The Tryst

8

Steve looked forward to his shopping expeditions for the old man. Apart from his trips to the OOD S ORE, they provided his only chance to take part in the real business of life, the thing that made sense of it all. Until then he’d been a mere spectator, wandering through the covered mall where the shops spilt out on to the promenade and the goods were heaped up in seemingly wanton profusion. It looked as though there was more than enough for everyone, as though you could just help yourself, but of course these free and easy manners were only a tease. The gorgeous hordes of goodies had their pimps, big ugly toughs in cheapo uniforms with spluttering walkie-talkies who sized up the punters’ spending power at a glance. If you looked too lingeringly at the merchandise or fondled it with too much feeling, without having what it took to take it home, then they moved in fast.

Nevertheless, the boy sometimes used to risk loading up a trolley with items, pretending to think long and hard about some, chucking others carelessly in, just like the shoppers whose mannerisms he had studied. The prices were already familiar to him. The stotters never missed an episode of the television show where people won things by knowing how much they cost. ‘Stupid cow!’ Jimmy would jeer. ‘Three hundred and ninety-nine quid? Up my arse!’ But when the trolley was full Steve had to abandon it and slip away empty-handed, so it was poor fun compared to the real thing. Besides, interpreting the old man’s lists involved a satisfying degree of responsibility. The instructions ranged from the nebulous (‘Vegetables. Fruit?’) to the pedantic (‘Steak and kidney pudding, not pie — Fray Bentos if possible, otherwise a small one only’). This kept Steve on his toes, and he prided himself on being able to account for every penny he spent.

But there was another and deeper reason for the boy’s satisfaction. Ever since the time when his collection of snapshot memories had been taken, he had been surrounded by people whose job was to look after him. However kind they were, he could never forget that they were paid to care. They fed and clothed and sheltered him because doing so provided their own food, clothes and shelter. They were really caring for themselves, not him at all. Of course there might be something else there, something real, but you could never prove it. Sometimes the other boys tried to do so by acting impossible, smashing the place up or trying to kill themselves, but what good was that? If the social workers and house parents continued to accept you however badly you behaved, it just proved how badly they needed the money. Steve felt sorry for these official minders, their lives made a misery by little shits like him. He wouldn’t have done their job, not for anything.

What had attracted him to the stotters was that they’d taken him on of their own free will. At the same time he knew it had really been a freak, a whim which had briefly flared in the darkness of Jimmy’s brain and which he’d imposed on the others in a fit of pique. Besides, they never allowed Steve to forget that he was dependent on them, a household pet who would be abandoned the moment they lost interest in him. With the old man it was different. The old man needed him. Again, there were moments when Steve wondered if perhaps there was more to it than that, love or whatever it was called. But the boy knew that you couldn’t build on anything as vague and feeble as that. Need was the stuff, need you could count on. He still didn’t understand what created Ernest Matthews’s need, why he couldn’t just go out and do things for himself like everyone else. Presumably it had something to do with the man Steve had nicknamed Hazchem. The story the old man was telling him would make all that clear. In any case, it wasn’t important. All that mattered was the need itself. It was as real as money: warm and smelling of people, of their dirt and their weakness. And Steve had a pocketful of it!

Friday being pay-day, all the tills at the checkout were busy. The trolleys lined up one behind the other, piled high with sliced white, washing powder, baked beans, ice cream, dog food and toilet rolls. Stunned-looking men with tattooed biceps and soft tummies stood awkwardly beside women in whose faces beauty came and went like the picture on a poorly tuned television set. Both sexes looked prematurely old, exhausted and bewildered, casualties of some routine disaster. Around their legs children clung and stumbled, their faces smudged with bruises, red with tears, cuts below their eyes.

Some one pushed Steve roughly from behind.

‘Fuck you doing here?’

It was Dave and wee Alex, with a trolley full of cans of lager. Dave gave the boy an even more meaningful punch.

‘Asked you a question, wanker!’

‘Shopping,’ Steve said.

Dave pawed through the contents of his basket.

‘Who’s this shit for? Where you get the money, you little fucker?’

‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ muttered Alex.

‘It’s for this old bloke,’ Steve explained. ‘He can’t get out. He’s crippled.’

‘You’ll be fucking crippled, time I’ve finished with you,’ Dave snapped.

At that moment the security guard intervened. A huge West Indian who never stopped smiling, he looked like a black Santa Claus.

‘Now then, lads, let’s calm down,’ he said in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the floor. He was still smiling merrily. Dave backed away, scowling.

