Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Copyright © Will Smith 2015

Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images

Will Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

‘The Boy in the Bubble’ Words by Paul Simon, Music by Paul Simon and Forere Motloheloa, Copyright © 1986 Paul Simon (BMI), International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission. ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ Words and Music by Paul Simon, Beginning by Paul Simon and Joseph Shabalala, Copyright © 1986 Paul Simon (BMI), International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission. ‘Fame’ Words and Music by Michael Gore and Dean Pritchard © 1980, Reproduced by permission of EMI Affiliated Catalog Inc., London W1F 9LD. ‘Jigsaw’ Words and Music by Fish, Mark Kelly, Pete Trewavas and Steve Rothery © 1984, Reproduced by permission of Charisma Music Publishing Co Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007594269

Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780007594283

Version: 2015-12-23

Dedication

For Peter.

A rock on the Rock.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Colin

Chapter 2: Colin

Chapter 3: Emma

Chapter 4: Louise

Chapter 5: Rob

Chapter 6: Colin

Chapter 7: Rob

Chapter 8: Colin

Chapter 9: Rob

Chapter 10: Colin

Chapter 11: Barney

Chapter 12: Colin

Chapter 13: Louise

Chapter 14: Christophe

Chapter 15: Emma

Chapter 16: Louise

Chapter 17: Colin

Chapter 18: Louise

Chapter 19: Emma

Chapter 20: Louise

Chapter 21: Colin

Chapter 22: Barney

Chapter 23: Colin

Chapter 24: Rob

Chapter 25: Colin

Chapter 26: Rob

Chapter 27: Colin

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1
COLIN
Thursday, 8 October 1987

Hundreds of feet below where Colin Bygate sat on a moss-covered rock, the Atlantic was eating away the coast. Huge surges rolled in to fling up their spray as they hit the cliff-base, then sprang back to collide with the next incoming wave and send a line of water skyward. The sinking sun gave the brilliant white of the foam an apricot tinge, and turned the vapour trails above to threads of fire. It was one of those sharp and clear dusks peculiar to Jersey, with a brightness that belied the approaching dark. A sky that might have hung over Eden.

Since he couldn’t climb down to the waves, he dreamt of them rising up to wash the Island clean of all the impurities that so irritated him.

A vast storm, a second Flood: that was what was needed. One that would carry off the bankers, the lawyers, the accountants and all the others who looked down on him from their vertiginous social position, with their sports cars, their boats and their skiing holidays. It was his wife’s sensitivity to his low altitude, and his resentment that he should be made to care about it, that had brought him here tonight.

‘Rob and Sally have invited us to Chamonix for New Year.’

‘I don’t know if we can afford it. We’re stretched enough with the mortgage, and we’ve got to get your car through a service in February.’

‘Sally says they’ll pay.’

‘No.’

‘Why not? She’s my best friend and she can afford it.’

‘You mean he can afford it.’

‘Don’t be jealous.’

‘I’m not jealous.’

‘You’ve such a problem with money, you’re really not suited to this Island at all.’

‘That’s not true. You can’t just throw that in. Hey, come on, look at me.’

‘I’d rather not. I don’t like your face when you know you’re wrong.’

Colin wasn’t being disingenuous: he didn’t have a problem with money. He just preferred it to be earned rather than inherited, but he could live with this inequality on the grounds that people inherit plenty of things that give them an unfair advantage in life – a disarming smile, a propensity for kicking a ball, or precocious numeracy. His problem with Rob de la Haye was Rob de la Haye. He didn’t like the way the man laughed at his car.

‘Renault 5! Don’t drive it too long, you’ll grow tits!’ Rob had a Porsche 911, which, on an island that had a maximum speed limit of 40 m.p.h., on only two sections of road, Colin saw as a needless display of conspicuous wealth.

Neither did he like his attitude to the local itinerant Portuguese workers.

‘Did you hear about the Porko who took a bath?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did I!’

Or his relentless stereotyping of the Scots, Irish, Mancunians and Liverpudlians who made up the remaining seasonal workforce of receptionists, waitresses and car-hire representatives.

‘Check your change – Scouser on the till.’

In fact, he didn’t like much about his world view.

‘Take away unemployment benefit, they’ll soon find jobs.’

It irked him that Rob’s horizons were witlessly free of storm clouds. ‘Keep going like this and in five years I can buy a parish,’ he joked, after another run of luck on the markets, at which Colin smiled while inwardly praying for a crash.

He shifted on his granite perch, unsettled by the idea that maybe his wife was right, that underneath the layers of antipathy he was just jealous. His own father had died when Colin was seven. Rob’s had kept on living and acquiring hotels, one of which, the Bretagne, he’d given to his son on his twenty-first birthday.

The thing that Colin really had a problem with, and which had hit him like a telegraph pole to the chest, was that his wife had dated Rob when they were teenagers. It had come out as a response to his diatribe over Rob and Sally’s plans to build a swimming-pool in the grounds of the old farmhouse they were having renovated at a level of expense that Colin found simply incomprehensible. Sally was flying back and forth to London, sourcing furniture and wallpaper, because she was determined that guests shouldn’t recognise any element of her house from visits to the few local department stores. Colin was aware that he had to tread carefully because Sally was Emma’s oldest friend but, like many such friendships, his wife seemed to spend more time talking about the qualities she didn’t like in Sally than those she did. Hence Colin felt on firm ground when it came to expressing his heartfelt but puritanical disdain at the de la Hayes’ need for a swimming-pool when surrounded by such beautiful beaches.

‘But they won’t be living near any beaches in St Lawrence. It’s bang in the centre,’ Emma had pointed out.

‘It’s an island. You’re never that far from a beach.’

‘It’s nice to have your own pool, though. Beaches are full of kids and tourists. And the sea’s only warm enough to swim in about one month a year.’

‘It’s refreshing.’

‘It’s bloody freezing.’

This confused and annoyed Colin. He was sure that, early on in their relationship, Emma had shared his feelings on public space and the beauty of nature. Hadn’t she swooned at his ability to quote huge chunks of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’?

‘I thought you preferred the wildness and purity of the ocean to the sterility and isolation of the pool.’

‘No, that’s you. I like swimming-pools. Maybe if I was still with Rob, I’d have one.’

‘What do you mean “still with Rob”?’

‘I said “if I was with Rob”. I didn’t mean it. Forget it.’

‘“If I was with Rob” would have been hurtful enough. But you said “still with Rob”.’

Then it had come out, made ominous by its earlier omission. Colin and Emma had both talked freely of previous lovers, and Colin had no problem with Dave Le Gresley, the man he had unwittingly usurped when he’d first started dating Emma. In fact, he rather liked him, and would have kindled a friendship if he hadn’t worried that Emma would find it odd. Rob, on the other hand, had never been mentioned. It now turned out that she had dated him when they were in parallel sixth forms. He wasn’t sure for how long – Emma seemed to change it from weeks to months depending on whether she was trying to hurt or protect Colin, which shifted as their argument rose and fell.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about him before?’

‘Because it’s obvious you don’t like him, and I wanted to avoid exactly this sort of conversation.’

‘Maybe you never mentioned it because you still like him.’

‘You’re being childish.’

‘Does he still like you – is that why he’s always so bloody rude to me?’

‘So what if he does? I wouldn’t be alone in having admirers outside of this marriage.’

