Asylum (27 page)

They tramped on and eventually found themselves at the picnic site, a sheltered spot in the lee of a hill. On a low flat outcrop of rock Hugh Griffin and the others had begun to spread their sandwiches and drinks. The children were forming into small noisy groups while the adults gathered around Hugh Griffin and poured hot tea from thermos flasks. There was laughter and shouting as a sudden gust of wind lifted a map from the rock and blew it away. Stella wandered a little way off by herself and a minute or two later was aware of Charlie beside her silently eating his sandwiches. He asked her if she was hungry and she shook her head. He asked her if she wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill and she said yes. Soon they were out of sight of the others. Charlie made his
way down the steep slope to the pool at the bottom, where weeds grew thickly in the shallows. Stella followed him and settled herself on the ground some way back. She felt the first spots of rain. Charlie shouted that he thought there were newts. Stella let her head fall forward onto her knees and covered her face with her hands. This time it was very bad. Black waves swept through her. The ground seemed to be undulating beneath her. She lifted her head and the air was misted with a fine black dust like specks of graphite. It was starting to rain. She saw as though from a great distance and through a heavy scrim the dark pool, its surface running with little waves and splattered with raindrops, and Charlie splashing indistinctly among the dense weeds at the edge. She pulled out her cigarettes and lit one, cupping her hand around the lighter’s flame. Charlie was trying to catch something in the shallows but it evaded him. She watched him mutely and passively and smoked her cigarette as he grabbed it, whatever it was, and lost his balance. The air was dark and the rain was coming harder now and the awful undulation had almost stopped and she felt the creeping numbness that always came afterward. Charlie was in deeper water now, trying to scramble upright and flailing around and shouting, and something in his shouting brought her to her feet. She stood in the gusting wind and rain with her shoulders hunched up tight and watched him for a few moments. Then she turned her head to the side and brought the cigarette to her lips. The edges of her head scarf fluttered wildly about her face; the waves were almost gone. She turned back and dimly saw a head break the surface, and an arm claw the air, then go under again, and she turned aside and again brought the cigarette to her lips. With one hand she clutched her elbow as her arm rose straight and rigid to her mouth. She turned her head to the side and again brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, each movement tight, separate, and controlled.

She didn’t see Hugh Griffin appear at the brow of the hill behind her. She didn’t hear him shout as he saw her there, smoking her cigarette, turning her head away, then back, then
away again, as an indistinct figure struggled in the water. She was aware of him only when he came bounding past her through the rain and went crashing into the water, still shouting.

It was all rather confused after that. Stella stood by while Hugh Griffin came splashing out with Charlie in his arms and laid him on the ground and tried to revive him. Then the others came running over the hill and she was forgotten in all the flurry of the children being got back to the bus, and the police being called, and so on, and one of the women gave her a cup of tea and put a rug around her shoulders, and she heard her say to someone that Mrs. Raphael was in shock, and eventually, after the bus had left, the police arrived, and when they got to the police station Max was there and after more cups of tea he drove her home and gave her a pill and she went to bed and slept.

She slept through the following day and when she came downstairs Mair told her Max was with the police and would be back at lunchtime. They sat in silence at the kitchen table. It was still raining.

“What a terrible thing,” Mair said at last. “Terrible.”

How would she know? Stella wondered. She hasn’t any children. How would she know it was terrible if one of them drowned?

When Max came home Mair left. He sat down at the table and stared at her, simply stared at her. Then he said, in a tone of utter bafflement, “But why didn’t you shout?”

She found this amusing: Max was asking her why she hadn’t shouted.

“You didn’t make a sound,” he said, in the same astonished tone. “You didn’t open your mouth.”

Usually they want you to keep your mouth shut, but sometimes they want you to shout, and they expect you to know the difference. This was what amused her.

“That man Griffin,” he said. “He’s saying it was your fault.”

There was a silence.

“Well, say something for Christ’s sake! Don’t just sit there, say something, tell me how it happened. Oh Christ.”

He calmed down.

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” he murmured. “Traumatic reaction, you’re the same. It won’t properly dawn on us for a day or two. Best to stay calm.”

He rubbed his face with his hands for several moments then once more stared at her from that gaunt face he had newly acquired.

“Why didn’t you
shout?”
he whispered.

“Why didn’t you shout, Mrs. Raphael? When you saw the boy was in trouble?”

She was in the police station and she didn’t have an answer there either.

In the days that followed their sympathy disappeared. This was as a result of Hugh Griffin’s insistence on the fact that when he came over the hill Charlie was in the water screaming and his mother stood by smoking a cigarette. She didn’t try to help him, he said, although the boy was clearly in serious trouble, and he also said that had she raised the alarm he might have been saved, though this was later disputed, given the distance between the top of the hill and the water. No, what horrified them was that she had made no noise and hadn’t moved. When they properly understood this it all changed, because then she was a mother who’d watched her child drown and done nothing to save him. It was unnatural, they said. It was evil. They couldn’t understand it; she has no feelings, they said, she isn’t human, she’s a monster. Or perhaps she’s mad.

She was mad. How could you explain it, unless she was mad? You had to explain it, a child was dead; either she was a monster or she was mad. The first thing they were going to do was
charge her with manslaughter. She was remanded. She was put in a cell once more. She was numb and empty and utterly detached from the woman who was moved from room to room, and questioned again and again, and still failed to tell them what they wanted to know. She watched herself endure the hours of those strange days, watched herself both from within, from some barricaded citadel deep in the psyche, and also from a point, so it seemed, a few feet over her head and slightly off to the side.

It was then that I came to see her. She hadn’t been expecting me, and at the sight of me she felt the first faint stirring of emotion she’d known for days. I was shown into the room and did my best to communicate my sympathy and concern.

