Asylum (29 page)

“You’ve never been married, have you?” she said at last.

“Were you frustrated?”

A bark of laughter. “Isn’t everyone?”

I waited.

“Oh, Peter, I don’t know what to tell you. I rather admired Max in the early days. I wanted us to go back to London, but that was our only real argument. I wasn’t craving excitement, if that’s what you mean.”

“A normal marriage, then?”

“I suppose so.”

“A husband, a home, a child, reasonable contentment. Yet you jeopardized it all for a sexual relationship with a patient.”

“That sort of calculation didn’t come into it.”

“Was it exhilarating to think that your whole way of life was at risk?”

I sat now, an elbow propped on the table, projecting an expression of warm, frank curiosity.

“I’d fallen in love, that’s what exhilarated me,” she said.

There was a silence.

“This love,” I said, “this feeling over which you had no control. What is it exactly?”

Another silence. Then, wearily: “If you don’t know I can’t tell you.”

“There’s no defining it, then? No discussion possible? It springs to life, it can’t be ignored, and it tears people’s lives apart. But we can’t say more. It just is.”

“Words,” she murmured.

“Words perhaps,” I said briskly, “but what else do we have? Let me ask you to consider a possibility: that this love of yours was just a blind for something else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at the effects of it. You abandon everything. You cultivate disdain for a man you’ve grown used to—”

I paused; she had started quietly to cry. I gave her a handkerchief. I could see she hated herself for exhibiting feminine frailty. If I rejected her, she said later, if I despised her, if I condemned her, then she had nothing. She was nothing. I recognized all this.

“All right, that’s enough,” I said gently, and we talked of other things. But before I went away I asked her to think about what it meant, to love. Be rigorous, I said.

She said she would.

She told me later that our talk left her confused and anxious. She returned to the routines of the ward with great unease. She was silent and preoccupied in the dayroom. She tried to work out what I was doing. I had deliberately upset her: why? It must be a way of testing her, of seeing how strong she was. And she had done rather poorly, caving in like that. I had shown her how fragile she had become, I had held up a mirror and let her see her weakness. This was good psychiatry, she supposed: I didn’t tell her to be strong, I led her instead to want to be strong.

It took her several days to work this out, she said. It occurred
to her to be grateful that she was in so protected a place, that she was safe here, and in wise, healing hands. She tentatively began to think of herself in a new way. Restricted since Cledwyn to a tiny cluster of superficial selfish concerns, and numbed lest she think of Charlie, she now opened herself, just a little, to the extent that she accepted that she was damaged and needed help. She looked to me to give her that help, and when it was time to see me again she mustered as much courage as she was capable of and came in with a brave smile, apparently eager to go further but, as I immediately detected, inwardly terrified at the prospect. I came around the table and pulled out her chair.

“Don’t be so anxious,” I said quietly, pushing the chair in as she sat down. I put my hand on her shoulder.

My fingers rested on her shoulder for several seconds and I could feel her intense awareness of the contact, for an electricity was there. I sat down and asked her how she was doing on the ward, and she managed once more to be almost her old self, witty and ironical, and she made me smile as she described her eccentric community. The mood shifted abruptly, however, when I pressed my fingers to my lips and allowed a certain contemplative expression to steal across my features.

“Have you thought about what I asked you to?” I said.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Peter.”

“Describe Edgar physically.”

She said she’d been afraid of this. She said that when she deliberately aroused the memory of him it felt as though a screen had been interposed between herself and his image. I reminded her that it was Edgar she’d seen struggling in the water that day on Cledwyn Heath, and I told her this strongly suggested to me that she was desperate to let him go, to bring the pain of her compulsion to an end; it is a stage we see in all such relationships, I said, craving the death of the lover. I wanted to know how far this process had advanced, to what extent the affair was really over.