‘They giving you any trouble?’ the guard asked Steve.

‘No, it’s all right. I know them.’

The guard moved away, but not very far. He kept an eye on the trio while Steve unloaded his basket and paid, under Dave’s and Alex’s hostile scrutiny. When he had packed the shopping into the orange sling, the boy walked quickly to the door without looking back. Once outside he started to run. His plan was to make it as far as the public lavatory by the park and hide in the cubicle with the broken window. It was only a temporary respite, of course. They’d get him when he came home. But at least it would give Dave a chance to cool down a little. The shopping was heavy and awkward to run with, but Steve hurried on as best he could. When he reached the lavatory, he stopped and looked round. There was no sign of Dave and Alex. They probably hadn’t even bothered to try to catch him. Steve always tended to overestimate the stotters’ energy. He slipped inside and sat down in his favourite cublicle.

The story on which his eye usually fell first, because of its position, was so squeezed in that the final words of each line had been pushed up on to the door frame. The story itself Steve found particularly obscure, since it lacked the usual terms for the parts of the body and the things people did with them. It began ‘THIS SCHOOLGIRL ASKED ME TO EAT HER OUT FIRST I LICKED HER LITTLE BUSH IT FELT SO GOOD I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE SO SHE BEGGED ME TO STICK MY TONGUE DEEP IN HER BOX AND I DID IT TASTED LIKE HEAVEN’, after which the writing became increasingly vertical and eventually slipped off the wall altogether in a rather pedestrian ending including such details as the fact that the schoolgirl in question was only thirteen and came there every week looking for older men. Steve leant back, the downpipe of the toilet pressing against his back like a second spinal column, trying to work out what the story was about. It seemed to involve a meal the writer had had with someone he loved, but the details escaped him.

When Steve came out of the lavatory it had started to drizzle. He hurried on along Paxton Grove, half-walking and half-running over the cracked uneven slabs. The house in Grafton Avenue seemed cosier and safer and more welcoming than ever that day. Ernest Matthews’s high tea the week before had been such a success that the old man had decided to make it a regular event. The water was already bubbling in an enamel saucepan on the stove, and while Steve unpacked and put away the rest of the shopping Matthews lowered the eggs in one by one, tut-tutting when one of them cracked, releasing a milky cloud. He stood in front of the stove, watch in hand like a station-master, until the statutory three minutes had elapsed. Then the eggs were promptly rushed to the table, where Steve demonstrated that he had mastered the art of opening them correctly. Then they ate, soaking up the runny yolk with strips of buttered bread before taking up their spoons to excavate the white.

Afterwards, as Steve sat looking round at the sideboard laden with nameless oddities, he realized for the first time what made this room feel so special, so different from any other: you couldn’t have won anything in it on that television game show. Steve had always assumed that everything had a price the same way it had a name. But the old man’s room was full of things that had neither. They seemed to have sprung magically out of nowhere, their very existence a scandal.

‘Where you get all this stuff?’ the boy demanded finally.

‘It was here before I came. All in different rooms, scattered throughout the house. I brought it all in here, what I wanted. Some of it was my mother’s, you see.’

But for some reason Steve didn’t want to see.

‘When you going to get on with the story?’ he asked, glancing pointedly at the clock.

‘My, but we’re impatient today!’ Matthews remarked. ‘Very well, then. Where were we?’

‘Hiding behind the hedge listening to the man telling his friend about the woman he’d seen,’ the boy promptly replied. The fact that he didn’t believe the old man’s tale actually made it easier for him to remember, just as the things that he and the stotters watched on TV always seemed more real than what happened in between.

Ernest Matthews nodded and smiled, pleased that the boy had not forgotten.

‘Good lad! That’s it. That’s it exactly. Well, as I said, Maurice Jeffries went on and on about this young woman he claimed to have seen on the lawn in the middle of the night, how she was the woman of his dreams, the woman he’d been hoping to meet one day. In fact he started getting so carried away that I began to wonder whether he was quite right in the head. Nor was I the only one, for Aubrey Deville, the friend to whom he was telling all this, started chaffing him about it. But Maurice refused to make a joke of it. He became more and more impassioned, until Deville hastily assured him that he believed every word he said and would watch with him that night, prepared to follow the woman if she should appear. That’s as much as I heard, for just then the head gardener appeared and started giving me what for. But though I went back to work hoeing the flowers, it wasn’t that bed I was thinking about for the rest of the afternoon, I can assure you. For when I heard Maurice describing this ravishing female roaming around the garden in her shift in the middle of the night, it was as though I could actually see her in front of me, and not exactly overdressed for the time of year, if you know what I mean.’

