Asylum (23 page)

Trevor Williams came over the next day and Max talked to him about moving in the spare bed, which had been put in the
barn. As Stella came downstairs to the kitchen he cast a quick glance in her direction. He may not have known about her scandalous past, but he was certainly drawing conclusions about the state of her marriage.

They started Charlie in the local school the following Monday and he came home rather miserable. He didn’t like the other children in his class. He said they were rough and unfriendly. Stella spent a long time with him. She listened to his troubled account of his loneliness in the playground and his trouble with unfamiliar classroom routines. It would all get better, she said; starting again in a new place was never easy but it was something he would have to do all his life. It was useful to learn how to do it now.

“But why do we have to start again?” he said.

“Because of Daddy’s job.”

Charlie thought about this and then explained that since he planned on becoming a zoologist, and intended to travel a good deal, it was probably best if he never got married. Stella said she thought this was wise. As for Max’s job, it didn’t seem to be as interesting as he’d hoped. Perhaps he had deceived himself, eager to believe that this wouldn’t be dull work, but she saw that he was already bored, and felt rather as Charlie did about their new situation, though he wouldn’t admit it. For he couldn’t afford to think that he’d been shunted off into a psychiatric backwater, where his career would languish while other men with less talent moved into the jobs he should have been offered. No, this was much too painful to contemplate. Max was an ambitious man, and at times Stella wondered if he cared more that she had damaged his career than that she had been unfaithful to him.

Winter came hard and early in north Wales. Max drove Charlie to school in the morning and went on to the hospital, leaving Stella stranded. If she wanted the car she had to get up when
they did, but she slept late now for she was awake most of the night. It rained for days on end and she woke each morning to banks of gray cloud moving ponderously across the valley and the sound of rain on the roof, and of course the Beast That Never Stopped Barking, as she and Charlie called it, a black-and-white sheepdog that Trevor Williams kept chained to its kennel on the far side of the house. One day they went around to have a look at it and it leapt at them in a fury, and but for the chain would clearly have torn their throats out. Charlie was very upset, he thought it a great cruelty to keep an animal chained up all day. He tried to make friends with it but each time he approached the kennel the dog leapt at him with teeth bared, wildly barking, and eventually he grew afraid that one day the chain would snap, and he left it alone after that.

For Stella the days seemed to slip by without anything happening. It became an effort to keep the house clean and provide a meal in the evening. She was gaining weight and she didn’t care. She gazed out of the kitchen window for long periods, watching the rain falling on the fields, and on awakening from her reverie she couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking about. When the rain let up she would go for a walk up the lane behind the house as far as the top of the hill, where she had a view across the next valley with its scattered farmhouses and the quarry in the distance. The rain went rushing along the ditches and beyond the thick clipped hedges the sheep gathered as she went by and bleated at her. She rarely met anybody; sometimes a farmer; occasionally Trevor Williams passed her in his rusty, mud-caked Land Rover. He nodded at her but never stopped. Leaves fell and drifted in soggy masses by the drains. Water dripped from the bare branches of the trees. Once as she stood in the wind at the top of the hill, and gazed off to the west, the clouds parted and the sun briefly appeared, and its watery radiance seemed like a miracle, like a glimpse of God. She wore Wellington boots that blistered her heels and a long gray raincoat. It was weeks since she’d had her hair done but it didn’t matter, she never saw anyone. She tried to imagine
Edgar still out there somewhere and drawing closer, coming for her.

On Saturdays the three of them went shopping. She didn’t like the weekends. The house felt crowded and she was disturbed by their noise. There were more meals to prepare and she was becoming less and less interested in cooking. She herself ate erratically whatever came to hand, which was why she was getting fat. She looked forward to Monday, when the house was empty and quiet again. Sometimes Mair came in and they had a cup of tea in the kitchen. Mair didn’t disturb Stella, for neither of them felt any need to make conversation.

