LITMIR.BIZ

       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. 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

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