Asylum Part 11

He shuffled out without a word shortly after dark, she heard him go, that strong man. She wasted no time. She had planned precisely what to do. She packed her suitcase and got dressed in less than ten minutes. In her raincoat, head scarf, and sungla.s.ses she ran down the stairs and along the pa.s.sage at the bottom. There she waited a moment and then peered out into the yard. It was empty. She walked quickly out to the street. She paused by the wall to check that he wasn't on his way back. He wasn't. There was a cold wind off the river. She hurried away.

Half an hour later she cautiously entered the saloon bar of a shabby little pub near Waterloo. It was a clean, warm, empty, dangerous room; there were rooms like this all over London, she thought, rooms that appeared to promise safety but were in fact alive with the possibility that he would walk in. Just one man in a gray raincoat, up at the bar with his evening paper and a gla.s.s of beer in front of him. A carpet on the floor and a gas fire burning. Beside the fire, in the corner, a small round table with metal legs. Just the man at the bar, the warm fire, the warm low lighting, cigarettes and alcohol, and outside, cold and twilight, an empty studio, a madman. She would sit at that little table for a while and have a drink. The woman behind the bar sold her a packet of cigarettes and a large gin and tonic, and she carried them over to the fire and installed herself, bruised cheek to the wall. She poured tonic into her gin and lit a cigarette. She was aware after a minute or two that the man at the bar was watching her, but when she looked up he turned back to his paper.

It was warm and quiet and the lighting was subdued. There was tonic left in the bottle so she bought another gin. While she was up at the bar the man in the raincoat asked her if she'd like to join him for a drink. No, she said, she was waiting for her husband. He probably thought it odd, she told me, that she was wearing sungla.s.ses. He probably wondered about the bruise on her face. She wasn't concerned with what he thought. She took her gin back to her table by the fire. She was waiting. She had chosen this pub because there was a phone box outside. She had called Nick's flat and been told he was out. She would try again in half an hour.

An hour later she was still there. The sadness kept welling up inside her, wave after wave of it, and she told herself fiercely, in a tone she recognized as Max's, not to be silly, not to give way to self-pity-to pull herself together pull herself together. Ironic that one of Max's precepts for the management of unruly female emotion should come to her aid in this particular extremity. Pull yourself together, dear, you're in a public place, do you want to make an exhibition of yourself? This distracted her, the idea of making an exhibition of herself. Putting a frame around the little table and its weepy occupant, a somber black frame and under it the t.i.tle of the piece, Melancholy Melancholy. She smiled, her face hurt, soundlessly the tears streamed down. From the public bar came the sound of men's laughter. Enough of this, Stella, she said to herself, but it didn't help, it only seemed to make it worse, and at that point the man at the bar turned and brazenly scrutinized her, so the public exhibition rose to her feet and went out to try and reach Nick for the third time.

The flat was tiny but it was better than the loft. What a pleasure it was to have a proper bathroom! Nick had been worried sick about her. He had gone back to the loft and found it empty. He hadn't known what to think but he'd feared the worst. His relief was enormous when he heard her voice on the phone. He came to the pub, they had a drink together, then he took her back to the flat. She told him that more than anything she wanted a bath.

She undressed in the bathroom. She sank into the hot water and lay there with her eyes closed. She felt she hadn't been properly clean for a long time. Some of the unhappiness and squalor and anxiety and guilt of the last days lifted. After a while she examined her body, her white skin, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her limbs, her pale, delicate hands and feet. Max had lost interest in her body after three or four years of marriage, for he lacked the imagination to sustain s.e.xual attraction. She had then been more or less celibate until Edgar. But she couldn't think about him now. She blocked him out.

She emerged from her bath and powdered herself in front of the long mirror in the door.

Dear Nick. He was not well equipped to offer hospitality and succor to a distressed woman but he was trying. He insisted she have the bed, he would sleep in the armchair. So she climbed gratefully into bed in her dressing gown as he fussed around her, getting her a drink.

"Would you like something to eat?"

"I'm not hungry, Nick."

