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.