The Tryst

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘By now they had reached what we called the fountain, a rock pool with carp swimming in it. They sat down on the stone bench there and after swearing his friend to the strictest secrecy, Maurice told him the whole story. It had started about a month before, he said, when he came down to the Hall for one of his brief visits. “You may recall, Aubrey, that after dinner we went to the billiard room and stayed there until two or three in the morning. Well perhaps it was the excitement of watching my brother being made an ass of by young Sullivan, but at any rate I found that I simply could not get to sleep. At last I gave it up and sat down at my writing-desk to catch up on my correspondence. The desk stands directly before the window, and thus commands an excellent view of the lawn. Well, I had been sitting there for some time when my eye was suddenly drawn by a movement outside. My first thought was that it must be a fox or a badger, but I very soon saw that the figure was human. The house had been as still as a grave for several hours, and I knew that it could not be one of us. I feared it might be an intruder, perhaps a poacher or even a housebreaker.

  ‘ “The moon that night was just a day or two off the full, and the lawn gleamed brightly except where the shadows of the two great beeches fell, as dark and dense as clay. At first the figure was in the shadow of the easterly beech, a mere glimmer of whiteness in the night, but as I watched it moved out into the open. It was a woman, Aubrey! She was wearing a sort of white shift which left her arms and lower legs bare. Her hair was all let down, too, so that she looked as though she had just risen from her bed. She moved slowly and gracefully across the lawn, looking about her at the house and the gardens as though it was the most natural thing in the world. My brain was in an absolute turmoil, yet I could not move, could hardly even breathe! I simply sat there, transfixed, as she crossed the lawn and was swallowed up by the shadow of the other tree. No sooner had she vanished than I felt as though I had been released from a spell. I dressed hurriedly, rushed downstairs and ran out on to the lawn, but there was no one there. I searched the whole garden, which was illuminated as brightly as on a winter day, but I could find absolutely no trace of the woman. At last I returned to my room and watched the lawn until it grew light, but all in vain. And as I sat there, exhausted and hollow-eyed, I realized with dismay that I had fallen in love. Her frank bold freedom, her candour, her purity! She is the woman I’ve always dreamed of, the woman for whom I’ve been searching all my life! Ah, Aubrey, if only you’d seen her! But you must see her. You shall see her!” ’

  The old man broke off as the chimes of the squat walnut-cased clock on the mantelpiece struck six.

  ‘I like that sound,’ Steve murmured.

  ‘You should have heard the clock that stood in the housekeeper’s parlour at the Hall,’ the old man told him. ‘Its chimes were as mellow as the drops of wine I used to taste out of the gentlemen’s glasses sometimes after dinner. And all day long and all through the night the pendulum swung to and fro, tick, tock, tick, tock. Ah, things were different then! There were sixty minutes to the hour in those days. Now the time is nothing but rubbish, short measure and shoddy quality. Still, we must try and make better use of it next week, or we’ll never be done.’

  Steve walked home that evening with a faint smile on his lips. Naturally he didn’t believe a word of what the old man had told him. Countryside under the sea! Houses that grew like plants! People who kept snacking all day but were so poor they didn’t even have electricity like the stotters! Matthews couldn’t even get his story straight. He’d talked about a big house, but before that he’d said he used to live in a cemetery. Steve had slept in a cemetery once, up Stoke Newington way. It hadn’t been too bad, until a gang of Irish gypsy kids shut him up in one of those little houses they had for the dead people. As for old Matthews, Steve was beginning to suspect that he was a bit round the twist. What he’d said about his skull being like a golf ball, that made sense all right! Steve had found a golf ball in a park once. It had been cracked along one side, and when he’d prised it open he’d found a crazy mess of tiny rubber threads inside, all squashed together higgledy-piggledy. That was what the old man’s skull must be like inside all right, a right mess. But Steve wouldn’t let on to the old man that he’d sussed him out. He had too much to lose. There was the warmth, the food, the tea, the money, the weekly appointments that gave him a future to look forward to. Above all, there was the old man’s fear. Steve loved to feel it, to bask in it. It enveloped him like a fur coat, a luxury he had never been able to afford before and which might be taken from him at any moment.

