Asylum Part 14

"I don't know," she murmured. She couldn't decide if it would shelter her or not, this big gray house. Five minutes later they turned in through the gate and emerged cautiously from the car. The sign on the gate read, "Plas Mold."

The removal van had already arrived and was parked in the yard behind the house with the tailboard down and the men standing around smoking cigarettes. One of them came forward, a small lean fellow in a rough tweed jacket. It was windy up there, and there was a strong smell of manure in the air, so Stella got back into the car and watched as Max and Charlie shook hands with the man in the tweed jacket, who then produced a set of keys. They moved to the back door of the house, unlocked it, and disappeared inside. Somewhere out at the back of the house a dog was barking. The removal men climbed into the van and began pa.s.sing boxes out. Max came back out to the car a few minutes later.

"Come in and see the place," he said. He seemed genuinely confident she would like it.

The man in the tweed jacket was Trevor Williams. He owned the house and lived in the other side of it with his wife, Mair. They had no children. He showed them around. He was a silent man, and he gave Stella the distinct impression that the less they had to do with each other the better he'd like it. The wind howled about the house and made it creak and bang like a ship. The kitchen was a long room on the ground floor. The sitting room, one floor up, matched its dimensions, and the top floor was divided into two bedrooms with a bathroom off the landing. Stella realized immediately that she and Max would have to share a bedroom: why hadn't he mentioned this? How could he expect her to sleep with him? She said nothing for the moment, however; Trevor Williams was watching her.

She didn't like the look of the master of Plas Mold. She told me she was to meet this type of character often in the weeks to come, suspicious, watchful men, dour and sly. They didn't like the Raphaels because they were English. They bore old grudges. The women were hard-worked and bitter. Stella met Mair a little later when she came out of her end of the house with a basket of damp laundry to hang on a line strung across a patch of gra.s.s at the side of the house. The laundry flapped and snapped in the wind as Mair moved along with her basket, a couple of clothespins in her teeth. She was as lean as her husband but lacked the spark of furtive vitality Stella had seen in his eyes, evidence of an appet.i.te for whatever secret pleasures spiced his dry life. Mair's eyes spoke only of work and disappointment and bitterness and sterility; she had no children. She introduced herself and they stood there in the wind, the women, Mair clutching her basket of washing with both hands as at the back door the removal men grunted with the double bed. She asked Stella had they come from London and Stella said no, not London, but not far from London. Ah, she said, and Stella realized that the smell of their scandal had not yet reached those thin pinched nostrils.

"How old's your boy?" she said.

"Ten."

"Still a baby."

"Yes."

The frame of the bed went through the back door with a man at either end. Stella offered Mair a cigarette. Mair put down the laundry. She knew how to light a cigarette in the wind. Her eyes were pale blue and her skin had once been soft. She was probably only thirty-five or thirty-six, but her good looks had long since been leached out and she gave the impression now of agelessness and s.e.xlessness, a piece of fruit so long neglected it had lost all juice and sweetness.

"He showed you where everything was, did he?" she said.

"Yes he did."

She nodded, picked up her laundry basket, and with the cigarette dangling from her lips and her eyes half closed against the smoke she trudged off around the back of the house, where the dog was still barking. The removal men emerged from the back door. Stella hadn't yet spoken to Max about the bedroom.

She didn't have a chance until Charlie had gone up after dinner and they were sitting at the table in the kitchen. She hadn't hung any curtains and the window at the end of the room looked out into the dark valley and a night sky full of stars. Above the steady roar of the wind she could hear the cattle in the field below. The headlights of a car moved slowly along the main road several miles away.

"How did you imagine our sleeping arrangements?" she said.

He put down his newspaper. They no longer made any attempt at conversation when Charlie wasn't in the room.

"I won't sleep with you," she said. "If you can't think of a solution we'll have to find somewhere else. It won't work like this."