She first had sex with Trevor Williams in the middle of November. It was not her doing, it hadn’t occurred to her to think of him in that way. It happened the morning Mair left to spend a few days with her mother. Stella was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, idly turning the pages of a magazine. There was a knock at the back door and when she looked out of the window over the sink there he was. She was still in her dressing gown. She opened the door and he asked if he could come in for a moment. She stepped aside and he came in and went straight to the window at the far end and stood staring out across the valley. It was one of those days when a profound stillness settled on the countryside, not a breath of wind, the trees motionless as though listening intently to movement deep in the earth, perhaps the sluggish blood of dead Welshmen, the murdered sons of Owen Glendower. She hated those still days, they filled her with dread, she felt menaced by unnameable things. She stood at the stove with her arms folded and watched him.

“Why is it so still?” she said. “I hate days like this.”

He turned. “Do you, Stella?” he said.

He’d never called her Stella before, he’d never called her anything. She knew then why he was there. She wondered idly what she should do. He was standing in front of her now. She still had her arms folded.

“You’re a lovely woman,” he said.

His voice with its burr of an accent was hoarse and low. His eyes seemed to be feeding off her. She felt something stir inside her, the merest flicker of inquisitive desire, a response so slight it could have been snuffed out in a second. She waited. He told her what he wanted to do. The flicker flared and he saw it. He touched her hair, then his fingers cupped the back of her head and he came a step closer so their bodies touched and as his other hand went to her breast he angled his face at her and kissed her. She pulled away from him slightly. There was warmth inside her now, though at the same time she was aware only of a mild dispassionate curiosity about the man, this dour farmer who appeared at the back door in the middle of the morning and started talking about sex.

“Is this how the world does it?” she said.

“What?”

His groin was pressed lightly against hers. She laid her palms flat against his shoulders as though to push him away. His skin was rinsed bone white by the wind. His eyes were small and narrow, deep set and slate gray. His breath smelled of tobacco.

“As you do it, I mean,” she said. “Walk in and say what you want.”

He didn’t speak, just held her eyes and began to stroke her in the cleft between her hip and her belly, and without really meaning to she set her legs slightly apart. He slipped his fingers inside her dressing gown and up between her legs and pressed gently. She thought she might as well let him have what he wanted, why not? He was so eager and it was so long since she’d felt even vaguely alive, sexually, and it would be so much trouble to try and stop him now, he would probably rape her.

“You’ll come upstairs then, will you?” she said, and he gave her a weaselly sort of smile as though he’d tricked her.

When they got up to her bedroom she knelt on the bed holding the headboard and pushed against his thrusts with her eyes closed and her mind empty, and she only spoke once, to tell him he couldn’t have his orgasm inside her. She hadn’t had her cap in for weeks, there’d been no point.

“Don’t you do it with Mair?” she said afterward, lying there watching him pull his trousers back on.

“Not so often,” he said. “And you don’t do it with him at all.”

She didn’t say anything. He sat down on the bed and watched her like a man counting his profits. She could see what it looked like in his ledger, a woman under the same roof who’d let him do this to her.

“Lucky fellow, aren’t you?” she said. “You didn’t think it would be so easy.”

“I could see you were lonely.”

“I’m not lonely.”

He left after that. He tried to make what he called arrangements but she wasn’t interested, she wasn’t going into his timetable as well as his ledger. Her curiosity was satisfied and she felt as indifferent to him as she had before. She thought it remarkable that a man could walk into a woman’s kitchen in the morning, tell her what he wanted, and get it. Was that really how the world did it?

When Max came home he was irritable, as though he knew he’d been betrayed again; but it was their sleeping arrangements that annoyed him. The spare bed was in Charlie’s room now, but it wasn’t really satisfactory. There wasn’t enough cupboard space, so he had to hang his suits in her room, and she made him take out at night what he would need in the morning as she didn’t want him coming in early and waking her. Nor did he have a proper place to work, for if he spread his papers on the table in the sitting room he was disturbed whenever anybody went upstairs: the stairs from the kitchen went up against the back wall of the sitting room and from there to the floor above.

