The Tryst (12 page)

‘As I said, Maurice and Rupert didn’t see eye to eye on anything, and whenever Maurice appeared at the hall we knew that sooner or later there would be ructions. Maurice was far too genteel ever to raise his voice, but he had a way of describing what his brother thought or did that made it sound ridiculous. For instance he might tell his guests, “Now if any of you are depraved enough to be up with the lark tomorrow morning, if you happen to glance out of your window, you may see a figure tripping stealthily across the lawn. Do not be alarmed. It is neither fawn nor satyr, but merely my brother Rupert, off to commune with Nature, that great dynamo whence he draws those mystic powers, which, as you have doubtless remarked, cause him to hum and crackle with energy and charm.” We had all this from the butler, who waited at table and could do Maurice to a T. Rupert gave as good as he got, though, only there was none of this sly insinuating manner about him. He’d come right out and say what he thought. “This country is decaying like fine timber with dry rot. There’s nothing to show on the surface as yet, but at the heart the old vigour and vibrancy is gone. And the fungi that have caused this, the canker that is consuming our great heritage, is composed of tiny crawling creatures like you and your friends, Maurice. Men who have sold their souls to progress and the mob, who go whoring after strange gods and neglect the spirits of their native land, who spice their corrupt and decadent conversation with foreign catchphrases yet have so far forgotten their own tongue that they call their cowardice pacifism, their ignorance science, their treachery socialism and their lack of virility civilization.” Oh, he didn’t mince his words, our Rupert, I can assure you! But Maurice and his friends didn’t seem to mind. They just smiled in a superior way, as though Rupert were some sort of country show they’d come down on purpose to see.’

The old man broke off to relight his pipe.

‘Are you following all this?’ he asked.

Steve shrugged.

‘Go on. I like hearing you talk.’

‘Well, that’s very convenient, because it happens to be the thing I like best myself. Anyway, according to the terms of old Jeffries’ will, with the two brothers at loggerheads nothing could be changed, which suited us down to the ground. My mother and the rest of the staff all kept their places and I wasn’t robbed of the only life I’d ever known, not yet. Then that last summer, just before the war, much to everyone’s surprise Maurice suddenly came to live at the Hall. Naturally this caused problems, not just for Rupert, who expected to have the place pretty much to himself, but for the staff, who had grown rather too used to idleness. No one seemed able to explain Maurice’s abrupt change of heart. By this time I had turned sixteen, and was helping out in the garden. They hoped I would take after my father, who they said could make a dead plant sprout again. At any rate, one day I was hoeing some beds when I heard somebody say, “… because I’m in love!”. It was Mr Maurice’s voice, coming from the alley just behind the hedge where I was working. I heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel, and then another voice replied, “In love! Why, Maurice, I fall in love at least once a week, on average, but I shouldn’t dream of deserting my friends and burying myself away in the depths of the country like some hermit.” Naturally all this whetted my curiosity. The head gardener was nowhere about, so I set off along the service path, which ran parallel to the walk that the two gentlemen were on. The hedge between us was so high that although we were just a foot or two apart, they were no more aware of me than of the man in the moon. I missed the next few words, but I caught up with them in time to hear Maurice saying, “… the most ravishing female I have ever set eyes on.’ “But who was she?” the other man enquired. I’d recognized him by now. It was one of Maurice’s closest friends, a young man named Aubrey Deville. “That’s just it,” Maurice went on, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

‘By now they had reached what we called the fountain, a rock pool with carp swimming in it. They sat down on the stone bench there and after swearing his friend to the strictest secrecy, Maurice told him the whole story. It had started about a month before, he said, when he came down to the Hall for one of his brief visits. “You may recall, Aubrey, that after dinner we went to the billiard room and stayed there until two or three in the morning. Well perhaps it was the excitement of watching my brother being made an ass of by young Sullivan, but at any rate I found that I simply could not get to sleep. At last I gave it up and sat down at my writing-desk to catch up on my correspondence. The desk stands directly before the window, and thus commands an excellent view of the lawn. Well, I had been sitting there for some time when my eye was suddenly drawn by a movement outside. My first thought was that it must be a fox or a badger, but I very soon saw that the figure was human. The house had been as still as a grave for several hours, and I knew that it could not be one of us. I feared it might be an intruder, perhaps a poacher or even a housebreaker.

‘ “The moon that night was just a day or two off the full, and the lawn gleamed brightly except where the shadows of the two great beeches fell, as dark and dense as clay. At first the figure was in the shadow of the easterly beech, a mere glimmer of whiteness in the night, but as I watched it moved out into the open.
It was a woman, Aubrey
! She was wearing a sort of white shift which left her arms and lower legs bare. Her hair was all let down, too, so that she looked as though she had just risen from her bed. She moved slowly and gracefully across the lawn, looking about her at the house and the gardens as though it was the most natural thing in the world. My brain was in an absolute turmoil, yet I could not move, could hardly even breathe! I simply sat there, transfixed, as she crossed the lawn and was swallowed up by the shadow of the other tree. No sooner had she vanished than I felt as though I had been released from a spell. I dressed hurriedly, rushed downstairs and ran out on to the lawn, but there was no one there. I searched the whole garden, which was illuminated as brightly as on a winter day, but I could find absolutely no trace of the woman. At last I returned to my room and watched the lawn until it grew light, but all in vain. And as I sat there, exhausted and hollow-eyed, I realized with dismay that I had fallen in love. Her frank bold freedom, her candour, her purity! She is the woman I’ve always dreamed of, the woman for whom I’ve been searching all my life! Ah, Aubrey, if only you’d seen her! But you
must
see her. You
shall
see her!” ’

The old man broke off as the chimes of the squat walnut-cased clock on the mantelpiece struck six.

