Asylum (4 page)

When she came back out a few minutes later she was not sure exactly what had happened. He had apologized for his behavior, and been so funny, and, oh, just so grown-up about it, she said, that she found herself liking him after all. He had reminded her of their friendship and told her how important it was to him, and mentioned that he hadn’t really known a woman for five years. He was a clever one, my Edgar; what he had done was inexcusable, he said, but he appreciated that she’d said nothing. It didn’t occur to Stella, then or later, that she should tell Max about the call, just as it had never occurred to her that she should tell him what Edgar had done to her at the dance.

Charlie was still at the edge of the pond when she came back out. He shouted to her that he thought there were snakes. She sat down and opened her novel. She did not tell him to come away, though he was still bending close to the water, one hand gripping the edge while with the other he groped about at the bottom of the pond. Her mind drifted almost at once, and she gazed unseeing at the back of the house, the open French windows of the drawing room, the door giving onto the hall, and at the end of the hall, on the other side of the house, but visible from where she sat in the shade of the old ash tree, the front door. Beyond the front door lay the drive, the trees, and the Wall. She felt relieved, she felt at ease, as though the disturbance in the order of things effected by that unruly penis had now been quelled, and her friendship restored.

At this stage Stella had no real idea how disturbed Edgar Stark was. She had never regularly listened to him spinning out his morbid delusions, as I had, and though she knew by his own admission what he’d done, she’d excused him by thinking of it as a simple crime of passion, which of course permitted her to romanticize him. When Edgar realized this he changed his tactics, but in the beginning I believe he simply wanted her to influence Max to look favorably on his efforts to secure his release. In this he displayed his naïveté, for things simply don’t work like that. Much more pertinent from my point of view was that he was behaving manipulatively and, at the outset at least, attempting to use his considerable sexual attraction as a means of control. The fact that the one he wanted to control was a doctor’s wife was a mark of the extravagant grandiosity of his designs.

Early in our relationship I had discussed with Edgar my
strategy for the psychotherapy. I told him that what I wanted to do was break down his defenses: strip away the façades, the pretenses, all the false structures of his disordered personality, and then start again, rebuild him from the ground up, as it were. Because this would be such a difficult, long-drawn-out process he would need all the support I could give him. For almost four years we had been working together. This clandestine relationship with Stella, however, this suggested that he was behaving toward me in bad faith. Far from attempting to examine the pathological manner in which he related to women, he was setting in motion the process that had led to murder once already, and had been the cause of his coming to us in the first place.

Then something happened that I don’t think either of them consciously anticipated. They didn’t realize—and who does, in these sorts of affairs?—that the violence of feeling he had aroused in her would shatter the constraints of caution and common sense, and overwhelm their fragile status quo.

It has not been easy to talk to Stella about the sex. She naturally finds it distasteful to be explicit. But she has described to me in detail how it began. It was another clear, bright, hot summer day, and she padded about the house in bare feet throughout the early afternoon, going from room to room, unable to be still. The sunshine streamed in through the windows of the big rooms downstairs, bringing up the burnish on the wood floors to a glare. She paused in front of the mirror over the fireplace and frowned at her reflection.

She touched her hair. She went upstairs and changed into a loose summer frock with a low neck, then sat in front of her dressing-table mirror and put on fresh lipstick. She went back downstairs and stood at the French windows in the drawing room and gazed out across the back lawn. She poured herself a drink. That morning he had bluntly suggested she come into the conservatory with him. It had flustered her badly. It had sent her running down the path and back to the house. Sex with the
man: the idea of it, long active in her imagination, frankly articulated had a terrible power.

She left the house by the front door and crossed the drive to the gate in the high hedge opposite, which opened onto what had once been the front lawn but now, through neglect, had become a meadow of thick grass and wildflowers. She crossed the meadow to an arched opening in the garden wall close to the conservatory. She stood in the rounded archway with her back against the bricks and waited.

She could hear him working. She could hear glass smashing in the dustbin. She knew he would soon become aware of her presence in the arch, for her shadow fell across the path. She wasn’t sure she could sustain herself there for very long. She felt that at any moment she would find her behavior ridiculous and abruptly go back inside.

Silence. Then he was standing in front of her. Without a word she pulled him into the conservatory. She took his head in her hands and with her fingers spread across his cheeks she kissed him fiercely on the lips. They got down onto the floor, hidden from view by the low stone wall at the base of the frame. She rapidly arranged herself on the ground as he knelt over her unbuttoning his trousers.

I probed her gently. I could not challenge directly her reluctance to talk about what happened next. We would return to it. I imagine it was urgent and primitive, a thing of hunger and instinct. I imagine he took her at once, without finesse, and that she wanted this, she was as avid as he was, no coyness now, no hesitation at all. And I imagine it was over rather quickly, and that afterward, flushed, burning, she ran back into the house and straight upstairs to the bathroom. I know that bathroom. The original fittings are all intact. The big tub with its tarnished brass taps stands on clawed feet on a floor of discolored tiles. A fern that flourishes in the steamy atmosphere of that large damp room overflows its terra-cotta pot by the door, and beside it there’s a large wicker laundry basket.