‘That’s not … true or fair.’

‘It’s so pathetic, this whole competition you have with Rob.’

‘You’re making me compete! You said if you were still with him you’d have a swimming-pool. Well, I’m sorry, I’m never going to be able to give you that.’

‘Don’t be so bloody smug and virtuous. Earning money is not a crime.’

‘Precisely. He doesn’t earn it. To earn it you have to do something, to contribute.’

‘Well, your contribution means we’ll be stuck in this flat for New Year, while my friends are drinking champagne on top of a fucking mountain!’

‘Maybe you should have married a Bond villain.’

‘You are so immature.’

‘I was joking, but if I’m honest, that’s not a lifestyle I—’

‘Here we go, Colin the fucking martyr. Could have gone into the City but chose to be a teacher. How bloody noble. And fuck anyone who actually wants to have some fun in their life!’

He’d stormed out after that and driven as far away as he could from their flat in St Helier. He’d ended up at Grosnez, the north-west tip of the Island, which was wedged up in the air as though some sea god had banged his fist on the south-east corner in a primordial rage. Maybe, thought Colin, it was Triton, furious at the discovery that his wife had previously dated Neptune. As he sat on the headland looking down on the churn and whomp of a foaming inlet, he noticed a seagull that kept settling on a sea-besieged rock, then taking to the wing as the water heaved itself over the smooth dome. The bird would not relinquish its perch, but slowly it would be driven off. He felt like the bird: eventually he would be swept from the larger rock. His surname hadn’t helped. Bygate. ‘How long have you been in the Island?’ was a question he heard a lot, the implication being that he didn’t intrinsically belong there, that he was permanently marked as an outsider. Even the grammar of the question, with the local idiosyncrasy of ‘in the island’ rather than ‘on’, felt loaded against him. His isolation had crept into his home. The qualities for which he felt his wife had initially cherished him were now held up as examples of his shortcomings.

Her reaction to his Bond-villain crack had frustrated him. Granted, it had been said in a row, but it was the sort of flippant comment that used to puncture her dourness and make her laugh. These days, she would take such comments at face value and fling them back at him.

Her birthday, a few weeks before, had been an oasis of happiness that now felt like a mirage. Colin had wrong-footed her by telling her to pack a bag and meet him in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, an unremarkable establishment on the west coast, which overlooked a beach with notoriously stinky piles of seaweed. He’d led her down into the Tartan Bar, the walls of which were covered with swatches of random tartans and where a man with a Bontempi organ was entertaining elderly couples with an off-key rendition of ‘The Skye Boat Song’.

‘You always complain you’ve seen everything on this Island,’ he’d said.

‘In this Island.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Doesn’t matter, you’ll get it eventually. Well, you’ve certainly opened my eyes. And they hurt! This décor is unbelievable.’

‘It’s like an explosion in a Scottish tat factory.’

‘I’ll say this for it, though. We’re not likely to bump into anyone we know.’

She’d cheerily gone along with his plan for anonymity in an epicentre of naffness and was proposing a toast to a night away without bumping into friends, colleagues or relations, when a waiter had walked in and announced there was a taxi for Mr and Mrs Bygate. Half an hour later they were making love in a suite at the luxurious Hotel L’ Horizon, Emma having been wowed by his extravagance. To Colin, it felt as if they had started over, but when they’d got home the next day, the evening had assumed the status of a one-night stand that neither party chose to acknowledge. Now they seemed further apart than ever.

As the light around him started to die and the temperature made him feel numb rather than refreshed, Colin slid back from his introspection. Further down the coast stood the Marine Peilstand 3 Tower, the silhouettes of its viewing platforms jutting out like the teeth of a key. The Germans had built it as part of a battery to defend St Ouen’s Bay from an Allied invasion that never came. He stood up to restore some blood to his buttocks, then turned to the outer wall of Grosnez Castle, caught in the fading rays. Such a bizarre place. Where else in the world could you sit looking at the sea, with a Nazi fortification in front of you and a medieval castle at your back? He fought an unwelcome memory of standing there, watching the subject of his wife’s gibe about ‘admirers’ giving a talk to members of the National Trust for Jersey. He had told her he was going to the talk to learn more about the Island, and had neglected to mention it was being given by his colleague Debbie Hamon. Was his deception on a par with his wife’s? No: nothing had ever happened between him and Debbie, and nothing ever would. He could erase a possible future; Emma could not erase an actual past that, to his mind, had stained their present.

He remembered that the castle was something of a folly. Although it must have seemed impregnable when built, protected on three sides by the cliffs of the promontory on which it stood, there was no water supply, perhaps accounting for its easy capture and partial demolition around the time of the French occupation in the late fifteenth century. So its current lustre seemed more like fool’s gold. Perhaps his marriage, like this castle, had been doomed from its inception.

The granite was glowing pink and orange. On the horizon the white-yellow brightness of the sun had turned to a burning red as it edged its way towards the ceaseless billow of the sea. As the bottom curve melted into the ocean a flickering swathe of ochre widened towards him as it stretched from the point of contact between sea and star. He wanted to get closer to that beam across the water, to get lower to the horizon as the sun disappeared. He set off along a path heading inland and rounded back through the castle, bounding up the steps to the doorway that stood next to the portcullis arch.

As he picked his way through the crumbling inner walls as fast as he could in the swelling murk, he tried to remember the path he had found that went from the headland to a platform further down the cliff. He had wanted to climb down once with Emma, but she’d said it looked dangerous, she was too tired, and she wanted to get home for the EastEnders omnibus.

He saw the white railings that led to the automated lighthouse at Grosnez Point, and the route began to come back to him. As the concrete path banked right, he bent down to climb through on the left, and began crabbing his way down a steep, grassy slope as carefully and speedily as he could. The light was waning quicker than he had anticipated and he wasn’t sure he would make it. It suddenly felt imperative that he get down there before the sun had gone. If he did, everything else would be okay. As a boy, he had often set himself such meaningless superstitious tasks, perhaps because of the insecurity he had felt when his father had been taken from him – ‘If I can throw this ball up in the air and catch it ten times in a row I’ll get into Cambridge.’ Sometimes the tasks were subconscious impulses: ‘If someone as beautiful as Emma marries me, it makes me okay’; ‘If I can climb down to watch this sunset, I married the right person …’

He reached the bottom of the slope and, holding on to two chunky tufts of grass, turned to lower himself down the fifteen feet of jumbled granite that led to the platform. His toes found a tiny ridge, and he twisted round to see where his next foothold would come, but his eyes stayed ahead.

The sun was now winking over the edge of the horizon. Going, going, gone. He felt a calming chill descend in the now colourless dusk. He’d drive the long way home, round the top of the Island. Maybe stop off at St Catherine’s harbour and walk along the breakwater, watching the moon on the sea and listening to the creak of the boats.

He looked down at the ledge he’d been making for and, to his surprise, saw a figure. It was a young boy, a teenager. He stood, feet together, right on the edge of the gently undulating rock that formed the basin, looking down the sheer drop to the sea below. He leant back, his face to the sky, arms raised above his sides. The light wasn’t clear enough for Colin to be sure, but the boy seemed to be preparing to jump.