"We're not moving again," he said. Oh, she could make him angry in a moment, no matter how determined he was to stay calm and reasonable. She heard the rising irritation in his voice, the barely controlled whine of indignation that she should be dictating terms to him, she who was entirely responsible for their upheaval. He was trapped in an idea of where his moral duty lay, but I'm afraid he hadn't the strength of character fully to believe in it.

"Why won't you help me?" he said tightly.

She was without mercy. She hated him because he wasn't Edgar.

"Someone has to sleep in Charlie's room," she said. "I don't care who it is."

He got up and walked to the window and stood staring out into the night, his hands in his pockets and his fingers twitching with the effort to keep his temper under control.

"I'll sleep on the couch tonight," she said. "It doesn't matter to me."

"No," he said, with his back to her, "I will."

"Why?"

Now he turned. "Because I don't think Charlie should see you sleeping on the couch. He shouldn't see either of us sleeping on the couch. Why can't you wait till I get the spare bed moved into his room?"

"No," she said. "Why didn't you think of this?"

He turned back to the window. He wouldn't tell her why he hadn't thought of it. Perhaps he'd hoped she'd start sleeping with him again. She saw then with a small dark surge of satisfaction that her power was far from extinguished, and that despite everything she was still stronger than he was.

Trevor Williams came over the next day and Max talked to him about moving in the spare bed, which had been put in the barn. As Stella came downstairs to the kitchen he cast a quick glance in her direction. He may not have known about her scandalous past, but he was certainly drawing conclusions about the state of her marriage.

They started Charlie in the local school the following Monday and he came home rather miserable. He didn't like the other children in his cla.s.s. He said they were rough and unfriendly. Stella spent a long time with him. She listened to his troubled account of his loneliness in the playground and his trouble with unfamiliar cla.s.sroom routines. It would all get better, she said; starting again in a new place was never easy but it was something he would have to do all his life. It was useful to learn how to do it now.

"But why do we have to start again?" he said.

"Because of Daddy's job."

Charlie thought about this and then explained that since he planned on becoming a zoologist, and intended to travel a good deal, it was probably best if he never got married. Stella said she thought this was wise. As for Max's job, it didn't seem to be as interesting as he'd hoped. Perhaps he had deceived himself, eager to believe that this wouldn't be dull work, but she saw that he was already bored, and felt rather as Charlie did about their new situation, though he wouldn't admit it. For he couldn't afford to think that he'd been shunted off into a psychiatric backwater, where his career would languish while other men with less talent moved into the jobs he should have been offered. No, this was much too painful to contemplate. Max was an ambitious man, and at times Stella wondered if he cared more that she had damaged his career than that she had been unfaithful to him.

Winter came hard and early in north Wales. Max drove Charlie to school in the morning and went on to the hospital, leaving Stella stranded. If she wanted the car she had to get up when they did, but she slept late now for she was awake most of the night. It rained for days on end and she woke each morning to banks of gray cloud moving ponderously across the valley and the sound of rain on the roof, and of course the Beast That Never Stopped Barking, as she and Charlie called it, a black-and-white sheepdog that Trevor Williams kept chained to its kennel on the far side of the house. One day they went around to have a look at it and it leapt at them in a fury, and but for the chain would clearly have torn their throats out. Charlie was very upset, he thought it a great cruelty to keep an animal chained up all day. He tried to make friends with it but each time he approached the kennel the dog leapt at him with teeth bared, wildly barking, and eventually he grew afraid that one day the chain would snap, and he left it alone after that.

