The Tryst (16 page)

He shot a glance in Steve’s direction.

‘I don’t suppose you know what a tryst is? It’s a meeting, an arrangement between two sweethearts. What they call a “rendezvous” nowadays, as though we hadn’t a good enough word in plain English. This house had been standing empty for years, and courting couples used it when they wanted to be alone, which was no easy thing in those days. It was a fine house, too, built of the local stone, three storeys high, with big gables. The garden was a waste of weeds and stinging-nettles, with a yew tree grown so wild it almost hid the house, though with the wood so close the place was always dark enough. I was scared to go there, to tell you the truth, even with the other lads. Partly it was the folk who lived in the woods. They were farm labourers who had been turned out of their homes when the bad times came and had been living up there like gypsies ever since. But it was also the place itself. It used to give me the shivers, I don’t know why. At any rate, the forest had all been chopped down now. They’d felled the tall beeches and were grubbing out the undergrowth close to the house when they came upon a shallow grave in which the body of Maurice Jeffries lay buried, his skull crushed in and every bone in his body broken.’

Ernest Matthews looked at Steve and frowned.

‘But you’re not listening,’ he complained.

The boy started.

‘It’s my own fault,’ the old man mused sadly, tapping the ashes of his pipe. ‘I’ve gone on too long. Look, it’s gone six. You’d better be off.’

It was spoken curtly, almost an order. Steve rose unwillingly. It was a joke, the old man thinking that he was in a hurry to leave. On the contrary, what was distracting him was precisely the fear of what awaited him on his return to Trencham Avenue. He knew that Dave would make him pay for having witnessed his humiliation by the security guard, while Jimmy would want to know who the shopping was for and why he hadn’t been told about it earlier. He was going to get it, that much was certain. Since he had decided not to tell them any more about the old man, he was going to have to think up a story. He hoped that Dave wouldn’t hurt him too badly, that one of the others would pull him off before he lost control.

9

When Aileen was called out of the ward meeting on Friday morning and told that the police wanted to speak to her on the phone, she knew instinctively that Douglas’s plane had crashed. She had spent much of the night lying sleepless at her husband’s side, not daring to move lest she wake him, thinking about what had happened that evening, trying to come to terms with it, to analyse what had been so disturbing about the event. In fact they had got off relatively lightly this time. The last time that their house had been broken into the living room had been reduced to an utter shambles: pictures smashed, cupboards staved in, ornaments mutilated, photographs torn up, books ripped apart, sofa and chairs slashed, the curtains cut to ribbons, the carpet burned and the wallpaper smeared with excrement. ‘Amateurs, probably kids from the council estate,’ the police had said off-handedly. ‘Broke in through the garden windows then couldn’t get past the locked door to the hallway. Never lock internal doors, it just winds them up.’ That experience had changed Aileen’s view of the place where she lived. The house felt scarred and vulnerable, the street at risk, its genteel façade a shabby deceit. The whole area had revealed itself to be psychotic.

But at least she hadn’t had to face the intruders herself, although every time she passed the youngsters playing in the car-park of the council flats nearby, she wondered if some of them had done it. The break-in itself had to some extent remained distanced by its anonymity, like one of those things you read about in the papers or hear discussed at a dinner party. The personal touch had been lacking. But not this time, she thought, recalling that brief unimaginably intense scuffle on the landing, a physical encounter as shockingly intimate as her early sexual gropings, thrilling and horrid. Of course she hadn’t dreamt of discussing this with Douglas, any more than she had mentioned the thing that had started it all, although the memory of it still made her shiver all over: the baby’s cry shining eerily out of the silence, drawing her helplessly towards it. When Douglas had arrived with the police – in a very bad temper because not only had his last-minute arrangements been disturbed but in the circumstances he couldn’t very well blame Aileen for it – they had searched the house. No damage had been done and relatively little was missing. The burglar, who had also broken in through the garden window, leaving the front door open for a speedy departure, had clearly been a professional. He had probably spent several weeks watching the street, and having established that the Macklins went to the supermarket on Thursdays he thought he had a clear hour or so to go through the house thoroughly. Aileen’s prompt return had disturbed him while he was investigating her jewellery. On the dressing-table stood a large doll dating from her childhood and now retained as an ornament. When it was moved, a mechanism inside emitted a crying sound.

Oddly enough, the knowledge that this was all it had been did nothing to calm Aileen’s agitation. Too much primal goo had been dredged up from the depths. The doll’s cry was not even particularly realistic, and although its connection with her childhood no doubt lent the sound emotional force, Aileen was only too aware that the experience had drawn most of its power from the events that had followed Raymond’s death. Lying tormentedly still in the constrained intimacy of the conjugal bed, she thought about the flashback experiences which some people reportedly had years after taking LSD, when for no apparent reason they would suddenly find themselves high again, the ground blurring away beneath them and the people around looking strange. It was almost as if something of the sort was happening to her. I’m no longer in full control of my life, she thought. A pattern has been indelibly engraved on my psyche and I perceive everything that happens to me in terms of that pattern. Which is madness, she concluded, proving her sanity with a joke.