Colin was about to cry out when one of the tufts he was holding on to tore out of the loose earth and he was sliding and scrambling down the rock. The boy ran over, helping to break his slow fall as he crumpled at the base.

‘Sir?’

‘Aah! Ooh! Hello, Duncan,’ Colin said, rubbing his knees, which had been scraped on his descent. His mind was split between the pain, the general awkwardness of meeting a pupil out of school, and the specific angst that he might have interrupted a suicide attempt.

‘Just sit for a second, sir. Don’t put any weight on it.’

Colin wanted to stand, partly for the sake of his dignity, but also so that he could grab the boy if he had indeed been about to jump and was minded to make a further attempt. ‘I’m fine. I can stand – better to walk it off,’ he said, wincing as he got to his feet and hobbled round to put himself between Duncan and the drop.

‘It’s hard to spot the footholds in the dark,’ said Duncan. ‘I can go and get my bike light to help you climb up.’

Colin was confused by how normal the boy sounded. He was talking as though they’d ended up stuck there as part of an agreed climb. Maybe he’d been mistaken in what he thought he’d seen. But what if the boy wanted to get away from him so he could fling himself off from another point?

‘No, it’s fine. The moon’s up, I should be okay. What are you doing here, Duncan?’

‘Looking at the sunset. It’s the best place to see it from.’

‘You gave me a jump when I first saw you. You were very near the edge.’ That was as close as Colin felt he could get to the subject.

‘I was just trying to get a view without a sense of the Island. You know, just the sun, the sea and me. It’s quite a rush.’

Duncan’s articulacy was no surprise. He was one of Colin’s star pupils, an eloquent and sensible boy, the youngest of three brothers. Both of his siblings had excelled in the classroom and on the sporting field, both had been head boy, both had secured places at Oxford. Duncan was matching them in the first two, and was expected to follow them in the others.

‘Why are you here, sir, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he asked.

‘Same as you. The sun sinking into the Atlantic. It’s an incredible sight. I was hurrying, hence my heavy landing. Don’t tell anyone about that, by the way. If I end up limping round the school tomorrow I’m going to say I hurt myself kicking down the door of a burning house to save some baby pandas.’

The boy smiled. That was a relief. Colin was closer in age to his pupils than most of the other staff and shared more of a rapport with them. He was open and approachable, and the sound that rang out from his lessons was rare in other classrooms: laughter. But, in the present circumstance, mannered reticence flooded back. ‘Do you live nearby?’ he asked.

‘Not really. St Martin’s.’

‘You cycled halfway across the Island? You must really have wanted to see the sunset.’

‘It’s only half an hour or so. I’ve gone right round it in under three.’

‘Still … everything all right?’ As soon as he’d said it, it felt too pointed. Colin retreated. ‘I mean, workwise. You do history as well as English, don’t you? Not having an essay overload or anything?’ He was gabbling now.

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘’Cause you know my policy?’

Duncan nodded. Everyone knew Colin’s policy – ‘If you really can’t do it, tell me and I’ll give you an extension, everybody has off-moments.’ It was frowned on by his colleagues and envied by the pupils not under his tutelage.

‘Are you okay now? We should get back up,’ Duncan said. Was this concern about Colin’s knee, or an attempt to change the subject?

‘Yes, I’m fine. Do you want to lead the way?’

They picked their way up the steep path in silence under the ghostly grey light. Duncan went first, turning regularly to check on Colin and to show him where best to put his hands and feet. When they reached the top, they turned to look at the moon on the water, a cool balm after the searing sun.

‘Why don’t I give you a lift?’ said Colin. ‘I’m sure if I put the seat down we can fit your bike in the back of my car.’

‘I quite like the exercise.’

‘I’d feel better, if you don’t mind. It’s getting late, and you should be back home. I wouldn’t feel right leaving you alone in the dark on the wrong side of the Island.’

The boy conceded and they collected his bike, then used the light to pick a way past the potholes and loose rocks to Colin’s car. After they had silently wrestled it into the boot, Colin felt an unease that built as they settled into their seats. He had a mild panic over what music to play. One of his most popular lessons was when he told the boys to bring in their favourite songs to discuss the lyrics. Now he felt as if his own taste was on the spot. He ran through the options, hesitating over Springsteen’s Born in the USA and The River. Some people, wrongly in Colin’s opinion, labelled Springsteen as a sickeningly bombastic American flag-waver, so he dismissed him as too controversial and polarising. He discarded Dire Straits’s Brothers in Arms as too ubiquitous and too obvious, something a teacher would play to appear cool while clearly having no idea what that constituted. He decided Erasure were too camp – he wanted to avoid a potentially unshakeable nickname – then became dismayed at the ludicrousness of worrying how his musical taste would be perceived when twenty minutes earlier he’d thought the boy was about to hurl himself to his death. He started the engine and pulled off the track that led from the headland on to a main road. Eventually, to mask the silence, he slid in the cassette tape of Paul Simon’s Graceland, which was both mainstream and off-beat enough hopefully to score a multitude of points.

‘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.

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.

3
EMMA
Friday, 9 October 1987

Emma’s eyes were shut, as much from bliss as from the bright October morning light that flooded into the fifth-floor room of the Hotel Bretagne, turning the white sheets gold and topping up her subsiding glow. As well as her physical nirvana, the smile that uncharacteristically took over the whole of her face had its wellspring in the exchange she’d had with Rob before he had stepped into the shower.

‘What are you up to the weekend after this?’

‘Whatever you fancy. Sally’s off to look at bloody furniture on the King’s Road.’

She had taken this as a tacit invitation to spend longer than the usual snatched hours with him, and was already weighing up plausible excuses with which to absent herself from Colin. Shopping, lunch with an unnamed relative, plain old wanting some time to herself …

She rolled away from the window and opened her eyes to look at the bedside clock: 9:32. Rob had said he needed to start work at ten – but he was the boss: maybe he could cry off and they could spend the day together, or at least the morning. She craved another fuck. In fact, there was time for that and for him to shower again before ten. He was quick and urgent – she loved letting him do what he wanted. Colin’s attentiveness in bed, his sublimation of his needs to hers, all of which had seemed too good to be true in those first heady months, now struck her as weak and bloodless. Her former prince had a neediness, a lack of self in his centre, that he filled with duty.

Her musing was broken by a knock. Rob was still in the bathroom, so no need to tell him to hide as was his habit when room service turned up. She always teased him about that: there was no dignity in a king hiding from his servants. She opened the door and a middle-aged Portuguese man with a thick moustache wheeled in a trolley of pastries, cereal, fruit, juice, tea and coffee.

She picked up a croissant, switched on the radio and sat back on the bed. She turned up Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ till Rob barked, ‘No!’ from the bathroom. Laughing, she lowered the volume and fiddled with the channels till she found something more appealing, settling on what she thought was Bryan Adams, or possibly Bruce Springsteen, or that other guy with Jaguar or something as a middle name. It annoyed Colin when she got singers confused like that, the same as getting lyrics wrong. She often did it on purpose.

