Asylum (20 page)

The events of the next hours have an unreal, nightmare quality for her now. She remembers a room in a police station and a woman in uniform giving her a cup of tea. An hour or so later Max arrived. He, like the police, had clearly decided that the best approach was the gentle one: Stella the victim, seduced and abandoned, a pitiful woman led astray by a cunning man who had manipulated and entrapped her then cast her aside. When he came into the room she tried to be calm and cool but
she hadn’t the resources, and even before he could open his mouth she found herself in his arms and clutching him tightly. She had been so weak and alone and desperate these last days. He stroked her head and she didn’t care that he stroked her like a doctor, like a psychiatrist, because that was what she needed then. It wasn’t until later that the doctor receded and the husband advanced, and a new nightmare began.

She allowed herself to go limp. She became passive and pliant, like a child or a sick person. They talked to her gently, and she answered their questions. She saw them frowning, murmuring to one another in low tones, and she didn’t even try to understand what was going on, she made no attempt to take any active part in it at all. All she wanted now was to be looked after.

That night she slept in a cell in the police station. They were apologetic but she didn’t care. Sleep was sleep and they’d promised her a pill. The room was bare and the sheets were clean. She swallowed her pill and closed her eyes, her mind empty of thought, clear of all feeling, and slept a long, deep sleep and the only dream she could remember in the morning involved the conservatory in the vegetable garden, but she couldn’t remember anything more than that.

The sense of numbness gradually wore off. The next day she had to submit to a lengthy interview with a senior policeman, who was polite, she said, in a brisk sort of way. Her eyes wandered about his office. The walls were a shiny green to shoulder height, cream above. There were two large, dusty arched windows, several gray metal filing cabinets, a wall map with pins in it, and a large clock over the door. He asked her where she had lived with Edgar Stark, what they had done, the people they’d seen. She told him all she could remember, she didn’t see how it could hurt him now, but she couldn’t remember anybody’s name. He nodded, he made notes, he moved her in a straight line through the days and nights since she’d first come to the warehouse on Horsey Street. She told him her story and paid no
particular attention to his reactions. She did not talk about the fits of jealousy, and she tried to leave Nick out of it as much as possible. Some parts of her account seemed to interest him more than others, she didn’t know why and she wasn’t interested in finding out. It was over, that was all, and as she experienced relief and blankness so did she glimpse as though through fog the encroaching fingers of loss, and understood dimly what would come next. She began to brace herself for the darkness.

Max drove her home the next day. The white Jaguar was parked in the yard at the back of the police station. As he opened the passenger door for her she glanced up at the back of the building and saw the barred window of the cell in which she’d spent the last two nights. In silence he pulled out of the yard and into light London traffic. It was the first time they’d been alone since she’d been picked up.

“You look tired,” she said.

He didn’t reply. He was smoking, staring straight ahead.

“I talked to Jack on the phone last night. We think the police won’t press charges,” he said eventually.

“Against who?”

He glanced at her. She was huddled up in the front seat, wearing his overcoat. When she felt his glance she turned toward him. His eyes slid back to the road.

“Don’t you know what you did was criminal?”

She didn’t like his tone of voice and she wasn’t interested in what he was saying. She didn’t reply. They both stared straight ahead at the road.

“Nobody wants a scandal,” said Max.

She said nothing.

“I didn’t expect you to be grateful.”

A lorry pulled out in front of them and Max had to brake sharply to avoid running into the back of it. It took him a few moments to overtake the lumbering thing, and by the time they were once more moving at normal speed he seemed to have forgotten the demand for gratitude he’d embarked on. She glimpsed then just how delicate and complicated their negotiations
would be, now that it was all over. If it was all over. Was it all over? He was apparently being chivalrous. He was saving her from prosecution. He was standing by her. For all of this a price would have to be exacted. Gratitude was just the beginning.