She was demure and gracious, as befits a lady in straitened circ.u.mstances. She liked this weak, messy, good-hearted man. His paint-spattered trousers had always made her smile; she and Edgar had a private joke about them, they'd suggested he exhibit them as art. Poor Nick, he'd laughed, but the next time they saw him he was wearing clean trousers, though they didn't stay clean for long. Now he sat forward on the edge of the armchair, rubbing his long hands together and shyly telling her how he'd felt when he'd heard her voice on the telephone that evening, the enormous relief.

"I knew him when he started getting ideas about Ruth," he said.

"Oh, Ruth," said Stella. She didn't want to hear about Ruth now.

"Nick," she said as an idea occurred to her.

"What?"

"Has Edgar ever been here?"

Nick looked sick and said yes.

She couldn't sleep, and nor could Nick, sprawled in the armchair under a blanket, tossing about, trying to get comfortable; she wondered at one point whether she should invite him into the bed with her. Later she slipped over to the window and pulled back the curtain an inch or two. The rain was coming down steadily, slanting down through the glow of the streetlights. The narrow street, slicked and gleaming, was deserted. What had she expected, to see him standing under the streetlight in the rain, gazing up at the window?

A little later she heard Nick groping for his cigarettes, trying to make no noise, and then came the flare of his match.

"I'm not asleep," she said into the darkness.

"I can't sleep either."

"Nick."

"What?"

"He'll come here, won't he?"

"I don't know."

"I'm frightened."

He sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand.

"It's not him," she said. "It's because he's sick. You know what he's like when he's not sick."

Nick didn't say anything. He was holding her hand tightly. She realized he was aroused. It had never occurred to her that Nick desired her. Had Edgar had seen it, was this how it had all started? Was it all Nick's fault?

"The door's locked," he said.

She squeezed his hand. He leaned toward her and she let him kiss her. He slipped his hand under the blanket and tentatively touched her breast.

"No, Nick."

"Sorry."

He went back to his armchair.

"Try and sleep," she said.

He came at dawn. They were awakened by the sound of the door handle being turned. They never did find out exactly how he got into the building, for the front door was locked. They sat up and stared with horror at the door.

"Nick, open the door."

His m.u.f.fled voice terrified her. It wasn't him, it was still the other one with the strange artificial accent. Nick stared wildly at her, shaking his head. In the gloom she read the terror in his face.

"Open the door, Nick. Come on, man, it's me. I'm not going to hurt you."

Silence. They were utterly still. He won't want to create a disturbance, she thought. He won't dare try and break the door down, it would be the end of him. Unless he doesn't care anymore.

"She's in there, isn't she?"

Nick didn't know what to do. He was paralyzed. Stella stared at him, shaking her head. He mustn't get into a conversation with him, not even through a locked door. Nick was shrugging his shoulders like a schoolboy. With her finger at her lips Stella silently crossed the room. She sat on the arm of the chair and put her hand on Nick's mouth. With her other hand she gripped his wrist. He gazed up at her and she made a silent shushing shape with her mouth.

"It's not your fault, Nick," came the voice. "I know what she's like."

Nick's eyes grew wide. She couldn't tell what he would do. She took her hand away from his mouth and leaned forward and kissed him.

"She's no good."

Nick tried to turn his head toward the door but her fingers were in his hair, gripping him, as she kept her mouth pressed to his.

"Nick!"

He thumped the door very hard once. Nick almost jumped out of the armchair, but Stella held him, still kissing him, darting her tongue into his mouth. Her dressing gown had opened across her legs as she balanced herself on the arm of the chair, and Nick's hand crept under and began tentatively to touch her thigh.

There was silence now from outside the door. Had he slipped away, alarmed that all the noise he was making would rouse the house; or was he waiting in the corridor? Nick's hand moved up her thigh to her groin. She was becoming aroused too, by the situation as much as by his touch, but she pushed his hand away. She went to the door and pressed her ear against it. She could hear nothing. Nick had slumped deep into the armchair and turned gray. She went to the window and twitched back the curtain a fraction. She saw him emerge from somewhere along the side of the building, and she watched him walk away. Even his walk was different now, gangling, ill-coordinated. It cost her not to call out to him, to let him just walk away. It had stopped raining. She turned into the room and faced the slumped and shattered Nick.