For Stella the days seemed to slip by without anything happening. It became an effort to keep the house clean and provide a meal in the evening. She was gaining weight and she didn't care. She gazed out of the kitchen window for long periods, watching the rain falling on the fields, and on awakening from her reverie she couldn't remember what she'd been thinking about. When the rain let up she would go for a walk up the lane behind the house as far as the top of the hill, where she had a view across the next valley with its scattered farmhouses and the quarry in the distance. The rain went rushing along the ditches and beyond the thick clipped hedges the sheep gathered as she went by and bleated at her. She rarely met anybody; sometimes a farmer; occasionally Trevor Williams pa.s.sed her in his rusty, mud-caked Land Rover. He nodded at her but never stopped. Leaves fell and drifted in soggy ma.s.ses by the drains. Water dripped from the bare branches of the trees. Once as she stood in the wind at the top of the hill, and gazed off to the west, the clouds parted and the sun briefly appeared, and its watery radiance seemed like a miracle, like a glimpse of G.o.d. She wore Wellington boots that blistered her heels and a long gray raincoat. It was weeks since she'd had her hair done but it didn't matter, she never saw anyone. She tried to imagine Edgar still out there somewhere and drawing closer, coming for her.

On Sat.u.r.days the three of them went shopping. She didn't like the weekends. The house felt crowded and she was disturbed by their noise. There were more meals to prepare and she was becoming less and less interested in cooking. She herself ate erratically whatever came to hand, which was why she was getting fat. She looked forward to Monday, when the house was empty and quiet again. Sometimes Mair came in and they had a cup of tea in the kitchen. Mair didn't disturb Stella, for neither of them felt any need to make conversation.

She first had s.e.x with Trevor Williams in the middle of November. It was not her doing, it hadn't occurred to her to think of him in that way. It happened the morning Mair left to spend a few days with her mother. Stella was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, idly turning the pages of a magazine. There was a knock at the back door and when she looked out of the window over the sink there he was. She was still in her dressing gown. She opened the door and he asked if he could come in for a moment. She stepped aside and he came in and went straight to the window at the far end and stood staring out across the valley. It was one of those days when a profound stillness settled on the countryside, not a breath of wind, the trees motionless as though listening intently to movement deep in the earth, perhaps the sluggish blood of dead Welshmen, the murdered sons of Owen Glendower. She hated those still days, they filled her with dread, she felt menaced by unnameable things. She stood at the stove with her arms folded and watched him.

"Why is it so still?" she said. "I hate days like this."

He turned. "Do you, Stella?" he said.

He'd never called her Stella before, he'd never called her anything. She knew then why he was there. She wondered idly what she should do. He was standing in front of her now. She still had her arms folded.

"You're a lovely woman," he said.

His voice with its burr of an accent was hoa.r.s.e and low. His eyes seemed to be feeding off her. She felt something stir inside her, the merest flicker of inquisitive desire, a response so slight it could have been snuffed out in a second. She waited. He told her what he wanted to do. The flicker flared and he saw it. He touched her hair, then his fingers cupped the back of her head and he came a step closer so their bodies touched and as his other hand went to her breast he angled his face at her and kissed her. She pulled away from him slightly. There was warmth inside her now, though at the same time she was aware only of a mild dispa.s.sionate curiosity about the man, this dour farmer who appeared at the back door in the middle of the morning and started talking about s.e.x.

"Is this how the world does it?" she said.

"What?"

His groin was pressed lightly against hers. She laid her palms flat against his shoulders as though to push him away. His skin was rinsed bone white by the wind. His eyes were small and narrow, deep set and slate gray. His breath smelled of tobacco.

"As you do it, I mean," she said. "Walk in and say what you want."

He didn't speak, just held her eyes and began to stroke her in the cleft between her hip and her belly, and without really meaning to she set her legs slightly apart. He slipped his fingers inside her dressing gown and up between her legs and pressed gently. She thought she might as well let him have what he wanted, why not? He was so eager and it was so long since she'd felt even vaguely alive, s.e.xually, and it would be so much trouble to try and stop him now, he would probably rape her.

"You'll come upstairs then, will you?" she said, and he gave her a weaselly sort of smile as though he'd tricked her.

When they got up to her bedroom she knelt on the bed holding the headboard and pushed against his thrusts with her eyes closed and her mind empty, and she only spoke once, to tell him he couldn't have his o.r.g.a.s.m inside her. She hadn't had her cap in for weeks, there'd been no point.

"Don't you do it with Mair?" she said afterward, lying there watching him pull his trousers back on.

