Asylum Page 14

  Oh, and he was good for Edgar too; she saw how Edgar tried to conceal his pleasure when Nick expressed genuine admiration for the work. Nick’s reaction mattered as hers did not: Nick was an artist, he knew what Edgar was up to. Later the pair of them went out and came back with a case of red wine and a box of groceries. That night was one of the happiest she’d known in the loft. The two men were in good spirits, there was plenty to eat and drink, they shouted and laughed and talked into the night, and Stella kept a quiet eye on Edgar throughout and secretly exulted in his mood. It was the old Edgar she saw that night, the funny Edgar, affectionate, spirited, smart, laconic, and dangerous. He argued with Nick about painters. A pad of paper appeared and Nick sketched out the paintings he was planning. Edgar made a series of rapid suggestions and Nick listened and nodded, chewing his lip in that way of his when he concentrated, getting it all down as fast as he could. Later, when Nick, drunk, was stretched full length on the couch smoking a cigar, Stella told Edgar she had no regrets. They were drunk too. He stood up unsteadily and came around to where she was sprawled in her chair with a foot on the side of the table and her skirt riding up her bare thighs. He held her shoulders and leaned in toward her and solemnly apologized for being such a shit.

  “You’re not a shit,” she said.

  “Oh yes I am,” he said.

  “He is,” said Nick from the couch.

  Nick passed out where he was and they slept late the next morning, which was a Sunday. Edgar was still unconscious when Stella got up and found the painter in the kitchen poring over his sketches and trying to decipher the notes he’d scrawled when Edgar was firing ideas at him. Stella said she needed some fresh air, she had a bad hangover, and Nick said he’d come with her. They left the place quietly so as not to wake Edgar.

  They wandered down to the river. Nick looked awful. He was in his old tweed jacket and paint-spattered trousers and shoes, and he was unshaven, red-eyed, and baggy-faced. It was a gray, chilly morning with spots of rain in the wind, and after a few minutes watching the river they were both too cold to stay out. Nick suggested they stop in at the pub.

  It was when they got back an hour later that the nightmare began. Edgar stood in the door of his studio glaring at them. He hadn’t opened the shutters so the place was still dark and his face was indistinct. The couple of drinks in the pub had mobilized the alcohol still in Stella’s blood from the night before and she was already squiffy.

  “Darling,” she cried, “we’ve brought you some breakfast!”

  Nick held up two quart bottles of brown ale. “Hair of the dog,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  Edgar hadn’t moved, he hadn’t said a word; he just stood there glittering at them, his bottom lip pulled down and his teeth pressed tightly together. Stella moved toward him, her laughter dying and concern now clouding her features. The other one, the sick one, was there, that was all there was; there was no Edgar at all.

  “What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

  “Don’t come near me.”

  She turned to Nick, who was frowning at Edgar, as troubled by his behavior as she was. They were both quite sober now.

  “Edgar—”

  “Get out, Nick. Don’t come back here.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Get the fuck out, Nick!”

  “Look—”

  Edgar moved toward him, clearly intending to hurt him. Nick backed away.

  “Get the fuck out!”

  Nick did what he was told. In silent amazement Stella watched him go.

  “Bastard,” muttered Edgar as Nick’s steps were heard clattering down the stairs.

  “Stop this, you’re frightening me—”

  “You little slut. With Nick.” He had started talking with a public-school accent like Nick’s.

  “I don’t understand.” But she did.

  “‘I don’t understand.’” He mimicked her. “Yes you do understand, don’t lie to me anymore.”

  A great weariness swept over her. She had seen the other one before but it had never been as bad as this. And he’d never turned on Nick before. How long would she have to wait this one out? She sat down and lit a cigarette. She felt sick and depressed.

  “You bore me to death with this nonsense,” she said quietly.

  She picked up an orange from the bowl on the table and turned it idly in her fingers. The next thing, he was across the room and dragging her onto the floor. She was aware of the orange rolling away toward the window and she wanted to tell him not to tread on it as they were expensive. Just as he had before, he half lifted her up and held her there by the wrists, shouting that he knew she was fucking Nick, did she think he was a fool? She said nothing, there was no point, and he slapped her, harder than the other time, and she fell back onto the floor and turned over and buried her face in her arms.

  She lay there, her breathing muffled, her body heaving. She couldn’t hear him. She didn’t know what he was doing. But he was still in the studio. Time seemed to slow down and she couldn’t tell how long it was since he’d hit her, whether it was one minute or ten. She dared not sit up. She feared enraging him further. Then she heard a sort of scraping sound. She couldn’t identify what it was. She lifted her head slightly and opened her eyes. She could see him on the other side of the room, standing at the table with his back to her.

  “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t turn, he didn’t answer. She again felt bored with it all. She sat up sighing and gingerly touched her face, which was throbbing painfully. She reached for her powder compact to inspect the damage. Still Edgar’s back was to her, and still he was making that curious scraping sound.

  “I said, What are you doing?”

