Mainlander

by Will Smith

‘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 a
nd 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. F
ive 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.