"He's gone," she said.

"I want a drink."

"Poor old fellow."

They moved out within the hour. They slipped away through a side door, each with a suitcase. n.o.body was about yet and the street was almost deserted. A little later they pa.s.sed two loud men in evening clothes looking for a cab. Stella had only one pair of shoes now, her high heels, and she stumbled trying to keep up with Nick, who was still badly frightened. He took her suitcase and she clung to his arm. They caught a bus going west, away from Southwark, and sat among silent, sleepy men and women too preoccupied with their newspapers and ill humor to pay any attention to the bruised woman in the raincoat and the tall shabby nervous man beside her.

The day was overcast. Small flurries of rain swept against the windows of the bus. After a few minutes they got off. Nick said he knew where they were. He took her down a side street to a run-down square of large Georgian houses surrounding a patch of brown gra.s.s with a tree in the middle and a fence around it. The hotel was no different from any of the other houses. A tired woman took them up two flights of cheaply carpeted stairs and showed them a room that overlooked a high brick wall with gla.s.s shards cemented along the top and an alley with dustbins, washing lines, and cats.

She said that the two days she spent with Nick were the grimmest yet. Only a few details stand out in her memory. He was not clean in his person, she said, and his eating and drinking were messy. He was considerate and devoted but he watched her constantly, not with tenderness but with hunger. She wondered if he was capable of rape. She lay for hours on the sagging double bed, and the overhead light cast a weak yellowy glow that made everything in the room uglier than it was already, including themselves. She lay there worrying about Edgar. She feared he was too disturbed now to avoid drawing attention to himself. She thought he might do something stupid.

And their future together?

Oh, she said blithely, she was always sure of that. She knew the thread was unbroken; even in his worst fits of aggressive jealousy she felt him straining for her, she felt the pa.s.sion, only it was confused and misdirected, it was as though it had been shunted off down some pa.s.sage from which it emerged monstrous and unrecognizable. This was his illness. And she said that it was during the two days she spent with Nick that she attempted what she called her heart's prompting: she tried for the first time, not intellectually but emotionally, to separate the man from his illness, and yes, she could do it. Oh, it was easy, she was more than equal to the task: she imagined him clutching his head as the storm raged in his poor benighted mind, but the storm wasn't him! The storm would pa.s.s, he would recover, he would be himself again. But for his sake for his sake she must avoid him while he was mad; later she would go back to him. How all of this would come about she had no idea, but she chose to trust that it would. she must avoid him while he was mad; later she would go back to him. How all of this would come about she had no idea, but she chose to trust that it would.

Nick was too afraid to go back to the loft, he was afraid to go out at all, and the pair of them were too much together. She was soon deeply irritated with him, but by now she had almost no money left and no clear idea how to get more. At the end of the corridor there was a bathroom, which they shared with the other residents of their floor. She spent as much time in it as she could, if only to escape Nick and his smells and his anxiety and his l.u.s.t. The house smelled of boiled cabbage and seemed occupied exclusively by shabby gray people who avoided her eyes when she pa.s.sed them in the corridor or on the stairs.

At last she'd had enough. She took it all out on Nick. She admitted that on the morning of the third day, after another restless, unhappy night, in a weak moment she acquiesced in his constant doglike l.u.s.ting and took him into bed. She was pa.s.sive. She was also rather sore. Her only satisfaction lay in being reminded of how it was to make love to Edgar. So in her debas.e.m.e.nt and despair, as Nick laboriously went about his pleasure, she summoned the image of her lover.

