offered his arm as they descended the steps. This morning he lacked the patience for their ritual so he simply picked up the shopping trolley and guided her to the top of the steps, readying himself to supply the usual murmurs of assent to their predictable conversation.
Step 1 – Got to get to the market for nine. Otherwise the best fruit and veg is always gone.
Step 2 – I don’t like my spuds too spongy. And cabbage wilts so quick once it’s picked.
Step 3 – Of course, in the war we hardly had any good vegetables at all. They all went to the Jerries. Cruel people the Jerries …
Step 4 – You probably don’t remember the war, do you? How old are you now?
Step 5 – Twenty-seven? Well I never. You look to me like you haven’t started shaving yet.
Step 6 – My boy Bradley’s your age, but I hardly see him. He’s at St Ouen’s on the other side of the Island.
This morning, however, Mrs Le Boutillier remained curiously tight-lipped, and Colin was perplexed. Then he remembered. ‘I’m so sorry. I said I was going to come and change your light-bulb for you last night.’
‘Oh, no bother, no bother.’ It clearly was a bother, though.
‘I’ll come and do it this evening, I promise. Can’t have you cooking in the dark, what with the nights drawing in.’
‘Well, that would be lovely. I’ll get some Jersey Wonders from the market for you.’
‘Oh, no, I’m happy to do it.’ It wasn’t so much the thought of what a plateful of the local twisted doughnut would do to his waistline but what the time spent chatting might do to his marriage. Given the current froideur it might not make much difference, but he didn’t want to be accused of trying to avoid his wife. Emma had never been well disposed to their neighbour: her aunt had insinuated she was the same Edna Le Boutillier who had been labelled a ‘Jerry Bag’ after the war for consorting with the enemy. That aside, she had gradually taken exception to Mrs Le Boutillier’s semi-regular incursions into their flat and Colin’s into hers. At first it had been something of a joke, Emma referring to Mrs Le Boutillier as ‘the other woman’, but it was now another reason why Emma wanted to move. ‘You’re too nice to tell her to get lost,’ she had said, ‘so next place we move to we keep the interaction with our neighbours cursory. Nods over the fence, maybe a Christmas card, that’s it.’ She was right: Colin was too nice to ignore the woman, and he was also plagued with guilt.
As the only child of a widow he had been the centre of his mother’s life. She hadn’t so much as lunched with another man, let alone remarried, maintaining that no one could measure up to his father. Besides, her unshakeable Christian belief meant that she was sure they would meet again, and the presence of a second husband in the afterlife would only complicate it. He had been taken aback by her mixed reaction to his acceptance of an offer from Cambridge. There was pride, obviously, but it was tempered with regret that he would turn down the place at his hometown university of Bristol. He was confused as to why she had reacted like that so late in the process – he would always have taken the Cambridge place if he was lucky enough to secure it. It did little for their relationship when she confessed that she hadn’t expected him to get in. He had found himself going back every other weekend for the first year. It was that, or she would come up to stay in Cambridge. Her presence and his absence limited the social impact he had made in that first year, which was already shaky, given how culturally and financially eclipsed he had felt by the people around him. He had stretched his visits to monthly by the end of university but, as a man who shrank from emotional confrontation, he couldn’t bear to tell her she was suffocating him. A small but significant part of Jersey’s appeal had been that it put 157 miles between him and his mother, including 105 miles of sea.
He couldn’t help feeling that to punish him for his callous ingratitude towards the mother who had raised him alone, God had installed a replica of her in the adjoining flat, a woman who felt neglected by her own son and had latched on to him. Mrs Le Boutillier would sit at their kitchen table drinking tea and eating biscuits, and Colin would zone out, then cycle through annoyance, boredom and guilt. Mrs Le Boutillier always seemed to say, ‘Dearie me, I must be boring you so,’ at the very moment she was boring him most, which made him cover it with denial and the immediate refilling of the kettle, as Emma sucked in her cheeks in fury at what she saw as his pathetic need to please.
He held open the door to the front of the block and thought of how to approach Duncan, while Mrs Le Boutillier cooed at a ginger cat on the wall. ‘There’s my lovely boy! How are you, Puss-puss?’
How on earth could he ask subtly if the boy had intended to jump off the cliff? That was the sort of question you either asked directly or not at all. And if you were going to ask it, you had to ask it at the relevant moment. To ask afterwards implied you didn’t really care, but simply wanted your curiosity satisfied. Colin needed to know that, if the boy had been building up to a jump, it had been a flash of madness from which he had moved on.
He manoeuvred the shopping trolley on to the pavement, deciding he would assess the boy’s mood in class.
‘He’s looking thin, don’t you think? Probably hasn’t had breakfast!’ The cat, Marmalade, belonged to the Ozoufs, a middle-aged couple in the ground-floor flat. Mrs Le Boutillier was often coaxing it upstairs for a snooze on her lap in exchange for some raw chicken, a source of tension with the cat’s owners. Colin tried to stay out of it. ‘You get on, my dear, I’ll stay and have a chat with my second favourite boy in the block. Poor thing, they don’t feed him enough.’ Mrs Le Boutillier started tickling the cat under the chin as he stretched his paws in front of her. ‘I’ll bring back some bacon, my furry love.’
‘Have a good day, and I’ll pop in later to fix the light, promise.’ Colin took the get-out. On the occasions he’d walked with her to the market, what would have been ten minutes on his own or twenty with Emma had taken forty. Mrs Le Boutillier, who would need to pause to get her breath, or put on or take off her hat or her coat, and stow or retrieve it from her shopping trolley, would treat the walk as a guided tour, interspersing it with lengthy anecdotes of frankly unstartling local history. All was delivered in the peculiar flat vowels and nasal drone of the indigenous Jersey-French patois that to Colin rendered the accent bizarrely akin to South African.
‘This Le Brun’s here used to be a haberdasher’s back in the fifties … The Midland Bank where your wife works used to be the post office … Used to see some of the postmen coming back from their rounds in the east of the Island, with fresh lobsters from the pots. This was before we started getting overrun with grockles, what we call tourists … Of course, back then there was a train that ran from Gorey to Corbière …’
He normally walked to school from the flat, along the main shopping precinct of King Street, with its mix of local outlets, the odd mainland chain, such as Woolworths, and tourist tat shops peddling ‘Damn Seagulls’ baseball caps streaked with fake guano. It was empty enough at that time of the morning for him to hit a long, pounding stride, unlike during the tourist season when aimless milling led to frustrating stop-start manoeuvres. He liked to walk with purpose; Emma liked to mooch. From King Street he would make his way to the bottom gates of the school grounds and up alongside Conqueror’s Lawn on a wooded path leading to the top of Mont Millais, where Normandy College presided over St Helier, like the castle of a local baron. He enjoyed the walk – it cleared his mind for the day. Today, though, he was now running slightly late, thanks to Mrs Le Boutillier, and this, coupled with the hollow dread of needing to know that Duncan was okay, meant that he drove.
As he sat in the glacially paced traffic he remembered the other reason he usually chose to walk:
