Asylum Part 16

"Not what you're used to, Brenda," she said, "but needs must when the devil drives."

"Regional cuisine can be surprising, don't you think?" Brenda spread her napkin in her lap. She lifted her spoon. "Well," she said hopefully, "this looks hearty."

Stella served herself last and then sat down, untying her ap.r.o.n and tossing it in the general direction of the pegs on the wall by the door.

"It can," she said, "if you can afford the ingredients. Not that there's much available in these parts. Anyway, on Max's salary it's a struggle just to put food on the table."

"You're exaggerating, darling," said Max.

"Cold mutton sandwiches I give them," said Stella. "On Sundays we have cabbage. For a treat."

She looked at Charlie, and he was wriggling on his chair and grinning. He thought it was funny.

"You're being facetious, my dear," said Brenda smoothly. "But I take your point. One is often limited by the availability of local ingredients. When Max's father and I were traveling in Spain in the forties we often dined on a bowl of garlic and a loaf of bread. There was nothing else to be had."

"Fancy," said Stella. She had been trying to make the point that they were poor, and here they were talking about bowls of Spanish garlic. Max took the opportunity to tell his mother that all the good histories of Spain were written by Englishmen, and Stella couldn't tell if he was making this up as well.

"Isn't that interesting," said Brenda.

"Fill our gla.s.ses, please, Max," said Stella. "If you drink enough you won't notice what you're eating. Collect the plates, please, Charlie."

She rose and busied herself at the stove.

"I don't suppose you've ever eaten in a kitchen, have you, Brenda?" she said without turning. "It's how the other half lives."

"Charles and I were often in straitened circ.u.mstances in the early years," she said.

"Hard to imagine," said Stella, and turned with the ca.s.serole to see Brenda glance at Max and hear her quietly sigh. The dinner was not going as Max had hoped it would.

It didn't improve. There wasn't an argument as such, rather a series of snarls in the thread of the evening, small disruptions of the flow of talk Max was working so hard to promote. Stella was responsible of course, being disinhibited, and even felt disappointed by the end that she hadn't provoked Brenda to a good b.i.t.c.hy hiss. But the older woman wisely wanted no part of her manipulations.

"Good night, my dear," she said when Max was ready to drive her back to the Bull. "I hope you feel better soon."

With that she climbed into the car.

Max returned in a fury an hour later and found Stella further disinhibited. He stormed the length of the kitchen to the window and stood there staring out and bristling. She was still at the table among the dirty plates, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes.

"Not only are you selfish," he said, his voice low and hoa.r.s.e with anger, "you are also stupid."

She put her elbows on the table and held her gla.s.s in front of her face and gazed at him over the rim and said nothing.

"Do you realize what you've done?"

"What have I done, Max?"

She expected him to tell her she had destroyed any chance of Brenda ever giving them money. But he surprised her.

"You've squandered the last of your resources." His voice had become suddenly quiet.

She did not enter into the melodramatic spirit of the moment.

"The last of my resources," she said. "What's that?"

He smirked bitterly. There was a brief silence. Then she snorted.

"What does that mean mean, Max?"

"It means you're on your own."

"I've always been on my own."

"Oh no you haven't. You've never been on your own. I'm going to bed."

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

She was on her feet by this time. She didn't like all this ponderous finality. She stood by the table and seized his sleeve as he tried to get past her to the stairs. He stared at her with a fury colder than any she'd seen in him before.

"Let me go," he said.

She gripped his sleeve harder, got a bunch of material in her fist, and grinned at him.

"Let me go!"

He jerked free of her and lost his balance slightly. He stumbled and reached for the banister.

"You're disinhibited!" she shouted.

He went up the stairs.

"What sort of c.r.a.p is this, Max?" she shouted. "What do you mean, I'm on my own? I've always been on my own, married to you!"

He came back down a few steps.

"Just shut up now, will you? We'll discuss the details in the morning, but I don't want you waking Charlie."

"What details?"

They stood there glaring at each other, him halfway up the stairs but half turned to face her where she stood at the bottom. She saw Charlie first, on the landing rubbing his eyes and frowning.

"Sorry, darling, did we wake you?" she said. "Daddy's just pretending to be a b.l.o.o.d.y fool."

Max darted up the stairs. "Come on, you," she heard him say, "back to bed," and the pair of them disappeared. Stella returned to the kitchen table and finished whatever she could find. When Max came back down he bluntly told her the news he had kept from her all day. He told her that Edgar Stark was in police custody. He'd been picked up that morning. In Chester.

