Asylum (6 page)

No control. You don’t control falling in love, she said, you can’t. At the time it had amused her that it should happen like this, with this man. A patient. A patient working in the vegetable garden. Stella, I said, you could not have chosen more unwisely had you tried. But the truth is, she said, I didn’t choose.

She functioned as normally as she could at home but she was never properly there. Her day became focused on that one point in time when she waited with rising excitement in the gloom of the cricket pavilion, waited to hear his boots on the wall as he clambered onto the roof of the shed, then heaved himself over the windowsill and dropped to the floor inside. He would come
toward her, grinning, where she waited, ready for him, on the blankets, and sink down with her, and she lost herself completely when she reached for him and felt his strong hands on her body. Oh, she loved him.

Perhaps.

I believe now that the visit that summer of Max’s mother, Brenda Raphael, in a curious way accelerated the progress of the thing. One Friday afternoon in early August, five or six weeks after the dance, she arrived at the deputy medical superintendent’s house while I was there. I had left the hospital early and dropped in on Stella on my way home. I had recently heard from John Archer about her budding friendship with Edgar, and naturally I wanted to talk to her. I had no chance to bring it up, however, for she at once told me her mother-in-law was expected.

“I offered to meet her at the station,” she said as she led me down the hall and into the drawing room, “but oh no, she didn’t want to put me to any trouble. She makes it sound as though I’m so stagnant it would be dangerous to move me.”

We had a drink in the garden, and she was distant, distracted. At the time I did not associate her mood with the faint sounds
of shattering glass and hammering that drifted in the still air from the direction of the vegetable garden. Five minutes later we heard a car in the drive. Together we went down the hall to the open front door just as the taxi driver brought up the first of Brenda’s numerous suitcases; she herself was just emerging from the back of the car. She was an urbane, autocratic woman, and she was also wealthy. I happened to know she was helping Max and Stella maintain their standard of living here, and that their car—a white Jaguar, of all things—had been her gift when Max was appointed deputy superintendent. She and I often spoke on the telephone. We understood each other. She relied on me for reports about her son.

She handed the driver his fare and tip with all the graciousness of royalty. “Peter,” she then said, “how nice to see you. Stella, my dear. You seem well.” They kissed, and Brenda advanced along the hall. She was, as always, fashionably dressed, and I knew this caused Stella a pang of envy not to be living in London still, not to be generating this same aura of chic.

“Would you like to go upstairs,” said Stella, “or shall we have a drink and take it into the garden?”

“That would be lovely,” said Brenda. “Now, Peter, don’t run away just because I’ve come. Where is Charlie?”

“I expect he’s out in the marsh,” said Stella, “or down by the conservatory.”

Brenda lifted a thin, plucked eyebrow. “He might have been here to say hello to his grandmother, but that’s a boy for you. I don’t think Max was very different. How is Max?”

As she said this she sank into one of the armchairs, crossing her elegant legs, and took her cigarettes out of her handbag.

“Busy,” said Stella. “Happy, I think. He likes it here.”

“I was rather afraid he would. Max is a cautious man, I’m sure I don’t need to tell either of you that. He’d be drawn to the security of a job here.”

“I think he wants to be medical superintendent. Don’t you agree, Peter?”

I was pouring the drinks, with my back to the women. I
stiffened slightly at this unpleasant suggestion and murmured some demurral.

“You don’t want to stay here, of course,” said Brenda, and as I handed them their drinks I saw again how things were with them: Brenda was not a woman’s woman, but she and Stella had worked out certain unspoken compromises over the years. Now, it seemed, at least on this issue, they were allies. Neither of them wanted to see Max bury himself in this provincial institution.

“Oh, I could tolerate it for a couple of years,” said Stella, giving me a private smile as I handed her a gin and tonic, “but I’m afraid it’s more than a couple of years Max wants. Shall we go into the garden?

“It’s the attention he gives the garden that worries me,” she went on, when we were settled in wicker chairs in the shade, and again I was struck by how distracted she was. We gazed out over the back lawn. The goldfish pond sparkled in the sunlight.

“A garden takes years to do properly and Max is working on this one as though he’ll be at it for the rest of his life.”

“How worrying.” Brenda glanced at me, but I was sustaining a studious neutrality here.

“He’s having the old conservatory fixed up now.”

It was the second time she’d mentioned the conservatory.

“I do hope you’re wrong about this,” said Brenda. “But tell me, my dear, how are you? You certainly look well. In the pink, I’d say.”

I glanced at her. In the pink. I rather whimsically reflected that it sounded like a euphemism, something to do with sex; and it was then that it occurred to me that something
was
happening to Stella, sexually. I regarded her with care.

“I’m having a lazy summer,” she said in an offhand manner. “I don’t really have a great deal to do, even though it’s such a big house. Mrs. Bain comes in in the mornings and I can usually leave it all to her.” She brushed at a wasp that was buzzing around her glass.

Brenda then began to talk about her social life in London,
and this litany of lunches and cocktail parties and formal dinners was accompanied by the usual weary complaints at how much in demand one was, and how tired one got, and how few people appreciated how precious one’s time was. As Stella listened to this, murmuring that a smart, busy London social life was about the closest thing to heaven she could imagine, I wondered idly with whom she might be having sex, but could think of no likely candidates on the estate.

“You must come up to town more often,” Brenda was saying. “Everybody asks how you both are. Spend the night. We’ll go to the theater and have supper afterward.”

“We will, soon.”

They talked about Charlie then, and a little later Brenda went in to wash her face and have a rest before Max came home from the hospital.

