Asylum Page 8

  She mentioned this to Brenda when they were getting lunch ready. “I shall have to do it myself, I suppose.”

  “What a nuisance. And here I was thinking you were the only woman I knew who’d properly solved the servant problem.”

  Stella glanced at her. A slight movement of Brenda’s lips indicated that she was being facetious.

  Stella didn’t know what, if anything, Jack or I had said to Max about his failure to report the theft of his clothes immediately. It was hard for her to get anything out of him at all, beyond the fact that the search was now concentrated on London and that there were no leads.

  “He’s gone to ground,” said Max.

  “Someone’s sheltering him,” said Brenda.

  He was safe, this was what Stella heard. He was safe, and he was thinking of her; whatever little room he was holed up in, he was keeping his head down and thinking of her. But as the days passed, and September came, there were times when she was filled with despair, when she faced the possibility that she would never see him again. It upset her so badly however that she pushed the thought away and remembered instead the conversations they’d had and the understandings they’d arrived at. He would not abandon her, she was certain of this. She did not lose faith. She told herself to be patient, and to take comfort in the fact of his safety, wherever he was. She felt she was in a state of suspension; nothing had ended, but it was changing. She did not try to imagine what would happen next, for such thoughts made her miserable, they strayed into practical questions that were for the moment unanswerable. She simply asked herself what he would want her to do, and answered that he would want her to be, yes, patient, silent, and relieved that he was safe.

  She drank constantly, it seemed essential if she were to maintain any sort of equilibrium at all. She avoided practical thinking and remained as much as possible buoyed by a sort of blind faith; that, and gin. There were moments—moments of practical thinking—when she understood that blind faith and gin couldn’t remain her sole spiritual nourishment forever; but while she could manage it she would. Everyone else was so utterly distracted by the crisis, by the eyes of the world, that none of them noticed that she drifted through her days in a state of detachment and abstraction, functioning as she was expected to but not ever, really, totally there. None of them noticed but me. I was watching her.

  She had one bad shock during this period. She was in the vegetable garden with the hosepipe one morning. The hot weather continued. There had been no rain for weeks. The soil was slightly sandy and needed lots to drink, and to thirst she was particularly sympathetic just then. So she hooked up the hosepipe to the tap in the hedge and set about giving everything in the garden a drink of water. She moved steadily along with the hose, in Wellington boots, light summer frock, sunglasses, and wide-brimmed straw hat, and there was a pleasantly mindless quality to the experience, a quality she sought in all her activity during these strained days. The sound of footsteps on the gravel behind her was unwelcome. She turned, the hose in her hand still gushing into the soil, and less welcome still was the sight of Jack Straffen advancing along the path toward her. Vigilance. Vigilance. She called to him to wait while she turned off the water. She came tramping out of the lettuce patch, the hose on the ground still gushing, and went to the tap and turned it off.

  “Max is up at the hospital,” she said.

  Jack was in a black suit and a Panama hat and looked hot and uncomfortable and very much alien to the greenery all about him.

  “I wanted to talk to you. Can we sit down?”

  She took him to the bench beside the conservatory and they sat in the shade. Jack took off his hat and set it on the bench.

  “Smoke?”

  “No thank you.”

  “A man like Edgar Stark,” he said, and then stopped. He tapped the ash from his cigarette with deliberation onto the gravel at their feet and stared at it. He sighed. “We have a number of patients diagnosed as paranoids. Now, these patients, Stella, are every bit as dangerous as our schizophrenics who’ve killed. The peculiar thing is, in many of them there’s not a flicker of psychosis, not a flicker. We don’t medicate them. We try and treat them, but not I’m afraid with any great success. We can manage them, we can contain them, but we don’t really know how to treat them. Because we don’t really understand what they are.”

  Is he talking about his patients, she wondered, or women?

  “Appearances to the contrary, Edgar Stark is a deeply disturbed individual.”

  “I know this, Jack.”

  “I wonder if you do. Do you know what he did to that woman after he killed her?”

  She said nothing.

  “He decapitated her. Then he enucleated her. He cut her head off, and then he took her eyes out.”

  She gazed from their shady seat down the length of the garden, and found it remarkable how the plants she’d watered looked more alive already than their neighbors. Beside the bench at either end, in the shade, was set a half-barrel that Edgar had filled with soil and planted with winter cyclamen. She remembered him sawing the barrel in half. She’d held it steady for him. They needed water too.

  “Shall we have a drink?”

  “It’s not ten yet, Stella.”

  “The garden will be ruined without the working party. Look at it.”

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

  She turned toward him. “I don’t know what it is you want,” she said. “You think I’m hiding something. I’m not.”

  “Did he ever touch you?”

  “No!”

  “Did he ever ask you for money?”

  “No. Don’t you think I’d have told Max if anything like that had happened?”

  Jack took his spectacles off. He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He sat up straight and leaned against the bench and stared out into the sunlit garden. He was a big, worried man in his sixties with shrewd eyes and a gray, cropped skull. He was close to retirement. He didn’t want this problem. The gold band on his ring finger gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the ivy over their heads.