They were holding him there.

The next couple of days felt unreal. She buried her response to the news about Edgar and channeled the affect into fury at being paraded in front of Brenda to show off her mental health so the old bag would start giving Max money again. Max was quieter than she'd ever known him. Such was the ferocity of the rows they'd been having that apparently he felt there was no longer any future for the marriage. He abandoned the psychiatric perspective, and who can blame him? He tried to talk to her about separation but she wouldn't listen, she walked out of the room.

"This won't go away," he said.

But she wasn't going to have an argument like that with him. And as he wouldn't talk about it while Charlie was in the house she was able to evade the discussion he so eagerly wanted about the details.

Not a happy household. Each time she went out she half expected to come back and find the locks changed. She talked to Trevor Williams about it and saw a queer glint come into his eye. Let him try it, he said. He told her n.o.body could change the locks on the house but him, which put her mind at rest to some extent. Somehow the forms of family life persisted. She didn't give up the housework and the cooking no matter how great the gulf grew, there was a sort of comfort in them that had nothing to do with anybody else, it was to do with her, to do with sustaining a structure to the day, a sense of order that she seemed to need more than ever, what else did she have? Silence and hatred, misery and futility, these things she could tolerate, not disorder. Not chaos. Not a dirty house and unplanned meals.

For she was holding on by her fingertips now. Waves of despair came without warning, and at these times she just wanted to lie down and die, but she was holding on, she wouldn't let go, she wouldn't surrender to it, not yet, though it gnawed at what small reserves of willpower she had left. And this shaky refusal to give up was what forced her through the routines of the day, making the beds and doing the laundry and cooking the dinner. It wasn't for them that she did these things, but herself. She clung to housework to save her sanity.

They sat down each evening to a silent meal and afterward Max and Charlie might go for a walk if it was dry. Stella cleared up and washed the dishes. She had another drink and sat at the window and watched the fading light, for it didn't get dark so early anymore. In three hours I will be asleep, she told herself, and another day will be over without me going mad. It was beginning to feel like an accomplishment, getting through the day without going mad. She didn't think about the future, thinking about the future only makes sense if you want something. She didn't want anything now but to get to the end of the day without going mad.

He was in Chester! Twelve miles away Twelve miles away.

In police custody.

All lost. There could be no more fantasy of flight and escape. It all collapsed then, the entire structure. And it's at this point I think we can say that Stella sinks into clinical depression proper.

One night they sat at supper and Charlie was agitated. He kept glancing at Max, and Stella guessed he wanted him to say something to her.

"Well, what is it?" she said eventually. "Why don't you tell me yourself?"

He cast a stricken look at Max, who sighed and dabbed at his lips with his napkin.

"Charlie's worried you've forgotten his cla.s.s outing tomorrow."

"Are you still going to come?"

She stood up and went to the sink and put her plate on the draining board and leaned against the counter with her back to them. Through the window over the sink she could just see the sky to the west, lacy islands of cloud drifting into the sinking sun and a glow of the palest orange imaginable. A few seconds went by. She felt the blackness rising in her.

"Yes, I suppose so."

CHAPTER ...

The bus came at half past nine. Charlie was pathetically grateful that his mother was going with him. She had had a bad night and in the morning regretted agreeing to this outing, but she didn't relish the prospect of staying by herself in the house. In better days, she thought, she would have asked Max to prescribe her something, after all there has to be some advantage to living with a psychiatrist; but then in better days she wouldn't have needed it. So she drank her coffee and smoked her cigarettes and Charlie packed his satchel, telling her about the pleasures awaiting them. She reflected on the child's ability to live in the present and be so seemingly unmarked by the unhappiness around him. There she sat, hollow-eyed and silent, the black hole in the heart of the family, the one responsible for destroying the joy of his childhood, and yet in the excitement of a day out together it was all forgotten, all that mattered was that he would board the bus with his mother, and the fact that she was a bitter, depressed woman who had shown him spa.r.s.e tenderness or affection for weeks, this was forgotten.

They got on the bus and her heart sank as the eyes of two dozen Welsh schoolchildren and half a dozen adults watched them make their way down to the last empty seats at the back. Hugh Griffin, sitting by the driver, made friendly noises, but his was the only voice in that silent bus which did. Stella realized then that Charlie's unhappiness had locked him out of this community as effectively as hers had, and she felt a dull sense of confirmation, she felt she might have known, this is the nature of people, they unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth. They were outsiders, Charlie and she, and they sat quietly at the back of the bus, and slowly the murmuring of the adults resumed, the babble and cries of the children, as mother and son gazed out of the window at the foreign fields.

