The Tryst Read online

  They did. A few weeks later Raymond went hang-gliding off the cliffs near Santa Barbara, high as a kite on amphetamines. The wind proved too fast for him and tossed his sail into an irreversible spin. At the funeral service one of his friends read a passage from Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and concluded that Ray had gone out the best way he knew how. Aileen was presented to Raymond’s father, a fundamentalist farmer from the Mid-West who had evidently written off his son as a bad job years before. His wife, it turned out, had died in childbirth a decade earlier. Grief was tossed from hand to hand like a live grenade. Aileen was left to carry it home with her, and she was cradling it to her body, up in the attic room she and Raymond had shared, when it finally went off. She opened the cupboard containing Raymond’s stash. Slowly and methodically, as though performing some exacting ritual, she snipped the sheets of acid-soaked blotting-paper into one-inch squares. Then she ate them, one by one.

  The next forty-eight hours of her life went missing as completely as a passage erased from a tape. When it resumed, she found herself lying in bed, her whole body a dull ache. It was warm and quiet and still. Figures in white coats came and went, murmuring about miracles. Aileen was beginning to think that her Sunday School teacher’s account of heaven must have been correct after all when two of Raymond’s friends appeared at her bedside. They explained that when they first saw her lying on the lawn they’d just freaked out and how at first the ambulance pigs wouldn’t take her because it didn’t look like they had the bread but fortunately Beth was holding because her connection was out of town so she hadn’t been able to score. ‘You must have been just like totally relaxed,’ the girl told her. ‘I read about a baby once, it fell like from a fourth-floor balcony into the parking lot and survived. That’s because babies are so naturally relaxed. It’s only like later on that we get screwed up and have to do yoga and stuff.’ The doctors and nurses confirmed that she was lucky to be alive. As for having escaped without fractures or internal injuries of any kind, just superficial abrasions and bruising, well, it was nothing short of a miracle. ‘It must be thirty feet from that window to the front yard,’ one of them remarked in a tone of near disgust, as though Aileen were a notorious criminal who had been acquitted on a technicality.

  A few days later she came home in a taxi to find the house fenced off behind corrugated iron sheeting marked with the name of the demolition company whose bulldozers were already at work scouring the garden. When Aileen glanced up at the attic window, still propped open on its curled stay of wrought-iron, a cry sounded quite distinctly through the rumbling turbulence of the machinery: high, piercing, long drawn out. It was the cry of a baby in distress. Only then did Aileen realize that she had not escaped without loss after all, that a transaction had taken place, that her life had been bought at the cost of another.

  The ousted hippie community had temporarily reformed in a flat a few blocks away, and it was there, over the course of the following week, that the final act of Aileen’s pregnancy took place. The physical effects were scarcely more painful or dramatic than a very heavy period, but the grief was beyond anything she had ever imagined. She wept almost continuously for days. There was nothing to say, and in any case no one she could have said it to. No one knew that she was mourning not one person, but three: Raymond, their child, and herself. For although she had survived, Aileen knew that from now on she would always be a survivor, someone who was alive nevertheless. As soon as she had recovered sufficiently, she wound up her affairs. After settling her hospital bill, she had just enough for a standby ticket to London. Her first reaction on returning was one of astonishment that the place was still there. Although she had been in California for less than a year, its apocalyptic rhetoric had affected her so deeply that she could hardly believe her eyes when she found Britain still going about its seedy unglamorous business, as unimpressed by prophecies of global doom as it had been by the auguries of a new Aquarian age. Aileen literally found herself back where she had started, with nothing to show for her year abroad but a hole in her c.v. and a circle of friends whom she had alienated by either ignoring or patronizing them while she and Raymond had been flying high together. She spent the rest of that year picking up the pieces. First and foremost she needed a job. The best chance of finding one seemed to be in clinical psychology, and with a little help from her former tutor she obtained a place in the MSc course at the Institute of Psychiatry. One of her classes involved travelling to Bloomsbury in order to gain ward experience at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square. She was aware that part of the hospital building was occupied by the Institute of Neurology, but her whole life before Raymond now seemed so unreachably distant that when a tall sandy-haired man stopped her in the corridor one day and identified himself as Douglas Macklin, she felt as though destiny must have brought them together.

  If Britain had seemed reassuringly unchanged, Douglas was the very core of that immutability. ‘So how was America?’ he inquired as casually as though he were asking her about a film she’d been to see. In another context — after fifteen years of marriage, for instance — this remark might well have struck Aileen as insufferably crass. At that moment it was just what she wanted to hear. With a shrewdness new to her, she scanned Douglas’s appearance and manner for signs of a female presence in his life. She failed to find any. He invited her up to his place for dinner later that week. Aileen didn’t stay the night, but they agreed to meet again and on that occasion she did. Douglas’s love-making, as clumsily well-intentioned as ever, sealed her sense of security. Here was no giddy spinner, no flighty drifter who dreamed of staying high for ever. Douglas Macklin was real, solid and comfortingly inadequate. She knew she could manage him. When she proposed that they get married, he frowned slightly, and then said, ‘I can’t see any reason why not.’