Afterward Nick was pathetically satisfied with himself and that was the trigger. She turned on him, she belittled him, she mocked his weakness, his failure to be a hard surface she could grind herself against. He tried to protest his sympathy and concern but what did she need his concern for, or his sympathy? He could keep it. She went to the bathroom and came back and got dressed in front of him, provocatively, and went out without telling him where she was going, because she didn't know. She left him like a kicked dog to lick his wounds.

She wandered the streets, a sad slow woman, her coat hanging open and a cigarette dangling from her fingers. She didn't care what she looked like or whether anyone noticed her. A sad woman drifting down sad streets, insubstantial, not quite real, not quite there, a ghost. She came to a decision.

It seemed suddenly absurd to her, she said, to be running and hiding not from the hospital authorities but from Edgar! Edgar! She caught a bus as far as Blackfriars and walked to Horsey Street in the rain. In the street the boys were kicking a ball against the wall. They stopped their game and stared at her as she turned up the alley to the yard, and their silent scrutiny did nothing to relieve the dread she felt, a dread so palpable it made her nauseated. More than once her step faltered and she thought she couldn't go on. She caught a bus as far as Blackfriars and walked to Horsey Street in the rain. In the street the boys were kicking a ball against the wall. They stopped their game and stared at her as she turned up the alley to the yard, and their silent scrutiny did nothing to relieve the dread she felt, a dread so palpable it made her nauseated. More than once her step faltered and she thought she couldn't go on.

She reached the pa.s.sage into the building. The children had not resumed their game, they had followed her into the yard and now stood silently staring at her. She soon understood why. At the top of the stairs the door to the loft was open and there were men inside. She immediately started back down but she'd been seen. She heard a voice calling; she did not stop. A man came after her and caught up with her halfway down. Just a moment, please, he said, as he put his hand on her shoulder. She turned. He recognized her. Christ, he said, it's Mrs. Raphael. You're Stella Raphael. She stared at him. She had never seen him before in her life. He started shouting to the other men. Within moments two more of them had appeared on the stairs, and they were both as surprised as the first one. They led her back up to the loft. Edgar wasn't there, nor did they appear to know where he was. They wanted to ask her a few questions, they said. If she didn't mind.

CHAPTER ...

With this dramatic development Stella swings back into my field of vision, she comes into focus once more, and the account is again grounded in my own observations. She says she was grateful they weren't rough with her. Actually they were more surprised than anything else, I think because it hadn't occurred to any of them that she would so clumsily blunder into their clutches. They didn't attempt to question her there and then, once they'd established that she didn't know where Edgar was.

The events of the next hours have an unreal, nightmare quality for her now. She remembers a room in a police station and a woman in uniform giving her a cup of tea. An hour or so later Max arrived. He, like the police, had clearly decided that the best approach was the gentle one: Stella the victim, seduced and abandoned, a pitiful woman led astray by a cunning man who had manipulated and entrapped her then cast her aside. When he came into the room she tried to be calm and cool but she hadn't the resources, and even before he could open his mouth she found herself in his arms and clutching him tightly. She had been so weak and alone and desperate these last days. He stroked her head and she didn't care that he stroked her like a doctor, like a psychiatrist, because that was what she needed then. It wasn't until later that the doctor receded and the husband advanced, and a new nightmare began.

She allowed herself to go limp. She became pa.s.sive and pliant, like a child or a sick person. They talked to her gently, and she answered their questions. She saw them frowning, murmuring to one another in low tones, and she didn't even try to understand what was going on, she made no attempt to take any active part in it at all. All she wanted now was to be looked after.

That night she slept in a cell in the police station. They were apologetic but she didn't care. Sleep was sleep and they'd promised her a pill. The room was bare and the sheets were clean. She swallowed her pill and closed her eyes, her mind empty of thought, clear of all feeling, and slept a long, deep sleep and the only dream she could remember in the morning involved the conservatory in the vegetable garden, but she couldn't remember anything more than that.

