Asylum (28 page)

“Here we are,” said Mary as she unlocked the door. There was a bed, a window with bars in it, a toilet, and a basin. There was a grate in the door, also barred. I followed her in.

“What now?” she said.

“I want you to settle down now and have a good sleep,” I said. “Is there anything we can get you?”

She told me later all she could see was the bunch of keys in the hands of the woman standing in the doorway. She shook her head.

“Wait!”

We paused in the doorway. “Yes?”

She wanted to say, in a reasonable tone of voice, Please don’t go, please don’t shut the door, please don’t lock me in! When she was on remand she’d been locked up but somehow it hadn’t been like this. She’d assumed that the nightmare would be over when she got here, or that it would at least be less dreadful. But she couldn’t say anything, not to what she later called our cool faces with their slightly lifted eyebrows. She shook her head.

The door banged shut and Mary locked it.

An hour later she came back. Stella was lying on the bed staring at the ceiling when she heard the key in the door. Mary had a cup of tea for her and some pills. Stella asked what they were and was told just to take them, Dr. Cleave had prescribed them.

She sat up and swallowed the pills and drank some of the tea. Mary sat at the end of the bed and watched her. She told her the superintendent was very concerned about her.

“Who is the superintendent now?” Stella said.

“You don’t know?”

“It was Jack Straffen but didn’t he retire?”

“Oh yes, Dr. Straffen has gone. It’s Dr. Cleave now.”

I thought it best if she found out like this, informally, from one of the staff. But yes: when Jack retired they came to me, for
no one knows the place better than I do. Reluctantly I agreed to take over. Stella said her last thought before she drifted off to sleep was of Max, and how he used to think the job was his.

The next morning an attendant called Pam brought her her breakfast on a tray. She had slept deeply and now she couldn’t properly wake up, she was bleary and sluggish from the medication. She sat there on the side of the bed nodding over the tray and it began to slide off her knees. Pam grabbed it before it fell and put it on the floor. Stella crawled back into bed and went to sleep again.

She was awakened sometime in the afternoon by the key in the lock, and this time it was me. I sat on the bed.

“How are you feeling, my dear?”

I took her hand and stroked it.

“Awful.”

She rubbed her face. The blurring of consciousness produced by the drugs seemed to be wearing off a little. I apologized. I told her it was standard procedure to prescribe heavy sedation for new admissions, it gave the ward staff a chance to see what sort of state they were in.

“All they see of me,” she said, “is how I sleep.”

“This’ll pass. We’ll have you out in the dayroom in a day or two.”

She yawned. “I’m so groggy,” she said.

“I know.” I patted her leg. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”

I rose and left her. She sank back onto her pillow and stared at the ceiling. When Mary Flynn came in with her pills that evening Stella said she didn’t need so many but Mary paid no attention, and she hadn’t the energy to argue with her.

The first days, then, were lost days. She lived in a sort of twilight state, never left her room, had brief woozy conversations with the attendants and a daily visit from me. I began gradually to cut back her medication and she grew more alert. On the fourth
day I had clothes brought to her, not her own but hospital issue, and she emerged for the first time onto the ward. She told me later it was fortunate she was still dazed by the medication, for she didn’t belong here, this was clear to her immediately. As Pam escorted her down to the dayroom she gazed with sleepy horror at the poor creatures who shuffled by her in the corridor, withdrawn women with lowered heads who inhabited worlds other than this one, hellish worlds they were unable to tear their eyes from. They ignored Pam’s cheerful greetings.

They reached the dayroom. Now she had the full spectacle, the women of the admissions ward at their recreation. The uncanny first impression was again one of private hells coexisting in public space. It was a long room with sunlight streaming through large barred windows onto a polished floor with tables and chairs the length of it, and a television set at the far end with couches and armchairs grouped around it. One woman stood absolutely still, staring at the wall. Another sat picking at invisible threads on her skirt, picking with fierce concentration at nothing at all. A third sat rocking gently from side to side, smiling and murmuring to herself.