"Not so often," he said. "And you don't do it with him at all."

She didn't say anything. He sat down on the bed and watched her like a man counting his profits. She could see what it looked like in his ledger, a woman under the same roof who'd let him do this to her.

"Lucky fellow, aren't you?" she said. "You didn't think it would be so easy."

"I could see you were lonely."

"I'm not lonely."

He left after that. He tried to make what he called arrangements but she wasn't interested, she wasn't going into his timetable as well as his ledger. Her curiosity was satisfied and she felt as indifferent to him as she had before. She thought it remarkable that a man could walk into a woman's kitchen in the morning, tell her what he wanted, and get it. Was that really how the world did it?

When Max came home he was irritable, as though he knew he'd been betrayed again; but it was their sleeping arrangements that annoyed him. The spare bed was in Charlie's room now, but it wasn't really satisfactory. There wasn't enough cupboard s.p.a.ce, so he had to hang his suits in her room, and she made him take out at night what he would need in the morning as she didn't want him coming in early and waking her. Nor did he have a proper place to work, for if he spread his papers on the table in the sitting room he was disturbed whenever anybody went upstairs: the stairs from the kitchen went up against the back wall of the sitting room and from there to the floor above.

He was starting to express his sense of injustice, and now something shifted in the balance of their relationship. No longer bound by a code of gallantry toward the fallen woman, Max seemed concerned only about Charlie, and she realized that her security would one day come to an end. He would leave her, not tomorrow, perhaps, but one day, and take Charlie with him; and their semblance of family life, the form of it if not the substance, was her sole structure and protection now, while she waited. The prospect of losing it should have alarmed her acutely, but even then, even as she saw it start to slip away, she couldn't pretend to Max that she felt toward him anything but indifference.

Max behaved now like a man who no longer believed in doing his moral duty, and had decided to start to look to his own needs instead. She watched him anxiously, she saw how his eyes never settled on her now, but pa.s.sed across her, as though she were invisible. He never spoke to her if he could avoid it. He wasn't angry with her anymore, just weary, impatient, irritable, distracted. He had given up.

She couldn't rouse herself to change any of this. She seemed to exist in a fog through which she saw the others as dim spectral figures, phantoms who possessed no real substance. Nor apparently did she possess substance in their eyes. When Trevor Williams came back some days later she was as pliant as before, for she came at least half to life with him, and the s.e.x made her calm and sleepy and took away the anxiety for a while.

Mair knew that something was happening. She understood her husband well enough to realize that an unhappy woman under the same roof would not escape him for long. She didn't seem to care. She came over as usual, and they sat with their cups of tea and said very little, and it didn't really matter to Stella which one of them came to see her, it relieved at least for a little while the numbness m.u.f.fling the world and turning everything colorless and indistinct. She still hauled on her Wellington boots and raincoat and went tramping up the hill behind the house when it wasn't raining, for she had become fond of the lonely lanes and their thick hedges, and the sheep, and the bare dripping trees, and the stone walls with pale green fungus growing on them, and the delicate little white mushrooms. It was all so wet! In the narrow ditches beside the lane the water went rushing down over the stones, and when she was near the top, and turned to look at the valley spread below her, she saw the stubbled fields raked with furrows in which rainwater puddled and gleamed like gla.s.s. She thought: he is out there somewhere. Crows flapped up from wet earth trodden to mud by the cattle, and when she pa.s.sed through the woods at the top of the hill she came upon sudden steep-sided glades overhung with ancient trees, and felt the age of the land, and how it brooded on its secrets, and in an odd way she felt at home.

One morning while she sat with Mair in the kitchen the telephone rang and it was someone from the school who told her that Charlie wasn't well and could she come and take him home? Max had left the car that day so she said yes, she could. He said there was nothing to be alarmed about and she said she wasn't alarmed. Mair offered to come with her.