  7

  Aileen had until Friday to find out why the boy she still thought of as Gary Dunn wanted so desperately to be confined in a psychiatric hospital. By the time she left work on Thursday afternoon, it had become clear that he wasn’t going to help her. She had played her big card that morning, telling the boy about her visit to the library, and her discovery that the book about schizophrenia which she’d found among his belongings had been borrowed by someone called Steven Bradley. He had reacted as though she’d struck him, which only confirmed Aileen’s conviction that this was not just another alias but his real name.

  But nothing else had budged. She had probed and pushed, almost pleaded in the end, but all in vain. He had simply shrugged off her questions in his usual sulky, uncommunicative manner. By the end of their conversation, Aileen was beginning to feel that panicky sense of suffocation which overcame her in the course of her dinner-table duels with Douglas. Gary’s strategy and tactics were the opposite of her husband’s — the weapons of the poor, the uneducated, the inarticulate — but the result was much the same. Douglas made her feel depressed about being stupid and unsuccessful, Gary made her feel guilty for being powerful and privileged. She had already given him what he wanted — admission to the Unit — and he evidently felt that he had nothing to gain by making any further concessions. On the contrary, if he got well again he’d have to leave. He therefore had every reason not to co-operate.

  In every other respect the boy was proving to be a model patient. He behaved rather as though the Unit were an exclusive club to which he had been lucky enough to be elected. He neither sought nor avoided attention, taking his cue from the other patients but keeping his distance so as not to offend anyone. He had proved to be an instant success with the hard-pressed nursing staff: not only did he give them no trouble, but on several occasions a nurse dealing with one of the more problematic inmates would find that Gary had quietly but effectively sorted out a minor crisis among the other boys while her back was turned. In short, everything was wonderful, except that his name wasn’t Gary and he wasn’t eighteen years old or mentally ill. Aileen saw no hope of solving the riddle of his behaviour before he was expelled from his fool’s paradise the following day. In a last desperate gesture she had phoned the police and passed on the boy’s real name in hopes that their Missing Persons section might be able to trace his family. But nothing altered the fact that the next day the boy would be taken away from her and handed back to the local authority, his secret still locked away inside him like an unexploded bomb.

  By five o’clock that afternoon Aileen felt that she had to talk to someone. Jenny Wilcox was the only conceivable possibility. It even occurred to Aileen that this might be an opportunity for them to get to know each other better, to become real friends. It was no doubt her own fault that it hadn’t happened yet. She had always held back from the younger woman, maintaining a coolness and irony that were the classic hallmarks of defensiveness. As for the dreaded Jon, was Jenny, with all her virtues, to be discarded simply because Aileen didn’t approve of her partner? The fact of the matter was that it had been she, Aileen, who had refused to be warm and open and intimate all along. Well, here was a perfect chance to set matters straight.

  Aileen’s route back to her office took her down a ground-floor corridor and out through a side door of the main building. The therapeutically uplifting colours of the wards had been abandoned here in favour of basic bureaucratic
grey. Aileen had passed through the swing doors at the end of the corridor at least four times a day for over ten years, but she had never actually looked at them before. But now, as she raised her hand to grasp the handle, she saw four words written there at the edge of the door, one above the other, just at eye level.

  EAT

  SHIT

  DIE

  BOX

  After a moment she pushed her way through, wiping her hands vaguely, as though they might have been contaminated by contact with the door. The words were somehow hatefully familiar. She knew she’d seen them before, and recently, but she couldn’t think where it had been. Not here at the Unit, at any rate. They were probably from some song or other, of no importance or significance.