‘I like that sound,’ Steve murmured.

‘You should have heard the clock that stood in the housekeeper’s parlour at the Hall,’ the old man told him. ‘Its chimes were as mellow as the drops of wine I used to taste out of the gentlemen’s glasses sometimes after dinner. And all day long and all through the night the pendulum swung to and fro, tick, tock, tick, tock. Ah, things were different then! There were sixty minutes to the hour in those days. Now the time is nothing but rubbish, short measure and shoddy quality. Still, we must try and make better use of it next week, or we’ll never be done.’

Steve walked home that evening with a faint smile on his lips. Naturally he didn’t believe a word of what the old man had told him. Countryside under the sea! Houses that grew like plants! People who kept snacking all day but were so poor they didn’t even have electricity like the stotters! Matthews couldn’t even get his story straight. He’d talked about a big house, but before that he’d said he used to live in a cemetery. Steve had slept in a cemetery once, up Stoke Newington way. It hadn’t been too bad, until a gang of Irish gypsy kids shut him up in one of those little houses they had for the dead people. As for old Matthews, Steve was beginning to suspect that he was a bit round the twist. What he’d said about his skull being like a golf ball,
that
made sense all right! Steve had found a golf ball in a park once. It had been cracked along one side, and when he’d prised it open he’d found a crazy mess of tiny rubber threads inside, all squashed together higgledy-piggledy. That was what the old man’s skull must be like inside all right, a right mess. But Steve wouldn’t let on to the old man that he’d sussed him out. He had too much to lose. There was the warmth, the food, the tea, the money, the weekly appointments that gave him a future to look forward to. Above all, there was the old man’s fear. Steve loved to feel it, to bask in it. It enveloped him like a fur coat, a luxury he had never been able to afford before and which might be taken from him at any moment.

7

Aileen had until Friday to find out why the boy she still thought of as Gary Dunn wanted so desperately to be confined in a psychiatric hospital. By the time she left work on Thursday afternoon, it had become clear that he wasn’t going to help her. She had played her big card that morning, telling the boy about her visit to the library, and her discovery that the book about schizophrenia which she’d found among his belongings had been borrowed by someone called Steven Bradley. He had reacted as though she’d struck him, which only confirmed Aileen’s conviction that this was not just another alias but his real name.

But nothing else had budged. She had probed and pushed, almost pleaded in the end, but all in vain. He had simply shrugged off her questions in his usual sulky, uncommunicative manner. By the end of their conversation, Aileen was beginning to feel that panicky sense of suffocation which overcame her in the course of her dinner-table duels with Douglas. Gary’s strategy and tactics were the opposite of her husband’s – the weapons of the poor, the uneducated, the inarticulate – but the result was much the same. Douglas made her feel depressed about being stupid and unsuccessful, Gary made her feel guilty for being powerful and privileged. She had already given him what he wanted – admission to the Unit – and he evidently felt that he had nothing to gain by making any further concessions. On the contrary, if he got well again he’d have to leave. He therefore had every reason not to co-operate.

In every other respect the boy was proving to be a model patient. He behaved rather as though the Unit were an exclusive club to which he had been lucky enough to be elected. He neither sought nor avoided attention, taking his cue from the other patients but keeping his distance so as not to offend anyone. He had proved to be an instant success with the hard-pressed nursing staff: not only did he give them no trouble, but on several occasions a nurse dealing with one of the more problematic inmates would find that Gary had quietly but effectively sorted out a minor crisis among the other boys while her back was turned. In short, everything was wonderful, except that his name wasn’t Gary and he wasn’t eighteen years old or mentally ill. Aileen saw no hope of solving the riddle of his behaviour before he was expelled from his fool’s paradise the following day. In a last desperate gesture she had phoned the police and passed on the boy’s real name in hopes that their Missing Persons section might be able to trace his family. But nothing altered the fact that the next day the boy would be taken away from her and handed back to the local authority, his secret still locked away inside him like an unexploded bomb.

By five o’clock that afternoon Aileen felt that she had to talk to someone. Jenny Wilcox was the only conceivable possibility. It even occurred to Aileen that this might be an opportunity for them to get to know each other better, to become real friends. It was no doubt her own fault that it hadn’t happened yet. She had always held back from the younger woman, maintaining a coolness and irony that were the classic hallmarks of defensiveness. As for the dreaded Jon, was Jenny, with all her virtues, to be discarded simply because Aileen didn’t approve of her partner? The fact of the matter was that it had been
she
, Aileen, who had refused to be warm and open and intimate all along. Well, here was a perfect chance to set matters straight.

Aileen’s route back to her office took her down a ground-floor corridor and out through a side door of the main building. The therapeutically uplifting colours of the wards had been abandoned here in favour of basic bureaucratic grey. Aileen had passed through the swing doors at the end of the corridor at least four times a day for over ten years, but she had never actually looked at them before. But now, as she raised her hand to grasp the handle, she saw four words written there at the edge of the door, one above the other, just at eye level.

EAT

SHIT

DIE

BOX