The car had lost its clean, sleek appearance, for the roads around Cledwyn ran with mud and dung which had so splattered and encrusted it that it looked like a farm vehicle. Also, she had sc.r.a.ped it against a wall a week earlier, and they couldn't afford to have the panel repainted. So it was a shabby, battered white Jaguar that pulled up in front of the school later that morning, and a shabby, battered mother who emerged from it and walked to the main entrance of the school.

This was a large, Victorian brick building with three floors of high windows, and a playground off to the side, and Stella felt a little intimidated, never having set foot in the place. At the reception desk she told the school secretary who she was, and was then asked if she'd wait in the staff room while Charlie's teacher, a Mr. Griffin, was located. Several children had appeared and were waiting to give the secretary a message; they eyed Stella curiously then fell to whispering among themselves, darting furtive glances at her and giggling. Did she look so odd? she wondered. Was it because her legs were bare that they found her odd, or because she had an English accent? It didn't matter, she didn't care. She went into the staff room as the secretary turned to the waiting children and silenced them with a look.

She was reading the notices on the notice board and smoking a cigarette when Hugh Griffin came in a few minutes later. He introduced himself and apologized for keeping her waiting. They had the room to themselves. He cleared a heap of textbooks off a couch and motioned her to sit. He was a tall young man with a shock of blond hair that stood up off his head in thick waves. He had a long, thin, pointed nose and a green tweed jacket with chalk dust on the lapels.

"I hope I didn't upset you," he began.

"Not at all. You said there was nothing to be alarmed about so I wasn't alarmed."

"Good."

She knew she fl.u.s.tered him. He was attracted to her, she said, and he was uneasy about it, for she was the mother of one of his pupils and quite unlike the farmers' wives and schoolteachers who otherwise made up the female element of his world. Amused, she watched him, this lanky young fellow with his long fingers and chalk dust all over his clothes.

"Mrs. Raphael," he said, "why is Charlie so unhappy?"

"Unhappy?" she said with some surprise. It hadn't occurred to her that he would say anything like this. He frowned and looked at his shoes and pushed his hand through his hair. Then he gazed straight at her.

"He's a clever boy," he said, "but he won't make the effort, and I think it's because he's so anxious. But he won't tell me what's wrong."

"I wasn't aware there was anything wrong."

"You don't see it then?"

"Maybe you should talk to his father."

"Can't you help me?"

"He's the b.l.o.o.d.y psychiatrist!"

This came out with more bitterness than she'd intended, and the laugh she laughed was brittle even to her ears. Hugh Griffin sat forward on the edge of his chair, long legs splayed wide and his fingers clasped together between his knees. He reminded her of Nick.

"Doesn't he talk to you, Mrs. Raphael? Why wouldn't he talk to his mother? Is this the problem?"

"What the h.e.l.l does it have to do with you?" she said, rising to her feet. She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette.

"Sit down, please," said this offensive schoolteacher in his wheedly Welsh voice. "Please."

"I don't have time," she said. She had turned her head away from him and stared unseeing at the notice board, smoking with short rapid puffs at her cigarette. He sighed. He seemed unwilling to let her go. He was about to say something more when the door opened and two women came in clutching piles of exercise books to their bosoms and talking loudly. They cast no more than a cursory glance at Hugh Griffin and Stella as they settled themselves at the far end of the room. Hugh Griffin wearily stood up and said he would go and fetch Charlie.

As she left the school with Charlie and walked rapidly to the car she was still so angry with the man she could barely speak. She pulled out onto the road and almost collided with another car, and had to sit a moment and bring her breathing and her temper under control. n.o.body spoke. Driving home she said to Charlie without turning her head that his teacher thought he wasn't working hard enough.

He said nothing.

"He told me it's because you're unhappy," she said.

Still nothing.

"I said I thought you were fine."

She glanced at Mair, who was sitting beside her in the front seat staring straight ahead.

"Are you unhappy?"