She fell back to thinking of locations for their mooted weekend assignation. It would be good to get out of this room. They met here as and when they could, maybe eight times since they’d first fallen on the bed back in July. Until then she’d genuinely thought she was over Rob. Their original split had thrown her off balance and she had struggled to regain it. Eventually she’d left the Island for a TEFL course, determined to travel the world and return solely for births, marriages and deaths, only to reappear with Colin at her side and triumph in her breast. He was different from Rob. He was just as handsome, but gentler and less raucous. He was idealistic and unworldly, self-deprecating and no hostage to cool, and above all he worshipped her. By going in the other direction, she had proved she wasn’t bothered by Rob moving on to Sally. She would have a purer love, based on intimacy and friendship, not showboating and overhosting. She had pronounced to the world through her marriage that she was finally happy, stable: she had boxed up the past and placed it in deep if not permanent storage. Rob and she had reached a palatable friendship, although she had never seen him without Sally, until that lunchtime when he’d passed her as she was looking in the window of Layzell’s, a local travel agency.

‘I recommend Barbados.’

‘Oh, hi, Rob. Yeah, I’ve been trying to persuade Colin we should go away for New Year. He doesn’t like the idea of winter sun, but I go a bit stir-crazy out of season here.’

‘Well, if you want sun and he wants cold you could come with us. We’re thinking of renting a ski lodge in Chamonix with Tony and Becs.’

‘Sounds great, but might be a little out of our range.’

‘Well, as a further compromise, you could do worse than stay at the Bretagne. I’d do it for mates’ rates, if not gratis.’

Emma laughed.

‘What?’

‘Rob, I want to get off the Island in my holidays. We’re already going to be here the rest of the summer, apart from a weekend at Colin’s mother’s and maybe a week in France.’

‘Trust me, you stay at the Bretagne and you won’t know you’re in the Island, apart from the view – which, by the way, is fantastic.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Grabbing a sandwich, then heading back to work.’

‘You’re not eating a sandwich. You’re eating at the Bretagne. Chef’s running in the new menu before next week’s reopening, for a few specially invited guests. Come on, free lunch.’

‘There’s not time to get there and back …’

‘You forget, I drive a Porsche.’

She had laughed, but allowed him to pull her along by the hand. After an above-par lunch of fruits de mer, with a couple of glasses of champagne, in a pristine deserted dining room, Rob had insisted on wowing her with the new decor of the rooms before he ran her back into town.

As she had looked out at the rocks of St Clement’s Bay from the room she was in now, he had stood behind her and put his hands on her hips. She’d turned to ask him what he was doing, but the fact she didn’t remove his hands meant they had kissed, then fallen on to the bed in a near-frenzy. Rob confessed that the memory of their time together loomed larger than its limited duration should have allowed, and that he felt neither regret for what they had just done nor the desire for it to be unrepeated. He had joked about keeping the room free at all times in case they needed it. She wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not, and found herself hoping that he wasn’t.

Rob came back in, his biceps flexing as he towel-dried the back of his hair, which was longer than the front. A larger towel was wrapped low round his hips, showing off the almost-six-pack for which he’d never had to work. Colin always wore a towel higher up, nearly under his armpits, like a woman.

‘Did you tip?’ he said, gesturing at the trolley from which he picked up the Financial Times.

Emma gestured to the spray of her clothes on the floor. ‘I don’t know where my bag is.’

‘Tip well and they’ll keep schtum.’

‘None of the staff would say anything anyway. They’d lose their jobs.’

‘True. Maybe I just like the intrigue.’

‘You like having a fuck-pad in your own hotel.’

‘“Fuck-pad” … I like it. Did you come up with that?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘We should have it as a plaque on the door. And another up at Grosnez Castle.’

‘Why Grosnez Castle?’

‘You’ve forgotten!’ yelped Rob, whipping the smaller towel from round his neck and twirling it triumphantly, like a banner. ‘It’s where we first went all the way. Usually I’m the insensitive lunk who forgets significant moments in a relationship.’

‘We didn’t do it in the actual ruins. It was further down, on a ledge.’

‘Does it matter? I got the general area right.’

‘It matters! It was my first time,’ she murmured, stunned that she was feeling the same elation now that she had felt then.

‘Mine too … outdoors.’

‘You said it was your first time!’

‘It was, it was! I’m kidding! Not sure it’s been bettered …’ He leant down and kissed her. She pulled off his towel and reached for his crotch.

‘Sorry, no time for seconds.’ He straightened and moved to the wardrobe.

‘Hey, next weekend, if the weather’s good we could maybe take the boat out, pop over to Carteret.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, as he pulled on the two-tone burgundy Pierre Cardin shirt that earlier he had deftly hung on a hanger with one hand while removing her bra with the other.

‘Sally’s not around.’

‘That would break rule numero uno – not outside this room.’

‘Why did you say, “Whatever you fancy”, when I asked you what you were up to the weekend after this?’

‘I didn’t. I said, “Whatever I fancy.”’

‘You said, “Whatever you fancy.”’

‘You must have misheard. Wishful thinking. I’m flattered. And mildly freaked.’

Emma sat up in bed and turned away from him.

‘Em, come on, we can’t risk being found out. You’re scaring me.’

‘We could go on the boat, go to France. Who’s going to see us there?’

‘Getting out of the harbour unseen is like trying to get out of a prisoner-of-war camp. And Carteret and Saint-Malo are full of Islanders doing the weekend baguette run. That’s why we have the rules.’

‘I don’t like rules. It makes me feel you do this all the time.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. This hotel is full of my mistresses. That’s the only reason I run it.’

‘Don’t make fun of me.’

‘But you’re being …’ He trailed off.

‘What? Ridiculous? Crazy? Say it.’

‘Paranoid. And demanding. We should just enjoy what we have.’

‘I’m a little confused as to what that is right now. It feels like no-strings sex.’

‘Well, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. It was me adding strings that split us up the first time.’

Emma stood and headed wordlessly to the bathroom. She felt a slam rising through her arm as she reached for the side of the door, but knew instinctively that the same cold pseudo-normality she had used against Colin last night and earlier that morning would be more cutting, and so closed the door gently.

She began her second shower of the day, annoyed again with the man in the other room. This shower was powerful, enveloping: she could lose herself in it, unlike the electrically heated unit at home that whirred and buzzed to produce a trickle akin to that of an emptying watering-can. She always took long showers after sex with Rob. She supposed he might read guilt into this, that she was undertaking the kind of instinctive baptism people do when struggling with shame, but she felt none of that. She just liked the shower.

What was bugging her, though, was that Rob had been right. Their affair could only ever remain behind closed doors, and closed doors upon which no one was likely to come knocking other than room service. Everyone knew everyone else’s business in the Island. Wipe a tear from your eye on leaving a supermarket in a cold wind, and expect your partner to ask why you were seen sobbing in public when you made it home.

He was also right that she had ended their earlier coupling through fear of constriction. While they had seen themselves as being together for ever, in the endless love peculiar to teenagers, they envisaged it happening in different parts of the globe. Emma was a big and beautiful fish in a small pond: she had designs on larger waters. London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, they would all fall to her charms, in what industry she wasn’t yet sure. She should be able to rise to the top of whichever pile she chose to climb: acting, music and fashion were all easy options for someone with her looks and instinctive knack for trailing broken hearts behind her, as evidenced by the legions of solitary doe-eyed boys pounding the beaches, pining for her, with ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ on their Walkmans. Rob saw their future differently. It was to be Island-based. He would provide a large income and they would be the Island’s ‘It Couple’. They would live in a converted granite farmhouse with a pool, and a garage for as many cars as they wanted. Labradors, horses and, after a time, two children, one of each, named Hugo and Holly, who would go to the same schools as their parents had attended and follow the same paths laid out before them, leading to lives of stress-free luxury.

