The Tryst

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ she told the policeman, exaggerating her qualifications to get his attention. ‘I think I may be able to help.’

  He glanced at her briefly and shook his head, pointing towards a blanket-covered bundle lying in the road in front of the white van.

  ‘Too late for that.’

  Aileen was about to explain that she wasn’t that kind of doctor but simply wanted to explain why the man being questioned was acting so oddly, but something about the size of the covered form drew her towards it. Her assumed status as a doctor cleared a passage for her through the crowd, and the police made no move to interfere as she bent to pull back the corner of the blanket. The boy’s head had been broken open and the face smeared like a wet painting, but there was no doubt as to his identity. Steven Bradley’s brief flight was over.

  13

  She turned away, towards the traffic squeezing slowly past the scene of the accident. A bus was inching its way through the gap between the delivery van in the middle of the road and the line of parked cars opposite. As it passed her, Aileen stepped on to the open platform, went inside and sat down on one of the bench seats. Once clear of the obstacle, the bus accelerated away. The other passengers — a mother and her two children, an old man with a small dog, two pale working-class girls and an Asian youth in a two-tone tracksuit — all turned to face the front again. Overhead, boots pounded on the upper deck. ‘We’re com-in’! We’re com-in’!’ voices chanted rhythmically.

  ‘Fares, please.’

  ‘Stamford Brook,’ Aileen replied automatically.

  ‘Don’t go there.’ The conductor was an elderly black, his voice and gestures robotic with exhaustion. ‘Change in Acton. Fifty pence.’

  Aileen handed him the coins.

  ‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ she said. ‘He ran straight out in front of me.’

  The drumming overhead intensified.

  ‘SCOT-land! SCOT-land!’

  The conductor handed her the ticket.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Aileen explained. ‘That’s why I’ve stopped blaming myself, you see.’

  One of the working girls turned to stare at her. Then she whispered something to her friend and they both tittered. There was a clatter of boots on the stairs and two youths in T-shirts and skin-tight jeans appeared, waving open cans of lager. One of them had a Scottish flag draped around his shoulders. He waved his fist at the conductor.

  ‘Hey, you black jobbie, did you no’ hear the bell?’

  Aileen took hold of his arm.

  ‘You’re going to die,’ she told him. ‘I promise you that.’

  A can of McEwan’s wrapped in knuckles ornamented with swastikas and death’s heads swayed back and forth in the air a few inches from Aileen’s face.

  ‘You’s barmy, woman,’ he said, backing away.

  The gob of white foam had pushed up through the keyhole-shaped opening in the can. It made Aileen think of the cuckoo-spittle that used to appear suddenly in spring. The long grasses by the stream were all spattered with the stuff. She would lie there for hours, hidden from view, sharing a sinful cigarette with her friend Liz. The clouds scudded along overhead, and in the windswept space between a lark was ecstatically soloing. Her mother used to tell a story about children from London who were evacuated to the Cotswolds during the war. ‘One day, one of the boys came home in great excitement. “There’s a little sparrer stuck up there!” he said. “He can’t get up and he can’t get down, and he ain’t half making a fuss about it!” The little Cockney had never seen a skylark before in his life, you see!’

  When Aileen looked again, the youths had gone. At the next stop, the two girls got up and walked towards the platform with short rapid strides, hobbled at the knee by their tight acrylic skirts. As they passed Aileen they broke into suppressed giggles that turned into howls of laughter as soon as they were off the bus. From time to time the bus stopped and people got on or off. Eventually Aileen stood up.

  ‘Not this one,’ warned the conductor.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she replied. ‘I know my way.’

  Once off the bus, however, the streets seemed unfamiliar. Still, if she kept walking she would get home sooner or later. Occasionally a dog barked in one of the houses as she passed, or she overheard music or the abrupt roar of recorded laughter, or saw lights left on in an empty room. Of course, all these phenomena could have been simulated by devices such as the one that Douglas had installed.

