Asylum (15 page)

When he was finished with her she would sit by herself in the kitchen with her compact mirror, trying to see what he saw. If she wandered back into the studio, either he ignored her and carried on working, or they went to bed.

At night she cooked for them again, or Nick went for fish and chips, and they got drunk together and talked. They talked about everything, but mostly about art.

•  •  •

After four or five days she became susceptible to sudden gusts of intense anxiety when she awoke to the enormity of what she’d done and the situation she’d placed herself in. This happened early in the morning while Edgar was still asleep. She tried to push it away she hated feeling the idyll disturbed, and she said nothing about it. This will pass, she told herself, they will forget, soon we will be able to slip quietly into the world and go unnoticed. This was all she was capable of, when she tried to think about the future. But most of the time she gave no thought to the larger reality outside. She tried, she said, not to dwell on Charlie, but without success, I suspect.

Housekeeping in the loft was primitive when she arrived. There was much to do and she was glad of it. It was work simply to stay clean, and the two men were less conscientious about it than she was. They only had one sink, one tap, and one lavatory. The sink was often full of paintbrushes. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care if they were dirty, what mattered was that they were together. Her identification with Edgar deepened daily. She told me she deliberately absorbed his tastes, his ideas, his feelings. His indifference to domestic comfort made her feel ashamed of all the years when the provision of domestic comfort for her husband and son had been her sole occupation. She began to write a little when no one was watching her.

She cooked them simple meals on a two-ring stove and made shopping lists and gave them to Nick, who shared the expenses with her. The nights when the three of them sat around the table drinking and talking, those were the best times of all. She was absorbing an entirely new way of thinking and feeling, losing what she thought of as her old, stale identity. Max and the hospital grew more distant with every day that passed.

This, she said, was her period of most rapid growth, for each day she understood more of what it was to think and feel and see as an artist, and the fact that they were fugitives, and that she and Edgar could not go out in daylight for fear of recognition and arrest, this only intensified her intoxication with this new way of being and gave it the flavor of danger that seemed to her intrinsic to the artist’s existence.

•  •  •

She was astonished to discover that Nick and Edgar had visitors. How could a fugitive from the law have visitors? And yet, on her second or third day in the loft, as the three of them sat in the kitchen at noon eating sardines on toast, they heard a hammering at the door. Stella rose to her feet in dismay, but Edgar only glanced at Nick, who said, “That’s Tony,” and went to let him in.

“Who’s Tony?” she whispered.

“Friend of ours,” said Edgar in an offhand manner, returning to his sardines. Then he looked across the table at her, grinning.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll like him.”

She did like Tony. Like all the men who visited the loft, he was an artist, had unconventional manners, was poor (judging by the state of his clothes), smoked and drank excessively, seemed to take nothing seriously, and was apparently unimpressed that Edgar had escaped from a mental hospital, though fascinated that he’d been followed by the wife of the deputy medical superintendent.

Tony sat with them in the kitchen and was given a plate of sardines on toast, which he ate with his fingers, which he then wiped on his trousers, and the three men gossiped about people whom she’d never met but whose names were becoming familiar through repetition. Singly and in pairs these various characters appeared in the loft over the next few days. All were polite to Stella, whose flight to the city had clearly caught their imagination, and she, after her first spasm of uncertainty as to the wisdom of half of London, so it felt, knowing where Edgar was hiding, soon warmed to these odd, friendly men, so far removed from her experience, and their casual, sloppy ways. But one evening when it was just the three of them drinking in the kitchen she did voice her unease. Nick seemed surprised. It had clearly never occurred to him that Edgar might be betrayed.

“Why would someone want to do a thing like that?” he asked with genuine perplexity.

Edgar shrugged.

Stella thought, If he’s not worried, why should I be?