  “I don’t believe you’re telling me the whole truth,” he said.

  She didn’t protest. She made a shrugging motion and shook her head slightly, as though at a loss how to convince him.

  “Stella, if you’re in some sort of trouble, if he’s persuaded you into something—”

  “What?”

  “I know Edgar Stark. I understand how he operates. There is no shame in admitting that he has involved you in his case, won your sympathy, set you against Max and Peter and myself. He would have identified you immediately as someone he could use. Did he tell you we were going to discharge him shortly? None of it is true. But I can’t help you unless you tell me what happened.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  Jack sighed. “Nothing happened.”

  “No.”

  “You won’t tell me.”

  “I am telling you.”

  He picked up his Panama. “Perhaps it’s as well for you that he’s gone. Come and talk to me soon. Will you?”

  She nodded.

  She watched him walk heavily back down the path. Her heart was beating very fast and her hands were trembling.

  Vigilance. There was nothing Jack had said that Edgar hadn’t already told her he’d say. She made her way slowly back along the path. She was uncomfortably aware of how persuasive the superintendent was, of how easy it would be to succumb to the warm, paternal tone he employed as he offered her his understanding and support. It required vigilance, and more than vigilance, it required a deliberate act of will to keep in the foreground of consciousness that it was Jack Straffen who was attempting to manipulate her, not Edgar.

  Oh, he was cunning, my Edgar. He had prepared her for something like this, and shown her how she should react. He had secured her silence, and his own security, in advance; and without even telling her he intended to escape.

  During the period immediately after the escape Stella
and Max kept a curious distance from each other. She had good reason to avoid him, but why, she wondered, was he so wary of her? Because he was afraid that the rumors were true. He knew her well enough to entertain a doubt. She admitted to me at the end of a long, emotional session that a year before any of this happened she’d told Max that she was not prepared to be buried alive in a cold marriage, a white marriage, because his own sexual drive was weak, or because he lacked the moral or physical imagination to continue to find her attractive, or because he channeled all his libido into his work, or because of whatever explanation he cared to offer. She thought he had probably discounted the threat implicit in this ultimatum, but now he was faced with the possibility not only that she’d carried it out but that she’d done so with a patient. This was something that must be pushed away, for to see it as feasible was to accept responsibility for the failure of the marriage, at least at the physical level, and perhaps for Stella’s disastrously ill-judged choice of a lover as well. Max was not prepared to talk to her about any of this. As far as he was concerned, the best medicine was denial.

  So they moved around that large sad house during the last hot days of summer like ghosts, drifting past each other, saying nothing that mattered, barely acknowledging each other. What substance there was, it came from Brenda, whose concern for the rituals of civilized life acted as a sort of adhesive and bonded them into a semblance of a family, which was important for Charlie, whose sense of excitement at this unfolding drama was tempered by the strain of living in a house of ghosts. Brenda held them together and Stella, meanwhile, sustained herself as best she could.

  Eventually Edgar slipped off the front pages and then, with no fresh reports of him, the papers lost interest altogether. Gradually the hospital adjusted to his absence and the crisis softened into something approaching normal routine. The weather broke at last, and after weeks of hot dry sunshine it started to rain.

  She stood at the drawing-room window watching a sudden shower of rain. After several minutes it turned to a light drizzle, which then gave way to a clearing of the clouds and the tentative reappearance of the sun. The garden glistened and shone. Everything seemed suddenly greener, more vigorous; but not for long. The clouds came back, the sky darkened, and again it rained. This changeable weather persisted for a few days, and we were soon talking about the summer in tones that said, Despite everything it had been glorious but it was over now and England could expect no better. Brenda went back to London, and Stella began to think about getting Charlie ready for school.

  She says she never gave up hope. At no point did she turn from him in her mind. She never lost the feeling that he was with her. She had learned to trust him. There was no good reason why she should trust him, and that in a way was why she did; trust, and faith, and love, it seemed, were what they were because they were aroused and sustained regardless of reason, because they lay deeper than reason. She had no idea what was happening to him. My own guess was that he’d slipped into some shadowy London underworld of artists and criminals, but I couldn’t be more precise than that; I had quietly talked to everyone I knew who might have information, and to my frustration drawn a complete blank. I knew he would turn up eventually; my concern, of course, was that without treatment, without my guiding hand, he would form a relationship with a woman and his illness would blossom anew.

  In an odd way my own intense preoccupation with Edgar’s whereabouts and welfare was mirrored in Stella: her sexual and romantic infatuation with him I later saw as a reflection, primitive and distorted, yes, but a reflection all the same, of my own solicitude for a sick man going untreated in what must have been a situation of great tension and uncertainty. She told me about those days, and I recognized in her experience something of my own. The evenings were the hardest, she said. Max would go to his study after dinner and she’d drift into the drawing room. When he went up to bed an hour or so later she didn’t go with him, she told him she wanted to read for a bit longer. She’d hear the bedroom door close, and that was her signal to put aside her novel and seriously fortify her drink.