  As it began to get dark, she found herself in a long avenue built on a slight curve. The houses had windows consisting of eight panes set in a curved bay, and whenever a car approached, its headlights caught the panes one after the other, making the windows flash like warning beacons. But a few hundred yards further on, everything became familiar again, and the only puzzle was how it could have previously looked so strange. Aileen supposed it was due to her having taken an unfamiliar route. Even a place you know well can look odd if approached from an unfamiliar direction. She didn’t think about it much, preoccupied with her enjoyment at having got home safely. In spite of all that had happened, she was looking forward immensely to getting inside and shutting the door behind her, to eating and drinking and watching TV. Life goes on, she told herself. That’s all it does. It goes on, until it stops.

  As she approached the front door, searching through her handbag for her keys, the phone started ringing inside. It would probably be Douglas, ringing to say that he had arrived safely. How nice of him! She felt very warm about Douglas sometimes, particularly when he wasn’t there. Her hand blindly rooted about in the bag, turning up her purse and diary, various items of make-up, two letters and a packet of tissues, but no keys. The ringing broke off with a truncated blip. She imagined Douglas setting down the receiver and turning away, disappointed or angry or even worried. As for the keys, she’d left them in the door of the Mini, of course.

  Driving with Raymond in the mountains north of Los Angeles, Aileen had noticed that almost every bend in the road was marked by a black sign with one or more death’s heads painted on it. Raymond had explained that each skull marked the scene of a fatal accident. But when her taxi reached the spot where Steven Bradley had died a few hours earlier, there was no sign that anything of any interest or importance had ever taken place there. Aileen paid the driver and walked around the corner to the place where she had left the Mini. It wasn’t there. With it had gone the keys to her house, whose address was marked on several of the letters and other documents she had left on the back seat. That meant it wouldn’t be safe to go home, but before the implications of this had sunk in she saw Steven. He came at her like a wolf, swooping across the street straight in front of a car that never swerved an inch to avoid him, just as though he wasn’t there. Aileen screamed at him again and again, trying to scare him off, until people appeared at the windows of the nearby houses to see what was the matter.

  She was in luck: the taxi that had brought her to the corner was still there, parked at the kerb, the driver counting his takings. At first he said he was off duty, but when Aileen told him where she wanted to go he smirked and nodded her into the back. The taxi dropped her at the side of the main block, by the sign ‘WARNING HAZCHEM’. The night staff were very sympathetic about the loss of her car and keys. They provided tea and biscuits and said of course she could spend the night. In the morning, Aileen knew, everything would be all right again. But first there was the night to get through. Before going to bed she paid a visit to the dispensary and took some Valium. Mindful of what had happened last time, she restricted herself to the manufacturer’s suggested dose, even though her room was in the basement and the window had bars on it.

  In other respects, the experience was not dissimilar. She awoke in broad daylight, in a hospital. No one mentioned miracles this time, but of course miracles only happen once. Most striking of all, she’d had the flying dream again, and this time it lingered tantalizingly on the fringes of her consciousness. The merest nudge, she felt,
would be enough to bring it back into focus. But her waking consciousness was too gross and clumsy an instrument, and a few moments later it was impossible to believe that the experience hadn’t all been an illusion. She washed and dressed, drank several cups of tea, thanked the staff and set out to walk to the tube. It was a warm and sunny day, and her mood had changed too. In fact a miracle of sorts had occurred, after all, for she felt sane again. She knew that she had been in shock the evening before, and had acted pretty oddly. But all that was over now.

  Her mood was briefly marred by the discovery, when she reached the tube station, that she had left her handbag behind at the hospital. Evidently some of the Valium must still be spicing her chemical soup, making her dopey and inattentive. For a moment she thought of going back to get it, but it was a long way through an unattractive part of West Kilburn. Besides, there was nothing of any value in the bag. Her money and credit cards were in her purse, which she had put in her coat pocket after paying the taxi driver the night before. The real problem was the loss of her keys. She would have to inform the police, then call a locksmith. It would take the whole day, just when she felt she needed a rest, peace and quiet.