They began to go out after dark. Edgar was growing restless after the days spent inside, so one night the two of them walked down to the river and gazed out across the water at the towers of Cannon Street and the dome of St. Paul’s. They didn’t yet go into any of the pubs but they felt secure enough out in the dark streets. If anyone came near they slipped into a doorway or an alley and embraced, and this aroused them so strongly at times that they ran unnecessary risks. She says it was starting to frighten her, the way their bodies flared at any contact, however slight. They seemed powerless to control this hunger they had for each other. Edgar slept soundly at night, but she often lay awake for hours in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and listening to the trains rumbling across the viaduct.

She remembers one night hearing Big Ben strike four and turning on her side and watching him sleeping. Who was he? Who was this stranger, her lover? She lit a cigarette. She remembered her first impressions of him, the man in the yellow corduroys mending their conservatory at the end of the vegetable garden. She remembered dancing with him and feeling his erection pressed into her groin, and being excited by his excitement, wanting him because he wanted her. Then the rapid escalation of the affair—the growing terror of exposure—and the escape. Now this. But who was he? From the fragmented episodes of the last weeks she tried to construct a man.

He was stronger now. No longer constrained, he spoke and acted with an authority she had never known in him on the estate. She saw how he was with Nick. Most of the time they appeared to be old art colleagues and close friends, but when anything serious came up Nick would wait to see what Edgar’s attitude was before expressing his own opinion. The other men showed him deference too. When they talked Stella didn’t join in, she just listened. She would take down Nick’s battered books
of reproductions and sit at the table turning the pages, gazing at the plates and watching for stirrings of response in herself.

She was drifting off. She thought about his word “likeness,” and the idea of a being who was detached from the interests and feelings of others, capable only of returning the observer’s gaze, impossible to know with any certainty. Could she see him like this? Would this be the truth? She leaned over the side of the mattress to crush out her cigarette. She adored sleeping with him under those rough blankets. She adored waking in the morning and finding him still there beside her.

During the day, when he didn’t need her to model, she sometimes wandered out into the yard for fresh air. The fruit and vegetable market on the other side was enclosed under a high glass roof supported by slender metal pillars with elaborate filigree struts and bracework at the top. Various bays were fenced off, high piles of wooden crates and cardboard boxes stacked inside. One morning she watched two men loading sacks of potatoes onto the back of a dusty lorry. When she became aware that they had seen her she moved away, for it was rapidly becoming an instinctive thing to avoid drawing attention to herself. Shortly afterward, as she walked out onto Horsey Street and turned down toward the river, she came upon a big, shabby, neglected old church. She was surprised to find it there, at the end of that obscure warren of narrow streets and alleys. She was more surprised still when she discovered it was Southwark Cathedral.

She went in, and was immediately struck with the feeling that this was a good place, that for the hundreds of years it had stood on this site it had been untouched by violence or evil. She sat at the back and watched a tramp talking wildly to a young churchman in a long black cassock. She saw a middle-aged man, in pin-striped trousers and a black coat, deep in prayer in a side chapel. She counted twenty saints in their niches behind the altar, and paused by the tomb of the first English poet, his effigy in repose, his hands clasped in prayer on his chest, and his head
resting on three books, one of which was called
Confessio Amantis
. She went back to Horsey Street refreshed by the quiet hour she’d spent there. She didn’t mention her visit to Edgar or Nick. She suspected they would have little interest in the cathedral on their doorstep.

They began using the pubs at night. Nick or Stella would go up to the counter to buy the drinks while Edgar stayed at their table in the gloomiest corner of the room. Not that there seemed much risk. These were rough pubs with bare floorboards and wood paneling scuffed and splintered with age. Ill-lit and shabby, they harbored men and women anxious to drown the tedium of their dull hard days in cheap beer and spirits. Nobody paid any attention to Stella and the two shabby artists as they hunched over their drinks and their cigarettes, talking to one another in low voices at the back of the room. It thrilled her when they went down to the Southwark or the Globe, for it meant a sort of normality was entering their fugitive life, they were able to behave to an extent like ordinary people. She began to glimpse a future.