Charlie shrugged his shoulders and looked out of the window. They drove the rest of the way home in silence. He went into the house without a word and straight upstairs. Stella asked Mair if she wanted a cup of tea but she didn't. So Stella sat in the kitchen and stared out of the window. After a while she poured herself a drink. She knew what was happening, she was starting to see Charlie as an extension of his father, and so a part of the conspiracy against her. She didn't want to feel this way about the boy, she knew it was unfair, but she couldn't seem to help herself.

When Max got home that evening she didn't tell him what had happened. She'd decided she would let Charlie explain it in his own way, and then she'd hear it from Max. But when Max came downstairs after saying good night to Charlie he didn't talk to her at all, just settled down in the sitting room with a medical journal.

She couldn't sleep at all that night, and she had the feeling that Max was awake too and listening to her pacing. It was a windy night, the house heaved and shuddered, and though she had a jersey on over her nightdress, and thick wool socks, and her dressing gown on top, she was still cold. She stood shivering at the window and stared at the stars in the wintry sky, her thoughts racing as she smoked one cigarette after another. She remembered the children laughing at her at the secretary's desk, and that teacher telling her she was making her own child unhappy. She thought about Trevor Williams, asleep on the other side of her bedroom wall, and their dispa.s.sionate s.e.x together. Since Mair's return he had twice coaxed her into a small stone outbuilding and had her bend over a stack of hay bales. He said she had a lovely white a.r.s.e. His p.e.n.i.s always seemed to be hard. Making her way back across the yard she hadn't dared look at the house in case Mair was watching from a window, though if she was it seemed to change nothing, for she still came over for her cup of tea.

She thought about Edgar and their weeks in London, and saw how her memories were starting to fade like old photographs. But she had her other signs. Certain cloud formations, s.n.a.t.c.hes of birdsong, flowers: by means of phenomena once shared with him she sustained a sort of contact with him. Whenever she went shopping, alone or with the others, in Cledwyn or Chester, she scanned the streets for a glimpse of him. A dozen times she'd seen him, and a dozen times been disappointed. It didn't matter. The flare of feeling, the lift of the heart, this was enough, even if it was in response to the broad black back of some big Welsh farmer going into Woolworth's with his wife.

She climbed back into bed and still she couldn't sleep. She turned from side to side and she was sobbing now. n.o.body came to her door. n.o.body tapped on her door and whispered, What's the matter? Are you all right? She thought about her father and remembered how she would drift to sleep feeling his bulk and strength as he sat on the side of the bed and stroked her hair and listened to her murmuring the last of the day's thoughts. Again she thought about Edgar, she saw them dancing in the hospital, G.o.ds among mortals, and she felt no regret, no remorse, it didn't occur to her to want to change a thing.

She saw the sky grow lighter and then she fell asleep. She awoke late in the morning and after her bath she made a cup of tea and put three spoons of sugar in it and a splash of gin. She felt better after that. She filled a thermos flask and walked to the top of the hill and spent the afternoon up there.

When Charlie came home from school he brought her a letter from his teacher. She asked him if he'd been talking to Mr. Griffin about her, or if Mr. Griffin had said anything to him about her. He shook his head. He looked frightened, as though he didn't know who she was anymore. She asked him if that meant yes or no and he said no. The letter was polite. He apologized for upsetting her. He repeated that he was concerned about Charlie. Would she and Dr. Raphael like to make an appointment with him, to talk about it? She thought not. She crumpled up the letter and threw it away.

Weeks pa.s.sed. Christmas came and went. She spent it alone in Plas Mold, she said, getting drunk. Max and Charlie went down to London for three days to stay with Brenda. Max was unsettled when they returned; Brenda had clearly wasted no time in urging him to leave her. But he did nothing, and life went on as usual. She heard no more from Hugh Griffin, though she thinks he may have written to Max at the hospital, this suspicion aroused by a conversation they had one night after Charlie had gone to bed.

"You have no cause to hate Charlie as well," he said, with no preamble at all.

They were in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes. He was at the table, turning the pages of the newspaper.

"Has his teacher been talking to you?" she said.