I made my own departure shortly afterward, but not before Stella had told me in a fierce whisper that she could expect nothing but torment like this for the next few days, and how was she going to cope without going mad? I was sympathetic. I managed to make her laugh. She slipped her arm in mine as we walked around the side of the house to where I’d left the car at the end of the drive. “Peter,” she said.

Her tone was casual, dreamy even. “Yes, my dear?”

“When is Edgar Stark getting out?”

It wasn’t so unusual a question, but it gave me a shock. I told her it would be a long time if it had anything to do with me. “Why do you ask?” I said as we reached my car.

“No reason. He’s the one doing Max’s conservatory. Will we see you on Tuesday night?”

“Yes, you will,” I said, as I kissed her cheek.

My Edgar?

When the professional staff leave the hospital at the end of the day the place assumes a different atmosphere, rather like a town by the sea when the season is over and the tourists go home. I
like it then. Over the years it has become my practice to return to my office in the stillness of the evening and reflect in tranquillity on the events of the day.

“Back again, Dr. Cleave,” says the attendant at the Main Gate as I collect my keys.

“Back again,” I say. With the custodial staff I have always projected a sort of patrician affability. They like it. They like structure and hierarchy. They know me well. I have been here longer than any of them.

My office had a good view of the country beyond the Wall. It was particularly lovely on summer evenings, when the last of the light brought a soft, hazy glow to the marsh, and over to the west the setting sun turned the sky all shades of red. One day some months after Edgar was admitted to the hospital I returned to my office at this quiet hour. I poured myself a drink—I keep a small stock of alcohol in my desk, under lock and key—and stood a few moments gazing out of the window. I remember it so well because it was in the course of a session with Edgar earlier in the day that he first began to reveal the full extent of his delusions, and dropped all pretense that the murder had been as impulsive as he’d first maintained.

I had been to see him during the afternoon in the dayroom of his ward in Block 3. This is a large, sunny room with a well-waxed floor and a snooker table in the middle. There were couches and armchairs upholstered in a tough dark-green vinyl, and a large table at one end where men played cards or read the newspaper. A television set had recently been installed at the other end. He was playing snooker, bent over his cue, about to take his shot, when someone whispered to him that Dr. Cleave was here. He made his shot.

“Oh yes?” he said, straightening up. He turned, grinning, toward the door.

I mouthed the word “Come.”

We had spent almost an hour in the interview room, and I had taped our conversation. He’d told me first about his promotion to the downstairs ward in Block 3. I had been instrumental
in arranging this, of course, but he needed to take the credit and have me applaud him, as a child might. This is not uncommon, the projection by the patient onto his psychiatrist of the feelings of a child toward its father. Such transference of affect can be useful, as it was in Edgar’s case, for bringing to the surface repressed material.

When he settled down I turned the machine on. At this point my understanding of his personality was not extensive. He had told me something of his reasons for killing his wife, and what I’d heard was quite fantastic. There is often a ghostly resemblance to logic in the thinking of delusional patients, and it was apparent here. Driven by morbid unconscious processes to suppose that his wife was betraying him with another man, he had reasoned, first, that they must have ways of signaling their arrangements, and second, that their activities must leave traces. He had then manufactured evidence of such signals and traces from incidents as banal as her opening a window just as a motorbike was going past in the street below, and from phenomena as insignificant as a crease in a pillow or a stain on a skirt.

I asked him, as I did at the beginning of every interview, if he still believed he had been sexually betrayed.

“Oh yes.”

This was said with utter assurance. He was rolling a cigarette, his eyes on his fingers. He nodded several times.

“How long had it been going on?”

He looked up and glanced out of the window, gathering his thoughts. A slight frown as he touched the edge of the cigarette paper with his tongue. He looked eminently reasonable and sane. I saw him come to the decision to be frank with me at last.

“Eight or nine years.”

His expression said, Now you understand everything.

“But that’s how long you’d been married!”

He nodded, genuine sadness in his face.

“When did you first suspect it was going on?”

“I knew from the beginning.”

“Are you saying that throughout your marriage you knew your wife was being unfaithful to you?”

“Yes.”

“With the same man?”

“No. There were others.”

“How many?”

His face came suddenly to life. He was bitterly amused.

“How many? Hundreds. I lost count.”

“And you did nothing about it?”

“I pleaded with her. Threatened her. I don’t think it was her fault. She wasn’t responsible.”

He began pushing his hands through his hair.

“It did no good?”

“She laughed at me.”

“I see.”

I allowed a silence. The reports I’d read indicated that the marriage had been relatively stable until a year before the murder. Were they wrong? Was Ruth Stark promiscuous? Had he been plaguing her with accusations all along?

“Did anyone know about your unhappiness?”

He nodded. He gave off the air of a man forced to make a difficult admission, one harmful not to himself but to another.

“Who knew?”

“Various people.”

“Friends? Family?”

He nodded again. I now knew that what I was hearing was all a product of the delusional structure.

“So she was sleeping around with a lot of men from the start of the marriage. You knew this, you talked to her about it, but she paid no attention.”

His eyes flared with a sort of astonished incredulity.

“She laughed at me!”

“She laughed at you. And others knew what was going on.”

“I didn’t have to tell them. They could see for themselves.”

“And she didn’t care.”

“It was her
work,”
he said. “She was a whore.”

This was new. “Go on.”

“She brought them to the studio while I was out. I’d see them waiting in the street, hanging about till I was out of the way. She could do ten or twelve a day. She couldn’t help it.”