The Tryst

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 accounting 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.

As Aileen opened the front door, the murmur of the television revealed that Douglas was home, lapping up his daily instalment of the thinking man’s soap opera.

‘… further details as they become known. And that’s the six o’clock news from the BBC. Mrs Thatcher told her critics, “We must make ourselves rich enough to be able to afford to be compassionate”, and the Duchess of York made quite a splash as she became the first Royal to try out a water slide when she opened Britain’s biggest-ever theme park. She said …’

To Aileen’s surprise, however, the living room was empty. Seeing a light on, she walked across to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Douglas there either, nor a half-finished glass of Scotch on the table in the living room. Then she realized that his coat and umbrella had been missing from the rack in the hall. Her puzzlement was just beginning to turn to alarm when the phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Why don’t you give the number when you answer the phone? It’s no use just saying “Yes.” ’

‘Douglas? Where are you?’

‘At work. I’ll be late tonight. There’s a lot of things to do before I leave for Boston.’

‘Douglas, the television’s on, and the light in the kitchen — ’

‘Well, of course. They’re on the automatic timer, aren’t they?’

Then Aileen remembered that after the second break-in, three months earlier, Douglas had bought a complicated electronic box of tricks that switched on and off at random to simulate occupancy.

‘Well, it doesn’t normally happen,’ she protested.

‘That’s because normally I get home in time to switch it off before the cycle starts. There’s a button which overrides the timer. I explained all this to you when we got it.’

After he had hung up, Aileen stood quite still for a moment, feeling the house gradually expanding all around her, unfolding like a flower in the knowledge that her husband would be absent for several hours. All its spaces were open now, all the lines of tension smoothed away. She found the switch controlling the timer circuit and turned it off. Then she poured herself a glass of wine and took it upstairs to her study, which overlooked the rectangle of gardens enclosed by the houses on the adjacent streets. Overhead, the landing lights of the planes on their flight path into Heathrow were picked out against the livid grey sky, three of them in line and a fourth just turning out of the holding pattern like a star far off in the east. Douglas was flying off to Boston the next day. At the thought, the relaxed spaces of the house turned chilly. For the paradox of their relationship, the bitter truth that Aileen had finally been forced to accept, was that after twenty-four hours away from her husband she began to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, notably the most terrible depression. Without her domestic bully around, Aileen’s mind started to wander. His presence increasingly drove her to distraction, but to her dismay she had found that his absence was even less bearable. Perhaps he felt something similar. That would explain why, despite everything, they had never actually broken up. There seemed to be no reason now why they shouldn’t just carry on as they were, eventually turning into another old married couple, too exhausted and frightened to do each other much damage.

When she had finished her wine Aileen began to think about dinner. Only then did she realize that it was Thursday, when they normally did their weekly bulk buy, and so there would be little or nothing to eat in the house. She couldn’t face going to Waitrose, so in the end she decided to pop down to the Polish delicatessen at Turnham