Mainlander - Will Smith

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registration Colin and his form made their way up to the main school assembly, which, as predicted, was a monotonous affair. The headmaster, Gerald Le Brocq, gave two addresses each term, the rest being delivered by other members of staff, local vicars and pupils. He tended to draw from one of three rotating talks, and today’s was a humdinger about how Jesus was like an invisible parachute we were all unwittingly wearing. Colin was getting close to memorising the addresses verbatim, the other two being a self-penned parable about a bear sharing his food with a field mouse, and an anecdote about the time Le Brocq had sat next to Jeffrey Archer on a train, which he tried to stretch into a lesson about fate: ‘If my wife had not burnt my toast that morning, I would not have missed my usual train and I would not have had the pleasure of sitting next to the Dickens of our time and drinking deep of his wit and wisdom.’ Colin occasionally performed versions of these for Debbie’s amusement. He’d ridiculed the Jeffrey Archer story to Emma, but she had missed the point and wanted to know the details of the encounter, whether or not Archer and Le Brocq were still in touch, and whether he could get a signed copy of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less for her father, who was a huge fan and believed the author would make a great future prime minister, having come through the recent libel trial with his integrity restored.

      Depressingly he noticed that Debbie was sitting next to Touzel at the other end of the back row.

      He scanned the hall for Duncan. It was impossible to pick him out in the massed rows. Although he had distinctive ash-blond hair, Colin reasoned that, since he was of average height, he could be lurking in front of a freakishly outsized pupil, of which there were a few. The boys rose for the headmaster’s exit, followed by the staff. Colin hung back to look over the room and stifle a mild but insistent sense of alarm that would not settle until he saw Duncan’s face.

      His failure to spot the boy meant he was distracted at the start of his first lesson. He began by playing a Chuck Berry song, which loosened the atmosphere and gave him time to gather himself. His mood was lifted by the excitement and interest he generated in explaining the connection between the song and the text – Berry sang of the teenage experience, and The Catcher in the Rye was the first novel to give that demographic a literary voice.

      He was walking to his A-level class in the sixth-form block when he saw Debbie ahead. He quickened his pace but then slowed. What was there to say? As she headed to the staffroom on the right, he peeled off to the large granite steps that led up to the back of the High Hall. As he walked through it, past walls filled with portraits of previous headmasters, plaques of sporting victory, and lists of pupils fallen in the Boer, First and Second World Wars, his residual unease was supplanted by dread that Duncan would not be in his class. And then what would he do? Wait till Monday and hope the boy returned with a sick note explaining his Friday absence? Or find an excuse to break protocol and get the school to contact the parents now? Colin was hit with waves of anxiety: what if the boy had found another way of ending his life? What if his body was waiting to be found by a dog walker, washed up on one of the eastern beaches, or had been claimed by the tides, never to be found, or was hanging from a beam in the garage into which Colin had seen him disappear last night? The potential enormity struck him like one of the Atlantic rollers he had watched pound against the foundations of the Island. Merely delivering the boy to his front door now struck him as cowardly and futile. Blampied would help to damn Colin, placing him at the scene of the first attempt and forgetting his own dismissive lack of care. Colin would appear a weak, guilty man, who, by his inaction, had as good as pushed the boy off the cliff.

      Twelve pupils showed up to his next class. Duncan was not among them.

       3

       EMMA

       Friday, 9 October 1987

      Emma’s eyes were shut, as much from bliss as from the bright October morning light that flooded into the fifth-floor room of the Hotel Bretagne, turning the white sheets gold and topping up her subsiding glow. As well as her physical nirvana, the smile that uncharacteristically took over the whole of her face had its wellspring in the exchange she’d had with Rob before he had stepped into the shower.

      ‘What are you up to the weekend after this?’

      ‘Whatever you fancy. Sally’s off to look at bloody furniture on the King’s Road.’

      She had taken this as a tacit invitation to spend longer than the usual snatched hours with him, and was already weighing up plausible excuses with which to absent herself from Colin. Shopping, lunch with an unnamed relative, plain old wanting some time to herself …

      She rolled away from the window and opened her eyes to look at the bedside clock: 9:32. Rob had said he needed to start work at ten – but he was the boss: maybe he could cry off and they could spend the day together, or at least the morning. She craved another fuck. In fact, there was time for that and for him to shower again before ten. He was quick and urgent – she loved letting him do what he wanted. Colin’s attentiveness in bed, his sublimation of his needs to hers, all of which had seemed too good to be true in those first heady months, now struck her as weak and bloodless. Her former prince had a neediness, a lack of self in his centre, that he filled with duty.

      Her musing was broken by a knock. Rob was still in the bathroom, so no need to tell him to hide as was his habit when room service turned up. She always teased him about that: there was no dignity in a king hiding from his servants. She opened the door and a middle-aged Portuguese man with a thick moustache wheeled in a trolley of pastries, cereal, fruit, juice, tea and coffee.

      She picked up a croissant, switched on the radio and sat back on the bed. She turned up Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ till Rob barked, ‘No!’ from the bathroom. Laughing, she lowered the volume and fiddled with the channels till she found something more appealing, settling on what she thought was Bryan Adams, or possibly Bruce Springsteen, or that other guy with Jaguar or something as a middle name. It annoyed Colin when she got singers confused like that, the same as getting lyrics wrong. She often did it on purpose.

      She fell back to thinking of locations for their mooted weekend assignation. It would be good to get out of this room. They met here as and when they could, maybe eight times since they’d first fallen on the bed back in July. Until then she’d genuinely thought she was over Rob. Their original split had thrown her off balance and she had struggled to regain it. Eventually she’d left the Island for a TEFL course, determined to travel the world and return solely for births, marriages and deaths, only to reappear with Colin at her side and triumph in her breast. He was different from Rob. He was just as handsome, but gentler and less raucous. He was idealistic and unworldly, self-deprecating and no hostage to cool, and above all he worshipped her. By going in the other direction, she had proved she wasn’t bothered by Rob moving on to Sally. She would have a purer love, based on intimacy and friendship, not showboating and overhosting. She had pronounced to the world through her marriage that she was finally happy, stable: she had boxed up the past and placed it in deep if not permanent storage. Rob and she had reached a palatable friendship, although she had never seen him without Sally, until that lunchtime when he’d passed her as she was looking in the window of Layzell’s, a local travel agency.

      ‘I recommend Barbados.’

      ‘Oh, hi, Rob. Yeah, I’ve been trying to persuade Colin we should go away for New Year. He doesn’t like the idea of winter sun, but I go a bit stir-crazy out of season here.’

      ‘Well, if you want sun and he wants cold you could come with us. We’re thinking of renting a ski lodge in Chamonix with Tony and Becs.’

      ‘Sounds great, but might be a little out of our range.’

      ‘Well, as a further compromise, you could do worse than stay at the Bretagne. I’d do it for mates’ rates, if not gratis.’

      Emma laughed.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Rob,

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