Asylum (22 page)

“What is it you’re saying to me?”

She sat on the edge of an armchair and lit a cigarette.

“You’re vulnerable at the moment. You’re about to move to a part of the country not known for its warmth to strangers, where you know no one, and with a husband who’s still very angry with you. It worries me, Stella.”

“I shall cope,” she said quietly.

“I hope so. I expect you to write to me.”

“I will.”

“Regularly.”

“Yes, all right!” She was laughing now. “Can north Wales really be so bad? You make it sound like Siberia.”

“For you it might as well be Siberia.”

“Oh nonsense.”

At the front door she asked me her pressing question.

“Have you heard anything of Edgar?”

I took a moment to decide how to respond to this. She assumed our common interest in his welfare; assumed too that I was as preoccupied with his whereabouts as she was. I curbed my impulse to tell her to put him out of her mind altogether. Instead I just shook my head.

“Poor man. Peter, where does his son live?”

“His
son?”

“Leonard.”

“He has no son.”

“Yes he does.”

“Stella, he has no son. Don’t you think I would know?”

She gave a small brittle laugh.

“We shouldn’t talk about him, should we?” she said.

•  •  •

She wandered through the empty rooms and remembered the events of the summer. In less than a week they would be in Wales, and she would never see this house again. Max had found them somewhere to live, not a place of their own but part of a large farmhouse divided in two. They would rent one half of it from the owner, who lived with his wife in the other half. Max said it was on the side of a hill and looked out over a valley. There was no real garden, he said, but there was plenty of open country around, fields, woods, a quarry. Charlie listened closely, wanting to believe they were going to a better place.

There were no farewell parties. Jack Straffen gave Max a glass of sherry in his office. I was there; they murmured platitudes to each other, the mansion of psychiatry having many rooms and so on, and Jack expressed his sympathy; though what sympathy could you offer a man who wanted your job and would probably have gotten it had his wife not sabotaged him so decisively? People had begun to question Max’s judgment in marrying a woman capable of doing what Stella had done. Could he be
sound?
I tried to keep an open mind, and encouraged others to do the same. Though I thought then, and still think, that Jack was right to let him go. This is too sensitive an institution to have a man like Max Raphael occupying a senior post.

I did stand by her, I can hear him saying; I did stand by her, despite everything.

It was raining the morning they left. The removal men had come the day before and carried their furniture out to a huge black van, and then the packing crates, and then the neatly taped and labeled boxes that held the rest of their possessions. When they were finished Charlie and Stella watched them drive away, while Max went around the house locking up. They drove to the Main Gate for the last time and handed in the keys. Then they left for the north.

•  •  •

The journey took several hours. Charlie was more interested in the scenery than Stella was, so he sat in the front seat and Max did the driving. At least they still had the car, Stella remembers thinking; she was fond of that comfortable car. Somewhere north of Birmingham a terrible thought occurred to her: how will Edgar find me? When he comes looking for me, who can tell him where I’ve gone? Who can he ask? She stared out of the window and willed the tears not to come. She caught Max’s glance flicking up at the rearview mirror, watching her, always watching her, waiting for moments of weakness like this when he would have it confirmed, again, that she was still elsewhere and unrepentant. Oh, Edgar, why have you done this to me, why have you left me here to twist and weep under the cold eye of this unloving man? She was angry with her lover then, she could afford to be: she knew he was trying to reach her.

It was already dark when they arrived. They would spend the night in the town and meet the removal men at the house the next morning. Max was tired; he was also angry, for it had not escaped him that Stella had been crying, and he knew she cried for Edgar Stark. He had distracted himself by having a long conversation with Charlie, and when after a while she paid attention again she discovered she was indifferent to what they were talking about but fascinated and horrified at how he was shaping the boy’s thoughts, imprinting him with the patterns of his own logic, drawing him beyond the reach of her influence, though whether he was doing this from a conviction of her unfitness as a mother or from a more primitive impulse to punish her, she was not sure; she suspected the latter. For a while she was disturbed by this; Charlie was at just the age to take the impress of a grown-up mind, he was like soft wax.

They were in the hotel, eating together in the dining room, and Stella had leisure to examine the shabby provinciality of their surroundings. She was suddenly convinced that the house they were moving into the next day would be ugly.

“Max,” she said, “is it ugly, this house? Will I hate it?”

Father and son stopped talking and looked at her. She had interrupted them. Good, she thought. She must interrupt them
as often as possible. She must not allow Max to have the boy for himself. To steal his soul.

“I don’t think it’s ugly no,” said Max. “On the contrary it’s rather a handsome house.”

“What is it made of?” said Charlie.

“It’s a stone house,” said Max. “They build with stone here.”

“It sounds cold,” Stella said to Charlie. “Don’t you think so, darling? Doesn’t it sound cold?”

Charlie was uncertain.

“Is it cold?”

“There’s a wood-burning stove in the sitting room, and storage radiators, and all the rooms are carpeted except the kitchen.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Stella.

“What did you mean?”

“I meant cold for the spirit.”

Max said nothing. He lifted his glass and watched her over the rim as he sipped his water. His eyes said, Be careful, stop now. Charlie looked from one to the other, not understanding.

“We’ll make it warm, won’t we, darling?” said Stella.

“What do you mean?”

“Mummy means we’re going to be happy in the new house,” said Max. “Don’t you?”