  The hours that followed were Edgar’s hours. She gave herself over to memories of their summer. She referred to her diary; she had not kept a written account, but by means of cryptic markings on particular days she could remember each meeting, and each act of love, as she called it. There was a way she found of holding an image in her mind as though it were cigarette smoke until she had entirely absorbed it, all the substance and meaning and feeling that were in it, and some images, she said, were more potent in this regard than others. In the cricket pavilion once, a few seconds after sex, he laid his head on her shoulder, and she listened to his breathing subside. Then he lifted his face, and she had no words for the expression in his eyes, no means of describing what it was they silently said to each other during those seconds before their thoughts turned again to practicalities, to haste and concealment. In the stillness, only this wordless recognition, and it seemed to her there was a breakdown of their separate egos, a falling away of personality, a sense of identity, a sense that they were essence to essence, fused—

  I listened patiently to all this and did not ask the question, What of him? What of Edgar? Did he, too, feel that they had been essence to essence, fused? At the time I believed he had deliberately aroused these feelings in her in order to use her, and that once he was clear away from the hospital she would never hear from him again. I was wrong.

  One evening around this time Max invited me to dinner. It was just the three of us. We had a drink in the drawing room and the conversation inevitably turned to Edgar. Max was saying that the escape was carefully planned. He kept worrying at it. He had become rather a bore on the subject.

  “All he needed was street clothes. He waited until the house was empty. Once he was sure nobody was in the house he didn’t waste a second.”

  “Fortunate,” I murmured, glancing at Stella, “that you and he are the same size.”

  “Fortunate for him,” said Max, frowning. He disliked this aspect of the thing, this identification, however indirect, between himself and Edgar Stark. He sat forward in his chair, his glass and his spectacles between his fingers, the spectacles dangling. Since the escape he had been unable to shake off the guilty awareness that after discovering the theft of his clothes he had delayed, and allowed Edgar to get away. He was too experienced a psychiatrist not to have analyzed, as I had, why he’d delayed, and by this time Stella, too, had realized that it was because he’d reached the conclusion that Edgar had entered the bedroom at her invitation. Better let him run than face that.

  “Something I’ve never properly understood,” I said, rather maliciously, I’m afraid, “is this business of drink being taken from the pavilion. Presumably he only got your keys the day he took your clothes, which was the day he escaped.”

  Max shook his head. “I don’t think it came from the pavilion,” he said.

  “How odd,” said Stella. I was watching her, she said, in that rather dreamy way I had, when it occurred to her that there was nothing in the least dreamy about the busy, intelligent mind behind those lazy eyes. She suddenly wondered how much I knew about what had gone on in the cricket pavilion. At that moment the telephone rang and she put her glass down.

  “It’ll be on the table in five minutes,” she said. She went out into the hall and closed the door behind her, and I heard her pick up the telephone.

  I learned only later it was him.

  At the dinner table I remarked that I’d been right about Edgar still having friends in London. “They knew he was coming,” I said. “There was a place ready for him. We won’t get him now, not unless he does something stupid.”

  “They always do something stupid,” Max muttered, picking at his curry. Stella glanced from Max to me with the bright, interested look of the good psychiatrist’s wife. She was alert, elated even, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder why. It should have, considering how grim this talk must have sounded to a woman in love.

&nb
sp; “Really, Peter?”

  “I don’t think so. I doubt we’ll see Edgar Stark again.”

  The conversation moved on. Stella cleared the table and took the plates out to the kitchen. She stood at the sink, staring across the yard, her heart on fire. You can imagine what it meant to me, that call, she said.

  Yes, I said, I could.

  But I couldn’t imagine why, after successfully escaping from the hospital, Edgar was risking everything to see her again. What I have since realized is that it was connected to his art. After making no work for almost five years, he sent for Stella because he needed a new head. And because of what she was, and who she was—but most of all because she loved him—it had to be hers.

  The days now dragged with a terrible slowness. Even at this late stage she was not immune to panic. Am I mad? she asked herself. How can I jeopardize everything, how can I be so irresponsible, a grown-up woman, a mother? But the idea of seeing him again dispelled all doubt and hesitation.

  On the Sunday night she told Max she was going up to London the next day. He asked her if she would need the car to get to the station and she said she’d take it if he didn’t want it; otherwise she’d call a taxi. How polite they were to each other. When she went to bed that night Max was still awake. His voice came out of the darkness.

  “Darling?”

  She made a sleepy noise.

  “This bloody business has blighted everything. I’m sorry.”

  He turned onto his side, facing her. His hand came stealing under the sheet.

  “I’m very tired, Max.”

  “We haven’t for weeks.”

  She turned away from him. He fitted his body around the curve of her spine so his legs were pressed against the backs of hers. Why tonight?

  “Go to sleep,” she murmured. She could feel him getting hard.