Asylum (3 page)

Another time, as he was sketching the design of an iron finial that had rusted badly and would have to be recast, he asked her if he could do her head. She said he could. He had her sit on the
bench while he worked, and in a few minutes had produced a strange sketch, all smudged lines, not at all naturalistic, with none of the roundedness and monumentality I saw in Stella, but a curious likeness all the same. She asked if she could keep it and without a word he tore it from the pad and gave it to her.

“But you must sign it,” she said.

She kept it in a locked drawer and showed it to nobody, for reasons she was reluctant to look at too closely. Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn’t said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention an event of significance in her day she was practicing a form of duplicity. She rationalized it. She should have known that deception eventually eats away all that is wholesome in a marriage, and she should have faced this, but she didn’t. She chose not to. From this evasion all else followed.

Oh, but it was so trivial, she told herself, it was absurd to think that talking to a patient in the vegetable garden could amount to anything. But if it was all so trivial, why did she have to conduct this argument with herself? Because of her growing sexual warmth for the man, which she foolishly indulged in this oblique manner, seeking his company, allowing him into her imagination.

It was not easy at first for her to talk about any of this. I know she was tempted to blame fate, or the vagaries of the human heart, for what happened, the tragic outcome of it all. She had a natural impulse to displace responsibility, we all do, but she disliked the idea of making excuses or hiding behind abstractions. Edgar, the one person she might have blamed, instead she defended to the end. Not once did I hear her hold him responsible for what happened.

The first I knew of their growing intimacy was the day Charlie fell off the garden wall. There was an old apple tree beside the conservatory and when Edgar was up his ladder Charlie would scramble onto the wall, and from there climb into the tree. He was a fearless tree-climber but, being plump,
not too agile, and one day as he was stepping out of the tree back onto the wall the branch broke—he lost his balance—and with a shout he tumbled onto the path and knocked himself out for a second or two.

Stella was upstairs when Edgar came striding in through the back door with the dazed boy in his arms. Mrs. Bain, the woman who helped with the housework, was sitting at the kitchen table shelling peas. She was the wife of a senior attendant, a man called Alec Bain, and it was he who told me later of his wife’s reaction to a patient who came into the house without knocking, shouting for Mrs. Raphael and using her first name. He wanted to lay the boy down on a bed or a couch but Mrs. Bain lacked the presence of mind to direct him to the drawing room, so he pushed past her out through the kitchen and into the hall. She began to shout at him just as Stella came running down the stairs. She cried out in horror.

Charlie was all right. He recovered in a matter of minutes, and Stella didn’t feel it necessary to phone Max at the hospital. She held him while Mrs. Bain went for a damp facecloth, showing by the shape of her back what she thought of patients who came barging into the house without being asked and called the doctor’s wife by her first name. Charlie tried to get up but Stella told him he must lie still a little longer. She turned to Edgar, who stood there pushing his hands through his hair.

“Thank you for bringing him in,” she said. She saw how relieved he was that the boy wasn’t hurt. He clearly felt responsible.

“No harm done,” he said.

“I don’t imagine so. But we’ll keep him inside for the rest of the day.”

“No!” said Charlie.

“Oh yes,” said Stella.

Edgar went out through the kitchen door. Stella knew she should try and explain to Mrs. Bain why he behaved toward her with such familiarity, but her old proud carelessness welled up and she didn’t say a word, because she didn’t see why she should.

•  •  •

Nothing physical had happened yet, but this incident helped establish a sort of bond between them. It should of course have been severed at this point, as soon as Stella saw that to behave so informally with a patient was bound to cause trouble sooner or later. But it didn’t occur to her. At the time she didn’t properly analyze why she was amused rather than alarmed by the incident, but later she said she thought it was because she found Mrs. Bain’s attitude so ridiculous, as though patients belonged to a lower order.