  Jenny Wilcox readily accepted Aileen’s offer of a drink and a lift home to Barnes. Her own car had been stolen a few weeks earlier, driven to a disused lot and set on fire, and until the insurance claim came through she was dependent on the unreliable bus service. As it was not yet opening-time, Jenny suggested that they do the drive first and go to a bar called Jewels which Jon had OK’d. This turned out to be a standard clone, like an antique shop which had started serving drinks on the side. There were lots of potted plants and brass rails and old furniture, and waitresses resembling French whores dressed as Edwardian chambermaids or vice versa flitted through the foliage. Eventually one of them was persuaded to bring the women two glasses of a Muscadet described on the blackboard wine list as ‘jolly quaffable’. While they waited for it to arrive, Aileen listened to Jenny discussing her project to get all the doctors working for the local health authority to sign an advertisement naming those categories of ‘non-urgent’ cases whose treatment would be deferred indefinitely if funding was not increased.

  ‘Divide and rule is the Government’s game, as usual. If we let them get away with it mental health will go to the wall. To get funding you’ll need publicity, which in practice means deaths. Hole-in-the-heart babies, fifteen-days-to-live kidney transplants, that sort of thing. There’s no way we can compete in that market. Madness doesn’t kill you, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘It can do.’

  ‘Not directly. Anyway, from a Daily Mail reader’s point of view, mental illness is like AIDS. Anyone who gets it had it coming to them anyway.’

  Aileen said nothing. She found Jenny’s ferocious cynicism hard to take in large doses, which is how it was usually administered.

  ‘That boy I talked to you about yesterday,’ she began tentatively. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had time to observe him at all.’

  ‘You mean what’s-his-name, Gary? To tell you the truth, I haven’t even noticed he’s there.’

  ‘He won’t be, not after tomorrow. I haven’t got anywhere with him, apart from stumbling on his real name. He’s undoubtedly lying about other things too, but there’s no time to discover what they are. Actually lying’s not quite the right word. He seems almost to lack any clear sense of what’s true and what isn’t. That makes it all the more effective, of course, because there’s no sense of guilt to give him away. It’s as if he’s holding a pack of possibilities and he deals out this one or that, according to the situation, without bothering himself about whether they happen to be true or not.’

  Aileen noticed a slightly glazed look come over Jenny’s eyes and realized that she was rabbiting on.

  ‘Anyway, perhaps the police will be able to find out something about him,’ she concluded.

  The younger woman shot her a distinctly sharp look.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘I told them his real name,’ Aileen explained.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  Jenny sipped her drink in silence.

  ‘They were very nice and helpful to me when I phoned,’ Aileen said defensively.

  ‘Of course they were! You’re a wealthy, middle-class, educated, white female. Why shouldn’t they be nice to you? If you buy a guard dog, you don’t expect it to attack you, do you?’

  Aileen returned Jenny’s look with a growing feeling of resentment.

  ‘You’re all those things too, Jenny.’

  ‘I know I am! And I know exactly where I stand with the police, believe me.’

  There was a momentary silence that was awkward in its intensity.

  ‘Anyway, what I don’t quite understand is why this particular patient matters so much to you,’ Jenny went on in a more soothing tone. ‘I mean concern is great, of course, but there are plenty of deserving cases at the Unit. You seem to have got very involved with this boy. What’s so special about him?’

  For a moment, a fraction of a second, Aileen was tempted to tell her, to open up completely and admit the mysterious and illicit identification of this boy with the ghostly child which had followed her about for over fifteen years. But she didn’t. It was partly the sheer magnitude of the task that daunted her, all the painful and confusing background details she would have to relate in order to make sense of what was happening now. But she was also checked by a chilling echo of Douglas’s voice in what Jenny had said. He too had asked her if she didn’t think there might be a danger of her becoming too involved in her work. Aileen winced internally. Jenny Wilcox and Douglas Macklin were so different in every way that the idea of their agreeing on anything at all seemed tantamount to a proof that it must be true.

  ‘I just can’t believe that in this day and age someone can just pop up from nowhere like this,’ she responded instead. ‘A person with no name, no identity. I mean, I thought we were all on computers somewhere.’

