Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

In other respects, the experience was not dissimilar. She awoke in broad daylight, in a hospital. No one mentioned miracles this time, but of course miracles only happen once. Most striking of all, she’d had the flying dream again, and this time it lingered tantalizingly on the fringes of her consciousness. The merest nudge, she felt, would be enough to bring it back into focus. But her waking consciousness was too gross and clumsy an instrument, and a few moments later it was impossible to believe that the experience hadn’t all been an illusion. She washed and dressed, drank several cups of tea, thanked the staff and set out to walk to the tube. It was a warm and sunny day, and her mood had changed too. In fact a miracle of sorts had occurred, after all, for she felt sane again. She knew that she had been in shock the evening before, and had acted pretty oddly. But all that was over now.

Her mood was briefly marred by the discovery, when she reached the tube station, that she had left her handbag behind at the hospital. Evidently some of the Valium must still be spicing her chemical soup, making her dopey and inattentive. For a moment she thought of going back to get it, but it was a long way through an unattractive part of West Kilburn. Besides, there was nothing of any value in the bag. Her money and credit cards were in her purse, which she had put in her coat pocket after paying the taxi driver the night before. The real problem was the loss of her keys. She would have to inform the police, then call a locksmith. It would take the whole day, just when she felt she needed a rest, peace and quiet.

It wasn’t until she reached Paddington that she understood what she was going to do. Coming up from the underground tunnels to change to the District line, she caught sight of a sign reading ‘Main Line Station’. Without a second thought, she followed the arrow, made her way to the booking office and bought a weekend return to Cheltenham. It was the perfect solution! She tried to phone her parents before boarding the train, but the phones were all in use or out of order. It didn’t matter, anyway. They would be only too pleased to see her, even though she turned up unannounced with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. They would understand, bless them. They always did. And from there she would phone the police, report the theft of her car keys and ask them to keep an eye on the house. It would be bliss to get out of London for a couple of days, to go home. It was just what she needed.

The train was scruffy, blisteringly hot and packed. Aileen put her coat on the overhead rack and squeezed into a corner seat, where she lay back and closed her eyes. When she awoke, they were already in the country. Bright sunlight fell on flat farmland with a roll of low hills in the distance. The carriage had emptied somewhat, although it was still quite crowded. On the seat opposite, a man with a smugly glum expression was leafing through a newspaper with the headline ‘LEAVE IT AHT, RON!’ Next to him, in the window seat, a relentlessly articulate middle-class father was talking the toddler on his knee through the scene outside, naming all the buildings and animals, explaining their functions and purpose, instructing his creation in the various amenities of a world that had been brought into being for his benefit.

Aileen slept in short snatches, during which the scene outside gradually changed from the bleak expanses of chalk and clay to the secretive limestone landscape she knew so well: valleys that seemed too big for the limpid streams lined with elms and willows, meadows full of unbothered sheep, villages that seemed to have been exposed by a process of erosion. Inside the train they were still in London, while out there, just the other side of the glass streaked with urban filth, was a whole countryside so intimately linked to Aileen’s childhood that for her it would never quite grow up.

When she next opened her eyes, the train had come to a stop in a small station. Sunlight fell hot and heavy on the seat where she was sitting, bringing out sweat under the light cotton dress which had seemed too scanty just the day before. Further down the carriage a portable stereo was dispensing a slouching reggae beat over which a rap artist was doing vocal karate. The seat opposite was now occupied by a harassed-looking mother and child. The mother was staring out of the window with an obstinate expression, pointedly ignoring the child, a girl of about six with a face like a blancmange, who was crying loudly.

‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ her mother snapped.

She can’t get up and she can’t get down, thought Aileen, that’s the problem. But she was careful not to say anything. The music gouged and stabbed, the child cried, the train did not move. There seemed no reason why it should ever move again. Sunlight streamed in through the grimy window, making the carriage unbearably hot and airless. The bawling child and the ghetto-blaster competed gamely for attention. No one else seemed bothered by any of this, but Aileen felt that if she stayed there a minute longer she would go mad. She opened the door and stepped out on to the platform, determined to find out what was going on and how much longer they were going to have to wait there. Outside the train, the air was deliciously cool and fresh, delicately scented. The sunlight was light and gentle, modulated by a slight breeze, no longer a penance.

‘Hey!’ A man in uniform waved at her from the next carriage. ‘Get back in!’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Aileen replied icily.

‘You can’t get off here! The train doesn’t stop here.’

The only advantage of living with a complete bastard, Aileen had realized, was that it gave you a head start in dealing with all the other bastards you came across in the course of your everyday life. The guard’s words made her remember one evening when she had made the mistake of greeting Douglas’s early return with, ‘Oh, I thought you were still at work.’ She hadn’t forgotten his crushing rejoinder.

‘There are doubtless various ingenious ways of demonstrating that you’re mistaken,’ she told the guard airily. ‘But under the circumstances it may be sufficient to point out that the train has stopped and that I have got off.’

The man didn’t respond, and at that moment the train started to move again. In the same instant Aileen realized what he had meant. This was not a normal stop but a disused station where the train had come to a halt waiting for a signal to change. The platform at her feet was still more or less intact, with the odd plant pushing up between the slabs, but the nameboards had been removed and the station building looked as though it had been hit by a shell.

The train disappeared round a bend and the signal changed soundlessly back to red. Aileen laughed to herself. It served her right! She’d been hoist with her own petard, or rather with Douglas’s, which she’d ill-advisedly borrowed. There was nothing for it but to walk to the nearest village and phone her parents. She couldn’t be far from home now and fortunately her father was always glad of an excuse to take the car out. ‘But what on earth happened?’ he would ask. ‘Well,’ she’d reply, ‘it’s a long story!’ She climbed through the slack barbed-wire fence which separated the platform from the station yard, and began to walk up the drive, the gravel crunching under her feet. It was hard to feel annoyed by what had happened when it had brought her this quiet, these scents and sounds, the wonderful sunlight and this breeze that ruffled the little golden hairs on her arms.

The track joined a narrow lane that crossed the stream and the railway and started to climb the other side of the valley. The verges were dense with overgrown vegetation, an impenetrable clutter of spindly tendrils matted together, bending under their own weight. Aileen had once feared the approach of winter, but now she found it a relief to think that all this superfluous growth would soon be swept away. It seemed almost threatening in its mindless proliferation. After a while the lane joined a wider road, boasting a white line in the middle. A signpost indicated one village five and three-quarter miles to the left and another half a mile to the right. On the other side of the road stood an imposing pair of stone gateposts, one of which bore a sign lettered in gold on a blue ground.