The Tryst Read Online Free

Sunday School teacher’s account of heaven must have been correct after all when two of Raymond’s friends appeared at her bedside. They explained that when they first saw her lying on the lawn they’d just freaked out and how at first the ambulance pigs wouldn’t take her because it didn’t look like they had the bread but fortunately Beth was holding because her connection was out of town so she hadn’t been able to score. ‘You must have been just like totally relaxed,’ the girl told her. ‘I read about a baby once, it fell like from a fourth-floor balcony into the parking lot and survived. That’s because babies are so naturally relaxed. It’s only like later on that we get screwed up and have to do yoga and stuff.’ The doctors and nurses confirmed that she was lucky to be alive. As for having escaped without fractures or internal injuries of any kind, just superficial abrasions and bruising, well, it was nothing short of a miracle. ‘It must be thirty feet from that window to the front yard,’ one of them remarked in a tone of near disgust, as though Aileen were a notorious criminal who had been acquitted on a technicality.
    A few days later she came home in a taxi to find the house fenced off behind corrugated iron sheeting marked with the name of the demolition company whose bulldozers were already at work scouring the garden. When Aileen glanced up at the attic window, still propped open on its curled stay of wrought-iron, a cry sounded quite distinctly through the rumbling turbulence of the machinery: high, piercing, long drawn out. It was the cry of a baby in distress. Only then did Aileen realize that she had not escaped without loss after all, that a transaction had taken place, that her life had been bought at the cost of another.
    The ousted hippie community had temporarily reformed in a flat a few blocks away, and it was there, over the course of the following week, that the final act of Aileen’s pregnancy took place. The physical effects were scarcely more painful or dramatic than a very heavy period, but the grief was beyond anything she had ever imagined. She wept almost continuously for days. There was nothing to say, and in any case no one she could have said it to. No one knew that she was mourning not one person, but three: Raymond, their child, and herself. For although she had survived, Aileen knew that from now on she would always be a survivor, someone who was alive nevertheless . As soon as she had recovered sufficiently, she wound up her affairs. After settling her hospital bill, she had just enough for a standby ticket to London. Her first reaction on returning was one of astonishment that the place was still there. Although she had been in California for less than a year, its apocalyptic rhetoric had affected her so deeply that she could hardly believe her eyes when she found Britain still going about its seedy unglamorous business, as unimpressed by prophecies of global doom as it had been by the auguries of a new Aquarian age. Aileen literally found herself back where she had started, with nothing to show for her year abroad but a hole in her c.v. and a circle of friends whom she had alienated by either ignoring or patronizing them while she and Raymond had been flying high together. She spent the rest of that year picking up the pieces. First and foremost she needed a job. The best chance of finding one seemed to be in clinical psychology, and with a little help from her former tutor she obtained a place in the MSc course at the Institute of Psychiatry. One of her classes involved travelling to Bloomsbury in order to gain ward experience at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square. She was aware that part of the hospital building was occupied by the Institute of Neurology, but her whole life before Raymond now seemed so unreachably distant that when a tall sandy-haired man stopped her in the corridor one day and identified himself as Douglas Macklin, she felt