Asylum (10 page)

I am satisfied this is the truth. I. don’t believe they planned it together. I don’t think she was actively working against us.

It happened much as I said it would. The press resurrected Edgar’s case, and Stella was forced into an unwilling recognition of what had brought him here. He had killed his wife with a hammer, and he had mutilated her corpse. Two psychiatrists testified at the trial that he suffered from a paranoid psychosis, and the insanity defense was accepted by the court. I admitted him the following day. Now the press wanted to know why such a man was allowed to leave the hospital on a daily basis and work in the gardens of the estate.

They were dreadful days for all of us. In the deputy superintendent’s house Brenda took charge of Charlie, leaving Stella and Max to handle the crisis undistracted. Stella feels she succeeded in concealing her feelings, which were concentrated, of course, on her absent lover. The deception she practiced during these days cost her dearly; she was after all in the heart of the camp of the hunters. Max came home from the hospital most days at lunchtime, and Brenda and Stella tried to create out of
thin air a warm, womanly flurry of domesticity around him to give him some sense of his home as a haven, a safe place insulated from the appalling pressures he faced in the hospital at this time.

Everyone was under such scrutiny! There were reporters all over the estate, asking questions of anyone who would talk to them. In a summer devoid of major news Edgar Stark effortlessly dominated the front pages. We felt besieged. Charlie was forbidden to leave the garden. On the one occasion that he disobeyed this order a reporter approached him in a friendly way and, on learning who he was, asked him embarrassing questions about his father, such as what Daddy talked about at lunch. Poor Charlie came home confused and tearful, afraid that he’d done something very wrong in talking to the man but too polite not to.

No working party appeared on the estate. Stella wandered about the garden and the stillness was alive with his absence. She went into the vegetable garden to pick lettuce and gooseberries. Amid all that greenness, all that summer growth, there was no glimpse of yellow corduroy by the conservatory at the far end. The trees hanging over the garden walls seemed weighted with a peculiar dull heaviness, and cast deep pools of shadow. It was all so full-blown, the grass in the meadow thick and high and the climbing roses blowsy in their second flush, but in the ripeness there was no lover. She wandered down the gravel path, her basket on her arm, and paused by the phlox she’d transplanted from old clumps in the spring. She inhaled the fragrance. A fat bumblebee crawled up a thistle head then lifted into the drowsy air and sailed away. She sat on the bench and picked with her fingernail at a spot of lichen furring the soft gray wood. Then she went into the conservatory.

Even the conservatory seemed desolate, abandoned, forlorn. Like her. He had begun to replace the rotten woodwork, and the new struts and sashes were notched into the sound wood of the original with a clean exactitude of fit. The pattern of old wood and new was pleasing to the eye. She lay down on the cracked stones, among the weeds, where they had first lain together.
Against her will the tears came. She brushed them away and rose to her feet, left the conservatory and moved purposefully along the path, stooping to pull slim sticks of rhubarb from the soil. The garden missed him as much as she did. Here and there clumps of flowers were drooping; the hydrangeas had collapsed for want of water. Everything needed deadheading, and the path through the rough grass of the meadow was sprinkled with dandelions gone to seed. The hosepipe hung unused and neglected on its post by the tap in the hedge. The freshness of the garden was lost.

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.