Asylum (13 page)

“Show me what you bought,” he said again.

Without a word she wiped her fingers on a tissue and rose to her feet. She crossed the end of the bed to the cupboard that ran the length of the wall by the door. She opened it at her end and stood on her toes to reach a box on the shelf above the dress rack. The box was wrapped in gift paper. As she came back to the dressing table she tossed it onto the bed.

“What’s this?”

Still she said nothing. She went on applying cream. There was a hint of uncertainty in his voice now, but she was silent.

“I’m going to tear the wrapping,” he said. Her face was close to the mirror, but not so close she couldn’t see him take the wrapping off. He managed not to tear it. Inside he found a long cardboard box.

“Harrods,” he murmured. He opened the box. He folded back the leaves of tissue paper. He lifted from the box a pair of silk pajamas. He turned from the pajamas to the dressing table.

“Are these for me?”

All the anger had drained from him. She swept out of the bedroom, pausing at the door to say: “Who the hell do you think they’re for?”

She slammed the bathroom door and locked it. She waited. After a minute or two she heard him go downstairs; he didn’t attempt to apologize through the locked bathroom door. She went back into the bedroom and dressed.

When she got downstairs Max was in the drawing room. She made straight for the drinks table and poured herself a gin; she was certainly sober by this point, and in need of a large one. He crossed to the door and closed it.

“I am a fool,” he said. “I’ll tell you what happened. Charlie said you came home drunk and I constructed a fantastic scenario. A scenario of infidelity. An apology’s in order.”

She sat in an armchair and drew out his discomfort for a few more moments. At last she spoke. “Charlie told you I came home drunk?”

“Yes.”

“I will have to talk to him. No, on second thought, you will. How dare he, Max? And how dare you? How dare you come upstairs and accuse me of infidelity because that child has a malicious imagination?”

“I feel very foolish. I’m sorry.”

As she sipped her drink she watched him. “I don’t think that’s enough. This worries me. This summer has been a terrible strain. You didn’t notice it, but while all the fuss was going on
this house was kept clean and meals appeared on time. Who do you think managed all that? Not your mother.”

“I know.”

“You may know now, but it’s the first time you’ve acknowledged it. I saw how difficult it was for you. I don’t think you thought for one moment about what I had to do.
And
with your mother in the house.”

“The timing was unfortunate.”

She snorted. “It certainly was.”

She was angry now, and enjoying herself. Max paced back and forth, frowning. He had once told her he always learned something from their arguments.

“Why did you buy me pajamas?”

“Peace offering. Consolation prize. New beginnings. I don’t know, why does a wife buy her husband a present after they’ve been through a difficult time? You’re the bloody psychiatrist.”

He sat on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the carpet, twiddling his spectacles in his clasped hands. “I feel horrible about this. How coarse you must think me.”

“Don’t overdo it.”

He looked up. He smiled. “You don’t give an inch, do you?”

“I will not tolerate being taken for granted, nor will I have that boy telling tales on me and you taking them seriously. It’s outrageous. How dare he? More to the point, how dare you let him?”

“I will talk to him. Stella, for the third time, I apologize. And I’m pleased with my pajamas. Thank you.” He crossed the room and she permitted him to kiss her cheek. “Would the drunkard care for another drink?”

“Yes,” she said, “she would.”

He made love to her that night and she had to allow it, in fact she had to do more than allow it, she had to feign enthusiasm, all in the cause of invisibility. Max was pleased with himself when it was all over. He smoked a cigarette in his silk pajamas, sitting propped against the headboard as the shadows of the branches outside the window stirred against the upper walls
and ceiling. She let him revel in his small postcoital glory. She wanted to see him content, she wanted him to feel that all was well in his marriage, that he was a good husband and she was a good wife.

She made one more visit to London and that visit tells us much about the tensions and contradictions of the double life she was attempting to lead during this period. She took a cab from Victoria to the end of Horsey Street, went up the alley and straight upstairs to the loft. She was picking Charlie up from school later in the afternoon and she only had an hour. They were in bed when Edgar said: “Don’t let him touch you.”

It should have sounded a loud alarm but it didn’t.

“Don’t let who touch me, my darling?”

“Max.”

“You don’t have to worry about Max, it’s dead between us. It has been for a long time.”

“Do you have to sleep in the same bed as him?”

She realized that he had no real understanding of her marriage, or of the difficulties of her situation generally.

“He’d find it odd if I didn’t.”

“Do you like it?”

“Of course not, but what can I do? My darling, I couldn’t stand anyone touching me but you. Of course I won’t let him touch me. He doesn’t, anyway.”

“No?”

“Not for years.”

That seemed to relieve him. She took him in her arms again, and then, to his distress and her own, she had to leave him, and wash and dress, and find a cab to take her to the station. She had left it all dangerously late.

They descended to the yard and made their way to the usual place, where they clung together a few moments in the doorway of the pub, and then he turned his collar up and slipped away and Stella stood looking for a cab. There weren’t any, and as the minutes passed she realized she would miss her train, and
that Charlie would not be met from school as he’d been promised. For a few seconds this filled her with panic, and she ran as well as she could in her high heels to the nearest corner, where the traffic was heavier.

