Asylum (33 page)

“What’s happened?” I said, taking her arm and leading her to a chair. I sat down beside her.

She didn’t want me to suspect anything out of the ordinary.

“Nothing’s happened. What could have happened?”

She managed to get some humor into this, as if to say, We both know how eventful life can be in the female wing. Still I frowned at her. I was being the doctor now.

“I don’t like the look of you. Are you dreaming again?”

She had told me a few days before that the dreams were far less vivid now, and far less frequent.

“I wake early and then I can’t get back to sleep.”

“I don’t want to increase your medication,” I said. “I don’t think you want that either, do you? You don’t want to be in a stupor all day.”

“The medication’s fine, Peter, really it is. I always wake up early in the summertime. I don’t suppose there’s been anything from the Home Office?”

I shuffled through the papers on my desk. It didn’t escape
me that she was attempting to steer the conversation away from herself. “Apparently we’ll hear something by the end of the week.” I looked up. “Is it an awful strain, my darling?”

“One can’t help feeling anxious.”

“Please don’t worry. They’d tell me if there was a problem. Are you looking forward to your new life?”

She put her hand on my arm. “Of course I am,” she said.

I regarded this sad, beautiful woman and thought of Max, broken Max, solemnly intoning, Perfidy, mendacity. No, it was absurd, and I dismissed the thought.

She never caused the night staff any concern. She dared not, for any disturbance would alert them to the fact that she was unmedicated. Her sleeping body never betrayed her. She was never shaken awake by an attendant, so she had to assume she appeared to be sleeping soundly. By day the woman of sorrows, by night the dreamless sleeper; in these last days, as she would have started thinking of them, the days before the dance, she was performing all the time, hers was a total performance, with no chance ever to peel off the mask and unfasten the costume, let it fall to the floor and step out of it.

The women around her grew daily more excitable. The dance was of vital importance to the patients of the female wing. What bustle there was! She made small jokes about it. I of course had attended more hospital dances than I cared to remember and smiled as I thought of the tide of suppressed hysteria that swept the female wing in the days before the great event.

“And it’s a full moon,” I said.

“Oh dear,” she said, “that’s very bad.”

“Actually it’s not. What is bad is the morning after. Such an anticlimax. A lot of you ladies are rather depressed the day after a dance.”

“I shall have to be on my guard.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’m worried about you. In fact you don’t
have to go if you’d rather not. I’d understand perfectly if you didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” she said. “Not go to the dance? How very antisocial.”

“You’ll be much looked at and commented on. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes I do,” she said.

As she was being escorted back along the terrace to the ward she must have realized that her worries were needless after all. But having decided for diplomatic reasons to attend the dance, she had begun in an odd way to look forward to it. For she had decided, I believe, to let what happened there determine her fate.

The female patients were all in their places in the Central Hall before the men were brought in. For the last few hours the atmosphere on the ward had grown steadily more feverish till it reached a pitch of anticipation that could only end in disappointment. Frantic women in all states of undress roamed the corridor in search of hairpins, perfume, underwear, makeup. A squabble over a cheap brooch would have come to scratches but for the intervention of an attendant. There were screams, there were tears, there was much silly chatter from the younger women about boyfriends and love affairs. The more mature women tried to stay calm but it was difficult to ignore the mood sweeping the ward and growing steadily more frenzied as seven o’clock approached.

Stella stayed in her room and dressed carefully. The smart clothes she had brought with her from Wales were too tight on her now; not precisely woman-of-sorrows, they suggested sin, rather, but then how was a woman to come by her sorrows if she knew nothing of sin? She again counted her pills. She was calm now. She had, she thought, enough.

When she left her room and joined the other women on the ward her appearance had a dramatic effect. They realized immediately
that she was by far the loveliest among them. They were proud of her, and intended to enjoy a reflected glory when they entered the Hall, or rather, when the men came in. They left the ward rather quietly, given the cacophony of a few minutes ago. The awful majesty of the evening was brought home to every woman there.