We talked about him for almost an hour. After she’d made a halting description came questions that were much harder to
answer, questions of feeling. She found herself telling me that for the first time in her life she’d desired someone with a physical and emotional intensity she had never experienced before, directly, but only sensed in men, coming from men. I nodded as she spoke, I encouraged her when she faltered, and somehow she found words for the chaos of feelings she had known in the few weeks she was with him. She told me how they conducted the affair on the estate, and what happened when she was in London with him. I was curious that she made no sort of moral judgment of him, not when he absconded without telling her, not even when he hit her.

“Why not?” I said.

She didn’t know. She said the question seemed all wrong. In order to criticize him she would have had to see him conditionally: I love you
unless you do this
. It simply didn’t arise.

“You accepted him without reserve?”

“I suppose I did.”

“Even when he hit you.”

“I know why he did it.”

“If I told you he was in the hospital now, what would your reaction be?”

I was watching her closely. I saw something flare briefly to life in her eyes; then she shrugged. She said it hadn’t occurred to her that he would have been brought back here, though once she thought about it it was obvious. Though it didn’t matter now. When she said this I regarded her with what she called that rather frightening detachment that made her feel like a specimen on a slide.

“It doesn’t matter?”

“It’s finished, Peter. It finished when Charlie died.”

She lifted her head and met my gaze squarely. I wanted to believe her, but at the same time I knew that she knew that this was what I wanted to hear her say. I tested her again.

“The question was hypothetical, Stella. He’s not here.”

Again that almost imperceptible flare of feeling.

“I’m glad,” she said.

It takes a few weeks to tidy up someone who comes to us in as bad shape as Stella was, but we did it. The ward reports came to my desk every morning, and I watched her gradually taking an interest in the world once more, narrow and circumscribed though that world was. She was still avoiding dealing with Charlie’s death and I felt no need to rush her. I was concerned, however, about the effect my question about Edgar might have had on her. I was afraid I had inadvertently disrupted the transference I wanted to effect, the displacement of whatever feelings she still harbored toward Edgar, to me, her doctor. For it was essential that she now see me as her sole source of support.

During the next days she became noticeably more alert. Mary Flynn, who’d seen her when she was first admitted, told her it was grand to see her coming along so well. She was more talkative than we’d known her so far. She became interested in hospital gossip, she wanted to know more about this community to which she now belonged. She began to spend as much time in the dayroom as she could, which we tend to regard as a good sign. Her brief identification with the other women, with Sarah Bentley in particular, she gradually abandoned. Sarah was subversive, she liked to mock the attendants and upset ward routines, she failed to hide her contempt for her situation and her belief that she should not be here. I killed the bastard because I hated him, she told Stella. He hurt me. That doesn’t make me crazy. I should be in jail. Then at least I’d know when I was getting out.

Sarah could talk like this all morning, and Stella saw now that friendship with her was a liability. She tried to explain to her that here you had to be diplomatic. You had to understand what was expected of you. Sarah refused to see this. As far as she was concerned they were all goons and she had no intention of keeping quiet about it. Stella thought this a mistake. There
were times, she told her, when you should keep quiet. Sadly she saw that she and Sarah could no longer be friends.

She asked to work in the laundry.

“You?” I said, in an amused tone of voice, concealing my suspicions. “Now, why on earth would you want to work in the laundry?”

“Oh, Peter,” she said, “of course I don’t actually want to work in the laundry but I’m bored stiff up here. Can’t you find me something to do?”

“You are coming along nicely,” I said dryly. “You’d perhaps like to go downstairs.”

She gave me a frank smile. “I don’t really think I belong up here,” she said, “do you?”

I was vague. She knew I didn’t altogether trust the improvement she seemed to be showing. She could see me wondering, behind what she called my silky disquisitions, if it was a false recovery I was seeing, one that presaged collapse into a depression deeper than the first.

“Do you think about Charlie?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And?”

A quiet tone of voice now. “I’m coming to terms with it.”

Now the frown, the fingertips pressed together against the top lip, as I gazed at her. A silence. We were in the conference room at the end of the ward, it was April, and through the bars the branches on the chestnut tree were covered with pale buds. The day was warm, and from the corridor came all the usual sounds, keys turning in locks, a murmur of voices, the muffled cry of Rooms, ladies! The clatter of a mop in a pail. The smell of bleach. In the silent room off the front office I pondered the pale woman sitting across the table from me. Then I rose abruptly to my feet.

