Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

‘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.’