These opposing visions of the future were as distinct as high and low pressure, and the result was as inescapable as the storm that had broken a week before the end of the summer holidays. They were about to start the last year of their respective sixth forms, where they were each deemed the coolest and most attractive of their peers. Rob had shown Emma the broken-down St Lawrence farmhouse he wished to buy one day and restore for her. She suddenly felt restricted, as though her life was being mapped out for her without her consultation, so her response was less than exuberant. Rob was hurt, declaring her ungrateful.

‘Ungrateful? For you telling me how my life’s going to be? There’s a whole world out there, Rob! It’s nice to have options.’

‘Options on houses, or options on guys?’

‘Both. This is all too much.’

She convinced herself that the split was for the best, which was easier than admitting she might have overreacted. She knew it would sting to be dropped off by her mother on the first day of term, rather than by Rob in his open-top white VW Beetle. She would no longer feel like the unofficial Princess of the Island, and would need to control the agenda when news of their break-up rippled through the common rooms. The sting had the added barb that on the first day of term it was her best friend Sally getting out of his car at the school gates. Sally, whose gawkiness threw her own elegance into even greater relief, Sally, who only got her cast-offs, Sally, to whom boys talked so that they got to talk to herself. Sally had explained that she’d started dating Rob only after Emma had dumped him, in fact just days before term started. When Emma’s anger had increased, she had become defensive, citing Emma’s proclamation that she was unfazed at the demise of what had been a golden coupling, and her declaration that she could ‘do better than Rob’. After weeks of antipathy, Sally had admitted at a tearful café summit that she should have told Emma that Rob had asked her out, but she hadn’t known how to go about it: she’d felt awkward and guilty, paranoid that it wouldn’t last, and was scared of jinxing it. Emma and she had made up, unsure as to how the new power shift would affect their worlds but still best friends because, at their age, these things seemed cast in stone.

Over their final year at school Sally’s status and confidence grew until she had become the cool beauty everyone wished to associate with, while Emma seemed to lose her bloom and momentum. Her bitterness and confusion seeped out, and her face hardened. Her eyes seemed permanently narrowed, which gave her the intimidating look of someone predisposed to disapproval.

She became aware that the short-term boyfriends she acquired thereafter were facsimiles of Rob. She wasn’t sure whether she went for yachting alphas because she wanted Rob or simply to outdo Sally. They treated her badly, perhaps encouraged by her own lack of self-esteem. The only exception had been Dave Le Gresley, who had begged her to maintain a cross-Channel relationship when she had set off for the TEFL training college, even promising to follow her round the world if she went through with her travel plans. Dave had been too doting and would do anything for her. By then she had known only how to come second.

And here she was, still coming second.

Rob was on the phone when she came out of the bathroom.

‘Christophe, Louise on the front desk, she’s got to go … No, not because she’s Scouse, I don’t have a problem with that, but my wife will … Yeah, you know. Cheers.’

He raised his newspaper and immediately made another call. ‘Rick, it’s Rob. How’s tricks? … Great, I want five thousand worth of Acorn … Because they’re going to replace the BBC micros in schools … Yeah, not just in the Island, across the UK … And a company called Exotech … Mainly copper … I want fifteen thousand of that … I don’t care how much it is, it’s going to go up … Because it’s in electrical wiring. Trust me, the amount I’ve spunked away having that farmhouse rewired, not to mention the bloody kitchens here, means I know what I’m talking about … Good, speak soon.’

He hung up and began making notes in his Filofax, while she sat on the bed and combed her wet hair. Provoked by his silence and knowing time was short, she opened her mouth to resume their argument, then closed it. A lump in her throat had choked her off. There was only one sensible way their affair could end: lifelong silence between them. If she pushed him now that would be it. She hated herself for accepting the little he could give, but she needed it.

She hid behind her hair. ‘You should get some monogrammed towelling robes.’

‘That’s all phase-three stuff, icing on the cake. We’ll scare the working classes off first, then go upmarket. Robes cost more than towels and one in five gets nicked. More, if it’s Scousers staying.’

‘How’s the restaurant doing?’

‘Not great. Refurb overran so playing catch-up from opening mid-season. Bar’s doing well, and at least Sammy Dee hasn’t come back. Had a major fight with Dad over that, but times change. Who wants to see some fat dick with a perm and a velvet jacket singing out-of-tune Sinatra in front of some tinsel?’

‘The guests presumably. Some of them come back year after year to see him.’

‘They’ll be dead soon, and until then they can stay at the Victor Hugo or Golden Dunes or one of the other morgues. I’m looking at the next generation, and they want something different. The Royal Barge have that guy who does Eagles covers – at least that’s only ten years behind. Right, done.’

Rob put down his Filofax as Emma switched on the hairdryer.

‘You need better hairdryers too. This always takes ages.’

‘They’re all new.’

‘They’re no good.’

‘No more upgrades till I’ve paid off a chunk of the refit bill. Need people to tuck into those surf-and-turfs. Such a good mark-up on lobsters. I’d start pulling ahead a damn sight quicker if that’s all they ate.’

‘You were just buying and selling in tens of thousands! You can afford some decent bloody hairdryers.’

‘I need those tens of thousands to keep afloat.’

‘Women need a decent hairdryer.’

‘Are you complaining about the facilities in the free fuck-pad?’

‘I’d be complaining if I was paying.’

‘The old dears we get are happy to spend half the morning drying their blue rinses, and it gives their husbands time to lie on the bed and stare at the walls.’

‘You’ve got to invest in your business.’

‘I am investing in my business – too fucking much, as it happens. Can we not talk about this? It’s stressing me out.’

Emma switched off the hairdryer. ‘I give up. I’ll let it dry on the way.’

Rob reached for her hand. ‘Em, what we’re doing, it’s okay, you know. We’re just working through a bit of unfinished business.’

‘You’re tagging this on to when we were together before.’

‘Yes. It’s part of what happened then.’

‘As opposed to now.’

‘Now is different. We’re in different places.’

‘Do you think I’m a slut?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve slept with more people in this Island than you have. I mean, you’ve been with me and Sally. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Are you trying to make me feel inadequate? What’s your point?’

‘I’m a girl you sleep with but don’t marry.’

‘I can’t marry you because I’m already married. So are you.’

She crawled across the bed and draped her arms round his neck. ‘I’m sorry … I don’t know what I’m saying today.’

‘If it’s too much, we can cool it …’

‘It’s not too much. It’s just enough. A little bit of fun in these four walls that no one knows about. Just as we agreed.’

‘Yup. Only Christophe.’

She withdrew her arms. ‘What?’

‘Christophe knows. About the room. And why I need it.’

‘Jesus, Rob.’

‘I can’t keep it from him – he’s my eyes and ears in this place. Trust me, he’s a locked safe. He’s French so he knows how these things work.’

‘I thought he was Corsican.’

‘Same thing.’

‘Oh, really? So a Jerseyman’s the same as an Englishman.’

‘Fine. He’s Corsican. You win. Point is, I trust the guy.’

Emma started picking her clothes off the floor. ‘Colin knows too.’

‘What?’

‘About us.’