  A decade and a half later, Aileen could see plenty. Her husband’s work on neuroendocrinology had been rewarded with a research fellowship, but the major breakthrough which he had hoped would establish his name internationally had failed to materialize. After finishing her postgraduate course, Aileen had spent some time at Maudsley Hospital, specializing in the problems of young people. She now worked in the Adolescent Unit of a psychiatric hospital not far from the Macklins’ home in a large Edwardian house in Stamford Brook. For reasons which Aileen thought she understood too well to want to verify, the marriage had remained childless. The couple’s days were devoted to work; their nights, with rare exceptions, to sleep. As soon as she got home, Aileen went up to her study, where she read or listened to the radio or just stared out of the window until it was time to prepare the evening meal. Meanwhile, in the living room, Douglas drank several glasses of whisky cut with progressively less water and watched the news, first on ITV, then on BBC1, and finally on Channel 4. At eight o’clock husband and wife met across the dinner table and battle commenced.

  Aileen could no longer remember at what point she had perceived the basic mechanism, so startling in its simplicity: their marriage was a closed system with only a limited amount of any given emotion available. It followed that if one of them had more, the other must have less. For example, if Douglas came home from work elated by some success, Aileen immediately began to feel depressed. If, on the other hand, something had made him tense and snappy, she at once became more confident and relaxed. It worked the other way too, of course. Her good news depressed him, her failures gave him heart. Consciously or not, Douglas was aware of this too, hence the battle. Although the quantity of emotion involved in these exchanges was quite small, it was often critical, just sufficient to make or break the evening for either partner. Moreover, since appearance was all, one could easily cheat. If Douglas could convince her that he was calm and serene, Aileen began to feel tense and edgy, which in turn induced a real calmness and serenity in him. Deceit had become reality; the fake had verified itself.

  She could play the game too, but unfortunately she had made two fatal errors. One had been years before, back in
their student days at Sussex. Late one evening, in the course of a rambling account of why she was studying psychology, Aileen had mentioned that there was a strain of insanity in her family. She had done this out of vanity: in 1968 madness was still ‘interesting’. Besides, she wanted to show off her sophistication, to demonstrate her awareness of her own motives. ‘I suppose that studying the subject is a way of coming to terms with the anxiety that I might be tainted myself,’ she had told Douglas, ‘a way of defusing the whole idea of madness through a process of objectification.’ To call it madness had actually been exaggerating wildly. All Aileen knew for sure was that her grandmother had begun behaving rather oddly towards the end of her life, and that when Aileen herself had been a child, her mother claimed to have been worried that Aileen might have inherited this ‘oddness’. Exactly what had happened to justify this remained unclear. As far as Aileen had been able to gather later, it amounted to nothing very much more than a tendency to sleepwalk during the periods of insomnia from which she suffered around the time of the full moon. At all events, she had quite forgotten having mentioned the matter to Douglas until the occasion of her second mistake, which was to try to discuss openly with him the deteriorating state of their marriage. To her dismay, her husband had not only refused to talk about it, but had rejected her description of the situation as distorted and exaggerated. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he replied in that solicitous tone which she had come to fear and loathe, ‘I think you read a good deal too much into things. When I come home in the evening I’m far too exhausted to have any interest in playing the kind of games you’re talking about. I just want to rest, to relax and chat like a normal couple. You don’t suppose there’s any danger of you becoming too involved in your work, do you, Aileen? It’s always bound to be a risk, I should imagine. Particularly for someone with your background.’ It was only then that Aileen remembered having told him about the ‘madness’ in her family, and realized with despair that she had handed her husband a weapon which would assure him of victory any time he chose to use it.

  Douglas Macklin poured the last of the wine into his glass and inspected the little flurry of sediment with a passionately disinterested eye. Without this expression changing in the slightest, he transferred his gaze to his wife.

  ‘So this boy,’ he said. ‘Gary, is it? I didn’t quite catch your conclusion. It almost sounds as though you think he might be right, that someone really is trying to kill him.’

  Aileen lit the cigarette for which her husband had made her wait while he toyed with the remnants of his meal.

  ‘Someone’s trying to kill all of us.’

  ‘Really? How thrilling. Who, for instance?’

  ‘You watch the news, don’t you? The PLO, the IRA, the multinational drug companies, the nuclear-generating people. There are enough missiles targeted on London to kill everyone a hundred times over, or is it a thousand?’

  The scatty female role was one of her more successful defences, no doubt because Douglas’s residual sexism made it difficult for him to accept that it wasn’t genuine.

  ‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘You mean this lad of yours is just another burned-out Guardian reader.’

  Aileen gazed at him from behind a deliberate smile.

  ‘And how’s your work going?’ she asked brightly. Too brightly, in fact, for it revealed that his irony had been wasted on a false target.

  ‘Oh, it’s all rather mundane and boring, I’m afraid,’ he purred. ‘Listening to you, I get quite nostalgic for the old days when the brain seemed to be something special, the seat of magic powers and terrible forces. As usual, reality is less exciting. The brain has turned out to be just another gland, of no more general interest than the kidney or the pancreas. Really, sometimes I almost envy you.’