  ‘We are! The two things go together. There’s a whole class of invisible people out there now, people with no name, no address, no job, no hope. Their last contact with the world we live in is by claiming social security benefits, which is one reason why the Government is making it as difficult as possible for them to do so. Because once they let go of that, they disappear totally, which is exactly what Thatcher wants. You create an underclass with no rights or privileges whatsoever and then threaten the members of the lower divisions of the social league with relegation to it if they dare complain about the lousy rights and privileges they have got. Just take a walk along the Embankment down by the Festival Hall some evening! Upstairs in the big glass hi-fi the bow ties and fur coats are sipping wait wain in the interval of listening to Andre and the RPO cream off some more of possibly-the-greatest-classics-in-the-world. Meanwhile, twenty feet below, a few hundred human derelicts are huddling up for the night in their cardboard packing cases. It’s like a fucking George Grosz cartoon, except it’s not Berlin in the thirties, it’s London in the eighties, right here under our noses. And no one gives a fuck.’

  ‘We’re drinking white wine,’ Aileen pointed out.

  Jenny looked at her with genuine puzzlement.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  But before Aileen had a chance to reply, the bar was taken over by music loud enough to make it unnecessary if not impossible. Above a synthesized beat like the clanking of an electronic dustbin lid, a choir of disembodied ghouls wailed vaguely at intervals, random bursts of demented laughter zinged about like machine-gun fire and a voice straining upwards in a manic shriek urged everyone to ‘Go for it! Go for it! Hup, hup, hup!’ Aileen signalled for the bill, over which she and Jenny had a gentle tussle won by the younger woman.

  ‘I just can’t listen to that stuff,’ Aileen commented once they were outside.

  ‘You’re not supposed to listen to it. It’s like the background music to a film, the film of your life. You use it to add an extra dimension to the moment, to focus your style.’

  ‘I’m just too old,’ Aileen replied, putting on a slightly comic moue of self-deprecation.

  ‘You’re as old as you feel.’

  ‘That’s the whole trouble. I wish you only felt as old as you are. I’m not actually very old, not really, but I feel ancient. Sometimes I’m almost tempted to believe in reincarnation. It seems the only way of accountin
g for how tired I get. It’s as if I’ve had many previous existences and not stayed dead long enough in between.’

  Jenny’s mouth opened to reveal an expanse of pink upper gum and the street echoed with her laughter.

  Although the great heart-to-heart talk hadn’t happened, Aileen nevertheless felt better as she drove home. She’d had a chance to air a few of her preoccupations, at least, and the wine had made her feel pleasantly drowsy and inconsequential. The problems of the day no longer seemed quite so acute. In fact for some reason she found herself thinking about the graffiti she had seen on the door at the Unit that afternoon. She repeated the words over and over to herself as she drove along: eat, shit, die, box. They didn’t seem to make any obvious sense, but there was something intriguing about them. Perhaps the last two belonged together, she mused. Could ‘die-box’ be a poetic formula for a coffin, like the riddling compounds in Anglo-Saxon verse? In that case the words looked like a sort of street haiku, a bleak inventory of human life. You eat, you shit, they bury you. And if you’re a middle-aged childless woman, she thought, you bleed as well: uselessly, uselessly, month by month.

  When Aileen parked the red Mini opposite the house, Mr Griffiths, her next-door neighbour, was at work on the tall hedge which screened his property at the front. Standing on a short step-ladder, he was busily shaving away the last of the summer growth with an electric trimmer so as to make the hedge look as much as possible like a wall. Mr Griffiths’s lawn was mown so relentlessly that Aileen sometimes wondered why he didn’t just replace it with artificial turf and have done. But that was to miss the point, of course. Everyone needs a hobby. Mr Griffiths’s hobby was forcing Nature to play dead. They exchanged ritual greetings as Aileen passed. The nights were drawing in already, Mr Griffiths said. They were indeed, agreed Aileen. For a moment Mr Griffiths paused, regarding her with a vacuous smile as though about to venture some further confidence, perhaps to the effect that he wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a frost. But in the end he must have decided that this would be coming on a bit strong, and turned his attentions to the hedge instead.