“Here we are,” said Pam brightly. “Let’s meet some of the girls.”

The “girls” Stella met were all as broken and doped as she was. She sat at a table with Pam and two other women and they smoked. Stella looked at them and they looked at her and it was like peering across a chasm at distant peaks and acknowledging that she wasn’t entirely alone, there were others in this wild region. No conversation seemed possible despite Pam’s earnest efforts. The murmuring quiet of the dayroom was shattered once by a peal of strange laughter, and once by a sort of whimper, and once by a small explosion of excitement when the tea trolley was trundled in and a loud voice cried, Tea, ladies! Later, when it was time to go back to their rooms, a woman she hadn’t noticed appeared at her side and quietly asked if Stella could give her a smoke. With slow fingers Stella pulled a couple out of her packet and the woman said, Thanks, love, and tucked them up the sleeve of her cardigan. They made their way down the
corridor together. They brought me in with nothing, said the woman. Just the clothes I stood up in.

Stella shook her head. She wanted to say it was outrageous but all she could seem to manage was a shake of the head. Take care, love, the woman whispered. She squeezed Stella’s hand and disappeared into her room.

Her life on the ward quickly fell into a pattern of meals, medication, time spent in the dayroom, and time spent locked up. I came to see her several times and told her not to worry, that we would start talking properly very soon. For the time being, I said, I just wanted to settle her down.

Settle me down. She felt like a squalling infant, she told me later.

As the days passed she began to lose the feeling that she didn’t belong here, though whenever she noticed this she made a conscious effort of will to resist the idea. I do
not
belong here, she told herself, though she had no idea anymore where she did belong. But she no longer saw the other women as so very mad or strange or different from herself. She began to understand how they had ended up here, and it was often through a bizarre chain of events, not unlike the events of her own life, culminating in some sort of public humiliation. The woman who’d said she’d been brought in with just the clothes she stood up in, this woman told Stella her name was Sarah Bentley and that she’d been married to a man who beat her whenever he was drinking, which was three or four times a week. When she couldn’t take any more of it she told him she’d kill him if he ever laid hands on her again. He promised he wouldn’t but two months later he came home drunk and hit her and then passed out on the couch. She stabbed him in the throat with the kitchen scissors, cut him open, cut his heart out, and flushed it down the toilet. Then she went to bed. The police were at the door in the morning and when they took her away all the women who lived on the street gathered to watch her go. She said some of them cheered her and some of them jeered.
Nobody could understand why she’d flushed his heart down the toilet, she said, but it was obvious to her. She didn’t want the bastard coming back.

Then she asked Stella what she’d done, and Stella had barely begun to attempt to formulate an answer when she was overwhelmed by the unutterable horror of it all. They were in the dayroom, sitting by the window, and Sarah tried to calm her down but it did no good and a few minutes later she was locked in her room, sedated but still weeping.

I went to see her the next day. I sat at the end of the bed nodding as she told me about the wave of horror that had welled up inside her. I told her this was natural, this was to be expected, she would have to go through a certain amount of grief before we could move on to anything else; it was good this process had started, I said. I told her I wasn’t going to increase her medication, but that I would make sure the ward staff knew what was going on.

The next time I saw her I asked her if she was ready to tell me what had happened, from the beginning.

“What is the beginning?” she said.

“Edgar?”

Her head came up and she gazed at me with an expression I found difficult to read precisely. Pain, apprehension, even dread, all this and something else too, what I now believe to be a dawning awareness of the new nature of our relationship. Nothing was simple anymore. I was the doctor, she the patient. We were on opposite sides. She required a strategy.