“Not yet, Stella,” I said. “I don’t think you’re ready yet.”

“Why not?” She gazed up at me, troubled, disappointed.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure of you yet.”

“I won’t argue with you,” she said quietly.

I nodded. Despite the fact—or because of it?—that I was, to Stella, far from the neutral figure generally considered appropriate to perform this sort of dynamic psychotherapy, I was becoming more convinced each time I saw her that the transference was occurring as I wanted it to, that she was shifting her dependence onto me. The thought gave me a peculiar and rather complicated satisfaction, which to my deep regret I failed properly to analyze at the time.

Her behavior now followed a predictable course. She began to cultivate a different attitude to time. She had to think in terms of months, if not of years. She had to find a way to manage her impatience. With her medication reduced it became a problem tolerating boredom, and she was quite well aware that a single outburst of frustration could undo weeks of painstaking self-control. Nor must the effort be visible to the attendants. A calm, good-tempered demeanor, amiable but not hysterical, composed but not depressed, this she knew was what we wanted to see, though what made the masquerade so difficult to sustain was not knowing how long was long enough, never being certain whether we noticed how well she was doing, and trying to cope with the idea that she was going to rot up here, grow old and die on the admissions ward. But she didn’t have long to wait. A few days later Mary Flynn told her I was moving her to a downstairs ward.

Life was less eccentric downstairs and she quickly came to understand why. Upstairs, no sort of behavior provoked surprise because it was accepted that all were mad. Being unhappy and bitter and relentlessly derisive, as Sarah was, that was mad, just as mad as picking at threads that didn’t exist or becoming agitated about a missed appointment and tasks left undone twenty-seven years ago. You ceased to be mad when you began to behave as though you weren’t in a madhouse, as though you weren’t locked up with no real idea when you were getting out again. Once you appeared to accept these conditions as perfectly satisfactory, then you were seen to be improving and they
moved you downstairs. This of course is a patient’s perspective. From our point of view, the self-control involved in making these calculations and then acting on them is a necessary first step in getting better.

The women downstairs had made that first step, that’s why they were downstairs, and nobody was being mad there, at least not in front of the attendants. Being downstairs meant greater privacy and some freedom of movement, and with this came opportunities to be mad without being seen. Often this meant simply the freedom to weep for a ruined life, a fractured family, a lost spouse. A dead child. Weeping was mad, certainly a symptom of depression, therefore to be treated with drugs, and drugs were the thief of alertness and clarity, which the women craved, some of them at least.

Downstairs they were allowed to wear their own clothes. This made a difference to Stella. I remarked on it as soon as I saw her. She was in a dark skirt and an elegant cream blouse with a high neck and an attractive brooch pinned to the breast. She was slower and more deliberate in all her movements and expressions now, there was a quality of stillness to her that rather dramatically heightened the effect of her beauty, which had always tended to the stately. She thanked me warmly for having her transferred; she was aware that most patients spent far longer on the admissions ward than she had. I waved away her gratitude.

“I couldn’t see that it would serve any useful purpose keeping you up there,” I said.

She was watching me carefully. I had come to the ward and she’d taken me to her new room. It was larger than her room upstairs, it had no bars on the window and no grate in the door. There was a rug on the floor by the bed, a table and chair, and a cupboard for her clothes. It was the sort of room you’d give a senior girl at a boarding school.

“No photographs?” I said. “No knickknacks, nothing personal?”

“No,” she said quietly. I was on the bed, she was on the chair facing me. She noticed the change in my attitude toward her, a
friendliness I hadn’t shown her when she was upstairs. The brisk, detached, inquiring tone had been abandoned. She felt I had made myself properly available to her again as a friend and not merely as a doctor. She didn’t try to exploit it, this new warmth, not yet, for she didn’t do anything spontaneously now.