‘Fucking hell! Why are you telling me this now?’

‘He only knows about the first time.’

Rob threw his head back. ‘Oh, Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack.’

‘Unlike Christophe, he’s very much an unlocked safe. Should make tomorrow interesting.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘We’re coming for lunch.’

‘Are you? Sally never tells me anything.’

‘Sorry – you annoyed me about Christophe.’

‘It’s fine. Look at us, sniping like an old married couple.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘I take it back. Are we okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’d better get to work.’

‘Me too.’

Thinking that they might have spent the day together, Emma had called in sick immediately after confirming her rendezvous with Rob. An empty day now yawned before her. The weather was fair but she couldn’t face a walk. There was the risk of bumping into someone who knew someone from work and, in any case, she was dressed in her Midland Bank navy skirt and jacket, and court shoes. She set off driving round the Island, on the same roads, past the same houses, with the same faces at the same windows and the same shrubs in the same gardens. Every corner, every street lamp, every tree-shrouded lane was primed to trigger a memory. She felt as if she was driving through her own theme park.

She passed her parents’ St Clement’s beachfront house where she’d spent an awkward New Year following the announcement that her first term at Birmingham University was to be her last, and where Colin had written ‘Marry me’ in seashells outside her bedroom window on the first Christmas Day of their relationship.

Further along the coast road was the flat at La Rocque that she’d rented during the years of idle temping and dating, years of confusion and anger. There were natural laws in the universe that she had never imagined could be defied, and one of them was that she would marry sooner and better than Sally.

Gorey Castle was where Sally, sprawled against the outer battlements after a pub crawl on the last day of school, had told her she didn’t care about her exam results and had decided to turn down her university place: she wanted to be Mrs Rob de la Haye. It was also where Emma had first kissed Rob after they had rolled down the castle green, a sweeping slope edging the castle’s northern wall.

St Catherine’s Breakwater was a compound memory: multiple family walks in the rain, disappointing her father with her lack of enthusiasm for sailing, her younger brother Rory nearly falling off the edge during a tantrum, Colin boring her with his superior knowledge of the history of the breakwater.

As she drove up the east coast she remembered sitting alone at White Rock, bereft and broken after fulfilling her duties as Sally’s chief bridesmaid. She had been convinced that Sally was trying maliciously to emphasise her recent weight gain with the cut of the dress. At the end of the evening a drunken Sally had told Emma that she knew how hard it must have been to watch her and Rob walk down the aisle, but that she, too, would soon find her prince. Emma had played it cool, denying it was even an issue, while struggling to understand why it still was and why she was maintaining a friendship that served only to undermine her confidence and self-esteem. As she had watched the sun come up that morning, disappointed that its sickly rays still left her shivering under her car blanket, she had known she had to leave again.

On skirting the top of Bouley Bay she was reminded of Colin, and how on his first visit he had eulogised about how the purple pebbles matched the heather on the cliffs then wondered why she could ever want to leave such a place. She had come back to work for the summer to earn some cash before she set off on her TEFL travels. As their love grew and his stay extended from July to August, his enthusiasm made Emma see the Island in a new light and her travel plans receded. When the job at the school had come up in September, she had allowed herself to be swept up in his sense of Providence. Now she resented Colin for having cheated her out of other, possibly better, options. She could have been off this rock and married to an architect in New Zealand, sending round-robin Christmas letters detailing their idyllic life spent flitting between their beachfront mansion and thousand-acre farm.

Nearing the brown-brackened outcrops that loomed over Bonne Nuit, she realised that she was halfway round the Island. She was literally going round in a circle. She turned into the centre, determined to find an unfamiliar road. She veered left down a lane, remembered it led to her cousin Yvonne’s house, so took the next right, then another left and a right, all along lanes that she knew by sight if not by name. She took three straight lefts in a row, then discovered she had doubled back on herself and went into a frenzy of random turns, speeding as fast as she dared, pushing herself to near panic as she imagined the hedgerows folding over and swallowing her. She came to a crossroads. Straight ahead lay the Carrefour Selous, another crossroads at the middle of the central parish of St Lawrence. The right cut across to the top of St Peter’s Valley and the airport, dense copses lining the slow curve up to a plateau leading to the broad beaches of the west coast. A pleasant drive but one she’d made many times before. The left led back towards St Catherine’s and Rozel. She rested her chin on the steering wheel and a fugue descended, until an estate car stopped behind her and beeped. She pulled out quickly to the left, then noticed a smaller road just off it that led up a steep incline. To make it she had to swing on to the other side of the road, which caused an oncoming van to brake hard and blare its horn, but she had found her Holy Grail: she did not know where this road led. Her mood lifted, along with the land’s elevation, as the lane banked left and right.

She turned on the radio for a further boost but the nimble-fingered riff of Dire Straits’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ conjured a heart-tugging combination of jauntiness and despair. She turned the dial blindly, desperate for another song, one she hadn’t listened to endlessly as part of the compilation tape Bounce Back that she’d made around the time of Rob and Sally’s wedding. As she flicked between stations, she laughed at her misplaced fury with the station programmers. They hadn’t chosen to mock her with their selections. There was no conspiracy: this was the Island getting on top of her.

As the road rose she found a French station, which was accessible from various points on the Island. The song that was playing was the one she had chosen as the climax of that tape, a song as high in the air as ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was down on the floor.

Baby look at me,

And tell me what you see,

You ain’t seen the best of me yet,

Give me time I’ll make you forget the rest.

For some reason it unlocked within her a deep-hidden joy. She slapped up the volume and jigged in her seat, beeping her horn in time with the music, partly out of the need to warn any oncoming drivers of her presence as she rounded fern-laden corners, and partly out of an unexpected frenzy of optimism that could not be held back. As she sang along, ‘Fame! I’m going to live for ever’, she started to believe it, only a kernel of her feeling ridiculous, but that was part of her revelry: the ridiculous was far more fun than moroseness. Rob was just something she was working out of her system. She’d needed to go back to him to grasp that she didn’t really want him. Their affair was benign, a boon to her marriage as it would help her see the good in the husband with whom she lived on a beautiful island. She would not be drowned by the past. She would spring on top of it, laughing as it drained away. She stopped the car, her elation snatched away, as if a magician had pulled off a tablecloth leaving everything on it in its place.

She had driven this lane before. She must have. There in front of her was the farmhouse that Rob and Sally were having renovated. The same farmhouse that Rob had promised her when she was seventeen. Sally had taken her round the empty shell at a celebration barbecue following the successful purchase, pleading with Rob to replace an oak on the front lawn with a circular drive and a fountain, and expounding on the dilemma of deciding between a swimming-pool or a tennis court or both, but then having a limited garden space. Emma had been inclined to make sure she was not around for the work’s completion.

Builders were plodding around the house now: it was coming together. Emma leant her head against the car window, crushed by the epiphany that it wasn’t just the ghosts of the past that she had to wrestle and evade but the ghosts of the future. She could fool herself no longer. She had to leave, this time for good.

As she trudged up the stairs to the flat, with nothing to look forward to except sitting in the tainted glare of framed wedding photos, wondering if she’d ever smile like that again, Mrs Le Boutillier’s door opened. Emma’s mood deflated further.

‘Hello, Mrs Bygate, not at work today?’

‘No.’

