Asylum (16 page)

“Move on,” said one of the policemen; then, after a moment, more loudly: “Move on, you two.”

They did as they were told. They went off down an alley, huddled close like lovers disturbed and anxious to preserve their heat, and their pace quickened so that by the time they emerged from the other end of the alley out onto the street they were running.

They hurried in through the yard and came shouting up the stairs. She said she would never forget that night. Edgar felt it too, that a change had occurred, a shift into a new sort of security, despite the fright earlier in the night. The sense of panic, the sense of being only one step ahead, of the hot breath on the back of the neck: it had disappeared, replaced by a tentative confidence, the awareness that it was getting easier, hour by hour, day by day, to stay ahead of them and so allow the trail to grow cold and the hounds begin to tire. She felt for the first time that their blind leap into the unknown would be rewarded, that it would earn them the safe place where they could love each other without fear. They made love in that spirit, fearlessly and freely, as the trains rumbled over the viaduct through the night. She laughed aloud, she cried out, she gave her own sounds of life to the warehouse, careless whether Nick heard her or not.

This at any rate is how she described it to me.

Often, she said, she went to the cathedral. She sat in the shadows on a stone bench at the back, or wandered down the side aisle, past the tombs and chapels, her footsteps echoing on the stone floor. She always wore sunglasses and a head scarf tied tightly under her chin. She was vague about these days, about what precisely she was going through, but this is how I see her, as the sad woman in the cathedral. The problem was that the further she moved away from the hospital the harder I found it to reconstruct her experience, to mold it into something with a shape and a meaning I could recognize.

Edgar had started working in clay and it wasn’t going well. At first she tried to tell him he must be patient, he hadn’t done any sculpting for so long, how could he expect to command the old facility straightaway? But he didn’t want to hear this. He wasn’t interested in excuses, or in facility for that matter. He was angry and frustrated, and it seemed that no sooner had he begun to make any impression on the clay than he grew
quietly furious with it and destroyed what he’d done. He worked on his feet, the clay slapped onto a wire frame in the rough shape of a head and mounted on a battered wooden stand. Nick had found him what he needed, the clay and the tools, and Stella had paid for it. She was feeling increasingly worried about money. Still nothing was coming in, apart from what Nick contributed in the way of groceries and drink and small sums of cash, and what did she know about getting money?

But these were the sort of thoughts she tried to block. They were not useful, and she was beginning to divide the world into what was useful and what was not, and talking to Edgar about money was not. She disregarded her own needs because she was reluctant to spend money on herself. She was without certain basics of body and skin care, she also lacked adequate supplies of clean underwear. She needed a warm coat but that was definitely out of the question, and all her other clothes smelled of stale air and cigarette smoke. The weather had turned damp and overcast and if she opened the shutters flurries of rain came in.

Edgar’s utter absorption in his work had the effect of turning her in upon herself, especially if Nick wasn’t there, and often now he wasn’t. But one afternoon, while Edgar slept, Nick told her he was familiar with Edgar’s mood; all artists were like this when the work went badly.

“You’re not,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

He was sitting on the edge of an old couch at the far end of the loft, frowning, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together. A cigarette hung from his lips. “But I’m not the real thing. Not like him.”

She wandered about the room looking at his canvases. Nick’s painting was turgid. She stopped by the window. In the yard below a potato lorry was backing through the gate of the vegetable market.

“What’s he like when it goes well?” she said.

“The same.”

She found this funny. Laughing a little she turned toward him, and he looked up, surprised. “Is that funny?”

“The way you say it.”

He thought about this while she lit a cigarette, still standing by the window watching him.

“Don’t you have a woman, Nick?”

He shook his head.

“I thought that’s where you went off to, visiting your mistress.”

He went on shaking his head, staring at the floor, twisting his long fingers. He shot her a glance, and though she didn’t clearly understand it she didn’t take the joke any further. What an odd, blocked fellow he was, she thought.

But more and more Nick stayed away from the loft, and with Edgar distant and distracted for hours on end, she was at times almost overwhelmed by anxiety, and it was only with difficulty that she roused the flame of her love and forced it to burn with enough fierceness that it crowded out the other feelings. She didn’t want to tell him about any of this, none of it was useful. So while he worked, or slept, she fought terrible silent battles with herself and though they exhausted her she lay awake at night hour after hour as the trains rumbled over the viaduct and Big Ben chimed the hours. What began to disturb her was the thought that these were precisely the conditions that
killed
love, after first blighting its growth: squalor, fear, uncertainty, over-familiarity. How could she have failed to see this? What a fool she was, to have behaved so impulsively, and so naïvely! She thought of her old life and was aware that the hospital had receded into some misty mental realm where the sun always shone and order prevailed, where everybody knew their place and nobody suffered from want: a castle keep on a rocky ridge, and within its walls security and plenty. And while she knew this to be an illusion there was still enough truth in it that it gave her a sort of comfort to think about a place of refuge, a safe place in her mind if nowhere else. Later still she would find it ironic that this great good place (as it seemed to her then) was the place they had both chosen to flee, and that they were now seeking its very qualities of safety, warmth, and plenty in a street of derelict warehouses.

