Asylum (12 page)

“Here you are,” said Nick.

Stella got out of the car. The air smelled of ripe oranges. The windows of the buildings around the yard seemed to peer down at her like so many blind eyes. Old lorry tires were stacked against a wall, baking in the sun. A scrap of newspaper lifted slightly in the still air. Nick left her standing by the car in the middle of the yard and disappeared back out into the street. When he returned a few seconds later he took her to a passage at the rear of one of the buildings. It was dark and smelled of urine. It occurred to Stella that she might be murdered.

He pushed open a door at the end of the passage. A steep, narrow staircase climbed into shadows. The air was damp and chill. There was a smell of mildew and shit now.

“Go on up, then,” he urged her.

“Where is he?”

“He’s on the top floor. Go on.”

He gazed at her with faint amusement and she felt she was being mocked, but was she being mocked because she had accompanied him so willingly to this place, or because she hesitated now, a fine lady out of her element and losing her frail resolve? He was no longer comic, he was sinister, but she started up the stairs, what else was she to do? They sagged and creaked under her feet. The air was clammy. A wooden rail, smooth to the touch, was loosely screwed into the plaster. She realized he was not following her and she paused, one hand on the rail, and looked back over her shoulder. He stood at the foot of the staircase, his face turned up toward her. He gestured upward with a long forefinger, keep going up, all the way up.

She passed several landings on her way up. At the top a dusty
window looked down onto the yard below. She saw Nick opening the door of the Vauxhall and she drew back, knocking over a length of metal pipe that clattered onto the floorboards and raised a small cloud of dust. There was a door on the landing and she hesitantly pushed it open. She was desperately frightened. She was looking into a room so large that the light from its row of windows didn’t penetrate beyond the beams down the middle of the floor. Her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. There were doors at the far end, doors in walls from which much of the plaster had crumbled away, exposing the studs and laths beneath.

“Edgar?”

She came a few steps into the room. Her high heels seemed deafening on the floorboards. She was wearing a head scarf and a light tan raincoat with the belt not buckled but tied in a knot, and she had a large bag slung over her shoulder. A bearded figure stood in the shadows watching her. The sudden sight of him caused her to cry out. He moved toward her, grinning, and she ran to him.

She got back shortly after six, and when she came down from her bath she found Max home from the hospital. He was in a good mood, a rare event these days. He wanted to know had her shopping been successful. His interest was feigned, and it was simple for her to give him the impression of annoyances and frustrations that would necessitate yet another trip to London on Friday. He suggested a walk around the garden before dinner and she thought it politic to agree.

They went first to the vegetable garden, and she found it ironic that, technically at least, this was Max’s territory, for she sensed her lover’s presence everywhere. He had grown a beard! On a warm evening in early September the air was still and sultry. Summer’s growth had exhausted the soil, and all that would remain after this brief interlude of ripeness and maturity was decay. There was a din of birds from the trees beyond the garden wall.

“Did you see Brenda?” said Max as they wandered along the path, pausing here and there to inspect this plant or that.

“I didn’t have time.”

“No, why would you go and see her? You’ve had quite enough of my mother this summer. All this other business, of course …”

His voice trailed off.

“Brenda and I get along if we have to. Actually, I was glad she was here. She was a help with Charlie.”

They had reached the conservatory. No further work had been done and it seemed a ruin in its skeletal incompletion, the great white frame glowing feebly in the fading light. Max sighed. Inexorably the conversation had turned to the days after Edgar’s escape. Stella could never properly talk to Max about the events of those days, and how they had affected his position in the hospital. If they had. Perhaps they hadn’t? They sat on the bench by the wall and smoked. Max asked her again about her day in London and it cost her an effort to shift him back to his more usual themes, which revolved around his work. She asked herself why she was getting all this attention, and remembered him saying in bed a few nights before that he had lost her. It occurred to her then that if she was to see Edgar regularly in London she must get her marriage back to the way it had been. She now required Max to find her invisible again.