  It wasn’t until she reached Paddington that she understood what she was going to do. Coming up from the underground tunnels to change to the District line, she caught sight of a sign reading ‘Main Line Station’. Without a second thought, she followed the arrow, made her way to the booking office and bought a weekend return to Cheltenham. It was the perfect solution! She tried to phone her parents before boarding the train, but the phones were all in use or out of order. It didn’t matter, anyway. They would be only too pleased to see her, even though she turned up unannounced with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. They would understand, bless them. They always did. And from there she would phone the police, report the theft of her car keys and ask them to keep an eye on the house. It would be bliss to get out of London for a couple of days, to go home. It was just what she needed.

  The train was scruffy, blisteringly hot and packed. Aileen put her coat on the overhead rack and squeezed into a corner seat, where she lay back and closed her eyes. When she awoke, they were already in the country. Bright sunlight fell on flat farmland with a roll of low hills in the distance. The carriage had emptied somewhat, although it was still quite crowded. On the seat opposite, a man with a smugly glum expression was leafing through a newspaper with the headline ‘LEAVE IT AHT, RON!’ Next to him, in the window seat, a relentlessly articulate middle-class father was talking the toddler on his knee through the scene outside, naming all the buildings and animals, explaining their functions and purpose, instructing his creation in the various amenities of a world that had been brought into being for his benefit.

  Aileen slept in short snatches, during which the scene outside gradually changed from the bleak expanses of chalk and clay to the secretive limestone landscape she knew so well: valleys that seemed too big for the limpid streams lined with elms and willows, meadows full of unbothered sheep, villages that seemed to have been exposed by a process of erosion. Inside the train they were still in London, while out there, just the other side of the glass streaked with urban filth, was a whole countryside so intimately linked to Aileen’s childhood that for her it would never quite grow up.

  When she next opened her eyes, the train had come to a stop in a small station. Sunlight fell hot and heavy on the seat where she was sitting, bringing out sweat under the light cotton dress which had seemed too scanty just the day before. Further down the carriage a portable stereo was dispensing a slouching reggae beat over which a rap artist was doing vocal karate. The seat opposite was now occupied by a harassed-looking mother and child. The mother was staring out of the window with an obstinate expression, pointedly ignoring the child, a girl of about six with a face like a blancmange, who was crying loudly.

  ‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ her mother snapped.

  She can’t get up and she can’t get down, thought Aileen, that’s the problem. But she was careful not to say anything. The music gouged and stabbed, the child cried, the train did not move. There seemed no reason why it should ever move again. Sunlight streamed in through the grimy window, making the carriage unbearably hot and airless. The bawling child and the ghetto-blaster competed gamely for attention. No one else seemed bothered by any of this, but Aileen felt that if she stayed there a minute longer she would go mad. She opened the door and stepped out on to the platform, determined to find out what was going on and how much longer they were going to have to wait there. Outside the train, the air was deliciously cool and fresh, delicately scented. The sunlight was light and gentle, modulated by a slight breeze, no longer a penance.

  ‘Hey!’ A man in uniform waved at her from the next carriage. ‘Get back in!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Aileen replied icily.

  ‘You can’t get off here! The train doesn’t stop here.’

  The only advantage of living with a complete bastard, Aileen had realized, was that it gave you a head start in dealing with all the other bastards you came across in the course of your everyday life. The guard’s words made her remember one evening when she had made the mistake of greeting Douglas’s early return with, ‘Oh, I thought you were still at work.’ She hadn’t forgotten his crushing rejoinder.

  ‘There are doubtless various ingenious ways of demonstrating that you’re mistaken,’ she told the guard airily. ‘But under the circumstances it may be sufficient to point out that the train has stopped and that I have got off.’

  The man didn’t respond, and at that moment the train started to move again. In the same instant Aileen realized what he had meant. This was not a normal stop but a disused station where the train had come to a halt waiting for a signal to change. The platform at her feet was still more or less intact, with the odd plant pushing up between the slabs, but the nameboards had been removed and the station building looked as though it had been hit by a shell.