She and I talked one morning in late October, a cool morning with the mist still clinging to the trees. We walked through the vegetable garden, where it had all begun. The men were burning dead leaves and there was a smell of bonfire in the air. She told me she was sad that she wouldn’t see another spring, or another summer, here in the garden. The change in her was noticeable. She was paler, slower, heavier; there was a gravity about her now. The apple trees were heavily laden, and the ground beneath was scattered with fallen fruit, soft, spongy apples, pale green and yellow, dimpled with black spots of rot. As we picked our way among the the fallen apples she took my arm. I was her first and only visitor, she said; all the rest nodded at her and said good morning but they couldn’t look at her, she was an affront to their sense of decency. There had been no word from the Straffens, and she’d assumed, she said, that her old friend Peter Cleave was with them.

“So how are you, my dear?” I said.

“Oh, Peter,” she said, “I’ve been better. Really, how lovely of you to come and see me. I did think you were up there in the stands, booing with the rest of them.”

“I?” I said. “I boo you? I don’t take my friendships as lightly as that!”

“I should have known.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m a doctor, I don’t blame someone for becoming ill. So how could I blame you for falling in love?”

“Nobody else seems to find it very difficult.”

“Ah, but that’s because they were hurt by what you did. It’s only when we feel pain, or the prospect of it, that we start to make distinctions between right and wrong.”

“Is that what it is?”

“I think so. Don’t you?”

We reached the bench by the conservatory and sat down. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m too tired to think.”

We sat there in silence for some minutes. Later she said it was heaven to feel that sense of simple companionship, she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it.

“How are things with Charlie?” I asked quietly.

She opened her eyes.

“Dear Peter,” she murmured. She was grateful for my tact, grateful that I didn’t ask how it was with Max; I had identified, she said, the relationship that really mattered.

“I’m winning him back. He wants to love me.”

“I shall miss you,” I said.

“You’ve heard then?”

“About Cledwyn? Yes.”

“Do you know the place?”

“I saw a patient there once. It’s all sheep and tractors. I’m afraid you won’t like it.”

She smiled.

“Sheep and tractors. I shall be the country wife. And no one will know about my sordid past.”

Before I rose to leave I told her what I’d come to say, that in all seriousness I was greatly relieved she had come to no harm.

“You don’t know what harm I’ve come to,” she said.

“You’re in one piece as far as I can see.”

She touched her breast. “Not in here.”

“You’ll heal,” I said.

“Please come and see me again,” she said. “You’re my only friend, you know.”

I said I would, and then, as I was leaving, she quietly asked me if I knew where Edgar was.

I told her I didn’t know.

She said later that she was much happier after my visit. A certain darkness lifted from her mind. She said she thought that before they moved to Wales she might lean rather heavily on me for support, so as to nourish her spirit for what lay ahead.

•  •  •

I came to see her frequently in the days that followed. She was frank with me about her relations with Max. He was taking a ghastly grim satisfaction, she said, in seeing her suffer the consequences of her defection. You did this, this is your fault, he seemed always to be implying. Damn you, she thought, I shall endure this but I won’t put up with this false calm of yours, this façade of neutrality and the poisonous moral superiority it masks. Max would be sure to be seen to do the right thing, she said, but he would never let her forget that she had hurt him, or rather that she had humiliated him publicly; the needle would be inserted whenever he chose. He assumed, she said, that a woman as much in the wrong as she was wouldn’t have the audacity to protest his toxic pinpricks. We’ll see about that, she thought, and lifted her chin, prepared for the worst.

How had the homecoming been?

They felt so
stale
to her, she said, with a shiver, those familiar rooms, more like cells than the police cells she’d just left! With his usual dry asperity Max said the one word, “home,” and went over to the drinks cabinet. She said nothing, just felt the fingers of the coming darkness plucking at her.

