The Tryst by Michael Dibdin Page A

away from home, you see, and the first time I’d been on a train, so it stuck in my mind. I remember the doors were inches thick, as heavy as a gate. My mother warned me, “You catch your fingers in that and it’ll have them off as quick as trimming carrots.” My mother didn’t like trains. She said you got fleas off the seats. I don’t suppose mothers have changed much, have they? Anyway, I must have liked it, because here I am, near eighty years on and I can see it as well as I can see you, my lad. To open the window you had to pull down on a thick leather strap, like at the barber’s, only it had holes punched in it to take a brass peg. You let the strap run back inside the door, the window came rattling down and you could look out. There was a smell of smoke and a spray of wet steam in the air, and every once in a while you’d get a smut of soot in your eye that set you blinking. That’s what I remember most from that holiday, that and the pier where we went in the afternoon to listen to the band. There was a flight of metal steps, just like a staircase, which went down into the water at the end of the pier. As the waves passed, in the troughs between them, you could see that the steps went on down below the water, all covered in barnacles and seaweed, but still as solid as ever. If I close my eyes I can still see that staircase leading down into the sea and hear the band playing and see the clouds drifting across the sky, as big and calm as battleships …’
    They were sitting in the snug clutter of the basement room in Grafton Avenue, the old man and the boy. To celebrate the commencement of the story he had promised to tell, Ernest Matthews had prepared a high tea of soft-boiled eggs with bread and butter cut into inch-wide fingers. Steve had been instructed at some length in the correct method of opening his egg, by tapping the shell repeatedly with his spoon and then peeling off the shards and the silky clinging inner membrane. When they finished eating, the old man had retired to his armchair and lit the pipe that now lay forgotten in his hand. Steve sat by the table, his eyes fixed on the stove, where rising currents of hot air made the tiles of the fireplace ripple like stones on the bed of a stream.
    ‘I remember the sea, too,’ the old man went on. ‘It seemed so big, so endless, and all in movement. I’d only seen the countryside before, and round our way that was all tucks and folds, so you couldn’t see far. Later on, I found out that once upon a time all that land had been under water too, and that the hills I used to walk upon were made of the skeletons of the creatures that lived in those ancient seas. Just imagine, those hills and valleys, the very houses, were all made of nothing but dead bodies! I lived in a cemetery, lad, and thought it a paradise.’
    He put his pipe between his lips and torched it briefly with the lighter.
    ‘But we must get on, and keep to the story, or we’ll never have done. The trouble is, this skull of mine is packed with memories like the inside of a golf ball, and once I get started there’s no stopping me. First I must tell you about the Hall. Now take this house here. What we’re in now is the kitchen, as was. There’s two more rooms like it downstairs, as well as any amount of cupboards and larders and so on. On the first floor there’s the sitting room and dining room, and three bedrooms above that, making eight rooms in all, not counting the attic. There are many meaner houses than this, I dare say, and yet to call it by the same name as the one where I grew up seems a sort of insult to the language. I’m not speaking about the architecture, mind, though I dare say that there was plenty of that too. It was Elizabethan, you see, which is why the shape of it was like a capital E, with two wings at either end and the great hall jutting out in the centre. But all that meant nothing to me, though I liked the idea, Elizabeth being my mother’s name. What I