Cledwyn Heath was a barren tract of rolling upland and their bus labored as it climbed up out of the valley and onto the plateau. For miles around a desolate landscape of moss and bracken stretched in all directions with here and there a stunted tree hardy enough to sustain its bent and twisted outline against the wind. Deep fissures came into view, sudden gulleys that plunged away steeply from the road and formed steep pockets in which stagnant water pooled, these pools overhung with clumps of weeds and low trees in whose shadow the water looked black and thick and evil. Stella hated it, there was an atmosphere of violence about this lonely moor, and she was not the only one who sensed it, the rest of them fell silent and all that could be heard for a while was the wind. Eventually they pulled off the road and parked in a sheltered spot near some woods and as the children left the bus their voices rose again, and then Hugh Griffin was organizing them into groups and arranging where and when they would meet for lunch. Charlie and Stella were part of a group that was to follow a track around the eastern rim of the heath. Apparently they would come upon a prospect a clear sixty miles to the sea. They set off, mother and son bringing up the rear of the party, and another parent, a father who had hiked in the area, leading them.

Her feeling of unease deepened as she tramped along in her Wellington boots, her raincoat tightly belted and a head scarf knotted under her chin. The track was narrow and stony and the climb was steeper than it first appeared. There was low cloud overhead and the sky threatened rain. Already the others had disappeared from view, and they seemed now the only living creatures in this bleak place where hillocks and heather spread on all sides, rising and falling, and no structure, no tree even to break the empty vista of land and lowering sky. Charlie marched on ahead of Stella, his satchel b.u.mping up and down on his back and his head moving from side to side so as to miss nothing, turning now and then to make sure his mother was keeping up, eager pleasure in his lonely little face. She felt the blackness rising in her again and wished she'd stayed at home, this was no place for her, these empty wastes, among unfriendly strangers, pushing against the harsh damp wind. By the time they reached the prospect of the sea she was struggling hard to keep going for there were forces at work in her mind that would have her sink to the ground with her arms over her head and never rise again. The father tried to talk to her but she had no conversation for him, she was beyond that.

They tramped on and eventually found themselves at the picnic site, a sheltered spot in the lee of a hill. On a low flat outcrop of rock Hugh Griffin and the others had begun to spread their sandwiches and drinks. The children were forming into small noisy groups while the adults gathered around Hugh Griffin and poured hot tea from thermos flasks. There was laughter and shouting as a sudden gust of wind lifted a map from the rock and blew it away. Stella wandered a little way off by herself and a minute or two later was aware of Charlie beside her silently eating his sandwiches. He asked her if she was hungry and she shook her head. He asked her if she wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill and she said yes. Soon they were out of sight of the others. Charlie made his way down the steep slope to the pool at the bottom, where weeds grew thickly in the shallows. Stella followed him and settled herself on the ground some way back. She felt the first spots of rain. Charlie shouted that he thought there were newts. Stella let her head fall forward onto her knees and covered her face with her hands. This time it was very bad. Black waves swept through her. The ground seemed to be undulating beneath her. She lifted her head and the air was misted with a fine black dust like specks of graphite. It was starting to rain. She saw as though from a great distance and through a heavy scrim the dark pool, its surface running with little waves and splattered with raindrops, and Charlie splashing indistinctly among the dense weeds at the edge. She pulled out her cigarettes and lit one, cupping her hand around the lighter's flame. Charlie was trying to catch something in the shallows but it evaded him. She watched him mutely and pa.s.sively and smoked her cigarette as he grabbed it, whatever it was, and lost his balance. The air was dark and the rain was coming harder now and the awful undulation had almost stopped and she felt the creeping numbness that always came afterward. Charlie was in deeper water now, trying to scramble upright and flailing around and shouting, and something in his shouting brought her to her feet. She stood in the gusting wind and rain with her shoulders hunched up tight and watched him for a few moments. Then she turned her head to the side and brought the cigarette to her lips. The edges of her head scarf fluttered wildly about her face; the waves were almost gone. She turned back and dimly saw a head break the surface, and an arm claw the air, then go under again, and she turned aside and again brought the cigarette to her lips. With one hand she clutched her elbow as her arm rose straight and rigid to her mouth. She turned her head to the side and again brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, each movement tight, separate, and controlled.

