Asylum (19 page)

The flat was tiny but it was better than the loft. What a pleasure it was to have a proper bathroom! Nick had been worried sick about her. He had gone back to the loft and found it empty. He hadn’t known what to think but he’d feared the worst. His relief was enormous when he heard her voice on the phone. He came to the pub, they had a drink together, then he took her back to the flat. She told him that more than anything she wanted a bath.

She undressed in the bathroom. She sank into the hot water and lay there with her eyes closed. She felt she hadn’t been properly clean for a long time. Some of the unhappiness and squalor and anxiety and guilt of the last days lifted. After a while she examined her body, her white skin, her breasts, her limbs, her pale, delicate hands and feet. Max had lost interest in
her body after three or four years of marriage, for he lacked the imagination to sustain sexual attraction. She had then been more or less celibate until Edgar. But she couldn’t think about him now. She blocked him out.

She emerged from her bath and powdered herself in front of the long mirror in the door.

Dear Nick. He was not well equipped to offer hospitality and succor to a distressed woman but he was trying. He insisted she have the bed, he would sleep in the armchair. So she climbed gratefully into bed in her dressing gown as he fussed around her, getting her a drink.

“Would you like something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry, Nick.”

She was demure and gracious, as befits a lady in straitened circumstances. She liked this weak, messy, good-hearted man. His paint-spattered trousers had always made her smile; she and Edgar had a private joke about them, they’d suggested he exhibit them as art. Poor Nick, he’d laughed, but the next time they saw him he was wearing clean trousers, though they didn’t stay clean for long. Now he sat forward on the edge of the armchair, rubbing his long hands together and shyly telling her how he’d felt when he’d heard her voice on the telephone that evening, the enormous relief.

“I knew him when he started getting ideas about Ruth,” he said.

“Oh, Ruth,” said Stella. She didn’t want to hear about Ruth now.

“Nick,” she said as an idea occurred to her.

“What?”

“Has Edgar ever been here?”

Nick looked sick and said yes.

She couldn’t sleep, and nor could Nick, sprawled in the armchair under a blanket, tossing about, trying to get comfortable; she wondered at one point whether she should invite him into the bed with her. Later she slipped over to the window and
pulled back the curtain an inch or two. The rain was coming down steadily, slanting down through the glow of the streetlights. The narrow street, slicked and gleaming, was deserted. What had she expected, to see him standing under the streetlight in the rain, gazing up at the window?

A little later she heard Nick groping for his cigarettes, trying to make no noise, and then came the flare of his match.

“I’m not asleep,” she said into the darkness.

“I can’t sleep either.”

“Nick.”

“What?”

“He’ll come here, won’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m frightened.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand.

“It’s not him,” she said. “It’s because he’s sick. You know what he’s like when he’s not sick.”

Nick didn’t say anything. He was holding her hand tightly. She realized he was aroused. It had never occurred to her that Nick desired her. Had Edgar had seen it, was this how it had all started? Was it all Nick’s fault?

“The door’s locked,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. He leaned toward her and she let him kiss her. He slipped his hand under the blanket and tentatively touched her breast.

“No, Nick.”

“Sorry.”

He went back to his armchair.

“Try and sleep,” she said.

He came at dawn. They were awakened by the sound of the door handle being turned. They never did find out exactly how he got into the building, for the front door was locked. They sat up and stared with horror at the door.

“Nick, open the door.”

His muffled voice terrified her. It wasn’t him, it was still
the other one with the strange artificial accent. Nick stared wildly at her, shaking his head. In the gloom she read the terror in his face.

“Open the door, Nick. Come on, man, it’s me. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Silence. They were utterly still. He won’t want to create a disturbance, she thought. He won’t dare try and break the door down, it would be the end of him. Unless he doesn’t care anymore.

“She’s in there, isn’t she?”

Nick didn’t know what to do. He was paralyzed. Stella stared at him, shaking her head. He mustn’t get into a conversation with him, not even through a locked door. Nick was shrugging his shoulders like a schoolboy. With her finger at her lips Stella silently crossed the room. She sat on the arm of the chair and put her hand on Nick’s mouth. With her other hand she gripped his wrist. He gazed up at her and she made a silent shushing shape with her mouth.

“It’s not your fault, Nick,” came the voice. “I know what she’s like.”

Nick’s eyes grew wide. She couldn’t tell what he would do. She took her hand away from his mouth and leaned forward and kissed him.

“She’s no good.”

Nick tried to turn his head toward the door but her fingers were in his hair, gripping him, as she kept her mouth pressed to his.

“Nick!”

He thumped the door very hard once. Nick almost jumped out of the armchair, but Stella held him, still kissing him, darting her tongue into his mouth. Her dressing gown had opened across her legs as she balanced herself on the arm of the chair, and Nick’s hand crept under and began tentatively to touch her thigh.

There was silence now from outside the door. Had he slipped away, alarmed that all the noise he was making would rouse the house; or was he waiting in the corridor? Nick’s hand
moved up her thigh to her groin. She was becoming aroused too, by the situation as much as by his touch, but she pushed his hand away. She went to the door and pressed her ear against it. She could hear nothing. Nick had slumped deep into the armchair and turned gray. She went to the window and twitched back the curtain a fraction. She saw him emerge from somewhere along the side of the building, and she watched him walk away. Even his walk was different now, gangling, ill-coordinated. It cost her not to call out to him, to let him just walk away. It had stopped raining. She turned into the room and faced the slumped and shattered Nick.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“I want a drink.”