  Then she recognized the sound. He was scraping a blade against a stone. She flipped open the compact. She was deeply alarmed. She stared at herself in the little round mirror. One side of her face was already changing color. There were little pulsing jabs of pain.

  “What are you sharpening?”

  No answer to this. She wondered if she should run for the door. How little she knew him after all. In the garden she’d known who he was. Then she’d have said that whatever happened in the future, whatever he did, it would be consistent with the man she knew. But he wasn’t the man she knew. He was somebody else. Or had she just invented that other man, created him out of her need?

  “What are you sharpening?”

  “A knife.”

  A knife to cut her head off with.

  “What are you sharpening a knife for?”

  She was strangely calm as she scrutinized her face. She remembers thinking she should be grateful he hadn’t broken the skin. Her eyes were smudged and she dabbed at them gingerly with a handkerchief. Her thoughts were of flight, for now he was going to murder her. Oddly the idea held no terror for her, she was detached from everything around her. The scale of things had changed. The compact she held in front of her face seemed far away, as though it had been compressed to the size of a coin. Her reflection was tiny. She couldn’t make out her features properly, her face was so small.

  “To cut up the orange with.”

  He was tiny and far away too. She saw him as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He had stopped his sharpening. He still had his back to her but he was watching her over his shoulder. A tiny man a long way away on the other side of a vast room.

  “To cut the orange?”

  Her voice seemed to issue from an unknown source, toneless and metallic. He crossed the room with his hand extended, offering a slice of the orange. She put it in her mouth. He didn’t want to murder her, he wanted to give her a piece of fruit. He watched her intently as she ate it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  It was so strange, the way he was watching her. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. He shook his head and turned away. She saw him cut another slice of the orange and tentatively bring it to his lips, as though he’d never tasted it before. And then she understood. She remembe
red something I had told her about the delusions he’d harbored about Ruth Stark. She remembered me telling her that he thought she was poisoning his food.

  This affected her in a way that nothing else had. His violence she had rationalized. His jealousy she could explain. But for him to think she was poisoning him with an orange!—now she was alarmed. Now she knew that for his sake she must get away from him, and everything we’d told her, everything she had so far successfully suppressed, it all came flooding into consciousness, and for the first time she was mortally afraid of him. Or rather, not of him, but of the madness that was in him, this was a point she stressed. She knew she mustn’t show her terror, for she believed now that at any moment he could become violent and do to her what he’d done to Ruth Stark. Perhaps with her he wouldn’t need to get drunk first, perhaps he was already out of control. She felt that if he caught the smell of her fear it would set him off.

  She wanted to flee but she didn’t dare leave the room. She sensed that he would know what she was thinking, and once he knew it would be the end.

  “I’m going up,” she said.

  She picked up her bag and slowly climbed the staircase and sat on the mattress. She wiped the stickiness of the orange off her fingers and resumed inspecting her face in her compact mirror. Then she reached for her book, settled back on the bed, and without once glancing down into the studio she began to read. She could feel him watching her. Will it be now? The calm she was projecting was utterly sham. Her heart was beating fast, her skin was moist with fear, and panic threatened at every moment to overwhelm her.

  All afternoon he stayed in the studio. He worked on her head. I think I can guess what a superhuman effort of will he made to stay in control. I think by working on her head he was trying to see her clearly, to see the truth of her, and so master and defeat the madness that was in him. Upstairs Stella guessed nothing of this, she simply prayed for him to go out. She dared make only mental preparations for her own departure. She lay among the bedclothes, her back propped against the bricks, smoking cigarettes. Having for so long denied what she knew about the murder of Ruth Stark, she could now think of nothing else. That he should think she was poisoning him—oh, he was mad, he was mad, and despite her terror she still found it in her to pity him, for she understood his madness as disease. She had lived among forensic psychiatrists far too long to forget that.

  • • •

  He shuffled out without a word shortly after dark, she heard him go, that strong man. She wasted no time. She had planned precisely what to do. She packed her suitcase and got dressed in less than ten minutes. In her raincoat, head scarf, and sunglasses she ran down the stairs and along the passage at the bottom. There she waited a moment and then peered out into the yard. It was empty. She walked quickly out to the street. She paused by the wall to check that he wasn’t on his way back. He wasn’t. There was a cold wind off the river. She hurried away.

  Half an hour later she cautiously entered the saloon bar of a shabby little pub near Waterloo. It was a clean, warm, empty, dangerous room; there were rooms like this all over London, she thought, rooms that appeared to promise safety but were in fact alive with the possibility that he would walk in. Just one man in a gray raincoat, up at the bar with his evening paper and a glass of beer in front of him. A carpet on the floor and a gas fire burning. Beside the fire, in the corner, a small round table with metal legs. Just the man at the bar, the warm fire, the warm low lighting, cigarettes and alcohol, and outside, cold and twilight, an empty studio, a madman. She would sit at that little table for a while and have a drink. The woman behind the bar sold her a packet of cigarettes and a large gin and tonic, and she carried them over to the fire and installed herself, bruised cheek to the wall. She poured tonic into her gin and lit a cigarette. She was aware after a minute or two that the man at the bar was watching her, but when she looked up he turned back to his paper.