  The train disappeared round a bend and the signal changed soundlessly back to red. Aileen laughed to herself. It served her right! She’d been hoist with her own petard, or rather with Douglas’s, which she’d ill-advisedly borrowed. There was nothing for it but to walk to the nearest village and phone her parents. She couldn’t be far from home now and fortunately her father was always glad of an excuse to take the car out. ‘But what on earth happened?’ he would ask. ‘Well,’ she’d reply, ‘it’s a long story!’ She climbed through the slack barbed-wire fence which separated the platform from the station yard, and began to walk up the drive, the gravel crunching under her feet. It was hard to feel annoyed by what had happened when it had brought her this quiet, these scents and sounds, the wonderful sunlight and this breeze that ruffled the little golden hairs on her arms.

  The track joined a narrow lane that crossed the stream and the railway and started to climb the other side of the valley. The verges were dense with overgrown vegetation, an impenetrable clutter of spindly tendrils matted together, bending under their own weight. Aileen had once feared the approach of winter, but now she found it a relief to think that all this superfluous growth would soon be swept away. It seemed almost threatening in its mindless proliferation. After a while the lane joined a wider road, boasting a white line in the middle. A signpost indicated one village five and three-quarter miles to the left and another half a mile to the right. On the other side of the road stood an imposing pair of stone gateposts, one of which bore a sign lettered in gold on a blue ground.

  Netherbourne Hall

  Golden Age Sheltered Accommodation

  Beneath this, a separate notice read ‘No Through Road’. Through the gates, Aileen could see an Elizabethan manor house with gables, mock crenellation, traceried windows and clusters of tall chimney-stacks, all in the local honey-coloured stone. It looked vaguely familiar. No doubt she had come here at some time with her parents, on a Sunday afternoon drive. Perhaps she could phone from there, she thought. If it was an old people’s home
it couldn’t be strictly private. There would always be relatives coming to visit. The drive curved sinuously away to the right through fenced-off parkland where sheep were grazing. Clouds occasionally drifted over the sun, muting the colours and casting a cool dull spell over the scene. As Aileen got closer to the house, she began to feel uneasy about going in. They must be fed up with people sneaking around the place with some feeble excuse or other, taking pictures. But by now she had come so far that it would be quicker to detour across the lawn and try and find a way out to the village, which according to the signpost lay only half a mile away in that direction.

  Even the Macklins’ next-door neighbour, the exacting Mr Griffiths, might have approved of the lawn, a magnificent expanse of grass trimmed in perfectly straight strips, except where circular flowerbeds had been planted around the stumps of two trees whose roots presumably went too deep for them to be removed without damage. Aileen strolled across it, glancing nervously at the grey stone facade of the house. She was afraid that at any moment one of the many windows would open with a bang and someone lean out and demand to know who she was and where she was going. Nothing of the sort happened, however. In a few moments she had reached the path, which led past the end of the opposite wing into a glade of enormous rhododendron plants. Beyond stood a small church, and Aileen decided to go in and have a look. Her mother knew every church for miles around, and if this one turned out to have a thirteenth-century font or a perfectly preserved hammerbeam roof Aileen would never hear the end of it. She was already starting to worry about what to say to her parents.

  She walked through the lych-gate and up the path that curved past tumbling tombstones covered in elegant but largely illegible lettering. The porch was protected by a screen-door to keep out birds. This was open, but she wondered whether the church itself would be. So many were kept locked these days, a thing unheard of when she and her parents had done their tours. ‘The house of God is always open,’ she remembered her mother saying sententiously, and then making a disapproving noise when her husband added, ‘Unlike the public houses, alas.’ Aileen grasped the ring of braided iron set in the massive door and turned. There was a loud clack and the door swung back. The place smelt as ripely musty as a cellar. A pile of hymnals stood on a low table near the door, below a noticeboard displaying a photograph of a drought victim in Africa and a faded typewritten note explaining that a service was held there on the fourth Sunday of every alternate month.