Escorted by their attendants they made their way across the courtyard and along the passage to the gate that gave onto the terrace. The evening was warm and the light was just beginning to thicken in the scented air. Women whispered to one another, the last anxieties were voiced, as a slowly swelling pride in their collective womanhood and their one true flower of beauty grew in all hearts. Stella was their flower of beauty, as she moved calmly among them with a loose black shawl thrown over her bare arms and shoulders against the evening air. The woman of sorrows, among her handmaidens, was making her farewell appearance.

The Central Hall was as she remembered it. Chairs were placed around the walls, the big bay windows were thrown open to the evening, and the band was tuning up on the stage. A few attendants were waiting for the women, and as they entered I came in from the terrace with the chaplain. I acknowledged her immediately with a bow, and then I saw what she was wearing. I stood there, as did the chaplain, and we gazed at her with astonishment. Then, as it dawned on me what she’d done, and what it must have cost her, I slowly nodded. For under the shawl it was the same dress, the same black evening dress of coarse ribbed silk, cut low at the front to reveal the curve of her breast, that she’d worn to the dance a year ago. The effect of it was more dramatic than it had been even then: not only did the dress complement her extraordinary physical beauty, but the very wearing of it, here, tonight, was the gesture of a spirit unbroken by shame. I felt proud of her.

She settled down and watched the bustle around her, the attendants moving back and forth, conferring with one another, and the more restless of the young women already over at the table for their soft drinks; and the senior staff talking and
laughing with exaggerated ease like the aristocracy they were. It was all a sham. Not one of them could think of anything but that she had been one of their number just a year ago, and the covert glances cast her way were numerous. That she should choose to wear that dress—! I had no recourse to covert glances. I made it clear that I was watching over her with affection and solicitude. My calm eye oversaw everything and missed nothing, and Stella was not disturbed. The propriety and order of the event were a direct effect of my presence, my quiet authority and the deference I enjoyed from patients and staff alike.

Time passed, and beneath her composure she grew tense. She saw the men coming in and felt the atmosphere change, felt it grow charged and slightly dangerous. The aristocrats were less languid now, the attendants more attentive. As for the women of the female wing, they grew very alert indeed. The band had already gone into its first number as the last of the men’s wards were escorted into the Hall. They filed in and took their places, and Edgar was not among them.

No, Edgar was not among them, he was in no condition to attend a dance.

She danced several times over the course of the evening and although the eyes of the entire Hall were upon her not once did the mask slip. She didn’t dance with me; I danced with no one; but she caught my eye each time she did dance, and I understood that her demure, inscrutable smile was directed at me, that in a way it was with me that she danced. The chaplain alone of all the senior staff asked her out onto the floor. He danced well and allowed her to move with ease and grace in his arms. The glimpses she had of my face, the fleeting instants when our eyes met, all reassured her that she was carrying it off beautifully, that she appeared exactly as I wished her to appear. Poor Peter, she must have thought.

Toward the end of the evening I went onto the stage and stood at the microphone and said a few benign words and made
a joke or two, as was customary. I am a popular medical superintendent, and the blessing I bestowed was warmly received. Stella watched me, not listening to my words, just absorbing the presence I conveyed that night, my patrician ease, my warm, wise humor. I believe she genuinely hated the prospect of causing me pain.

She sat out the last dance and joined the other women when it was time to go back. They made their way in the moonlight along the terrace to the female wing. There was some excited chatter but mostly they were quiet, and a sort of tired satisfaction seemed to be the mood. All agreed it had been a good dance, perhaps the best for years, and while some romances had been cruelly crushed out others had sprung to life. On the ward they fondly said good night to one another and went to their rooms.

Stella prepared for bed. The lights were turned out and the ward was silent. A little later she quietly got out of bed and turned on the cold tap and let the water run into the basin. Then she opened her cupboard and reached in.

