The Tryst

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.

‘I must run, Jenny. I have to take the Mini to the garage. The brakes have been giving trouble.’

The driveway to the Unit was blocked by a delivery lorry, which was trying to reverse into the unloading bay by the kitchen. As she waited, Aileen thought about the unexpected breakthrough that had apparently resulted from her discovery of the boy’s real name. Full marks, she told herself. Give yourself credit where credit is due. Not everything was going to pieces. Despite the almost intolerable pressures on her over the last week, she had done her job. ‘We’ve found out everything,’ the policeman had said. ‘Who he is, where he comes from, the works.’ Armed with that information, Aileen was confident that the boy’s treatment could be adequately undertaken on a day- patient basis. It only remained to sell that idea to Steven himself, which she would do first thing that afternoon, before Pamela Haynes came to pick him up and drive him to the hostel where he was being housed until a permanent home could be found for him.

Aileen tapped the steering wheel impatiently. She felt cold, having been misled by another fine morning into putting on a thin white sleeveless cotton dress which had proved totally inadequate once the clouds rolled up. Besides, it was getting late. Someone had thoughtlessly parked in such a way that it was almost impossible for the lorry to get into the space reserved for it. In the end Aileen did a three-point turn and drove along the link road to the main psychiatric hospital. At the front of that forbidding edifice she slowed to go over the speed bump. To the left, incongruously tacked on to the Victorian redbrick, was a compound full of storage cylinders and a mass of silver tubing. The wire fence that surrounded it was marked ‘WARNING HAZCHEM’. The words reminded Aileen of something someone had said to her recently. But as usual these days, she couldn’t for the life of her remember who it had been or why it had stuck in her mind. Despite its exotic appearance, the sign merely indicated the presence of hazardous chemicals, in this case the various explosive or inflammable substances used in the hospital. As she accelerated down the driveway to the street, Aileen recalled that Douglas liked to define the human brain as a bowl of chemical soup. In that case, she thought, perhaps we should all wear a sign like the one on that wire fence. For one thing that was certain was that those chemicals, too, were hazardous.

10

Uneasy hints of spring struggled against the wintry dusk like a river running feebly against the incoming tide. At the corner where Steve turned out of the main road, two men and two women were standing around an empty pushchair. The boy mechanically noted the tell-tale signs of impairment: the bodies swaying back and forth like plants in the wind, feet continually shuffling to maintain balance, the rigid tunnel-vision gaze, the blurred voices all spluttering away at the same time. The two men were grasping cans of Carlsberg Special Brew. One of the women was holding a baby in her arms while the other lit a cigarette. The quartet kept up a constant patter, a verbal scaffolding on which they leant, tilting in towards each other.

‘… do for him …’

‘… little darling …’

‘… wants he wants …’

‘… bet your life …’

‘… just the job …’

‘… little pet …’

‘… right as rain …’

‘… never worry …’

One of the men took a feeding-bottle from the pushchair and poured beer into it. The two women, feinting and weaving like wrestlers, were trying to pass the baby from one pair of outstretched hands to another. The shopping hurt Steve’s shoulder, which still ached from the beating he’d received the week before, but he was determined to keep going until he reached the public lavatory. There he could not only have a rest but also put to use the pen he’d bought out of the money the old man allowed him. The stotters wouldn’t be getting it any more, not after what they’d done to him. Dave and Alex had started in as soon as he got home. Jimmy hadn’t been there, and if it hadn’t been for Tracy, Steve was sure they’d have killed him. They’d stood at either side of the room,