The boy began talking, the moment had passed.

‘Tom saw him at the Albert Hall in April. Said it was amazing.’

‘How’s your brother doing?’

‘Really well. He’s got a job at the Telegraph. Sports desk.’

‘He did English?’

‘History.’

‘That’s it, and Nigel’s doing English?’

‘Yes. Finishes next year.’

‘Any idea what you might like to do?’

‘English, but I don’t want to copy Nige.’

‘You wouldn’t be copying him. Lots of people do English.’

‘I just want to get on to the mainland. I don’t really mind what I do.’

‘Do you mind where you go? Are you thinking of Oxford?’

‘Mum and Dad are pushing that. But, you know …’

‘Your brothers went there, so you’d like to find somewhere new?’

‘Kind of.’

‘What about Cambridge?’

‘Dad and Grandpa went to Oxford, so it wouldn’t go down too well.’

‘I’m sure they’d be proud. As a Cambridge man, I can tell you it’s every bit as good as Oxford. Although there are other options. Oxbridge is obviously fantastic, but some people can find it quite a lot of pressure. Doesn’t suit everyone.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Bits of it. Most of it.’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘The Island? I met my wife. And it’s a beautiful place.’

‘I suppose so, it’s easy to forget that.’

‘We’ve just gone from golden cliffs and roaring seas through autumn copses and winding valleys. And look at those stars. Won’t see many of those in a big town on the mainland. Whereabouts are you?’

They were approaching St Martin’s village.

‘It’s a left after the church, then the second right.’

Silence descended again after the flurry of rapport. The mention of his wife had led Colin to wonder whether Paul Simon was singing about him, a ‘poor boy’ compensating ‘for his ordinary shoes’.

‘Just here’s fine.’

Colin pulled up outside a large granite house.

‘Thanks for the lift, sir.’

‘No problem. Duncan …’ The boy turned back after getting out of the car. Colin wanted to know whether there’d been more to Duncan’s comments about futility than the usual adolescent feelings of isolation in an indifferent universe, but how to ask?

‘… your bike.’

They hauled it out of the boot in silence.

‘Thanks, sir.’

‘See you tomorrow.’

As Duncan wheeled his bike up the path to his house, Colin got back into the car. He watched the boy push it into an annexed garage with a final wave. He had seen the boy home so he was safe now. But Colin would need to keep an eye on him.

He looked at the clock on the dashboard. Seven thirty. He’d stormed out of the flat at half past five. Not much of a statement, being away for two hours. He needed his angst to settle: he didn’t want to go back and say things he might later regret. He needed to work out his feelings. He didn’t know what to say. Rob was married to his wife’s best friend: an end to contact could not be justifiably demanded or practically enforced. They were supposed to be lunching at the de la Hayes’ on Saturday – would he refuse to go? Deep down he knew he had to be the bigger person and let it go, but he needed to spend a few more hours stewing, to let the anger and remorse boil out of him.

Also, childishly, he didn’t want to see Emma yet because he wanted her to worry about him, to be the first to apologise when he walked through the door. He should go back when she would have begun to worry, but he shouldn’t stay away so long that he appeared pig-headed or as if he was trying to induce panic.

He started the car. How to kill time? He thought of dropping in on a friend, but he didn’t want anyone knowing his business. He sometimes thought that a Venn diagram of all the interlocking relationships on the Island would have no more than three circles.

He headed down to St Catherine’s Bay, where more than half a kilometre of broad granite breakwater reached out towards France, sheltering a mix of fishing boats and pleasure cruisers. The breakwater was unlit, but the moon lifted everything out of the darkness. He got out of the car and walked to the end, where he stood listening to the gentle lap of the water on the leeward side, he thought of what Duncan had said, about looking at the sea and the sky and forgetting the Island. It was a clear sky – the cold silver stars flickered as brightly as the warm golden lights of Carteret eleven miles across the water. A distant constellation, that’s dying in the corner of the sky. Such should be his anger at the fact that ten years ago Emma had slept with someone he didn’t care for; a faraway fading rage. He took succour from the solitude. He walked up and down the breakwater three times, then headed home with his sense of proportion restored. He would talk to his wife; he would talk to his pupil.

2

COLIN

Friday, 9 October 1987

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.