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
