Asylum (17 page)

“You were getting money,” she said.

“Good old Nick.”

She took the money out of the envelope. It should have made her happy, this wad of notes, it translated into food and drink, but the effect was the opposite, it depressed her. It was too brutal, the fact of his money and what it would buy them. Life was a squalid barter, cash for time. Cash bought them time, what did time buy them, the chance to watch love turn to ash? It was an awful sensation, to feel the meaning drain out of everything. She dropped the money onto the floor.

“What’s going to happen to us?”

He reached down for the money and with his eyes still on her face he touched it to his lips. He put it back in his pocket.

“No good,” she whispered.

“Money, Stella.”

“Oh, money.”

She stood at the window with her back to him.

“Yes, money.” She knew what he would say next. He would tell her it hadn’t been easy to get.

“You think it was easy?”

“I want to go to sleep.”

She pushed herself off the window frame and without looking at him wearily climbed the staircase to the mattress. She lay down and closed her eyes. Immediately she felt it all begin to slip away. She was exhausted. She wanted to sleep for a year and when she awoke it would all be as it was before, she would have her child back. Then he was shaking her awake.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She could smell wine on his breath.

She rolled onto her back, then sat up on her elbow and reached for the cigarettes.

“Oh what does it matter?”

There was a silence. He didn’t understand her. Why not? He was so clever, he understood so much, why was he being so obtuse now? He sat on the end of the mattress, staring straight ahead. She lay there, propped on one elbow with her back to him, smoking.

“I got it for us,” he said eventually.

This at any other time would have filled her with joy. Now she was indifferent. She said nothing. She shrugged. He was watching her closely; he saw her shrug, and it enraged him. He seized her wrists so that she half rose off the bed.

Immediately they became excited. They began kissing, and then they were pulling open their clothes. This overwhelming appetite they had, this ravenous lust, it alarmed her, she hated being constantly out of control. There was desperation in it now, and aggression, she worked off her anxiety and frustration in the sex, and this time, as they clung blindly to each other, she bit his shoulder hard. The effect was dramatic. He reared up and slapped her face, but they didn’t stop, and it wasn’t until a minute or two later, when they came apart, that she rolled away from him and buried her face in the pillow. She felt utterly numb. It was collapsing as she knew it would and she didn’t care. She heard him muttering some nonsense and
she didn’t listen. She lay on the mattress with her face stinging and her mind blank. She expected him to beat her up and she didn’t care. But after a few moments he went back down to the studio.

She sat up and found her powder compact. Already her face was red. There would be a bruise. She snapped shut the compact. You fool, she told herself, over and over again.

When she returned from the cathedral he didn’t apologize. It was late afternoon and he had gone back to work on the clay. He hadn’t turned the lights on, and with the shutters half closed the loft was gloomy. The day had seen enough clarity, enough grating exposure; it was time for gloom and gin and eventually sleep. A night of gloom and gin. They were both depressed; they didn’t speak; they felt no inclination to go out. Stella lay on the bed, sprawled on top of the blankets in stockings and slip, a woman adrift amid a flotsam of old cosmetics and yesterday’s newspaper. When it grew dark he didn’t turn the lights on, he pushed open the shutters instead, and the streetlight diffused a soft gray glow into the studio. Stella wanted to get drunk and try and see things with some sense of hope. She went down to the studio with her gin and drifted over to the window. Edgar was at the clay, hunched over it, and didn’t turn around.

“I wish Nick was here,” she said, and saw him stiffen.

When she awoke at dawn she was still on top of the blankets and she’d spilled her gin. Edgar was asleep beside her in his clothes. She sat up, a foul dry bitter taste in her mouth and her head already thumping from gin on an empty stomach, and got him into bed. They both immediately fell asleep.

It occurred to her the next day as she listlessly set about cleaning the place that nobody rises above their surroundings, not for very long. Stay in shabby, constricted places and then look in the mirror, what you see is shabby and constricted, watch your own behavior and see it turn cheap and shabby too. She had been thought a beautiful woman: that had all been
stripped away, there was no place for beauty here and the more she tried to restore herself with cosmetics the more she looked like a tart.

Edgar seemed not to notice it. It didn’t bother him. What bothered him was her. Ever since he’d met her running into the yard he’d become suspicious of her. He thought she wanted to go back to Max. She tried to explain to him it was Charlie she missed, not Max, surely he understood that, but he appeared not to. He appeared to have lost the quickness of intelligence she had grown used to. She said he seemed coarse. Even his voice grew coarse when he was like that.

I think he was frightened. I think any expression of distress from Stella he took as a signal of imminent desertion. Like many artists, Edgar had the soft fearful core of a child.

They went out to the pub the next night and he frightened her, he was so strange, behaving as though every man they saw was trying to take her away from him. He sat there muttering angrily to himself, then caught himself doing it and broke off, shaking his head, embarrassed and bewildered by this other, foreign voice he heard issuing from inside himself, the distorted, ugly voice of jealousy and terror and need. It broke her heart to see him so miserable and helpless, for he didn’t want to be like this, he hated what he seemed to be turning into. She held his hands and told him fiercely to hang on, to keep fighting, they’d be all right, she wouldn’t leave him. Eventually and with great effort he got control of himself, and after that he became something like his old self once more. But now she couldn’t trust it, because she didn’t know how long it would last. She saw a divided man; she saw that the man she’d known on the hospital estate had not disappeared but had been invaded, rather, occupied, so it felt, by some other spirit that wasn’t his. She told him it was because of the pressure they were under, and that a little time was all they needed. He didn’t really take it in, he was frowning and rubbing his head as though he could dispel his illness as one shakes off a bad dream.