  It was warm and quiet and the lighting was subdued. There was tonic left in the bottle so she bought another gin. While she was up at the bar the man in the raincoat asked her if she’d like to join him for a drink. No, she said, she was waiting for her husband. He probably thought it odd, she told me, that she was wearing sunglasses. He probably wondered about the bruise on her face. She wasn’t concerned with what he thought. She took her gin back to her table by the fire. She was waiting. She had chosen this pub because there was a phone box outside. She had called Nick’s flat and been told he was out. She would try again in half an hour.

  An hour later she was still there. The sadness kept welling up inside her, wave after wave of it, and she told herself fiercely, in a tone she recognized as Max’s, not to be silly, not to give way to self-pity—to pull herself together. Ironic that one of Max’s precepts for the management of unruly female emotion should come to her aid in this particular extremity. Pull yourself together, dear, you’re in a public place, do you want to make an exhibition of yourself? This distracted her, the idea of making an exhibition of herself. Putting a frame around the little table and its weepy occupant, a somber black frame and under it the title of the piece, Melancholy. She smiled, her face hurt, soundlessly the tears streamed down. From the public bar came the sound of men’s laughter. Enough of this, Stella, she said to herself, but it didn’t help, it only seemed to make it worse, and at that point the man at the bar turned and brazenly scrutinized her, so the public exhibition rose to her feet and went out to try and reach Nick for the third time.

  The flat was tiny but it was better than the loft. What a pleasure it was to have a proper bathroom! Nick had been worried sick about her. He had gone back to the loft and found it empty. He hadn’t known what to think but he’d feared the worst. His relief was enormous when he heard her voice on the phone. He came to the pub, they had a drink together, then he took her back to the flat. She told him that more than anything she wanted a bath.

  She undressed in the bathroom. She sank into the hot water and lay there with her eyes closed. She felt she hadn’t been properly clean for a long time. Some of the unhappiness and squalor and anxiety and guilt of the last days lifted. After a while she examined her body, her white skin, her breasts, her limbs, her pale, delicate hands and feet. Max had lost interest in her body after three or four years of marriage, for he lacked the imagination to sustain sexual attraction. She had then been more or less celibate until Edgar. But she couldn’t think about him now. She blocked him out.

  She emerged from her bath and powdered herself in front of the long mirror in the door.

  Dear Nick. He was not well equipped to offer hospitality and succor to a distressed woman but he was trying. He insisted she have the bed, he would sleep in the armchair. So she climbed gratefully into bed in her dressing gown as he fussed around her, getting her a drink.

  “Would you like something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry, Nick.”

  She was demure and gracious, as befits a lady in straitened circumstances. She liked this weak, messy, good-hearted man. His paint-spattered trousers had always made her smile; she and Edgar had a private joke about them, they’d suggested he exhibit them as art. Poor Nick, he’d laughed, but the next time they saw him he was wearing clean trousers, though they didn’t stay clean for long. Now he sat forward on the edge of the armchair, rubbing his long hands together and shyly telling her how he’d felt when he’d heard her voice on the telephone that evening, the enormous relief.

  “I knew him when he started getting ideas about Ruth,” he said.

  “Oh, Ruth,” said Stella. She didn’t want to hear about Ruth now.

  “Nick,” she said as an idea occurred to her.

  “What?”

  “Has Edgar ever been here?”

  Nick looked sick and said yes.

  She couldn’t sleep, and nor could Nick, sprawled in the armchair under a blanket, tossing about, trying to get comfortable; she wondered at one point whether she should invite him into the bed with her. Later she slipped over to the window and pulled
back the curtain an inch or two. The rain was coming down steadily, slanting down through the glow of the streetlights. The narrow street, slicked and gleaming, was deserted. What had she expected, to see him standing under the streetlight in the rain, gazing up at the window?

  A little later she heard Nick groping for his cigarettes, trying to make no noise, and then came the flare of his match.

  “I’m not asleep,” she said into the darkness.

  “I can’t sleep either.”

  “Nick.”

  “What?”

  “He’ll come here, won’t he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m frightened.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand.

  “It’s not him,” she said. “It’s because he’s sick. You know what he’s like when he’s not sick.”

  Nick didn’t say anything. He was holding her hand tightly. She realized he was aroused. It had never occurred to her that Nick desired her. Had Edgar had seen it, was this how it had all started? Was it all Nick’s fault?

  “The door’s locked,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand. He leaned toward her and she let him kiss her. He slipped his hand under the blanket and tentatively touched her breast.

  “No, Nick.”

  “Sorry.”

  He went back to his armchair.

  “Try and sleep,” she said.

  He came at dawn. They were awakened by the sound of the door handle being turned. They never did find out exactly how he got into the building, for the front door was locked. They sat up and stared with horror at the door.

  “Nick, open the door.”

  His muffled voice terrified her. It wasn’t him, it was still the other one with the strange artificial accent. Nick stared wildly at her, shaking his head. In the gloom she read the terror in his face.