•  •  •

He began at last to make some progress. He now required her to sit for him for four or five hours every day. She saw her head and neck begin to emerge from the clay strangely flattened and elongated but recognizable all the same. But his mood remained tense and preoccupied, and a day or two later Nick moved out. Stella was now more alone than ever, and found herself turning again and again in her mind not to the hospital, not to Max, but to Charlie. She couldn’t help counting the days since she’d last seen him. She realized that while he must be missing her, at the same time he would be learning to hate her. He would see the depth of his father’s pain, and know that she was responsible, and the longer she was away from him the deeper that hatred would root.

Eventually she allowed these feelings to infect her dealings with Edgar, and it backfired badly. The artist’s psyche, when it achieves equilibrium, achieves it at such a pitch that any distraction, any disturbance by brute reality will destroy it in an instant; to make art it is necessary to turn away from life. Edgar’s sensitivity in this regard was intense, to the extent that I thought of him as the pure type of the artistic personality. For him the making of art and the maintenance of sanity had a precise and delicate relationship. Disturbance in one would create dysfunction and breakdown in the other.

One morning she awoke and found herself alone in the loft. Edgar had never gone out in daylight before. At first she was calm. She made some tea, then washed her underwear in the sink and hung it up to dry on the pulley. She went into the studio and opened the shutters. It was a clear, windy day, with a few high white clouds kicking across the sky. She wandered about looking at the drawings pinned to the wall. The clay on its stand was covered with damp cloths.

She went upstairs and read an old newspaper. After an hour she was sick with worry. He hadn’t told her where he was going or how long he’d be gone, and it was too easy to imagine another
chance meeting with the police, though this time without the cover of darkness and with no alley to slip down. How would she know? This suddenly struck her with force: how would she know if he’d been caught? Her helplessness started to terrify her. Without the two men she was lost. She depended on them utterly. This was a flaw in their arrangements, they must plan for contingencies like this, he must not abandon her again.

By noon she was desperate. She thought it now beyond question that he was in the hands of the police. She felt angry with him but she dimly recognized that this was the effect of anxiety, she’d felt the same when Charlie vanished into the marsh for hours. It was a mistake to think about Charlie when she lacked the strength of mind to resist the guilt he aroused in her, now that it seemed she’d lost Edgar as well. Eventually she could stay there no longer. She rushed down the staircase.

Where she intended to go she doesn’t remember. But she does remember her urgency, her sudden burning conviction that by doing nothing she was losing everything. Perhaps, I suggested, she intended to return to the hospital, but she shook her head. She clattered down the stairs in her panic and stumbled along the passage and out into the sunshine.

She ran right into his arms.

“What is it, for God’s sake!”

She realized what a state she was in: coatless, hatless, her hair a fright, her face puffy and unwashed. Her panic subsided, she let him help her back up the stairs.

He was badly rattled by her behavior.

She tried to explain that she’d felt sure he’d been picked up by the police. He moved away from her and paced about the studio, frowning and chewing at his thumbnail and casting wild glances at her. She had never seen him like this before, he had always been strong enough to absorb her anxiety and quiet her down. She didn’t understand what was going on.

“Is that what you want?” he said.

She stared at him. He stood there in the middle of the loft watching her coldly.

“No! How could you think that?”

“You’re missing your comforts.”

He was standing at his table now, idly turning over sketches, not looking at her, still chewing his thumbnail.

“I thought they’d got you. I thought I was on my own.”

“You wouldn’t be on your own for long.”

She said she didn’t properly take in the meaning of this, all she heard was his pain, so she went to him and tried to take him in her arms. He pushed past her and sat on the chair by the wrapped clay and rolled a cigarette. She knelt by his chair. “I was frightened,” she whispered. He wouldn’t look at her. He lit his cigarette and shrugged his shoulders. She stood up and went over to the window and sat on the sill and looked out into the street. She was sick at heart. All this art, all this squalor, what was it for?

“Frightened,” he sneered, but he sounded frightened himself, and it suddenly seemed so childish and petty and selfish of him to be angry with her for being frightened on his behalf!

“Oh, you don’t love me,” she said, “you haven’t the imagination.”

She didn’t look at him as she said this. The next she knew there was a crash and he was on his feet, the chair on its side on the floor, and then he was standing in front of her with his fists clenched, huge and furious.

“Are you going to start hitting me?” she said calmly. She looked up at him without fear. It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered. She didn’t care if he knocked her around. He was just another angry man, the world was full of them.

“You were going back to Max.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

He turned to the wall and hit it once very hard with the side of his fist. The room was alive with violence. It was dreadful to feel his rage. Why had she never seen it before?

“So they were right about you.”

“What?”

“You are a psychopath.”

She didn’t care if it made him angrier. She was past caring.
He turned back toward her and his pent fury filled the room and made everything tremble as though it were about to shatter.

Then his mood shifted. He let out a deep breath. He leaned against the wall, pushing with his hands, his eyes closed. His anger had subsided. “Oh, psychopath,” he said. “This is Max, is it, or is it Cleave?”

Not me. Edgar is many things but he’s not a psychopath. But she didn’t want this, she didn’t want him grouping her with the psychiatrists. She went to him and tried to take his hands. Without opening his eyes he resisted her and now she didn’t blame him, he was right.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I was desperate. You didn’t come back and I thought they’d got you. I didn’t know where you were.”

He opened his eyes. He absently touched her face. His mood shifted again. He became brisk. “Look at this,” he said. He pulled an envelope out of his inside pocket and handed it to her. “Go on, open it.” She slit it open with her fingernail. There was a wad of ten-pound notes inside.