He reached for her hand. “I love it here in the evening,” he said. “Are you getting cold?”

“I’m a little chilly,” she said. “I should have brought my cardigan.”

“We’ll go in.”

They walked back along the path in the twilight, holding hands.

I didn’t learn until some days later of this trip to London, or of the one she took later in the week. Stella’s position at this time was precarious. In the early days of the affair, desperate though they were, the pressure, oddly, was less acute. Then she had
feared that it might be the very constraints of their situation that were driving the passion, and that without those constraints and the tension they bred she might find herself limply blankly wondering what it was that had provoked her to take such risks. There were times, she confessed, when she had even hoped, in some corner of her mind, some small place where prudence, safety, and security were priorities, in that place she had faintly hoped to see the thing defused and herself set free of this compulsion over which she seemed to have no control whatsoever—

Not now. Now all the structures that had previously sustained daily life—her responsibilities, the family, appearances, routines—all had become shells merely. She sustained them, but only for reasons of cold pragmatism: she wished to attract no attention and no interference, otherwise, she said, she could not go to him.

So what happened?

She wept a little as she described how she’d gone up the stairs and into the loft that day, and there he was, waiting for her. They wasted no time. They hurried down to the far end of the loft, to a room he called his studio, and climbed a staircase to a sort of sleeping platform, where they lay down together on the mattress. Again I probed her, curious to learn if this sex differed from the sex she’d had with him on the hospital estate, but all she would say was that for the first time they didn’t have to be quiet about it. Primitive, urgent—and loud, this was my surmise. Later, sprawled naked on top of the blankets, they talked about the days following his escape, about how, after he’d reached London, Nick had come for him and brought him here to his loft and given him his studio. She said she’d never been in a room like this before. It was raw industrial space, with grimy brick walls and high ceilings hung with pipes. There were three large dusty windows facing onto a shuttered warehouse on the far side of the street. A huge trestle table pushed up against the wall was littered with drawing paper and other materials. She liked it, she said, this artist’s room, it made her feel, oh, bold, and original, and free. She went down and wandered
about in her open raincoat, a drink in her hand, picking up objects, examining everything. A little later, back in bed, she told him about living on blind faith and gin while she waited for his call.

“So you didn’t doubt me.”

She turned to him and shook her head.

“I would have.”

“You’re not me.”

“Who am I then?”

She pressed herself against him, her hand playing across his body, tracing its form, and then his face, rubbing her fingers in his damp beard. They had sex again, the time fled by, and it wasn’t until she sat up and said she must leave that the one sour, ominous note was sounded. He stirred on the bed behind her.

“Back to Max,” he said.

“Back to Max.”

“Does he know about us?”

“He doesn’t want to know.”

Suddenly his voice was full of contempt.

“He’s a spineless man. What about the others? Cleave must be climbing the bloody wall!”

She was startled by this outburst. From sleepy indolence he had suddenly reared up fiery with resentment and scorn. She knelt beside him, kissing his face and his neck, stroking his head, murmuring words of comfort. He shook his head, shook off his irritation, and calmed down. He was suddenly unwilling to let her go. He had to know when she’d be back. He said he needed her. She lay down beside him and took him in her arms. She had never known him like this before, she had seen him almost from the start as the outlaw, the artist, grinning, fearless, passionate, free. Now she understood the shape her life must take: frequent trips to London on pretexts that would arouse no suspicion. She didn’t care how difficult this was going to be.

I was not surprised by this sudden vulnerability. Jealous men are inherently weak. They are terrified of being abandoned. Despite her protests he came with her when she left. He had
regained his good temper and there was no more drama. Clinging tightly to each other they walked up to the nearest busy street, where he waited smoking in the doorway of a pub while she flagged a cab. The heat was less oppressive now. She watched him through the rear window of the cab as he emerged from the doorway, threw away his cigarette, and turned in toward the river again. He was wearing Max’s linen jacket, she realized, and also his trousers, cinched tight around his waist with a narrow leather belt. It made her smile whenever she thought of it.