  Aileen carefully flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. Whatever happened, she must not allow herself to be provoked. By the law of compensation, the angrier she became, the cooler her husband would remain. Conversely, if she could frustrate him long enough then he might lose his temper, in which case she would have won.

  ‘Envy me? Because I deal with the whole person, you mean, not just a mass of tissue?’

  ‘No, no. I envy you because you live in the past, professionally speaking. You’re treating people whose mental models of the brain were formed years ago, back in the Dark Ages. Your patients are like country folk who still believe that ghosts walk in the woods at night and mutter darkly about strange goings-on at the great house. In fact the woods have all been levelled on an EEC grant and the house is now the headquarters of the local agribusiness, but you’re still up to your ears in tall tales about spooks and spirits.’

  ‘My job is to help people get better. I use the most up-to-date methods available.’

  ‘But that’s still primitive in terms of current research. Take this boy of yours, for example. From a state-of-the-art perspective, he’s simply suffering from an endocrine disorder requiring hormonal analysis and treatment to correct the imbalance. That’s a world away from the land where you live, inhabited by demons with names like Schizophrenia and Paranoia. No one has ever seen these demons or knows how their power operates, but everyone believes that they haunt people. Your task, as the local witch-doctor, is to identify the demon that is haunting a given patient and then prescribe the appropriate healing ritual. I know that’s the best you can do. We can’t yet deliver therapeutically. Fair enough. But the fact remains that the difference between your view of mental life and the one we’ll be kicking around in Boston’ — Douglas was going to a conference at MIT at the end of the week — ‘is like the difference between a modern atlas and one of those old mappa mundi consisting of a dodgy outline and lots of blank space inscribed with comments like “Here be monsters.” ’

  Aileen crushed out her cigarette and stood up, stacking their plates together.

  ‘Our cures work,’ she said.

  ‘Do they? The last set of figures I saw seemed to be something less than totally conclusive. In any case, witch-doctors don’t do so badly either, you know. Never underestimate the placebo effect. At least a third of all people suffering from anything at all will show some improvement on being told, for example, to gargle a mixture of tomato ketchup and hot lemonade last thing at night.’

  This was wild enough to be ignored with safety. Recognizing that he had settled for a draw, Aileen pushed her way through to the kitchen and put the plates in the sink to soak. As she turned off the water she caught sight of the woman reflected in the glass. It was the end of September and the nights were starting to draw in rapidly. Aileen had always had a difficult relationship with those regular features of hers, that ovality so prized by the eighteenth-century land-owning class that they paid painters to clamp them on like a mask. The sixties had had very different ideals, and in her youth Aileen had worked hard to look striking and strange. She had learned that perfection is inflexible. The moment she tried to do anything with it, her face turned dumpy, common and ordinary. It was not until she met Raymond that she was able to accept that her features were herself, that there was no difference between the person others saw and the person she was. Until then, the most important parts of her body had seemed to be her hands and feet, whose size her mother was always bemoaning, and her eyes, which had traditionally been put forward as her ‘strong point’. She had thus grown up with the image of herself as a bug-eyed stick insect with boxing-glove hands, Army-boot feet and nothing to speak of in between. But Raymond told her she had a ‘neat ass’ and ‘cute tits’; Raymond told her he loved her pussy; Raymond told her that she was beautiful. In Cheltenham, ‘beautiful’ was a word without resonance, applied to a cup of tea or a vase of flowers or the weather. It indicated that the strictly limited degree of satisfaction which might reasonably be expected from such things had in fact been forthcoming. But when Raymond used it, the word glowed. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her. ‘You’re really beautiful.’ True, he had also used to joke that with someone so ‘ty
pically English and straight’ on the pillion, he was always waved through Customs without question on their motorcycle trips across the Channel. But for Aileen his love had abolished the distinction between her private and public selves. When it returned, it was in a subtly different form. For although the image now thrown back by the darkened window reminded Aileen once again of those dead land-owners, it was no longer their fatuous insipidity that she read there, but the emptiness and tragedy of lives given over to externals. Those matching sets of rigid features had been as necessary an artifice as the protective masks doctors had once given soldiers whose faces had been erased by shrapnel.

  A sound vibrated through the whole house. Starting somewhere upstairs, it slithered down, a long-drawn-out keening that finally turned over on its side and swirled away like a television picture being put through its paces by computer graphics. Someone less familiar with the house than Aileen might have thought that it was the cry of a baby in distress, but she was well aware that there was no baby in the house and never would be. As for the sound, it came from the water pipes. The mains feed to the storage tank in the attic had burst the previous winter, and the plumber who had come to mend it had allowed an assortment of noises to escape into the system. Aileen stood listening to it fade away, the dishwater already drying on her hands, staring at the woman reflected in the window. She looked deceptively normal. Only in her eyes, perhaps, was there a hint of something missing. She had survived, certainly, thanks to a miracle, but her life was to all intents and purposes over. At thirty-five, Aileen Macklin was absolutely certain that she was a person to whom nothing more would ever happen.