He paused, giving Steve a sideways glance.

‘Do you know what I mean?’

The boy thought about Tracy. Sometimes at night, to help get to sleep, he would tell himself a story in which he and Tracy were alone in the house, the stotters having conveniently disappeared. In the story, he heard footsteps, soft and quiet, bare feet coming towards him across the floorboards. Then the mattress would dip unexpectedly and it was her, Tracy, lying down beside him, explaining that she felt cold and lonely and afraid too. Close together, their bodies made heat instead of losing it. She turned around so that her fine smooth back fitted snugly into the hollow of his chest, his knees pressed into the sockets at the back of hers, and he would lick that supple hollow where shoulder moulded into neck. ‘You’re more beautiful than Hammersmith Bridge,’ he would murmur.

Sensing that he had lost his audience, the old man gave a theatrical cough.

‘Well, that’s neither here nor there,’ he said. ‘But it so happens that at the time of which I’m speaking, I had got friendly with one of the housemaids, name of Elsie. The female staff slept in the attic rooms, where they were locked in at night. But love will ever find a way, and I’d soon found mine up through a trapdoor on to the roof, which was almost flat. Once there, I had the run of the whole length of the Hall, and it was no great difficulty for an agile lad like myself to shin down a drainpipe and in through Elsie’s window. Anyway, that afternoon, thinking over what Maurice had said, it occurred to me that I too could stay up and watch for the woman he had described. I even wondered if I might not be able to solve the riddle that so perplexed Maurice. “Who is she?” he’d asked Aubrey Deville. “Who can she be?” Well, I knew the area better than the young master, and everyone who lived there was familiar to me. If the woman came, I thought, then I would recognize her.

‘As soon as the house was quiet that night I made my way up through the trapdoor and out on to the leads of the roof. It was a mild summer night. The sky was hazy, and the moon sat behind it as plump as a lantern. I made my way carefully along the roof to the west wing, from which I had a good view over the lawn and the main part of the house, where Maurice had his rooms. All the windows were dark. To my right, the lawn lay as smooth as a billiard table, with the two beech trees that rose taller than the house itself. Behind them I could just make out the fence where the park began, and the dark swell of the hillside beyond. On the other side lay the river and the railway, while up the valley to the west I could make out the roofs of the village, all silvery in the moonlight. Now you mustn’t suppose that anything happened right away. It never does, you know, except in stories. To pass the time, and maybe to steady myself, for it was a little spooky up there all alone on the roof at night, I started to go the rounds of each house in the village, in my thoughts I mean, flitting from one cottage to the next like a ghost. I knew them all, you see. I made my way from one to the next, opening doors and moving from room to room, pausing to gaze down at the people asleep in bed. I felt solemn and sad, although at the time I didn’t understand why. The only sound throughout was the hushing of the river, and after I had finished with the village, I began to follow it downstream in my thoughts, past the farms and meadows I’d grown up with, then to the local market town and beyond, the river growing larger and smoother and more stately all the time, until it reached the metropolis and then the ocean that spanned the entire globe, patrolled by our warships and policed by our troops. It was peaceful and yet thrilling to lie there listening to the murmur of that tiny stream, and know that those drops of water were one with those that lapped the shores of Africa and India, Australia and the East, fabulous places where at that very moment the sun was just rising or was already high in the sky.

‘At any rate, nothing occured to draw me from these reveries. The church clock told off the hours one after the other, until I began to consider how tired I would be in the morning and wonder if I shouldn’t go to bed while there was still time. It had struck four when I heard a sliding creaking sound which brought me bolt upright in an instant. Looking down at the face of the house, I saw that the lower sash of one window had been thrown up. Someone was looking towards the lawn, and I heard Maurice’s voice calling, “Who are you? Where are you going?” But to my bitter disappointment, when I looked towards the lawn there was nothing whatever to be seen. I had good eyes in those days, and from my perch on the roof I could see the whole extent of the garden as clear as day, but there was nothing there. No mysterious figures in nightdresses, no movement, no glimmers, nothing. When I looked back at the house, Maurice had disappeared from the window. A few moments later I heard a series of noises down below, and then the front door of the Hall opened and I saw something that capped my growing sense of the madness of the scene. Unlike his brother Rupert, who took all nature for his drawing room, Maurice would hardly venture out of the house from one day’s end to the next, as I told you. Nevertheless, there he was now, at a quarter past four in the morning, running towards me across the lawn and into the shrubbery below, where I lost sight of him, although I heard his footsteps a while longer on the path leading to the stables and the church. I quickly made my way back along the roof to the trapdoor and scuttled down the back stairs to the servants’ quarters. I let myself out through the scullery window and hurried around to the end of the west wing, where I stopped to make sure that I was not observed, for my next step would have taken me out into the open.