But of course we had to start with Edgar. Stella had come to us because she’d stood by and watched her child drown, but the pathology there was straightforward. The literature on maternal filicide is not large but it is clear: usually an extended suicide, the removal of the child from a situation the mother finds intolerable, though in Stella’s case complicated by the projection onto the child of the intense hostility she felt toward its father; a classic Medea complex. Recovery involved, first, guidance
through an initial intense period of suffering whose main feature would be guilt; then acceptance of the trauma; then the integration of the trauma into memory and identity. Routine psychiatry. No, from a clinical point of view her relationship with Edgar was far more intriguing, in fact it was one of the most florid and dramatic examples of morbid obsessional sexual compulsion I had encountered in many years of practice. Consider: what she had seen in the water, in extremis, was not Charlie, not even Max. It was Edgar.

Now that I had her here in the female wing I relished the prospect of stripping away her defenses and opening her up, seeing what that psyche of hers really looked like. I understood of course that she would resist me, but we had time.

I thought it a good sign when she began to worry about her appearance once more. She said that now that she was invariably dressed in the gray cardigan, blue blouse, gray skirt, gray stockings, and black laced shoes that we issued to the patients in the female wing, she was acutely aware of how smartly
I
dressed by comparison! Each time before she saw me she went down to the office at the front of the ward and asked to use the cosmetics tin. This was an old biscuit tin filled with a clutter of lipsticks and eye pencils, little vials of perfume, jars of cream and powder, all donated by members of staff and shared by the women on the ward for important occasions such as a visit from the doctor. Seated at the table in the front office with a compact mirror propped in front of her, she did the best she could with what she had, then combed her hair and mentally apologized to me for so dismally failing to meet my own high standards. She went back down to the dayroom to wait, and the other women complimented her in a sisterly way on how she looked.

There was a small conference room next to the office and that’s where we had our first proper talk. I asked her how she was feeling, and then we started. I gazed at her with my fingertips pressed together and resting on my top lip. My eyes, she said later, seemed to bore into her soul like a pair of skewers.

“Peter, what are you doing? You make me feel like a specimen! God knows I don’t bear scrutiny these days. Why must you dress us like nuns?”

How long it had been since she’d even tried to talk like this, flippant and smart, the way she and I used to talk all the time! For a fleeting moment she was a pale shadow of her old self, a woman at ease with an old friend.

“We have a lot to get through,” I said. “It’s going to be painful for you.”

She busied herself getting a cigarette alight. She tried to sustain the brief flare of gaiety but I’m afraid it collapsed in the face of my gravity.

“Let’s talk about Edgar. Tell me about the first time you seriously entertained the idea of having sex with him.”

This was blunt, but I intended it to be so. She dropped her eyes and played with the cigarette packet, carefully aligning it with the edge of the table. Her voice was wary.

“Oh God, I don’t know. The first time?”

I nodded.

“In the vegetable garden,” she said quietly. I watched as the experience gradually assumed shape and definition once more. “Go on.”

In her mind’s eye she relived the moment in the garden, in the sunshine, when she knew it was inevitable that they have sex because it was impossible not to. It was just not possible not to. Not thinkable. Risk was no deterrent, when the impossibility of avoiding or deferring or ignoring the necessity became apparent. She tried to explain this to me.

“It was a necessity?”

“Yes.”

“And you think he shared your sense of necessity? Despite the risks?”

“Oh yes.”

“Why?”

She shrugged slightly. “I could tell. I knew.”

“Is it conceivable that Edgar was using you because he planned to abscond all along?”

“No.”

“All right. Did it live up to your expectations?”

She tried to make a joke of it. “You want the details, Peter? The grope and fumble in the undergrowth?”

“You found a place in the garden.”

“Yes, at first. The conservatory.”

I ignored the distaste in her voice as she tossed me this gobbet of information.

“And then?”

“The pavilion.”

“Ah, the pavilion.” I sat back. “I’m sorry, my dear, I don’t embarrass you for my own pleasure. Was Max really so unsatisfactory?”

“I suppose he must have been or it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Why not?”

“I’d have thought you could only fall in love with someone if you weren’t already in love with someone else.”

“You weren’t in love with Max. But did you love him?”

She gazed blankly at me.