The Tryst

back in their student days at Sussex. Late one evening, in the course of a rambling account of why she was studying psychology, Aileen had mentioned that there was a strain of insanity in her family. She had done this out of vanity: in 1968 madness was still ‘interesting’. Besides, she wanted to show off her sophistication, to demonstrate her awareness of her own motives. ‘I suppose that studying the subject is a way of coming to terms with the anxiety that I might be tainted myself,’ she had told Douglas, ‘a way of defusing the whole idea of madness through a process of objectification.’ To call it madness had actually been exaggerating wildly. All Aileen knew for sure was that her grandmother had begun behaving rather oddly towards the end of her life, and that when Aileen herself had been a child, her mother claimed to have been worried that Aileen might have inherited this ‘oddness’. Exactly what had happened to justify this remained unclear. As far as Aileen had been able to gather later, it amounted to nothing very much more than a tendency to sleepwalk during the periods of insomnia from which she suffered around the time of the full moon. At all events, she had quite forgotten having mentioned the matter to Douglas until the occasion of her second mistake, which was to try to discuss openly with him the deteriorating state of their marriage. To her dismay, her husband had not only refused to talk about it, but had rejected her description of the situation as distorted and exaggerated. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he replied in that solicitous tone which she had come to fear and loathe, ‘I think you read a good deal too much into things. When I come home in the evening I’m far too exhausted to have any interest in playing the kind of games you’re talking about. I just want to rest, to relax and chat like a normal couple. You don’t suppose there’s any danger of you becoming too involved in your work, do you, Aileen? It’s always bound to be a risk, I should imagine. Particularly for someone with your background.’ It was only then that Aileen remembered having told him about the ‘madness’ in her family, and realized with despair that she had handed her husband a weapon which would assure him of victory any time he chose to use it.

Douglas Macklin poured the last of the wine into his glass and inspected the little flurry of sediment with a passionately disinterested eye. Without this expression changing in the slightest, he transferred his gaze to his wife.

‘So this boy,’ he said. ‘Gary, is it? I didn’t quite catch your conclusion. It almost sounds as though you think he might be right, that someone really is trying to kill him.’

Aileen lit the cigarette for which her husband had made her wait while he toyed with the remnants of his meal.

‘Someone’s trying to kill all of us.’

‘Really? How thrilling. Who, for instance?’

‘You watch the news, don’t you? The PLO, the IRA, the multinational drug companies, the nuclear-generating people. There are enough missiles targeted on London to kill everyone a hundred times over, or is it a thousand?’

The scatty female role was one of her more successful defences, no doubt because Douglas’s residual sexism made it difficult for him to accept that it wasn’t genuine.

‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘You mean this lad of yours is just another burned-out Guardian reader.’

Aileen gazed at him from behind a deliberate smile.

‘And how’s your work going?’ she asked brightly. Too brightly, in fact, for it revealed that his irony had been wasted on a false target.

‘Oh, it’s all rather mundane and boring, I’m afraid,’ he purred. ‘Listening to you, I get quite nostalgic for the old days when the brain seemed to be something special, the seat of magic powers and terrible forces. As usual, reality is less exciting. The brain has turned out to be just another gland, of no more general interest than the kidney or the pancreas. Really, sometimes I almost envy you.’

Aileen carefully flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. Whatever happened, she must not allow herself to be provoked. By the law of compensation, the angrier she became, the cooler her husband would remain. Conversely, if she could frustrate him long enough then he might lose his temper, in which case she would have won.

‘Envy me? Because I deal with the whole person, you mean, not just a mass of tissue?’

‘No, no. I envy you because you live in the past, professionally speaking. You’re treating people whose mental models of the brain were formed years ago, back in the Dark Ages. Your patients are like country folk who still believe that ghosts walk in the woods at night and mutter darkly about strange goings-on at the great house. In fact the woods have all been levelled on an EEC grant and the house is now the headquarters of the local agribusiness, but you’re still up to your ears in tall tales about spooks and spirits.’

‘My job is to help people get better. I use the most up-to-date methods available.’

‘But that’s still primitive in terms of current research. Take this boy of yours, for example. From a state-of- the-art perspective, he’s simply suffering from an endocrine disorder requiring hormonal analysis and treatment to correct the imbalance. That’s a world away from the land where you live, inhabited by demons with names like Schizophrenia and Paranoia. No one has ever seen these demons or knows how their power operates, but everyone believes that they haunt people. Your task, as the local witch-doctor, is to identify the demon that is haunting a given patient and then prescribe the appropriate healing ritual. I know that’s the best you can do. We can’t yet deliver therapeutically. Fair enough. But the fact remains that the difference between your view of mental life and the one we’ll be kicking around in Boston’ — Douglas was going to a conference at MIT at the end of the week — ‘is like the difference between a modern atlas and one of those old mappa mundi consisting of a dodgy outline and lots of blank space inscribed with comments like “Here be monsters.” ’

Aileen crushed out her cigarette and stood up, stacking their plates together.

‘Our cures work,’ she said.

‘Do they? The last set of figures I saw seemed to be something less than totally conclusive. In any case, witch-doctors don’t do so badly either, you know. Never underestimate the placebo effect. At least a third of all people suffering from anything at all will show some improvement on being told, for example, to gargle a mixture of tomato ketchup and hot lemonade last thing at night.’

This was wild enough to be ignored with safety. Recognizing that he had settled for a draw, Aileen pushed her way through to the kitchen and put the plates in the sink to soak. As she turned off the water she caught sight of the woman reflected in the glass. It was the end of September and the nights were starting to draw in rapidly. Aileen had always had a difficult relationship with those regular features of hers, that ovality so prized by the eighteenth-century land-owning class that they paid painters to clamp them on like a mask. The sixties had had very different ideals, and in her youth Aileen had worked hard to look striking and strange. She had learned that perfection is inflexible. The moment she tried to do anything with it, her face turned dumpy, common and ordinary. It was not until she met Raymond that she was able to accept that her features were herself, that there was no difference between the person others saw and the person she was. Until then, the most important parts of her body had seemed to be her hands and feet, whose size her mother was always bemoaning, and her eyes, which had traditionally been put forward as her ‘strong point’. She had thus grown up with the image of herself as a bug-eyed stick insect with boxing-glove hands, Army-boot feet and nothing to speak of in between. But Raymond told her she had a ‘neat ass’ and ‘cute tits’; Raymond told her he loved her pussy; Raymond told her that she was beautiful. In Cheltenham, ‘beautiful’ was a word without resonance, applied to a cup of tea or a vase of flowers or the weather. It indicated that the strictly limited degree of satisfaction which might reasonably be expected from such things had in fact been forthcoming. But when Raymond used it, the word glowed. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her. ‘You’re really beautiful.’ True, he had also used to joke that with someone so ‘typically English and straight’ on the pillion, he was always waved through Customs without question on their motorcycle trips across the Channel. But for Aileen his love had abolished the distinction between her private and public selves. When it returned, it was in a subtly different form. For although the image now thrown back by the darkened window reminded Aileen once again of those dead land-owners, it was no longer their fatuous insipidity that she read there, but the emptiness and tragedy of lives given over to externals. Those matching sets of rigid features had been as necessary an artifice as the protective masks doctors had once given soldiers whose faces had been erased by shrapnel.

A sound vibrated through the whole house. Starting somewhere upstairs, it slithered down, a long-drawn-out keening that finally turned over on its side and swirled away like a television picture being put through its paces by computer graphics. Someone less familiar with the house than Aileen might have thought that it was the cry of a baby in distress, but she was well aware that there was no baby in the house and never would be. As for the sound,