How much longer? She lay awake at night and asked herself
how long they could last like this. The bruising on her face was still noticeable, and on these streets there were no illusions about how such things happened. She saw the sympathetic glances she got from other women, and when they were out at night she saw how their eyes flickered to Edgar to see what sort of a brute her brute was. It made her so very uneasy. Any one of those glances might draw the gleam of sudden recognition. So the days passed, and all her efforts went into keeping Edgar steady, though when she went to bed, and he went back to his clay, her mind would turn to Charlie, and she wept silently into her pillow. She had to treat Edgar as a child now, a touchy, clinging child, and she wondered why she was looking after this child and not her own.

But it doesn’t surprise me that she didn’t leave him. At root, I suppose, in spite of everything she loved him, or told herself she did, and women are stubborn in this regard. She had made her choice, she had gone to him willingly, and it was unthinkable to run home because he was ill and his illness robbed him of responsibility. What did surprise me was that she could ignore the proliferating signals that an act of violence was imminent. It astonished me that her capacity for denial was so strong as to block the knowledge of what he was capable of. Even when she saw what he was doing to his work, even then she failed to recognize the danger she was in.

She was awakened at dawn by men shouting in the market. Edgar was asleep beside her. She got up and slipped on her coat and went down to the studio. She pushed open the shutters and admitted into the room a pale autumn light. She smoked a cigarette and listened to the market coming to life. The clay was covered in damp cloths as usual and on impulse she began to remove them. What she found was ugly and shocking. It was as she’d last seen it, a strangely attenuated head and shoulders, recognizably hers, but violently scarred and gouged now, she could see where he had gone at it with both his tools and his fingers.
She felt sick and quickly covered it up again. But instead of fleeing the place, instead of running for her life, she went back to bed and took him in her arms and held him.

And then he was all right, and there was, again, passion, and then tenderness. The sex, she said, was rather painful now. Her menstrual rhythm was disturbed, and she even thought at one time she might be pregnant. I asked her if she wanted medical attention but she said no, she was fine. She’d been the one looking after the contraception and she hadn’t been truly worried. No, much more worrying was
him
. When his guard was down, when he trusted her, when he was himself, she regretted nothing. It was all worth it. At the smallest sign that he was receptive she surrendered. She only wanted to love him; her own will was crippled, the old pride had gone.

If only they had enough
time
, she thought, then they would be all right. If he didn’t do something stupid. But it was so hard to reassure him. It was
his
photograph that had been all over the papers, not hers, this was his angry response, it was him they were looking for, him they’d put back inside, she’d be all right, she had Max to go back to. She no longer argued with him when he told her she had Max to go back to, there was no point in making him angrier.

And what of Max? Did she ever miss him?

Not once, she said; she had thought about him, of course, but she insisted she had felt not a single pang of regret, which of course made it so bitterly ironic that Edgar should feel jealous and think she yearned to return to him. No, she had no feelings for Max. She said that had he been a real husband none of this would have happened, there would have been no emptiness in her, no hunger, she would not have needed what Edgar had offered her and which she had been unable to refuse, even though it meant losing everything in the process: child, home, a
place in the world. Max seemed to her now a sort of dead man, a bloodless creature who behaved toward human beings like an insect collector, skewering them in glass cases with labels underneath, this one a personality disorder, this one a hysteric. Only after leaving him, she said, did she become aware of the extent of the lack he had created in her. She hated him for that, for pushing her to the extreme of desperation. What would happen to her now she didn’t know, but it seemed to her that all she could do was play it out to the end.

One day while she was sitting for him she asked about Ruth Stark. She asked him if he’d done her head in clay.

“No good,” he said, without breaking the rhythm of his work.

“Why?”

“I couldn’t see her at all in the end.”

“Why not?”

He was absorbed with the clay and didn’t answer her for several moments. When he did reply his tone was vague.

“All the men. I couldn’t get through them.”

“Get through them to what?”

“To what she looked like.”

“Oh.”

She was silent for a while.

“Her likeness,” she said.

“I tried someone else but her head was all wrong too. I didn’t want to know who she was, I just wanted to see what she looked like.”

“How did Ruth take that?”

“What?”

“The other woman.”

A small snort here. “She didn’t like that at all.”

“And?”

Another silence.

“I told her she could clear out if she didn’t like it.”

“Did you have sex with the woman?”

Now he stopped working and gazed at her for a moment, a smeared wooden spatula hanging from his fingers. He grinned at her.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“No! I just wanted to do her bloody head in clay!”

And then she thought she detected good omens abroad. She had been reading the papers every day and Edgar had not been mentioned for weeks. Nor had she been mentioned once, and certainly there had been no photograph. She assumed, correctly, that this was because the hospital didn’t want it known that the deputy medical superintendent’s wife was the lover of the escaped patient and had gone to join him. This would have been sensational indeed, and more sensation, more publicity, was precisely what Jack and the rest of us would be anxious to avoid. So yes, we hushed it up, and from her point of view this worked in their favor. It was progress.

Then Nick showed up again.

Dear Nick. She had grown fond of Nick, tall, lanky, earnest Nick. It was Nick who usually gave Edgar the money he brought back to the loft. He had a small income from somewhere, and he was generous with it. Also, seeing how things were with Edgar and Stella, he had borrowed a small flat in Soho so as to give them more room. Stella was relieved to see him again. I believe Edgar was too, in his way; he was aware that he was starting to lose control, and I believe it frightened him. Without me his work was his only lifeline, the only thing that gave any sort of structure or purpose to his existence. He discounted Stella now, for he was increasingly plagued by suspicion, and though he fought these thoughts they cast a shadow over his mind, a persistent pall of misery and doubt that only rarely allowed him to see her fully and clearly anymore, and that was when he was working.