He was starting to express his sense of injustice, and now something shifted in the balance of their relationship. No longer bound by a code of gallantry toward the fallen woman, Max seemed concerned only about Charlie, and she realized that her security would one day come to an end. He would leave her, not
tomorrow, perhaps, but one day, and take Charlie with him; and their semblance of family life, the form of it if not the substance, was her sole structure and protection now, while she waited. The prospect of losing it should have alarmed her acutely, but even then, even as she saw it start to slip away, she couldn’t pretend to Max that she felt toward him anything but indifference.

Max behaved now like a man who no longer believed in doing his moral duty, and had decided to start to look to his own needs instead. She watched him anxiously, she saw how his eyes never settled on her now, but passed across her, as though she were invisible. He never spoke to her if he could avoid it. He wasn’t angry with her anymore, just weary, impatient, irritable, distracted. He had given up.

She couldn’t rouse herself to change any of this. She seemed to exist in a fog through which she saw the others as dim spectral figures, phantoms who possessed no real substance. Nor apparently did she possess substance in their eyes. When Trevor Williams came back some days later she was as pliant as before, for she came at least half to life with him, and the sex made her calm and sleepy and took away the anxiety for a while.

Mair knew that something was happening. She understood her husband well enough to realize that an unhappy woman under the same roof would not escape him for long. She didn’t seem to care. She came over as usual, and they sat with their cups of tea and said very little, and it didn’t really matter to Stella which one of them came to see her, it relieved at least for a little while the numbness muffling the world and turning everything colorless and indistinct. She still hauled on her Wellington boots and raincoat and went tramping up the hill behind the house when it wasn’t raining, for she had become fond of the lonely lanes and their thick hedges, and the sheep, and the bare dripping trees, and the stone walls with pale green fungus growing on them, and the delicate little white mushrooms. It was all so wet! In the narrow ditches beside the lane the water went rushing down over the stones, and when she was near the top, and turned to look at the valley spread below her, she saw the stubbled fields raked with furrows in which rainwater
puddled and gleamed like glass. She thought: he is out there somewhere. Crows flapped up from wet earth trodden to mud by the cattle, and when she passed through the woods at the top of the hill she came upon sudden steep-sided glades overhung with ancient trees, and felt the age of the land, and how it brooded on its secrets, and in an odd way she felt at home.

One morning while she sat with Mair in the kitchen the telephone rang and it was someone from the school who told her that Charlie wasn’t well and could she come and take him home? Max had left the car that day so she said yes, she could. He said there was nothing to be alarmed about and she said she wasn’t alarmed. Mair offered to come with her.

The car had lost its clean, sleek appearance, for the roads around Cledwyn ran with mud and dung which had so splattered and encrusted it that it looked like a farm vehicle. Also, she had scraped it against a wall a week earlier, and they couldn’t afford to have the panel repainted. So it was a shabby, battered white Jaguar that pulled up in front of the school later that morning, and a shabby, battered mother who emerged from it and walked to the main entrance of the school.

This was a large, Victorian brick building with three floors of high windows, and a playground off to the side, and Stella felt a little intimidated, never having set foot in the place. At the reception desk she told the school secretary who she was, and was then asked if she’d wait in the staff room while Charlie’s teacher, a Mr. Griffin, was located. Several children had appeared and were waiting to give the secretary a message; they eyed Stella curiously then fell to whispering among themselves, darting furtive glances at her and giggling. Did she look so odd? she wondered. Was it because her legs were bare that they found her odd, or because she had an English accent? It didn’t matter, she didn’t care. She went into the staff room as the secretary turned to the waiting children and silenced them with a look.

She was reading the notices on the notice board and smoking a cigarette when Hugh Griffin came in a few minutes later. He introduced himself and apologized for keeping her waiting. They had the room to themselves. He cleared a heap of textbooks off a couch and motioned her to sit. He was a tall young man with a shock of blond hair that stood up off his head in thick waves. He had a long, thin, pointed nose and a green tweed jacket with chalk dust on the lapels.