‘Have you got that bug that’s going round?’

‘I think I probably have, so best keep back. I don’t want to give it to you.’

‘Very thoughtful of you – got to be careful at my age.’

Emma turned to put her key in the lock.

‘Oh, silly me, I’ve got this for you – you must have just missed him,’ Mrs Le Boutillier went on.

‘Colin?’ replied Emma, confused.

‘No, the boy. He had a letter for your husband. I said I’d make sure he got it. Things get awfully messed up in the pigeon-holes. Not everyone in this block takes as much care as I do, making sure the right letters go in the right places.’ She held up an envelope with ‘Mr Bygate’ handwritten in the centre.

‘Right, thanks.’ Emma tried not to sigh, but was weighed down by yet further proof that any interaction with her neighbour took at least five times longer than she might have predicted.

‘He was ever so helpful. I’d just got back from the market and he helped me in with my trolley. I offered him a cup of tea to say thank you but he said he was in a rush. Maybe I put him off, talking too much. That’s the thing when you live alone. If you get the chance to talk you probably do it too much …’

‘Right. I’ll make sure Colin gets it. Did he say who he was?’

‘He said he was a pupil.’

‘He should be at school then.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. I get so confused by what holidays they have, these days. Not like in my day …’

‘Wonder how he knew our address.’

‘Well, it’s an odd name. Only one in the phone book.’

‘I suppose. Thanks again.’

‘Let me know if you’re feeling up to a cup of tea later. I bought some currant buns at the market that need eating up …’

Emma had shut the door.

4
LOUISE
Saturday, 10 October 1987

The first coffee had pierced the fug of her hangover. The second had helped her assemble the jumbled pieces of the previous night. The third unbuttoned the Scouse lip that Louise O’Rourke had used sparingly since she’d come to the Island.

She had held back yesterday morning when she’d been fired from the Bretagne halfway through her first day. Initially this was because she was reeling from the shock. She had just about got used to the fact of having landed a job at one of the Island’s top hotels, the first rung on a ladder that would take her to higher levels previously denied. For a moment she had thought she was about to cause a monumental scene, but as she processed what was happening she decided on a cannier move.

Though she knew him by name and reputation, she had not met Rob de la Haye before she started working on the front desk of his hotel. She’d caught his eye as he walked up the main staircase that Friday morning, but she had recognised him as Doug, the yacht salesman, ‘in the Island for one night only’, who had bedded her at the end of a day’s carousing at the Bouley Bay Hill Climb in July, an annual event in which bikes and cars took turns to roar up the tree-fringed bends from the harbour to the top of the bluffs.

She hadn’t been sure it was the same man so once she’d finished dealing with a guest she had checked the register for anyone staying named Doug or Douglas. There was none. Later that morning the inscrutable Christophe had taken her into his manager’s office and told her that, due to circumstances beyond his control, he would have to ask her to leave. He offered her three months’ wages, a glowing reference and a hint to refrain from pursuing the matter, which she declined to take.

‘Shame. I never even got to meet Mr de la Haye. Or his wife.’ She still wasn’t sure whether Rob was the man she had slept with.

‘I could make it six months’ wages, if your need to meet Mr de la Haye or his wife were to disperse.’ That was all the confirmation she needed.

She’d taken the money, met some friends at lunchtime, told them she’d jacked in her job after a modest win on the local lottery that would see her right for a while, and drunk the day away. Her friend Danny had joined her for last orders once he’d finished his kitchen shift and they’d sat on the walkway that led out to the Victorian tidal bathing pool at Havre des Pas. It was opposite the café outside which she now sat, insulated from the fresh October air by her body-warmer, and a stagger away from the bedsit where she’d been woken by sunlight streaming through the dip in the sheet that hung as a makeshift curtain. It hadn’t helped her mood to find Danny on the floor; that meant they’d started off sharing the bed platonically, then he’d either mentioned the L-word or had started grinding against her with an erection while they were spooning. Either way, she’d literally kicked him out of bed. He had a characteristic that marked him out from other men she had known, which drew her to him as a friend but repelled her as a lover: dependability. She’d enjoyed sleeping with him initially, but she was not conditioned to be attracted to men who posed no challenge, so had made it clear some months ago that they were to proceed as friends. He’d protested but they had stuck to it without any tension, except on those odd occasions when Louise had been drunk on the wrong side of the Island at midnight without a taxi fare and they’d ended up sharing a bed. Her girlfriends had taken to referring to him as ‘Danny Doormat’, which she resented. If he chose to put her on a pedestal and make an unasked-for pledge of romantic servitude, that was his look-out. She’d made clear to him where they stood.

The café was starting to fill for lunch. A family of four stood on the pavement, the parents eyeing the menu with distaste.

‘It’s a rip-off place for visitors. I mean, look at the people,’ muttered the father, in peach-coloured linen trousers and boat shoes. Louise looked around at the out-of-season tourists. They were her kind of people: Mancs, Scousers, Scots, working-class families in search of a bit of sun in a place where you could order a decent cup of tea in your own language.

‘Oh, please, I’m starving,’ moaned the elder son, lanky for his age.

‘You said it was our choice, Dad, and this looks fine,’ put in the daughter.

‘There’s no room anyway,’ said the mum, whose taut features were mostly hidden behind a pair of outsize sunglasses.

‘I’m going if you’re looking for a table,’ piped up Louise, broadening her accent to intensify the awkwardness.

‘Oh, no, we’re fine, actually,’ replied the dad. ‘We’re running late for a thing anyway …’

‘They serve really quick,’ said Louise, getting up. ‘Hey, Mick, I’m leaving two quid for the coffees. This lovely family needs to eat and go!’ A waiter in his fifties with smeared tattoos on his forearms and a beer belly like a balloon came straight over with menus and ushered the family, who were divided between relief and annoyance, to their seats.

‘I recommend the chip butty,’ Louise added perkily, as she passed the mum, who looked the type to wonder why ten minutes a week in front of the calisthenics video didn’t shift the pounds accrued at aimless social teas.

She crossed the road and stood at the railing, looking down at the beach. The dark blue water was smooth and gelatinous. She inhaled deeply. She loved the saline scent that permeated the perimeter of the Island. Very different from the stench of the diesel-skimmed brown water that lay in the port of her home city. The sound of the wash was calm and hypnotic. It wasn’t the kind of tide that felt like it was trying to take the Island, unlike the late-autumn swells that beat over the edge of the sea walls. It was nuzzling the sand about twenty feet down from where the high tide had left a rim of seaweed. She looked at her watch. Midday. Twelve hours earlier she and Danny had bought a bottle of whisky from behind the bar and sat on the walkway staring down at the reflections of the coloured bulbs strung above that glinted in the roll of the black water. She had found herself admitting to him that she had been sacked. She regretted telling him the specifics: mention of her sleeping with another man reinforced the boundaries of their relationship, but he spiralled into a monosyllabic gloom of hurt. She remembered ignoring this and declaring that Rob de la Haye would regret the fucking day he’d crossed her.

A toddler punctured her reverie by bursting into tears as a seagull attempted to mug him for his doughnut. She remembered crying last night. Fuck. Danny was so loyal to her, carrying a torch that might have been mistaken for a lighthouse, that she tended to steel herself against the revelation of any vulnerability, but last night she had broken down, and he had put his arm round her. A pass dressed up as gallantry. He had made her a promise. She had talked about packing up and going home. The best a Mainlander like her could hope for was to serve at top table: she was never going to get a seat at it.

