The Tryst Read Online Free PDF

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, it came from the water pipes. The mains feed to the storage tank in the attic had burst the previous winter, and the plumber who had come to mend it had allowed an assortment of noises to escape into the system. Aileen stood listening to it fade away, the dishwater already drying on her hands, staring at the woman reflected in the window. She looked deceptively normal. Only in her eyes, perhaps, was there a hint of something missing. She had survived, certainly, thanks to a miracle, but her life was to all intents and purposes over. At thirty-five, Aileen Macklin was absolutely certain that she was a person to whom nothing more would ever happen.

2

    In fact things were starting to happen at almost exactly that moment, but Aileen was not to know about them until Pam Haynes telephoned her shortly after eight o’clock the following morning.
    Aileen was sitting alone at the dining-table, smoking the first of the three cigarettes she allowed herself daily. Except when Douglas cheated her of it by leaving late, this interval between his departure for work and her own was like a second sleep, a moment of stillness and solitude that made everything that followed possible. It was a fine morning. The room was divided in two by a beam of sunlight through which the cigarette smoke unwound in lazy coils. At the extreme upper corner of the window a patch of blue sky was just visible. Aileen therefore felt particularly resentful when the phone went off like an alarm clock.
    ‘It’s Mrs Haynes,’ announced a breathy female voice. ‘I don’t know if you remember but I’m Gary Dunn’s social worker. I tried calling the Unit but there was no one there who knew about Gary and I found you in the book. I’m at the Assessment Centre, there’s been some trouble.’
    Aileen listened to the dull thumping of her blood, amplified by the telephone receiver.
    ‘What sort of trouble?’
    ‘You couldn’t stop by here, could you? I wouldn’t ask except it’s actually quite urgent. It’s a bit difficult to discuss on the phone the way things are this end, if you know what I mean. It’s not far really. Only it’s got to be before nine, you see.’
    Aileen stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray decorated with a design showing an eager swain pursuing a coy nymph through a pastoral landscape.
    ‘He’s all right, is he?’ she said.
    ‘Yes. Well, more or less.’
    ‘Give me the address.’
    Outside, the sky was already filling up with cloud. By mid-morning it would be completely overcast. It never happened the other way round, she thought. There was obviously some law at work, one of the many whose effects she observed