He began to tell her about life in the hospital, and she was surprised that she had never understood before what went on other than from Max’s point of view, the psychiatric perspective. Now she glimpsed a new perspective, she began to see how it was to live, eat, and sleep in an overcrowded ward, sixty men in a dormitory meant for thirty, and to put up with plumbing that dated back to the last century and rarely functioned properly. One story horrified her particularly, about a patient in Block 1 who washed his face in his own urine, then dried himself with the communal towel.

She became involved. Identification, hazy at first, hedged around with friendly detachment, quickened. The idea that this man, this
artist
, should suffer the indignities of primitive plumbing, lack of privacy, bullying, boredom, and utter uncertainty about his future, all this aroused her indignation. He was in Block 3 now, a parole patient with a room of his own, but he still had to tolerate much that, to Stella’s sense of justice, was incompatible with the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Though she was starting to doubt that he
was
mentally ill. She thought he was guilty of a crime of passion; and passion, in essence, was good, surely?

He didn’t push too hard. He was never serious for long. He made her laugh with stories about the Cambridge mathematician who spent his days sitting in a corner of the dayroom doing higher calculus on a sheet of toilet paper. He told her about games of bridge played with such intensity that a patient almost
lost an eye once when a dispute turned ugly. He told her that at times he felt he’d joined a superior gentlemen’s club, for he knew bankers, solicitors, army officers, and stockbrokers; old Etonians as well as men from the lower depths.

“But we all have one thing in common,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“We’re all mad.”

She remembers the moment distinctly. She was sitting on the bench in the shade of the garden wall, and Edgar was up his ladder, bare-chested, looking down at her and grinning at his own joke. She wasn’t amused.

“I don’t think you’re mad,” she said.

His mood instantly shifted into accord with hers.

“Neither do I.”

“Then you shouldn’t be here.”

You shouldn’t be here. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d been angling for? That the wife of the deputy superintendent agreed with him that he shouldn’t be here, this was real progress.

Then came the dance.

Stella describes how, the morning after the dance, she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, idly turning the pages of the newspaper. She was uneasy. She had spent much of the night thinking about what had happened. The essence of it, she told me, was that while they were dancing she became aware that what was pressing against her groin, through his trousers, was, in fact, his penis, and it was getting hard. She said she kept remembering, first, her incomprehension when she felt it, and then, an instant later, her realization that it was, yes, what she thought it was; but even as she recoiled from him, even as she opened her mouth to cry out her outrage, she recognized something in his expression that changed her mind, a sort of mute abashed helplessness—he couldn’t control it! It was funny, and it was sad, too; she was moved by the need she at once perceived behind it. So she’d returned his pressure, and this is how they’d danced around the Central Hall, clinging
together with his erection pressed between them, Edgar now beaming broadly and she gazing off into the middle distance with a demure and inscrutable expression on her face. At no point then or later did her composure fail her. She was almost sorry when the music stopped and he turned abruptly and went back to the other side of the room.

I was not shocked by any of this. I was surprised, however, surprised and annoyed, not so much by the nature of their collusion—Edgar’s libido was strong, as was Stella’s, and both, clearly, were excited by the public nature of the situation—but rather that he would put in jeopardy
our
work together, his and mine, in such cavalier fashion. For he said nothing to me about what had happened at the dance; and how could I hope to help him, when I was being deceived?

The day after the dance was one of the hottest of the summer. She took three or four baths at various times, and each time, as she undressed, she remembered the sensation of the erection pressed into her groin. To this point her sexual interest in Edgar had been a strictly private indulgence and she hadn’t considered that it might be reciprocated; apparently it was. This made his presence in the vegetable garden a problem for her.

It was irritating. There were things she needed: chives, radishes, lettuce. She was not a timid woman, but she had no desire to resume her relationship with him. She realized, quite rightly, that it was impossible for her to in effect acquiesce a second time. She decided that since she would have to go down there and deal with him sooner or later, it might as well be sooner. The next morning she cleared away the breakfast things, brushed her hair, put on some lipstick, then went out through the back door and across the yard. She was in a light summer frock and white sandals and her legs were bare.

