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