‘Get your own place then, like you wanted,’ Danny had slurred. When they first met, at the St Aubin hotel where she’d started as a cleaner, she’d talked of her grand plan to buy a little hotel or B-and-B and build up a business. Her fellow expats were happy to use the Island as a source of casual labour and casual sex, but not her. She didn’t like the way its people looked down their noses at her. Forty-three years ago and seventy-one miles away her granddad had run up Normandy’s Gold Beach into the jaws of death while these petty Islanders were waiting out the war with nothing more to complain about than a shortage of sugar.

‘I’m not allowed to fucking buy here, Danny,’ she’d spat back. Her grand plan had been shattered: without local housing qualifications she wasn’t eligible to buy any property, commercial or private, until she had rented for twenty years. ‘I can’t wait till I’m forty-two.’

‘Use my quallies then.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘We’ll do it together. You find the money, I’ll buy it for you.’

‘Buy what, though?’

‘The Crow’s Nest is for sale.’

‘How much?’

‘Sixty.’

‘So I’d need a six-grand deposit. Plus another four or so for the refurb. That place hasn’t been touched since the seventies. Anyway, that would make you my boss. I don’t think either of us could handle that.’

‘We’d be partners. Mine on paper only. I run the restaurant, you do the rest. And we split any sale fifty-fifty.’

‘Oh, Christ, Danny. This is some weird future fantasy you’ve worked out. How many times? I don’t need you to save me.’

‘I’m looking at it as a business proposition. You’re bright, Lou, brighter than me. And tougher. I don’t want to spend my life chopping carrots and reheating shepherd’s pies so some hotelier can own three cars and a pool, but that’s all I’ve got ahead of me. You can pull me out too.’

‘Pull you out of what? You’re Jersey born and bred. You’re fine.’

‘We’re not all fucking millionaires and tax exiles. Some of us work bloody hard, same as your lot.’

‘Do not compare yourself to my lot. My lot have been shat on. How many of your school-friends have been stabbed or banged up?’

She started to feel hungry so opened her purse to check how much cash she had left. She found two pounds and a scrap of paper scrawled with Le Petit Palais, La Rue de Grassière, Trinity. Rob’s home address. She had surreptitiously obtained it from the office before she left the Bretagne. She hadn’t known why. A vicious letter to his duped wife? An anonymous threat? A dog turd in a box? She looked back at the café where the parents of the local family were wolfing their food, the wife clutching her handbag on her lap rather than risk putting it on the floor against her chair. What did she expect would happen? That it would be hooked and tossed into the throng of the great unwashed who would close ranks like a League of Thieves from a nineteenth-century romance? This Island had branded her since she had first touched down, a two-star accent in a five-star town: Scousers were thieves, untrustworthy. Very well, if that’s what the Island wanted, maybe that’s what the Island should get.

She strode back to her bedsit and used the communal phone in the hall to dial a cab, then went back to her room and took a tenner from Danny’s wallet, leaving him an IOU and a promise to be in touch in the week.

On the way into the belly of the Island, sunbeams darted through the spindly branches of the wind-stripped trees, adding to her headache. She shifted to the other side of the car and wound down the window to let the cool breeze enliven and narrow her sense of purpose. This had the bonus of drowning out the insinuations of the prying local driver.

‘Friend’s house?’

‘Yeah, going for lunch.’

‘Nice houses round there.’

She wanted to say, ‘Keep the car running while I rob them,’ but settled for ‘Hm.’

The houses on the hawthorn-edged lane began to thin out and swell. As, she imagined, did the hair and girth of the male owners, fattened by the confluence of middle age and wealth. The waists of their wives would slim with the need to retain the attention and resources of the tailored sloths.

‘Just pull up here,’ she said. She paid and got out in the road.

The white house looked big but, then, anywhere looked big compared to the council flat in which she’d grown up. It had had two windows: the front and the back. This house had twelve on the front, all with wooden shutters painted gold to match the fake Victorian gas lamps that lined the snaking drive at intervals too close for the desired effect to work.

A metallic green Renault 5 approached, its indicator flashing to turn in, so she continued walking towards the next house to muster her courage. After it had pulled into Rob’s drive, she snuck back to see who it was. She knew who it wasn’t: there was no way that the man she had fucked would drive a car like that.

She peeked round the trunk of a beech tree that stood at the edge of the front garden and saw a rowing couple get out of the now parked car. The woman was attractive, in spite of her frown, which looked to Louise as though it had become the default setting for her face. Their raised voices drifted over.

‘I can’t believe you only mention this now. Where’s the letter?’

‘Back at the flat.’

‘And he said he was a pupil? I’ve got to go back now.’

‘You can read it later. This is embarrassing.’

‘No – I’ve got to go now. I’m sorry … I’ll come straight back – we’re just down the road.’

‘Fucking hell, Colin, why does everyone have to come before me? Fine, piss off. And don’t bother coming back. I’ll get a taxi.’

‘I’ll be back …’

As he jumped back into the car and began to reverse clumsily at speed, Louise ran forward to hide behind one of the large bushes that pocked the garden. He headed out of the drive and back the way he had come, while she spied on the woman she supposed was Colin’s girlfriend or wife. She watched her collect herself, then ring the bell. The door was opened by a blonde woman in a Breton top and white jeans with a gold chain-link belt. She was pretty, but the kind of pretty you could buy. Rob hovered in the background. Louise bristled at the sound of indiscriminate shrieking. She knew their sort: they were finicky orderers and bad tippers. As the door with its large fish knocker shut behind them, she thought of how people like that didn’t know they were fucking born. She’d love to choke the forced shriek in that stupid bitch’s throat and give her a real howl of pain.

She collected herself. The wife wasn’t the enemy. Rob was. She pitied the poor cow. She looked at the cars parked in front of the house and in the open garage. A Porsche, a small jeep, some kind of classic car, an old soft-top VW Beetle and a sporty yellow cabriolet. More cars than her dad had owned in his life.

The phone was ringing as she eventually approached the house. She heard Rob yell that he’d get it and caught a glimpse of him through the glass panels at either side of the door that looked on to the front hall, which was bigger than her living quarters. It sported an oak sideboard the size of her bed, on which sat a large pink conch shell, a piece of white coral and a golden bowl overflowing with sunhats and sunglasses. He had picked up the phone and had his back to her.

‘Hi … Oh, hi, you going to be joining us eventually? … Sure, I’ll get her.’ He held the receiver away. ‘Emma, Colin for you!’

As Emma approached, her view of Louise blocked by Rob, he pointed at the phone with his spare hand, motioned ‘ssh’, then opened his arm for an embrace. Emma allowed him to kiss her, while Colin waited at the other end of the line. Louise stood still and smiled: this prick couldn’t be asking for it more if he tried. As Rob moved aside and Emma took the call, she spotted Louise and pointed, then turned her back, terror in her eyes.

‘Hi … I put it on the coffee table … Well, you must have moved it without knowing what it was …’

Rob caught sight of Louise and his jaw dropped, as if he’d just been told he had thirty seconds to live. She moved in front of the door, which he opened, then stepped through, shutting it behind him.

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