You could see the house from the road when you were still a mile away. The valley was broad, contained by long, low hills crested with stands of trees. It was a clear, blustery day and she was filled with dread. Banks of cloud rolled across the open sky. The road was narrow, and splattered with dung, and there were thick, bristling hedges and stone walls on either side. When they were three or four miles outside the town Max pointed it out, a gray square block of a house high up the valley. It seemed built for defensive purposes, to protect its occupants, but against what? Max glanced at her in the rearview mirror.

“What do you think?” he said. “Think it’s handsome?”

There was, she said, a jaunty tone in his voice now; he knew she was trapped.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. She couldn’t decide if it would shelter her or not, this big gray house. Five minutes later they turned in through the gate and emerged cautiously from the car. The sign on the gate read, “Plas Mold.”

The removal van had already arrived and was parked in the yard behind the house with the tailboard down and the men standing around smoking cigarettes. One of them came forward, a small lean fellow in a rough tweed jacket. It was windy up there, and there was a strong smell of manure in the air, so Stella got back into the car and watched as Max and Charlie shook hands with the man in the tweed jacket, who then produced a set of keys. They moved to the back door of the house, unlocked it, and disappeared inside. Somewhere out at the back of the house a dog was barking. The removal men climbed into the van and began passing boxes out. Max came back out to the car a few minutes later.

“Come in and see the place,” he said. He seemed genuinely confident she would like it.

The man in the tweed jacket was Trevor Williams. He owned the house and lived in the other side of it with his wife, Mair. They had no children. He showed them around. He was a silent man, and he gave Stella the distinct impression that the less they had to do with each other the better he’d like it. The wind howled about the house and made it creak and bang like a ship. The kitchen was a long room on the ground floor. The sitting room, one floor up, matched its dimensions, and the top floor was divided into two bedrooms with a bathroom off the landing. Stella realized immediately that she and Max would have to share a bedroom: why hadn’t he mentioned this? How could he expect her to sleep with him? She said nothing for the moment, however; Trevor Williams was watching her.

She didn’t like the look of the master of Plas Mold. She told me she was to meet this type of character often in the weeks to come, suspicious, watchful men, dour and sly. They didn’t like the Raphaels because they were English. They bore old grudges. The women were hard-worked and bitter. Stella met Mair a little later when she came out of her end of the house with a basket of damp laundry to hang on a line strung across a patch of grass at the side of the house. The laundry flapped and snapped in the wind as Mair moved along with her basket, a couple of clothespins in her teeth. She was as lean as her husband
but lacked the spark of furtive vitality Stella had seen in his eyes, evidence of an appetite for whatever secret pleasures spiced his dry life. Mair’s eyes spoke only of work and disappointment and bitterness and sterility; she had no children. She introduced herself and they stood there in the wind, the women, Mair clutching her basket of washing with both hands as at the back door the removal men grunted with the double bed. She asked Stella had they come from London and Stella said no, not London, but not far from London. Ah, she said, and Stella realized that the smell of their scandal had not yet reached those thin pinched nostrils.

“How old’s your boy?” she said.

“Ten.”

“Still a baby.”

“Yes.”

The frame of the bed went through the back door with a man at either end. Stella offered Mair a cigarette. Mair put down the laundry. She knew how to light a cigarette in the wind. Her eyes were pale blue and her skin had once been soft. She was probably only thirty-five or thirty-six, but her good looks had long since been leached out and she gave the impression now of agelessness and sexlessness, a piece of fruit so long neglected it had lost all juice and sweetness.

“He showed you where everything was, did he?” she said.

“Yes he did.”

She nodded, picked up her laundry basket, and with the cigarette dangling from her lips and her eyes half closed against the smoke she trudged off around the back of the house, where the dog was still barking. The removal men emerged from the back door. Stella hadn’t yet spoken to Max about the bedroom.

She didn’t have a chance until Charlie had gone up after dinner and they were sitting at the table in the kitchen. She hadn’t hung any curtains and the window at the end of the room looked out into the dark valley and a night sky full of stars. Above the steady roar of the wind she could hear the cattle in the field below. The headlights of a car moved slowly along the main road several miles away.

“How did you imagine our sleeping arrangements?” she said.

He put down his newspaper. They no longer made any attempt at conversation when Charlie wasn’t in the room.

“I won’t sleep with you,” she said. “If you can’t think of a solution we’ll have to find somewhere else. It won’t work like this.”

“We’re not moving again,” he said. Oh, she could make him angry in a moment, no matter how determined he was to stay calm and reasonable. She heard the rising irritation in his voice, the barely controlled whine of indignation that she should be dictating terms to him, she who was entirely responsible for their upheaval. He was trapped in an idea of where his moral duty lay, but I’m afraid he hadn’t the strength of character fully to believe in it.

“Why won’t you help me?” he said tightly.

She was without mercy. She hated him because he wasn’t Edgar.

“Someone has to sleep in Charlie’s room,” she said. “I don’t care who it is.”

He got up and walked to the window and stood staring out into the night, his hands in his pockets and his fingers twitching with the effort to keep his temper under control.

“I’ll sleep on the couch tonight,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“No,” he said, with his back to her, “I will.”

“Why?”

Now he turned. “Because I don’t think Charlie should see you sleeping on the couch. He shouldn’t see either of us sleeping on the couch. Why can’t you wait till I get the spare bed moved into his room?”

“No,” she said. “Why didn’t you think of this?”

He turned back to the window. He wouldn’t tell her why he hadn’t thought of it. Perhaps he’d hoped she’d start sleeping with him again. She saw then with a small dark surge of satisfaction that her power was far from extinguished, and that despite everything she was still stronger than he was.