She didn't see Hugh Griffin appear at the brow of the hill behind her. She didn't hear him shout as he saw her there, smoking her cigarette, turning her head away, then back, then away again, as an indistinct figure struggled in the water. She was aware of him only when he came bounding past her through the rain and went crashing into the water, still shouting.

It was all rather confused after that. Stella stood by while Hugh Griffin came splashing out with Charlie in his arms and laid him on the ground and tried to revive him. Then the others came running over the hill and she was forgotten in all the flurry of the children being got back to the bus, and the police being called, and so on, and one of the women gave her a cup of tea and put a rug around her shoulders, and she heard her say to someone that Mrs. Raphael was in shock, and eventually, after the bus had left, the police arrived, and when they got to the police station Max was there and after more cups of tea he drove her home and gave her a pill and she went to bed and slept.

She slept through the following day and when she came downstairs Mair told her Max was with the police and would be back at lunchtime. They sat in silence at the kitchen table. It was still raining.

"What a terrible thing," Mair said at last. "Terrible."

How would she know? Stella wondered. She hasn't any children. How would she know it was terrible if one of them drowned?

When Max came home Mair left. He sat down at the table and stared at her, simply stared at her. Then he said, in a tone of utter bafflement, "But why didn't you shout?"

She found this amusing: Max was asking her why she hadn't shouted.

"You didn't make a sound," he said, in the same astonished tone. "You didn't open your mouth."

Usually they want you to keep your mouth shut, but sometimes they want you to shout, and they expect you to know the difference. This was what amused her.

"That man Griffin," he said. "He's saying it was your fault."

There was a silence.

"Well, say something for Christ's sake! Don't just sit there, say something, tell me how it happened. Oh Christ."

He calmed down.

"I don't know what I'm saying," he murmured. "Traumatic reaction, you're the same. It won't properly dawn on us for a day or two. Best to stay calm."

He rubbed his face with his hands for several moments then once more stared at her from that gaunt face he had newly acquired.

"Why didn't you shout?" shout?" he whispered. he whispered.

"Why didn't you shout, Mrs. Raphael? When you saw the boy was in trouble?"

She was in the police station and she didn't have an answer there either.

In the days that followed their sympathy disappeared. This was as a result of Hugh Griffin's insistence on the fact that when he came over the hill Charlie was in the water screaming and his mother stood by smoking a cigarette. She didn't try to help him, he said, although the boy was clearly in serious trouble, and he also said that had she raised the alarm he might have been saved, though this was later disputed, given the distance between the top of the hill and the water. No, what horrified them was that she had made no noise and hadn't moved. When they properly understood this it all changed, because then she was a mother who'd watched her child drown and done nothing to save him. It was unnatural, they said. It was evil. They couldn't understand it; she has no feelings, they said, she isn't human, she's a monster. Or perhaps she's mad.

She was mad. How could you explain it, unless she was mad? You had to explain it, a child was dead; either she was a monster or she was mad. The first thing they were going to do was charge her with manslaughter. She was remanded. She was put in a cell once more. She was numb and empty and utterly detached from the woman who was moved from room to room, and questioned again and again, and still failed to tell them what they wanted to know. She watched herself endure the hours of those strange days, watched herself both from within, from some barricaded citadel deep in the psyche, and also from a point, so it seemed, a few feet over her head and slightly off to the side.

It was then that I came to see her. She hadn't been expecting me, and at the sight of me she felt the first faint stirring of emotion she'd known for days. I was shown into the room and did my best to communicate my sympathy and concern.

"My poor dear girl," I said, and that was enough. The tears came.

Now she was able at last to give up, she said, to abandon her grip on things and just sleep and dream and drift, because now she was getting pills and nothing was expected of her anymore. She was able to tell me what it was she'd seen in the water. I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised that since I'd seen her last she'd put on weight and her hair was lank, and her eyes were ringed with shadows, though her skin was as white and clear as ever: she was still a beautiful woman. She was also a profoundly depressed woman. My visit became the central event of her day and made all the rest of it tolerable. There were more interviews with various men; I was present. There was a court appearance; I made sure it caused her as little distress as possible. She didn't attempt to understand what was happening to her, she left it all to me. One day I asked her if she wanted me to keep on looking after her.

Of course, she said, with a flicker of alarm. Why did the question need asking? Was I saying I might leave her?

I told her what was going to happen. She was going to a hospital. She'd been sick and I wanted to treat her. Was she sure she wanted me to treat her?

"Oh yes," she said.

Then she must come to my hospital. Did she know the name of my hospital?

She told me the name of the hospital.

"That's right," I said. "You'll come to the hospital and I'll look after you there."