Water gushed from the taps. She flung off her clothes and
stepped into the bath. The fever subsided. She lay in the bath for an hour with her eyes closed and her mind empty, though not properly empty, for beneath the surface moved the knowledge of what she had just done. It was not to be looked at, it was not to be acknowledged at all; but there are forms of mental experience that exist outside the machinery of repression, and in those obscure regions of her psyche arose the question whether, having done this once, she would do it again, and though she did not actually think this thought, and would have denied it vehemently had it flickered into consciousness, she was aware, as one is aware of all such things that don’t bear thinking about, that the answer was yes.

Some hours later she was sitting on the back lawn, with a drink, in a white wicker chair, in the shade of the ash tree, her novel in her lap, when she heard Max at the front door. She came into the house, went down the hall and let him in; he seemed to be having trouble with his keys. He was in his dark suit, his tie was loosened, he was hot and tired, and more than anything he wanted a drink.

“Bloody day,” he said.

Behind him on the far side of the drive the pines rose in a dark mass against the evening sky. She embraced him with a warmth unusual for her, and as she did so an ironic thought sprang into her mind, that it’s the guilt of the adulterous woman that drives her into her husband’s arms.

“Hello,” he said as she clung to him like a woman adrift, a woman drowning, “what’s all this?”

She moved away to the mirror over the empty fireplace and patted at her hair, and tried to find some sign of sin on her face.

“Nothing. I missed you today, that’s all.”

“Why did you miss me?”

She turned to face him. There was real curiosity in his voice, and she felt the psychiatrist in the man, or rather, the man receded and the psychiatrist emerged as the wheels turned and she saw him examine this fragment of her psychic life and fish
around for its meaning. In that moment he became her enemy. She knew then that any openness between them was dangerous, and that her explosive secret must be hidden with especial skill from the eyes of this sudden stranger with his desperately acute powers of mental intrusion and perception.

She poured them each a drink and thought, How easily he will find out, unless I am on perpetual alert. Not through any carelessness of the obvious kind but through
reading my mind
—reading me like a book, finding it written in fragments of behavior, fleeting nuances of expression, certain absences of response of which I would not be aware. Oh, I must be vigilant, from this point on I must be vigilant. This was her thought. But she didn’t have to put this policy of dissimulation into immediate effect, for Charlie came running in and began breathlessly telling his father about a bone he’d found in the marsh.

“I think it’s
human,”
he said.

“I rather doubt that,” said Max, smiling slightly.

“I think,” said Charlie darkly, “there may have been a murder.”

Stella drifted over to the French windows and gazed out at the setting sun and allowed herself to think about her lover.

She thought about him intermittently for the next three days without once going down to the vegetable garden. Max startled her at dinner one night by mentioning him by name.

Did she disguise the shock it gave her, to hear his name on Max’s lips?

She thinks so, though perhaps Max wasn’t paying attention, often his mind was elsewhere. He said that Edgar Stark was needed for a few days in the chaplain’s garden. Thank God, she thought; now I don’t have to imagine him out there all the time.

A horribly anxious few days, then she started to feel calmer. She thought it was the relief that came of running a risk and getting away with it. She was surprised to discover a fresh affection for Max, and realized she was grateful to him for suspecting nothing, for unwittingly allowing her to bury her guilty secret. And so the first sharp shock of horror at the appalling transgression she’d committed—having sex with a
patient
, not fifty
yards from the house—began to subside, and she told herself it had been a moment of madness, no more than that; never, of course, to be repeated. Though it worried her that Edgar would return to the garden, and that when he did, she would be able to find him, if she wanted to.

Now, predictably, as they moved toward assignation and structure, Stella began to create a sort of arabesque in her mind, a pattern of thought and feeling whose function it was to lead her back to him. She told me how one hot July morning she put on her wide-brimmed straw hat and took her tea out onto the terrace on the north side of the house and watched the patients feeding a bonfire with barrowloads of the dead wood and other debris strewn about this neglected part of the garden. It had been overgrown for years, a long, shallow, wooded slope that gradually flattened out and then beyond the back fence climbed into a stand of deciduous trees that crowned the far ridge and formed the outskirts of the forest.

Max’s plan was to clear this slope and plant it with new turf. He envisioned a rolling pasture here, an idea that disturbed Stella, for it suggested that their tenure of the house would be longer than she’d been led to believe. It had occurred to her that his ambition was to tame and cultivate both the hospital and the estate, make them over as his twin gardens.

The patients worked on steadily. The wood was dry and caught quickly, sending up showers of sparks as it burned white and gold in the sunshine. Onto the blaze they forked heaps of dried grass, the mowings of the back lawn, and the grass damped the blaze and produced clouds of black smoke. She saw them step back from the smoke and lean on their forks. One man turned and, shielding his eyes from the sun, gazed up the slope to where she stood in her straw hat, holding her cup of tea. She held his gaze.

Her own behavior puzzled her. She asked me what it meant. She made no gesture of any kind, merely stood there staring at the man. He took the handles of his wheelbarrow and started to push it up the slope, coming not straight in her direction but by
the path that led to the gate in the back fence. He was wearing the baggy yellow corduroys of the outside work parties, and the blue institution shirt with no collar. The cuffs were unbuttoned and they flapped at his wrists. He paused and pushed a strand of hair off his forehead and wiped the sweat away with a red-and-white-spotted bandanna that was certainly familiar to her, for Edgar had one. Her eyes were still on him and he knew it. She began to fan herself gently with her hat. Then, annoyed, she turned and went in.

I did not tell her that as a function of her relationship with Edgar not only had she begun to identify with the patients, she had eroticized them. She had eroticized the patient body.