The house was strangely silent that night. Summer was long over and the weather was damp and misty. The house seemed too large for them, and they drifted about it like strangers in an empty hotel. Max was unable properly to begin his punitive campaign, perhaps, she thought, because the magnitude of her guilt awed him. That she should still eat, and drink, and move from room to room, burdened as she was with sin, this struck him dumb with amazement and even a sort of admiration. He could not quite believe that she wasn’t crawling about on her hands and knees, weeping and tearing her hair out and begging his forgiveness. He was aghast with a sort of furtive pleasure that she didn’t behave with shame, which made her in his eyes more shameful still, and so compounded his sick delight in the whole sordid performance. It was a cool evening but she took her drink onto the back lawn and stood staring out into the
darkness. She heard him behind her in the house, moving about, getting ready.

She made up the bed in the spare room, and she could tell he thought she was sparing him the embarrassment of having to refuse to sleep with her. Nothing of the sort, it was her decision, had she wished to sleep in her own bed she would have done so. She wasn’t afraid of him, and she wasn’t going to do his work for him. If she was to be punished he would have to do it himself. How would he do it? She didn’t trouble herself with his problems. She felt the ground tremble beneath her feet and the abyss begin to open.

For the next few days everything seemed imbued with a solemn, heavy formality. She remembers one wet afternoon lying a long time in a hot bath with a gin and tonic then drifting about the house, going from room to room, doing nothing, not bored, just passive, numb. She went into Charlie’s room and lay on the bed, and she must have fallen asleep, for that’s where Max found her when he came home from work. He was, as usual, irritable, but there was something else, his mood was compounded with an anxiety that came from a source other than her.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “What’s happened? Is it Charlie?”

He was leaning against the door frame. He pulled out his cigarettes. He wasn’t looking at her.

“Are you sure you’re interested?”

“Of course I’m interested. Tell me.”

She was sitting on the side of the bed. Max lit his cigarette, tilted his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

“You’ve finished me,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s fired me.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“Oh, he can’t do that.”

He rubbed his face and sighed.

“Don’t you want to know why I’ve become an embarrassment
to the hospital? Why the fact that my wife ran away with an absconding patient makes me a liability?”

He was suddenly angry.

“What will you do?” she said.

He didn’t speak for a few moments. He was simmering silently once more.

“Jack believes the hospital’s mission will be compromised if I remain on the staff.”

She yawned.

“There’s a ham,” she said.

He looked away and shook his head then went downstairs. She heard him go into his study. He didn’t come out for the rest of the evening, and he was still in there when she went to bed. She was terribly tired.

The next morning she telephoned Charlie. He had been staying with Brenda and she hadn’t seen him yet, but she’d called him every day. He was hurt, of course he was hurt; she’d gone away without preparing him for her departure and he’d naturally felt abandoned. He must have thought it was his fault, she said; until, that is, his guilty bewilderment was given definition by Max and Brenda, so that by now he’d be blaming her for his unhappiness. But she knew he wanted to come home. He wanted to love his mother, and to know that she loved him. Brenda, however, was being obstructive.

“He’s not here,” she said, and Stella knew she was lying.

“Let me talk to him, Brenda,” she said.

“He was very upset last night. I think you should let him come to terms with this whole thing gradually.”

“Just put him on, please.”

“Have you really thought what’s best for him?”

“Please don’t interfere. Let me talk to him.”

Silence then, and a few moments later Charlie was on the line.

“Mummy?”

“Hello, darling. What have you been doing?”

“Oh, going to see things. I want to come home now.”

She drove through with Max in the afternoon to meet the train. Max was silent. Stella was sure he would want a divorce, but he had said nothing yet and she certainly had no intention of raising the topic. She didn’t want any fresh upheaval, she wanted a haven, and time to heal, for she realized that she was still in shock and the pain of losing Edgar had not properly begun to make itself felt yet.

Charlie was nervous when he got off the train. But then, as they came together, all four of them, for Brenda was with him, on the platform, and Stella crouched and took his hands, he fell into her arms and kissed her on the lips. She glanced up and caught the look that Brenda shot Max, the lift of a thin plucked eyebrow.