‘A heavy dew had come down, and the moonlight sparkled from each drop on every blade of grass, making a smooth sheet of shimmering light that looked more like a lake than a lawn. What I saw there stopped me going any further. For that shining surface was broken by a single line of footprints stretching back across it like spots of candle wax on polished floorboards. Close to the house they divided in two, one set leading to the front door and the other to a door in the east wing, opposite to where I was standing. The message I read there seemed pretty plain to me. In the time it had taken me to climb down from the roof, get out through the scullery window and run round to the front of the house, Maurice Jeffries had thought better of the advisability of roaming about the grounds in the middle of the night and had returned to the house. And what had finally made him see the error of his ways, I thought, might perhaps have been the same thing that convinced me that I had been wasting my time. For it would have been impossible for any human being to have crossed the lawn that night without breaking the luminous sheet of dew that lay upon it, and yet the only footprints quite clearly led to and from the house. That clinched it. The mysterious apparition Maurice claimed to have seen had no existence outside his own head, in which case that head must be addled. And in that case, I thought as I made my way back to the scullery window, Maurice will be locked up in an asylum, Rupert will become sole master of the estate and we need have no more fears for the future.

‘The next day I felt as weak and dreamy as a girl, and I paid little enough attention when I heard that Maurice was nowhere to be found. He had always been subject to sudden whims and flights of fancy, and was famous for doing whatever came into his head without taking the least trouble to consult anyone else’s convenience. Nevertheless, this disappearance was bizarre even by his standards, for his clothes and personal belongings were all in his room, and even his valet knew nothing of his whereabouts. But I said nothing about what I’d seen during my night on the roof, for whatever happened to anyone else, I should have been severely punished. Besides, it was not for me but Aubrey Deville, if he chose, to divulge the tale which Maurice had told him in strict confidence. As he said nothing, I felt no qualms about remaining silent. As for Maurice’s mysterious lady friend, no more was ever heard of her, and a few weeks later the whole episode was forgotten, for we were at war.’

Ernest Matthews glanced at Steve, who was leaning forward attentively.

‘There you are!’ the old man exclaimed. ‘You’re interested now, aren’t you? Actions speak louder than words, they say, but there are some words that speak loud enough for anything, and one of them is war. Once it had been spoken, Maurice’s disappearance came to seem of little account, particularly since his brother hinted that the two events were not entirely unconnected. Rupert had argued all along that a big European war was what was needed to get the country trim and fit again. Nor was he the only person to think like that. Of course, no one doubted that if war came, we would win with ease. The whole thing would be over by Christmas at the latest, after which the old life would pick up again just the same as before, except that we’d all be healthier and more robust for the exercise. That was most people’s view, but Maurice thought very differently. He used to say that a war would ruin everything. “The country just now is like a play at the end of the second act,” he said. “There is an interesting cast and the plot is developing splendidly. But if war comes, all that will go for nothing. We’ll be left with a botched job, a work of genius completed by a hack.” Needless to say, Rupert took a less flattering view of his brother’s pacifism. “If Maurice has chosen this particular moment to vanish from view,” he said, “then I for one have no desire to interfere. The glorious sacrifice which we may all be called upon to make loses its meaning unless it is freely offered, and the duties which my brother has sought to demean are honourable only if undertaken in a spirit of glad comradeship.” Rupert himself enlisted immediately war broke out.

