The Tryst

“Just look at that lawn!” you told me. “You don’t have grass like that in the States. That’s something you can’t buy with money. Hundreds of years rolling and mowing went to make that lawn. Isn’t it lucky my feet don’t touch the ground or my footprints would spoil it all.” Oh, boy! You were really flying!’ He didn’t tell her that she had later become hysterical and started screaming about someone falling to his death, and then tried to struggle to the window, and how he’d had to call the others and they’d forced orange juice laced with barbiturates down her throat until she calmed down. She found that out later, after her second trip, from one of the others. At the time she was too relieved to have got her hallucinogenic initiation over successfully to wonder why Raymond never encouraged her to repeat the experience.

Summer turned to winter almost unnoticed in the homogenized climate. Aileen’s application for a postgraduate place at UCLA came to nothing, but she wasn’t unduly disappointed, having realized by then that her reasons for wanting to study psychology had had little or nothing to do with wanting to be a psychologist. Coupled with this insight was the realization of what she did want, what would cure her insecurity, clarify the rather ambiguous situation and make Raymond fully hers at one stroke. In very much the same way that she had decided one night to take Douglas Macklin to bed, Aileen now allowed herself to get pregnant. Even when she was sure that this had been achieved, she did not tell Raymond, although she was only superficially anxious about his reaction. The future was assured; there would be life. The details would arrange themselves somehow.

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,