Mainlander

‘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.’