‘But the war wasn’t over by Christmas, nor by the one after that, by which time our army had been knocked about so much that they decided they needed a new one. There was no difficulty finding volunteers. Everyone had heard what monsters the enemy were and we couldn’t wait to go and settle accounts with them. I myself was wild to enlist, but you had to be nineteen, which left me three years short. Then one day I met a boy I knew from the village, swaggering along as pleased as Punch. “You look like the cat that got the cream,” I says. “I must bid you farewell,” he says to me, as solemn as the vicar, “for I’m off to France in the morning to fight for my king and country.” The impudence of it! I was thunderstruck. Him, a boy scarcely a year older than me, giving himself the airs of a national hero, a martyr! “You’re no more nineteen than I am!” I cried. “That’s not what the Army thinks,” says he. And with that he told me how at first when they asked him how old he was he’d said seventeen. “ ‘Minimum age nineteen years, lad,’ the sergeant replies. ‘Now then, I’m a bit deaf on that side,’ he says with a broad wink, ‘and I didn’t quite catch your age. Let me have it in the other ear.’ ” So this time of course he says nineteen and they let him in. Well, the very next day I begged a ride to town on the carrier’s cart, went down to the recruiting office and told them the same story as impudently as I could manage. Much to my surprise, I walked out of there half an hour later Private Ernest Matthews, the newest member of the New Army. When we were all sent off to training camp a few weeks later, the whole village was there to see us off. We felt like conquering heroes! I was sad to leave my mother in tears, but despite what happened afterwards, I have to say that that was the happiest and most exciting day of my life.

‘As soon as we were trained, they sent us over to France. The other lads were jolly and chummy. We might have been going on holiday. Once across the Channel, we were put on a slow train that crawled through the countryside for what seemed an eternity. At last it stopped, in the middle of nowhere, and we were ordered out and set to march all day and most of the night until we reached our camp. The whole place was in chaos with preparations for the offensive, thousands of people and mounds of equipment coming and going and the guns pounding continually like the end of the world was at hand. But absurd as it may seem, the only thing that worried me at the time was the possibility of being found out by Rupert Jeffries. Everyone from our part of the country was in the same battalion, you see, so I knew I’d see him sooner or later, and of course he knew my real age well enough. I was afraid he might have me disciplined, or even sent home in disgrace. But when he finally saw me, a few days after we arrived, he merely grinned, patted my shoulder and called me a brave lad.

‘As I said, there was a big attack in preparation, so big that everyone supposed that it would put an end to the war. It was just a few days before it began that we heard the news about Maurice. Even before I left home, the countryside had been transformed. We couldn’t bring in all our wheat from the Empire any more, you see, so the land which had been lying fallow since the bad days of the seventies was all ploughed up again, and they even started to clear what remained of the forest as well. It was in that way that Maurice’s fate came to light. The land around the Hall had once been covered with a great forest stretching for miles in every direction. Some old men could still remember when it had surrounded the village like a sea, but little by little it had been broken up and thinned out until there was just the one big patch left, forming a hanger on the wolds above the Hall. In the midst of it was an old house that had once been a hunting lodge, which everyone called the trysting-house.’

He shot a glance in Steve’s direction.

‘I don’t suppose you know what a tryst is? It’s a meeting, an arrangement between two sweethearts. What they call a “rendezvous” nowadays, as though we hadn’t a good enough word in plain English. This house had been standing empty for years, and courting couples used it when they wanted to be alone, which was no easy thing in those days. It was a fine house, too, built of the local stone, three storeys high, with big gables. The garden was a waste of weeds and stinging-nettles, with a yew tree grown so wild it almost hid the house, though with the wood so close the place was always dark enough. I was scared to go there, to tell you the truth, even with the other lads. Partly it was the folk who lived in the woods. They were farm labourers who had been turned out of their homes when the bad times came and had been living up there like gypsies ever since. But it was also the place itself. It used to give me the shivers, I don’t know why. At any rate, the forest had all been chopped down now. They’d felled the tall beeches and were grubbing out the undergrowth close to the house when they came upon a shallow grave in which the body of Maurice Jeffries lay buried, his skull crushed in and every bone in his body broken.’

Ernest Matthews looked at Steve and frowned.

‘But you’re not listening,’ he complained.

The boy started.

‘It’s my own fault,’ the old man mused sadly, tapping the ashes of his pipe. ‘I’ve gone on too long. Look, it’s gone six. You’d better be off.’

It was spoken curtly, almost an order. Steve rose unwillingly. It was a joke, the old man thinking that he was in a hurry to leave. On the contrary, what was distracting him was precisely the fear of what awaited him on his return to Trencham Avenue. He knew that Dave would make him pay for having witnessed his humiliation by the security guard, while Jimmy would want to know who the shopping was for and why he hadn’t been told about it earlier. He was going to get it, that much was certain. Since he had decided not to tell them any more about the old man, he was going to have to think up a story. He hoped that Dave wouldn’t hurt him too badly, that one of the others would pull him off before he lost control.