The morning that followed had not helped to restore her equilibrium. As always when he went away, Douglas was in a foul mood, tense and snappy. Knowing that his wife was nervous about him flying, he taunted her with statistics which suggested that boarding an airplane was less dangerous than walking upstairs in one’s own house. Aileen said nothing. She drove Douglas and his fibre-glass suitcase – the manufacturer’s claims suggested that
it
would survive whatever happened – to Hammersmith tube and waved goodbye with a hollowly casual, ‘See you on Monday, then.’ But when one of the secretaries interrupted the discussion on the therapeutic merits of projective techniques to tell Aileen that she was wanted on the phone by the police, she felt her insides give a sickening lurch, as when you drive too fast over a hump-backed bridge, and she knew at once what had happened. It was then almost one o’clock. Douglas’s flight had left at eleven. It would have taken time to get hold of the passenger list, and they would first have called the Institute and then the Macklins’ home number. Aileen had a sudden vision of the slim white phone, like overlapping lovers’ hands, chirping plaintively to an empty house. As she followed the secretary along the corridor, the linoleum squelching like mud under her soles, her only real surprise was that the police hadn’t come to break the news in person. The last time, they’d sent a pair of rookies, callow insolent punks whose veneer of sorrowful concern swiftly peeled off as they looked round, taking in the colourful, indiscriminate, organic mess, the smell of dope and incense, the Dayglo posters and anti-war slogans, the books on Buddhism and vegetarian cookery, the endlessly repeated riff booming from the stereo where a record no one was listening to had got stuck in a groove. But, of course, Raymond’s had been just a single death. There would have been three or four hundred people on the flight to Boston: they couldn’t possibly inform all the next-of-kin personally.

‘Aileen Macklin speaking.’

‘Hello and good morning, Hammersmith CID, Detective Inspector Croom. I am calling pursuant to the matter on which you were in communication relative to one Steven Bradley.’

For a moment Aileen felt too surprised to speak.

‘Have you … have you found out something, then?’ she finally managed.

‘We certainly have, madam. In fact it would not be too much to infer that we’ve found out
everything
. Who he is, where he comes from, the works. Gary Dunn didn’t mean nothing to us, but Steven Bradley, well, that was different. Not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve been able to wrap up an assortment of unsolved cases, comprising of two murders, two GBH, and a string of assorted robbery with threat, uttering menaces, aiding and abetting, not to mention the odd taking and driving away and anything else they may ask to be taken into consideration.’

Aileen gripped the receiver tightly, forcing herself to concentrate.

‘What has this got to do with Gary – I mean Steven?’

‘Well, that’s a bit complicated, to say the least. I can’t enter into it on the phone, anyway. If you could pop down the station for half an hour some time, say late morning or early afternoon, I or one of my colleagues will be more than happy to map out the situation with regard to this one.’

Aileen agreed hastily and hung up. So Douglas wasn’t dead. How odd. Not that the call hadn’t been about that, of course. It was her conviction that it
had
that was odd, or worse than odd. It was bad enough to wish your husband dead. When you started believing that your wishes had come true, you were in real trouble. Was she really losing that instinctive sense of balance which all sane people have without knowing it, but which is so hard to define and even harder to get or give back once it has gone? If so, it was all Douglas’s fault. he had been trying for years to drive her mad, and now – racked by sleeplessness, worry and doubt – Aileen was prepared to admit for the first time that he might be succeeding. She had been proud of her ability to hold her own in their daily battles, too proud to realize that she should never have agreed to take part in the first place. For the rules of that domestic warfare had been drawn up by her husband, and although Aileen had proved herself remarkably adept, she still had to force herself to do what came naturally to him. His defeats hardly troubled him, but she suffered even when she won. The continual separation of her thoughts into those that were admissible and inadmissible had become second nature to her, and the price she had paid was an equivalent separation within herself, a loss of wholeness. The essential question for her was no longer ‘Is this really what I think or feel?’ but ‘If I admit to thinking or feeling this, will he be able to use it against me?’ Her true motives and reactions had come to represent a danger to her, potential weaknesses that her husband would attack if he suspected their existence. After so many years of painfully carrying on an adulterous relationship with reality, it looked as though she had finally decided to break off the affair. It just didn’t seem worth the bother any more.

When Aileen got back to her office at lunch-time, the communicating door was open. Through it she could see Jenny Wilcox, dressed in a blue leotard. The occupational therapist’s heels were leaning on the top of a filing cabinet. Her head rested on the floor, cushioned by the E–K telephone directory.

‘Meeting of the action group this afternoon,’ she remarked in a voice constrained by the weight of her body. ‘Hope you can make it. It’s a bums-on-seats situation.’

Aileen dumped her files and folders on the desk and grunted ambiguously. After a while Jenny lowered her legs to the ground and sat up.

‘What’s wrong?’ she exclaimed. ‘You look like death warmed up.’

‘I think I’m going mad.’

Jenny grasped her right foot and leant forward, stretching her back.

‘Join the club. Any special reason, apart from living in Thatcher’s Britain?’

Aileen unwrapped her lunch, a cheese roll and a plastic pot filled with the raw vegetable that Douglas, laboriously whimsical, referred to as ‘raped carrot’.

‘Someone broke into the house last night. I’d just popped down to get something from the shops. When I got back he was still there. It gave me quite a turn.’

Jenny switched her attentions to the other foot.

‘Did you nail him?’

‘Not really. He rather sort of nailed me, actually.’

‘You should have done that self-defence course I told you about. I mean, you were
lucky
. I wish I’d had a chance to confront the fuckers who trashed my Fiat. Talk about a short sharp shock!’

Aileen sat looking without enthusiasm at her food. What she really wanted was a cigarette. Jenny’s comments had once again brought her up short against the disconcerting fact that political opinions apart, the younger woman’s character was that of her class, the service aristocracy, which once provided the nation with its officers, diplomats and explorers. Jenny had no patience with people who couldn’t cope. In that, despite the yawning gulf in ideology, she resembled the Cheltenham schoolmates whom Aileen bumped into occasionally and who always managed to leave her feeling spineless and incompetent. No doubt this bracing manner had a lot to commend it, but Aileen didn’t feel like being braced just then. Ironically, although she had a perfect excuse for getting away, she couldn’t use it with Jenny for fear of being criticized for collaborating with the police. As so often, a plausible fiction was the answer.