I was sitting in my office writing. Outside my window the terrace and the gardens and the marsh beyond were bathed in moonlight. I paused and looked up, frowning. Something had been nagging at me since I’d seen Stella in the Central Hall, a vaguely disquieting feeling I’d suppressed until now, something connected to her wearing the dress she’d worn the night Edgar had taken her in his arms and pressed his penis into her groin. Absurd to think she could still be in love with him! And then I thought: but what if I’m right? And that’s when I saw it. That’s when it all became clear, and at last I knew that it was not dead, that it was far from dead, and I understood why she had worn the black silk dress.

Now I was alarmed. I capped my pen and reached for the telephone. I dialed an internal number and a telephone rang in the front office of a downstairs ward in the female wing. Oh, I had been blind! It was not for us, that dress, it was not a gesture
of pride, or defiance, thrown in the face of the hospital community, it was for
him
, she’d worn it for
him
, it was her wedding dress, she’d worn it the night she became wedded to him, and as I waited for the phone to be picked up I at last realized the full extent to which I’d deluded myself: I had allowed my judgment to be clouded by private concerns, and in the process lost my objectivity. Classic countertransference—

The attendant on duty spoke to me briefly. Without replacing the receiver she left the office and went along the corridor to Stella’s room. She opened it a crack and saw that the bed was occupied and its occupant asleep and breathing deeply. She closed the door and returned to the office and told me what she’d seen. I thanked her and replaced the receiver. I did not resume writing, however, instead I stood gazing out of the window, still profoundly uneasy.

Rapidly I reviewed the events of the last weeks. I remembered the flare of feeling I’d seen in her eyes the day I’d suggested he was here in the hospital. I imagined how it might have affected her, this fragile kindling of hope, and realized that when I’d then said that it was hypothetical, that he wasn’t here, the feeling wouldn’t have been extinguished, that once aroused it was too strong to be snuffed out with a word. I imagined her returning to her room and breathing on that small flame of hope, keeping it burning.

She had kept it burning ever since. Oh, she would have quickly worked out why I should first tell her the truth, that is, that Edgar
was
here, and then regret telling her, and contradict myself, and she’d have realized too that for me a measure of her mental health would be her indifference to the mention of the name Edgar Stark. She’d have known then that she must pretend not to care. Everything that followed—asking for a job in the laundry, sitting alone on her bench—
even the dreams of a screaming child
—all a performance, a distraction, invented to keep me from the truth. And the truth was that her suffering these last weeks was not remorse for the death of her child, the truth was that she was still obsessed with Edgar Stark, to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

Yes, even the dreams of a screaming child, for it was not her child who disturbed her nights, it was him, it was Edgar! And her engagement to me, that too a masquerade, the desperate duplicity of a woman still passionately in love with another man and frantic to conceal it—

I found I was pacing the floor, my mind ablaze with this new truth, and with an effort I brought myself under control and sat down at my desk. And then I thought, If she believed he was here, and she wore the dress for him, and he didn’t appear, how would she react to that? And I knew then what my psychiatric intuition was telling me, and why I’d been feeling so uneasy. If she couldn’t have Edgar then she might as well be dead. Life was no longer tolerable without him. Better to die than suffer this way. This response is rare, but it happens. It is the last stage of all.

A few minutes later I was moving along the terrace in the direction of the female wing. My pace quickened and soon I was striding with some urgency through the shadowy cloisters and moonlit courtyards of the sleeping hospital.

Through the long hours of the night we fought to save her, but Stella had been among psychiatrists quite long enough to gauge with precision a fatal dose of sedatives. She didn’t regain consciousness and shortly before dawn she died. As she relaxed, as she let go all effort of deception and repression, her face changed, her beauty became even more remarkable, and once again she was as pale and lovely as when we’d first known her. Everyone was distressed. I reminded them that those who wish to die will always find the means, sooner or later, but it was no real comfort to those of us who had been looking after her and had come in our own ways to love her. We buried her in the hospital cemetery three days later, outside the Wall, behind the female wing, and the chaplain conducted the service. There were not many mourners present, apart from staff. It was a hot, bright day and we were all uncomfortable in black.