The next Friday Nick met her again and now she saw him as her ally, her go-between. He drove her to the warehouse, and this time she noticed the name of the street, it was Horsey Street. As she climbed the staircase to the loft she was barely aware of the gloom, the creak and sag, the sharp foul smell of a neglected building that now housed only outcasts and vermin. She clattered quickly up the last flight, opening her coat, and went straight in. He came loping toward her, like a great wolf, she said, and again they spent the afternoon in bed, and again the time slipped by absurdly fast. She’d brought him clothes, soap, and whisky, and they’d drunk a fair bit of it. When she came down the staircase into the studio she was unsteady, and she stumbled pulling her skirt on. All that alcohol on an empty stomach; she had a strong head, but not without any lunch inside her. When they walked up Horsey Street to look for a taxi, and she had some slight trouble moving in a perfectly straight line, she realized she must get control of herself before she arrived home. The object after all was to resume her invisibility; this would hardly happen if she came home sloshed from shopping.

She had a black coffee and a sandwich in Victoria then walked up and down the platform until the train was due to leave. She
sat by an open window inhaling deeply then found the whole thing ridiculous and shut the window and lit a cigarette instead. Of course she was not drunk.

She got off the train and made her way to the car park. She started the car and let out the clutch, and it leapt backward like a startled gazelle and promptly stalled. She restarted it and carefully backed out, this time without mishap. She drove home slowly and with fierce concentration.

She came straight into the kitchen and stood at the sink drinking cold water. Fortunately Max was not back from the hospital. She must go upstairs and have a bath before she saw him. She turned from the sink and was startled to find Charlie sitting at the table, swinging his legs and watching her. His gaze was clinical.

“Darling! How long have you been here?”

“Not very long. Where have you been?”

“I had to go up to London again. Why?”

He continued to watch her carefully as she drained her glass of water.

“Are you drunk?” he said.

“Of course not! Why on earth did you say that?”

“Your eyes look funny.”

She was in the bath when Max got home from work. She heard him downstairs talking to Charlie. When she emerged she was feeling entirely presentable. She was bathed and powdered, she’d brushed her teeth and scrutinized her eyes for any sign of the drunkenness that Charlie had apparently detected in them, and could find no evidence at all. She would dress, go downstairs, and start preparing dinner, and all would be just as usual, a typical night at home,
en famille
, in the deputy medical superintendent’s house. She was after all the invisible woman.

Not altogether invisible. She wandered from the bathroom into the bedroom, her light dressing gown open over her bare skin, and found Max there. He was in his black suit, and he was standing at the window by her dressing table, gazing into the garden. He turned as he heard her coming in, and she pulled her dressing gown closed and knotted the sash.

“Here you are,” she murmured. She went to him and kissed his cheek, then sat at the dressing table and began to apply a cleansing cream to her face. As she did so she glanced up and met his eye. He was frowning.

“Sit down, darling,” she said. “Talk to me. Tell me about your day.” She didn’t like his manner. She felt a prickle of alarm.

“Where have you been?” he said.

She put down the pot of cream. “Where have I been? You know where I’ve been, I’ve been shopping in town. What is it, Max?”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth. Why on earth wouldn’t I? I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Tell me why you’re interrogating me like this.”

“Show me what you bought.”

A long pause here. She sat at the dressing table, half turned toward him where he had settled on the bed. They stared at each other and there was a sort of nakedness, she said, in the moment. She said nothing. She was as strong as he was at these naked moments; all his insight, all his psychiatric expertise, none of it could penetrate her womanly shield. Still without a word she turned back to her mirror and resumed applying cold cream to her face. It was a mirror with a movable wing on either side; she adjusted them so that she could watch him. He did not move from the edge of the bed. By giving him her back she intended to tell him she would try and ignore what he’d said. She would assume he didn’t intend to insult her. She was offering him the chance to apologize. He did not apologize, however. His face remained as cold as steel.