LITMIR.BIZ

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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 to school’ that would itself be matched with ‘It’s really no bother’ until Colin finally dismissed Mrs Le Boutillier’s feigned opposition, picked up her shopping trolley and 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

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