Then she discovered she didn’t care. She didn’t care if she missed her train. She didn’t care if she was late. Charlie could go home on the bus and she would tell him some story, and it wouldn’t matter. She was alert enough to recognize the hostility in the thought, and to understand that she hadn’t forgiven him for betraying her to Max. She caught the train with a minute to spare. She sat by the window and gazed at the narrow back gardens of the terraced houses with their high back walls and the sheets on the washing lines flapping in the wind. She saw the railway cuttings, the backs of the factories, the allotments, then fields and open country. She thought about Edgar. She was moved by his insistence that she not let Max touch her. She was aware, she said, of just how monstrous jealousy could become in the wrong conditions. Was their situation, with all its difficulties and frustrations, a breeding ground for sexual jealousy? It would be, she thought, unless she maintained a strict vigilance. Edgar was so isolated, she was his only harbor, his only safe place, and she left him each time to return to the house and the bed of a man he hated. Such a situation could easily provoke sexual jealousy. She would go to any lengths to prevent that happening. They had quite enough enemies at the gates of their city.

I was frankly astonished at this display of naïveté. Was she really so blind to the danger she had placed herself in? Had she learned nothing from living among psychiatrists?

She was in the vegetable garden. She told me later that she went there when she wanted to indulge her nostalgia for the early days of the affair. The first signs of autumn were on it now, the afternoon light casting its long shadows, the colors of things starting to deepen and glow. There was a faint hint of crispness in the air that spoke to her of dead leaves and cold nights and heavy dew shining in the cobwebs in the trees at dawn. The outside party of parole patients was back at work, supervised as before by John Archer. They were sweeping, clearing, burning, cutting back the spent season’s growth, putting the garden to bed for the winter. She sat on the bench by the conservatory and watched a patient she didn’t know push a loaded wheelbarrow to the bonfire that was smoldering on cleared ground at the far end. Smoke rose from the malodorous heap and hazed the light of the afternoon. She had a feeling of closure, of ending. The apple orchard was heavily laden, and fallen fruit was starting to rot in the grass; she should be collecting it for canning. But she
preferred to sit and remember the events of the high summer, how blindly they had behaved given how little they knew. Now that she had the first stirrings of a perspective on what had happened, she saw how unthinkable it would have been to hold back, though she was still astonished at her own recklessness. Their love was stronger now, she thought, more robust, more resilient than she could have dared to hope in the summer. The garden was dying, it was being put to sleep for the winter, but what had sprung to life here was still young.

With these pleasant, faintly elegiac thoughts running through her mind, their passage eased by the couple of gins she’d had before lunch, she considered going back into the house. Another five minutes, she said to herself, just as the door in the wall at the far end opened.

I came along the path, picking my way carefully between the dead grass and flowers heaped on the gravel, and trying not to inhale bonfire smoke. I had guessed, after Edgar’s escape, that she was hiding knowledge of him; and I had sensed that she knew that I had guessed it, for she had begun to avoid me. My policy had been to wait and watch and do nothing; until, that is, I learned of her trips to London. Then I knew that I had to act with some urgency. My intrusion alarmed her. As she watched me coming through the haze of smoke she remembered Jack Straffen making his way along the same path a few weeks earlier. Why was she so irresistible to the psychiatrists? We couldn’t keep away from her.

“Peter, what a nice surprise. Sit down. I was just enjoying the last of the summer.”

“And what a summer. I think I should rather like to go to sleep until next spring. How are you, my dear?”

“I’m all right. I think Max is up at the hospital.”

“Can’t I sit here and enjoy the last of the summer too? I’ve seen so little of you recently. You look very well. Are you?”

Oh, and then I turned my dreamy gaze upon her, and Be careful, Stella, she told herself; though at the same time she was conscious of an almost overwhelming urge to confide in me as she used to, before our friendship was compromised. How
strongly a great passion wants to declare itself, to tell its story, and how logical a listener I was, a wise, gentle friend. And how relentless must be her effort to keep it from me.

“I have more time to myself with Charlie back at school. The summer was a strain, having him at home, and Brenda here, of course. I don’t think Max understands what his mother does to a household.”

She told me later she set this hare running to see if I might go after it.

“Your dear mother-in-law. How priceless she is. Do you know, she asked me to dissuade Max from applying for Jack’s job.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Drew me aside, told me how much she respected my judgment, then asked me not to encourage him, the reverse if possible.”

“I must say I’m with her on this.”

“You want to get back to London of course.”

I let this pregnant phrase hang in the air before going on.

“But does Max want the job? I haven’t spoken to him about it.”

“I think he does, I’m afraid.”

“I see.”

I took my flat silver cigarette case from my inside breast pocket and we smoked. An idea formed in her mind, something that had never occurred to her before.

“Peter, do you want Jack’s job?”

I was vague and pensive, but not surprised.

“I wonder sometimes. But no, I think not. It’s a young man’s game, and I should have to work much too hard. And all so political nowadays.”

I fell silent. I allowed her to think of my life, my handsome house a few miles away with its fine paintings, its fine furniture, and its fine library, and no, she didn’t see the administration of a large, complicated institution as having any place in my measured existence, with its balanced commitments to forensic psychiatry and aesthetic indulgence. She probably wondered
was there a sex life too? She would have heard people speculate, but her intuition told her that whatever I may have done as a young man, it was all the stuff of memory now. And frank as we were with each other, or as we had been until recently, this she had never asked me. She presumed my sexual drive was not strong, and tried to imagine how it would be to live as I lived. She couldn’t.

All this I sensed going through her mind.

“Dear Peter,” she murmured.

“You’re still seeing Edgar Stark then?” I said.

Vigilance! I was dangerous. She must not underestimate me. Could she buy safety with a partial disclosure? No. It had to be denial. And it had to be convincing. She wheeled around slowly. A small incredulous smile, eyes wide.