The sense of numbness gradually wore off. The next day she had to submit to a lengthy interview with a senior policeman, who was polite, she said, in a brisk sort of way. Her eyes wandered about his office. The walls were a shiny green to shoulder height, cream above. There were two large, dusty arched windows, several gray metal filing cabinets, a wall map with pins in it, and a large clock over the door. He asked her where she had lived with Edgar Stark, what they had done, the people they'd seen. She told him all she could remember, she didn't see how it could hurt him now, but she couldn't remember anybody's name. He nodded, he made notes, he moved her in a straight line through the days and nights since she'd first come to the warehouse on Horsey Street. She told him her story and paid no particular attention to his reactions. She did not talk about the fits of jealousy, and she tried to leave Nick out of it as much as possible. Some parts of her account seemed to interest him more than others, she didn't know why and she wasn't interested in finding out. It was over, that was all, and as she experienced relief and blankness so did she glimpse as though through fog the encroaching fingers of loss, and understood dimly what would come next. She began to brace herself for the darkness.

Max drove her home the next day. The white Jaguar was parked in the yard at the back of the police station. As he opened the pa.s.senger door for her she glanced up at the back of the building and saw the barred window of the cell in which she'd spent the last two nights. In silence he pulled out of the yard and into light London traffic. It was the first time they'd been alone since she'd been picked up.

"You look tired," she said.

He didn't reply. He was smoking, staring straight ahead.

"I talked to Jack on the phone last night. We think the police won't press charges," he said eventually.

"Against who?"

He glanced at her. She was huddled up in the front seat, wearing his overcoat. When she felt his glance she turned toward him. His eyes slid back to the road.

"Don't you know what you did was criminal?"

She didn't like his tone of voice and she wasn't interested in what he was saying. She didn't reply. They both stared straight ahead at the road.

"n.o.body wants a scandal," said Max.

She said nothing.

"I didn't expect you to be grateful."

A lorry pulled out in front of them and Max had to brake sharply to avoid running into the back of it. It took him a few moments to overtake the lumbering thing, and by the time they were once more moving at normal speed he seemed to have forgotten the demand for grat.i.tude he'd embarked on. She glimpsed then just how delicate and complicated their negotiations would be, now that it was all over. If it was all over. Was it all over? He was apparently being chivalrous. He was saving her from prosecution. He was standing by her. For all of this a price would have to be exacted. Grat.i.tude was just the beginning.

She and I talked one morning in late October, a cool morning with the mist still clinging to the trees. We walked through the vegetable garden, where it had all begun. The men were burning dead leaves and there was a smell of bonfire in the air. She told me she was sad that she wouldn't see another spring, or another summer, here in the garden. The change in her was noticeable. She was paler, slower, heavier; there was a gravity about her now. The apple trees were heavily laden, and the ground beneath was scattered with fallen fruit, soft, spongy apples, pale green and yellow, dimpled with black spots of rot. As we picked our way among the the fallen apples she took my arm. I was her first and only visitor, she said; all the rest nodded at her and said good morning but they couldn't look at her, she was an affront to their sense of decency. There had been no word from the Straffens, and she'd a.s.sumed, she said, that her old friend Peter Cleave was with them.

"So how are you, my dear?" I said.

"Oh, Peter," she said, "I've been better. Really, how lovely of you to come and see me. I did think you were up there in the stands, booing with the rest of them."

"I?" I said. "I boo you? I don't take my friendships as lightly as that!"

"I should have known."

"Anyway," I said, "I'm a doctor, I don't blame someone for becoming ill. So how could I blame you for falling in love?"

"n.o.body else seems to find it very difficult."

"Ah, but that's because they were hurt by what you did. It's only when we feel pain, or the prospect of it, that we start to make distinctions between right and wrong."

"Is that what it is?"

"I think so. Don't you?"

We reached the bench by the conservatory and sat down. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

"Oh, I don't know, I'm too tired to think."

We sat there in silence for some minutes. Later she said it was heaven to feel that sense of simple companionship, she hadn't realized how much she'd missed it.

"How are things with Charlie?" I asked quietly.

She opened her eyes.

"Dear Peter," she murmured. She was grateful for my tact, grateful that I didn't ask how it was with Max; I had identified, she said, the relationship that really mattered.