Will Smith - Mainlander

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Copyright © Will Smith 2015

Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images

Will Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

‘The Boy in the Bubble’ Words by Paul Simon, Music by Paul Simon and Forere Motloheloa, Copyright © 1986 Paul Simon (BMI), International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission. ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ Words and Music by Paul Simon, Beginning by Paul Simon and Joseph Shabalala, Copyright © 1986 Paul Simon (BMI), International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission. ‘Fame’ Words and Music by Michael Gore and Dean Pritchard © 1980, Reproduced by permission of EMI Affiliated Catalog Inc., London W1F 9LD. ‘Jigsaw’ Words and Music by Fish, Mark Kelly, Pete Trewavas and Steve Rothery © 1984, Reproduced by permission of Charisma Music Publishing Co Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007594269

Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780007594283

Version: 2015-12-23

For Peter.

A rock on the Rock.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Colin

Chapter 2: Colin

Chapter 3: Emma

Chapter 4: Louise

Chapter 5: Rob

Chapter 6: Colin

Chapter 7: Rob

Chapter 8: Colin

Chapter 9: Rob

Chapter 10: Colin

Chapter 11: Barney

Chapter 12: Colin

Chapter 13: Louise

Chapter 14: Christophe

Chapter 15: Emma

Chapter 16: Louise

Chapter 17: Colin

Chapter 18: Louise

Chapter 19: Emma

Chapter 20: Louise

Chapter 21: Colin

Chapter 22: Barney

Chapter 23: Colin

Chapter 24: Rob

Chapter 25: Colin

Chapter 26: Rob

Chapter 27: Colin

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Hundreds of feet below where Colin Bygate sat on a moss-covered rock, the Atlantic was eating away the coast. Huge surges rolled in to fling up their spray as they hit the cliff-base, then sprang back to collide with the next incoming wave and send a line of water skyward. The sinking sun gave the brilliant white of the foam an apricot tinge, and turned the vapour trails above to threads of fire. It was one of those sharp and clear dusks peculiar to Jersey, with a brightness that belied the approaching dark. A sky that might have hung over Eden.

Since he couldn’t climb down to the waves, he dreamt of them rising up to wash the Island clean of all the impurities that so irritated him.

A vast storm, a second Flood: that was what was needed. One that would carry off the bankers, the lawyers, the accountants and all the others who looked down on him from their vertiginous social position, with their sports cars, their boats and their skiing holidays. It was his wife’s sensitivity to his low altitude, and his resentment that he should be made to care about it, that had brought him here tonight.

‘Rob and Sally have invited us to Chamonix for New Year.’

‘I don’t know if we can afford it. We’re stretched enough with the mortgage, and we’ve got to get your car through a service in February.’

‘Sally says they’ll pay.’

‘No.’

‘Why not? She’s my best friend and she can afford it.’

‘You mean he can afford it.’

‘Don’t be jealous.’

‘I’m not jealous.’

‘You’ve such a problem with money, you’re really not suited to this Island at all.’

‘That’s not true. You can’t just throw that in. Hey, come on, look at me.’

‘I’d rather not. I don’t like your face when you know you’re wrong.’

Colin wasn’t being disingenuous: he didn’t have a problem with money. He just preferred it to be earned rather than inherited, but he could live with this inequality on the grounds that people inherit plenty of things that give them an unfair advantage in life – a disarming smile, a propensity for kicking a ball, or precocious numeracy. His problem with Rob de la Haye was Rob de la Haye. He didn’t like the way the man laughed at his car.

‘Renault 5! Don’t drive it too long, you’ll grow tits!’ Rob had a Porsche 911, which, on an island that had a maximum speed limit of 40 m.p.h., on only two sections of road, Colin saw as a needless display of conspicuous wealth.

Neither did he like his attitude to the local itinerant Portuguese workers.

‘Did you hear about the Porko who took a bath?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did I!’

Or his relentless stereotyping of the Scots, Irish, Mancunians and Liverpudlians who made up the remaining seasonal workforce of receptionists, waitresses and car-hire representatives.

‘Check your change – Scouser on the till.’

In fact, he didn’t like much about his world view.

‘Take away unemployment benefit, they’ll soon find jobs.’

It irked him that Rob’s horizons were witlessly free of storm clouds. ‘Keep going like this and in five years I can buy a parish,’ he joked, after another run of luck on the markets, at which Colin smiled while inwardly praying for a crash.

He shifted on his granite perch, unsettled by the idea that maybe his wife was right, that underneath the layers of antipathy he was just jealous. His own father had died when Colin was seven. Rob’s had kept on living and acquiring hotels, one of which, the Bretagne, he’d given to his son on his twenty-first birthday.