“My poor dear girl,” I said, and that was enough. The tears came.

Now she was able at last to give up, she said, to abandon her grip on things and just sleep and dream and drift, because now she was getting pills and nothing was expected of her anymore. She was able to tell me what it was she’d seen in the water. I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised that since I’d seen her last she’d put on weight and her hair was lank, and her eyes were ringed with shadows, though her skin was as white and clear as ever: she was still a beautiful woman. She was also a profoundly depressed woman. My visit became the central event of her day and made all the rest of it tolerable. There were more interviews with various men; I was present. There was a court appearance; I made sure it caused her as little distress as possible. She didn’t attempt to understand what was happening to her, she left it all to me. One day I asked her if she wanted me to keep on looking after her.

Of course, she said, with a flicker of alarm. Why did the question need asking? Was I saying I might leave her?

I told her what was going to happen. She was going to a hospital. She’d been sick and I wanted to treat her. Was she sure she wanted me to treat her?

“Oh yes,” she said.

Then she must come to my hospital. Did she know the name of my hospital?

She told me the name of the hospital.

“That’s right,” I said. “You’ll come to the hospital and I’ll look after you there.”

I was convinced I was the man best qualified to treat her. And while bringing her back to the hospital might seem unorthodox, or even, given the circumstances, positively dangerous, I was in a position now to make it happen.

Max went to see her. I had warned her that this would happen and she pleaded with me not to make her go through with it. Quietly and firmly I insisted on it. She told me I was a cruel bastard and I reminded her that if I was treating her she must trust me. I told her it was as much for Max as it was for her.

“This thing has broken him,” I said. “Make peace with him.”

“Peace,” she said.

“For both your sakes.”

So she agreed.

They met in a bare room with a wooden table in the middle and a single high window. Stella was deeply anxious when she was brought in, clutching only a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. Max was already there; he rose to his feet and they stood there facing each other as the door closed.

“Hello, Stella.”

Her first impulse was to turn and walk straight out again but she didn’t want to disappoint me. She sat down. He sat down. He had lost weight, and he had been a lean man before. There was a fragility to him now, as though he would shatter like fine bone china if you struck him. He offered her a cigarette. He seemed older too, not so much in how he looked as in the way he moved and held himself. He seemed to have reached the stage when men begin to think of themselves as no longer robust, and deliberately adopt the first mannerisms of age; as though his personal resources were limited and must be husbanded
with care. She took the cigarette he offered. What did she look like to him? she wondered. The slut who’d ruined his life was now the pale fat witch who’d drowned his son.

“What did you want to see me about?” she said.

This surprised him. He opened his mouth and a small, coughlike laugh came out.

“Sorry” he said. “Straight to the point. I didn’t think that question would need to be asked.”

She waited for him to get to the point.

“I dare say you won’t be interested in my thoughts about everything that’s happened to us. Where the responsibility lies.”

Like an accountant, she thought. Debit column and credit column. I’ll take the blame for this, you take the blame for that. Then we can sleep at night.

“But I don’t know anymore if it matters. Well, say something.”

“It was Edgar in the water.”

He nodded. “I thought it probably was.”

There was silence then and she grew restless. She turned in her chair and glanced at the door. She wanted them to come and get her.

“Do you still hate me?” he said.

She thought of a dream she’d had a few nights before. She was in bed with Max and the bed was full of shit. She told him this. She saw him recoil.

“So you do,” he said. He made a mild sort of snorting noise. She watched him carefully. He put his hand over his mouth and stared at her with those hollow eyes and she turned away.

“So should I hate you?” he said.

She wasn’t interested in this arithmetic.

“It seems unfair to Charlie,” he said.

A tug at the heart, this, presumably. But it had no visible effect. Another small silence. Maybe their time in this room wouldn’t be up till he went to the door and called them. She was about to ask him to do this when he began to talk.

“Do you know what’s going to happen next? The shock is going to wear off and you’re going to start feeling guilty. I know
what I’m talking about. It will be a truly terrible guilt. It will devastate you. You’ll be carefully watched, for you may attempt suicide, that’s how bad you’ll feel. Eventually, with Peter Cleave’s help, you’ll come to terms with what you’ve done. And when that happens you won’t hate me anymore and I hope you won’t hate yourself. You’ll just be terribly, terribly sad, and you won’t lose that sadness for the rest of your life.”

That’s when she flung her lighter at him and tried to climb over the table to get her fingernails into his face. It was her screaming that brought them running in. They took her away and left Max to congratulate himself on his skill at the psychiatric interview.

The female wing of the hospital comprises two blocks each with a pleasantly spacious enclosed yard with flower beds, lawns, and benches. Its southern aspect gives onto the terraces, so the ladies with parole privileges may wander among the gardens and down the stone steps between the grassy banks just as their male counterparts do, though the sexes are separated, of course, by an internal wall. Many of my own patients are in the female wing, in fact administratively speaking the female wing has been my domain for years. I always feel a rather proprietary pride when I gaze out over its orderly, well-tended paths and yards and terraces.

Stella was driven down the next day and admitted to the hospital. She brought only three suitcases with her; she said she needed just a few essentials, though I noticed she’d packed most of her evening clothes, including the black silk dress. I didn’t ask her how it felt to come up the hill in a police car, to come past her old house and into the hospital not through the Main Gate but through the gate of the female wing, and from there to the admissions room behind the front office. She stood by while the police handed over her paperwork to me, and then I went through a brief formal interview with her before taking her up to the admissions ward with a female attendant, a competent young woman called Mary Flynn. In a large communal bathroom
Stella was asked to undress. She did so. She was taken into a cubicle and bathed. I gave her a thorough physical examination, then she put on a cotton shift and we escorted her down the ward to her room.