The sun was already hot. The wall that enclosed the vegetable garden was shaggy with large-leaved ivy and furred with moss between the bricks. The wooden door, with its round Moorish arch, had recently been given a coat of green paint. She
paused in front of it, apprehensive. The latch was hot to the touch. She went through. The path wound through a profusion of flowers and vegetables, with clumps of catmint spilling onto the gravel. The day was still and shimmering, and insects murmured among the roses. Flowerpots glowed in the sunlight. When she was halfway along the path she saw John Archer at the far end, sitting on the bench in the shade of the wall in his shirtsleeves, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and rolling a cigarette. She had no wish to talk to him but it was too late to turn back. He heard her on the gravel and immediately stood up. “Mrs. Raphael,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Archer.”

Panes of glass were stacked against the wall. Edgar was on his knees chipping away at the crumbling mortar in the brickwork at the base of the conservatory. Shading his eyes with his hand, he squatted on his heels and gazed up at Stella where she’d stopped some yards back along the path. He said nothing, just gazed at her, waiting, unsmiling, his hair pushed back off his forehead and his expression one of deadly seriousness. She was aware of the delicacy of the situation. John Archer owed her deference because she was a doctor’s wife. Edgar was a patient and therefore technically of lower caste than either of them. Yet what obliquely had drawn her into the vegetable garden was the direct physical overture he had made to her, his mute sexual gesture, man to woman. He had risen to his feet now. Still he said nothing, just stood there, silently defying her to betray him.

“Mr. Archer,” she said, “would it be all right if Charlie helped the men with the bonfire?”

John Archer said it would.

“You know what boys are like. But you must send him away if he’s a nuisance.”

Picking her way back along the path in the sunlight she could imagine the glances being exchanged between the two men behind her back. She’d felt excitement when she saw him squinting mutely up at her, but she had resisted it, she had no further wish to be sympathetic. He is a crafty, unpleasant fellow,
she thought, and he believes he has me at a disadvantage because I let him get away with that thing at the dance.

She dismissed the entire sordid experience from her mind.

Despite the fact that we were friends, or perhaps because of it, Stella was inhibited with me at first by what I assumed to be a sense of shame. I tried to show her that she need hide nothing from me, as I had no intention of sitting in judgment on her. I realized a little later that it wasn’t shame that made her reluctant to talk to me, but uncertainty about my attitude to Edgar. She didn’t know if she could trust me to understand what she had done or, more important, why. She suspected I would condemn him. As soon as I grasped this I made it clear I had no intention of judging him either. I told her that as a psychiatrist I wasn’t in the business of moral judgments. She seemed to need this reassurance.

She began to talk then, and it felt as though a valve had been opened, for out it all came in a flood of detail. She was in the back garden with Charlie. She was reading a novel, but every few moments she glanced up with some unease, for he was kneeling on the edge of the goldfish pond, gazing into the water. The pond was deep and she disliked seeing him there on the edge but she was trying not to be too protective. All summer he had been busy with amphibians of one sort or another that he kept in glass tanks in the backyard. Max had said that he’d be delighted if Charlie decided to become a zoologist.

Stella disliked amphibians and she disliked Charlie poking about in the pond like this. She was about to tell him to come away when she heard the telephone ringing in the house. “Get back from the edge!” she shouted as she crossed the lawn and went in through the French windows.

Edgar had a room in the ground-floor ward in Block 3. At one end of the ward was the dayroom. At the other end were the attendants’ office and two small interview rooms, in one of which there was a telephone. How he found the means of using
this telephone I have never been able to establish. Certainly it was at great personal risk, for had he been discovered he would instantly have lost his parole status. All internal calls go through the hospital switchboard, so I presume he impersonated an attendant and told the operator he was looking for Dr. Raphael.