Being out in the real world brought its problems, however. One Saturday night they sat at the very back of a large, crowded pub, just the two of them. It was smoky and noisy and Stella felt at ease and a part of it. They sat side by side on a bench with a small round table in front of them, and she held his hand under the table. They were outsiders but they’d fetched up in this warm loud pub where to Stella everyone seemed somehow complicit with them. She thought then with a shudder of all the drawing rooms she’d been in presided over by the wives and mothers of psychiatrists, and remembered the horrors of strangeness and nonbelonging she’d felt in such rooms. Edgar picked up their glasses and pushed through to the bar, and she sat watching him with the glow of gin on her, filled with a sense of quiet elation.

There was no part of it she couldn’t romanticize.

Suddenly a man appeared in front of the table and leered at her. She dropped her eyes and began looking through her handbag for cigarettes, lighter, anything.

“All by yourself, darling?” he said.

She looked up. “No, I’m not, actually,” she said, “my husband’s with me.”

“Husband, is it, actually?”

He was a big man, a handsome man, but he’d been drinking and he was letting it show. He put his hands on the table and leaned toward her. She wanted him to go away. She didn’t like that he mocked her speech, and she was angry with herself for giving him the chance.

“Yes it is, actually,” she said, stressing the “actually,” and this was a mistake, it amused him, and he pulled out a chair and sat down. Oh, she hadn’t intended him to do this! It was then that Edgar came back from the bar with their drinks.

“Who’s this?” he said.

The man had set his elbows squarely on the table and fixed his eyes on Stella. He now turned toward Edgar and looked up at him over his shoulder.

“This the husband, is it, darling?”

She shook her head wildly at Edgar. Nothing to do with me, she tried to tell him. He set the drinks carefully on the table, not looking at the man. Then he had the man’s collar in his fist and his big black-bearded face was in the man’s face. There was a sudden silence around them. Something passed between the two men, and she saw with startling clarity what was about to happen: a fight, smashed glass, blood, shouting, the police. Edgar let go of the man’s collar and the man backed off. Edgar sat down. People returned to their drinks and conversations. But there was still a quality of hush around them, and she knew they were being listened to. He began rolling a cigarette and didn’t look at her.

“What did you say to him?” he murmured.

“Nothing!”

He licked the paper. He shook his head. “Must have said something.”

In a fierce whisper she told him what had happened. For a while he was quiet. Did he think she had led the man on? He was so cool, so distant, she had never seen him like this! She told
him again that the man had sat down without any sort of invitation or encouragement.

“You won’t play tricks on me, will you, Stella?” he said at last in an even, friendly voice.

“Of course I bloody won’t!”

“That’s all right, then.”

But if it was all right, it left a bad taste in her mouth, this calm response of his that felt so full of threat. The old pride welled up inside her and she thought, To hell with you. She stared straight ahead, angrily smoking her cigarette in short rapid puffs. When she felt his fingers on her thigh and his lips at her neck she tried to ignore him, and pushed his hand away, but it did no good, any contact could overwhelm her.

“Give us a kiss, darling,” he whispered.

“Piss off,” she said and bit his lip.

Hurrying home a few minutes later, out in the damp night air, all now forgotten in the urgency to get back to the loft, they saw the policemen she had so recently imagined. There were two of them. They were at the far end of the street and walking slowly in their direction with their hands behind their backs. She drew close to him, both hands gripping his arm; he didn’t break stride. She realized they would pass the policemen under a streetlight.

“They’re going to see us,” she murmured.

Still Edgar walked on. Stella could think of nothing, she was conscious only of a wave of black dread rising in her throat, she could taste it. The blur of the gin rapidly cleared and the tap of her heels on the wet pavement seemed to beat out a tattoo that said, Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Then he steered her off the pavement and past a row of capstans and down a flight of steps to the river, and there with the black water lapping at the stones he kissed her. She threw her arms around his neck and drank up his kiss as though her passion, if it were strong enough, could drive away the two policemen and leave them untouched. She was aware now only of Edgar’s breathing and the approaching footsteps. They stopped at the top of the steps. Her fingers moved up the back of
his head and she gathered his hair into her fist, her mouth still on his.