The Tryst

9

When Aileen was called out of the ward meeting on Friday morning and told that the police wanted to speak to her on the phone, she knew instinctively that Douglas’s plane had crashed. She had spent much of the night lying sleepless at her husband’s side, not daring to move lest she wake him, thinking about what had happened that evening, trying to come to terms with it, to analyse what had been so disturbing about the event. In fact they had got off relatively lightly this time. The last time that their house had been broken into the living room had been reduced to an utter shambles: pictures smashed, cupboards staved in, ornaments mutilated, photographs torn up, books ripped apart, sofa and chairs slashed, the curtains cut to ribbons, the carpet burned and the wallpaper smeared with excrement. ‘Amateurs, probably kids from the council estate,’ the police had said off-handedly. ‘Broke in through the garden windows then couldn’t get past the locked door to the hallway. Never lock internal doors, it just winds them up.’ That experience had changed Aileen’s view of the place where she lived. The house felt scarred and vulnerable, the street at risk, its genteel facade a shabby deceit. The whole area had revealed itself to be psychotic.

But at least she hadn’t had to face the intruders herself, although every time she passed the youngsters playing in the car-park of the council flats nearby, she wondered if some of them had done it. The break-in itself had to some extent remained distanced by its anonymity, like one of those things you read about in the papers or hear discussed at a dinner party. The personal touch had been lacking. But not this time, she thought, recalling that brief unimaginably intense scuffle on the landing, a physical encounter as shockingly intimate as her early sexual gropings, thrilling and horrid. Of course she hadn’t dreamt of discussing this with Douglas, any more than she had mentioned the thing that had started it all, although the memory of it still made her shiver all over: the baby’s cry shining eerily out of the silence, drawing her helplessly towards it. When Douglas had arrived with the police — in a very bad temper because not only had his last-minute arrangements been disturbed but in the circumstances he couldn’t very well blame Aileen for it — they had searched the house. No damage had been done and relatively little was missing. The burglar, who had also broken in through the garden window, leaving the front door open for a speedy departure, had clearly been a professional. He had probably spent several weeks watching the street, and having established that the Macklins went to the supermarket on Thursdays he thought he had a clear hour or so to go through the house thoroughly. Aileen’s prompt return had disturbed him while he was investigating her jewellery. On the dressing-table stood a large doll dating from her childhood and now retained as an ornament. When it was moved, a mechanism inside emitted a crying sound.

Oddly enough, the knowledge that this was all it had been did nothing to calm Aileen’s agitation. Too much primal goo had been dredged up from the depths. The doll’s cry was not even particularly realistic, and although its connection with her childhood no doubt lent the sound emotional force, Aileen was only too aware that the experience had drawn most of its power from the events that had followed Raymond’s death. Lying tormentedly still in the constrained intimacy of the conjugal bed, she thought about the flashback experiences which some people reportedly had years after taking LSD, when for no apparent reason they would suddenly find themselves high again, the ground blurring away beneath them and the people around looking strange. It was almost as if something of the sort was happening to her. I’m no longer in full control of my life, she thought. A pattern has been indelibly engraved on my psyche and I perceive everything that happens to me in terms of that pattern. Which is madness, she concluded, proving her sanity with a joke.

The morning that followed had not helped to restore her equilibrium. As always when he went away, Douglas was in a foul mood, tense and snappy. Knowing that his wife was nervous about him flying, he taunted her with statistics which suggested that boarding an airplane was less dangerous than walking upstairs in one’s own house. Aileen said nothing. She drove Douglas and his fibre-glass suitcase — the manufacturer’s claims suggested that it would survive whatever happened — to Hammersmith tube and waved goodbye with a hollowly casual, ‘See you on Monday, then.’ But when one of the secretaries interrupted the discussion on the therapeutic merits of projective techniques to tell Aileen that she was wanted on the phone by the police, she felt her insides give a sickening lurch, as when you drive too fast over a hump-backed bridge, and she knew at once what had happened. It was then almost one o’clock. Douglas’s flight had left at eleven. It would have taken time to get hold of the passenger list, and they would first have called the Institute and then the Macklins’ home number. Aileen had a sudden vision of the slim white phone, like overlapping lovers’ hands, chirping plaintively to an empty house. As she followed the secretary along the corridor, the linoleum squelching like mud under her soles, her only real surprise was that the police hadn’t come to break the news in person. The last time, they’d sent a pair of rookies, callow insolent punks whose veneer of sorrowful concern swiftly peeled off as they looked round, taking in the colourful, indiscriminate, organic mess, the smell of dope and incense, the Dayglo posters and anti-war slogans, the books on Buddhism and vegetarian cookery, the endlessly repeated riff booming from the stereo where a record no one was listening to had got stuck in a groove. But, of course, Raymond’s had been just a single death. There would have been three or four hundred people on the flight to Boston: they couldn’t possibly inform all the next-of-kin personally.

‘Aileen Macklin speaking.’

‘Hello and good morning, Hammersmith CID, Detective Inspector Croom. I am calling pursuant to the matter on which you were in communication relative to one Steven Bradley.’

For a moment Aileen felt too surprised to speak.

‘Have you … have you found out something, then?’ she finally managed.

‘We certainly have, madam. In fact it would not be too much to infer that we’ve found out everything. Who he is, where he comes from, the works. Gary Dunn didn’t mean nothing to us, but Steven Bradley, well, that was different. Not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve been able to wrap up an assortment of unsolved cases, comprising of two murders, two GBH, and a string of assorted robbery with threat, uttering menaces, aiding and abetting, not to mention the odd taking and driving away and anything else they may ask to be taken into consideration.’

Aileen gripped the receiver tightly, forcing herself to concentrate.

‘What has this got to do with Gary — I mean Steven?’

‘Well, that’s a bit complicated, to say the least. I can’t enter into it on the phone, anyway. If you could pop 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.