“Poor old fellow.”

They moved out within the hour. They slipped away through a side door, each with a suitcase. Nobody was about yet and the street was almost deserted. A little later they passed two loud men in evening clothes looking for a cab. Stella had only one pair of shoes now, her high heels, and she stumbled trying to keep up with Nick, who was still badly frightened. He took her suitcase and she clung to his arm. They caught a bus going west, away from Southwark, and sat among silent, sleepy men and women too preoccupied with their newspapers and ill humor to pay any attention to the bruised woman in the raincoat and the tall shabby nervous man beside her.

The day was overcast. Small flurries of rain swept against the windows of the bus. After a few minutes they got off. Nick said he knew where they were. He took her down a side street to a run-down square of large Georgian houses surrounding a patch of brown grass with a tree in the middle and a fence around it. The hotel was no different from any of the other houses. A tired woman took them up two flights of cheaply carpeted stairs and showed them a room that overlooked a high brick wall with glass shards cemented along the top and an alley with dustbins, washing lines, and cats.

•  •  •

She said that the two days she spent with Nick were the grimmest yet. Only a few details stand out in her memory. He was not clean in his person, she said, and his eating and drinking were messy. He was considerate and devoted but he watched her constantly, not with tenderness but with hunger. She wondered if he was capable of rape. She lay for hours on the sagging double bed, and the overhead light cast a weak yellowy glow that made everything in the room uglier than it was already, including themselves. She lay there worrying about Edgar. She feared he was too disturbed now to avoid drawing attention to himself. She thought he might do something stupid.

And their future together?

Oh, she said blithely, she was always sure of that. She knew the thread was unbroken; even in his worst fits of aggressive jealousy she felt him straining for her, she felt the passion, only it was confused and misdirected, it was as though it had been shunted off down some passage from which it emerged monstrous and unrecognizable. This was his illness. And she said that it was during the two days she spent with Nick that she attempted what she called her heart’s prompting: she tried for the first time, not intellectually but emotionally, to separate the man from his illness, and yes, she could do it. Oh, it was easy, she was more than equal to the task: she imagined him clutching his head as the storm raged in his poor benighted mind, but the storm wasn’t him! The storm would pass, he would recover, he would be himself again. But
for his sake
she must avoid him while he was mad; later she would go back to him. How all of this would come about she had no idea, but she chose to trust that it would.

Nick was too afraid to go back to the loft, he was afraid to go out at all, and the pair of them were too much together. She was soon deeply irritated with him, but by now she had almost no money left and no clear idea how to get more. At the end of the
corridor there was a bathroom, which they shared with the other residents of their floor. She spent as much time in it as she could, if only to escape Nick and his smells and his anxiety and his lust. The house smelled of boiled cabbage and seemed occupied exclusively by shabby gray people who avoided her eyes when she passed them in the corridor or on the stairs.

At last she’d had enough. She took it all out on Nick. She admitted that on the morning of the third day, after another restless, unhappy night, in a weak moment she acquiesced in his constant doglike lusting and took him into bed. She was passive. She was also rather sore. Her only satisfaction lay in being reminded of how it was to make love to Edgar. So in her debasement and despair, as Nick laboriously went about his pleasure, she summoned the image of her lover.

Afterward Nick was pathetically satisfied with himself and that was the trigger. She turned on him, she belittled him, she mocked his weakness, his failure to be a hard surface she could grind herself against. He tried to protest his sympathy and concern but what did she need his concern for, or his sympathy? He could keep it. She went to the bathroom and came back and got dressed in front of him, provocatively, and went out without telling him where she was going, because she didn’t know. She left him like a kicked dog to lick his wounds.

She wandered the streets, a sad slow woman, her coat hanging open and a cigarette dangling from her fingers. She didn’t care what she looked like or whether anyone noticed her. A sad woman drifting down sad streets, insubstantial, not quite real, not quite there, a ghost. She came to a decision.

It seemed suddenly absurd to her, she said, to be running and hiding not from the hospital authorities but from
Edgar!
She caught a bus as far as Blackfriars and walked to Horsey Street in the rain. In the street the boys were kicking a ball against the wall. They stopped their game and stared at her as she turned up the alley to the yard, and their silent scrutiny did nothing to relieve the dread she felt, a dread so palpable it made her nauseated.
More than once her step faltered and she thought she couldn’t go on.

She reached the passage into the building. The children had not resumed their game, they had followed her into the yard and now stood silently staring at her. She soon understood why. At the top of the stairs the door to the loft was open and there were men inside. She immediately started back down but she’d been seen. She heard a voice calling; she did not stop. A man came after her and caught up with her halfway down. Just a moment, please, he said, as he put his hand on her shoulder. She turned. He recognized her. Christ, he said, it’s Mrs. Raphael. You’re Stella Raphael. She stared at him. She had never seen him before in her life. He started shouting to the other men. Within moments two more of them had appeared on the stairs, and they were both as surprised as the first one. They led her back up to the loft. Edgar wasn’t there, nor did they appear to know where he was. They wanted to ask her a few questions, they said. If she didn’t mind.

With this dramatic development Stella swings back into my field of vision, she comes into focus once more, and the account is again grounded in my own observations. She says she was grateful they weren’t rough with her. Actually they were more surprised than anything else, I think because it hadn’t occurred to any of them that she would so clumsily blunder into their clutches. They didn’t attempt to question her there and then, once they’d established that she didn’t know where Edgar was.