Asylum Part 20

"I think," she said, "I'd like to go back to the ward now."

"Of course."

The woman of sorrows followed her routines and kept to herself her astonishing proposal from the medical superintendent. It occurred to her to tell the ladies on the ward, just to see their reaction, but she could guess what they'd say. Marrying the superintendent? Of course you are, dear. And I'm the bride of Christ. My proposal had amused her at first, but I knew she would soon make a complicated calculation of self-interest. and I was confident she would see marriage to me as her best course. I was placing a heavy burden on her, given everything else she was having to deal with, but I believed she was strong enough now to bear it. She was still reluctant to tell me about her dreams but I drew her out without too much difficulty. I knew that just talking them through would bring about the discharge of that first painful freight of guilty feelings.

The screaming child of course was Charlie. When at last she talked about him she said she was aware of forces at work in her that tried to defend her from him, but he was too strong, he came through despite everything. She would sit up in bed with her hands clasped to her face and her mind clearing, but not fast enough to prevent her seeing his fading image, and in one particular recurring dream he gazed back at her and said in a voice she knew so well, his serious voice, the voice that had always been accompanied by a funny little frown, that voice clearly saying, Mummy, can't you see I'm drowning? Mummy, can't you see I'm drowning?

Those words! They lingered on into the morning, as she followed the fixed routines of ward life, as she washed and dressed and walked down corridors with the other women to the dining room. It was the hardest time of the day, she said, those first hours, when she had to maintain an outward poise and a pretense of serenity as inwardly she reeled from that small, serious voice. Mummy, can't you see I'm drowning? Of course, my precious darling, of course I can see it, I'm coming to help you, don't panic, darling love, Mummy will help you, Mummy won't let you drown! But who did she cry this out to, who could hear her? n.o.body; her voice echoed as though trapped in a vault full of shadows, and no answering presence, no warm familiar companion emerging from the darkness to take her hands and comfort her, tell her it was all right, it was only a dream. She may have been awake but it wasn't all right because it wasn't only a dream. Charlie was dead but he lived on in her, crying out in his panicky failure to understand why she wasn't helping him.

She became deeply upset, telling me this, and I comforted her. I have met this before, I told her. Charlie is is dead, I said, and we can't bring him back, but I can help you. I can relieve this suffering. You are not alone anymore. She said she dreaded going to sleep now, she felt as though she were about to descend a ladder into a cellar where she would meet only horror. This was what the night began to mean to her, a pa.s.sage into horror. Its shadow lengthened, it clung on longer and longer in the morning, filling the first hours of the day with its foul psychic aftertaste- dead, I said, and we can't bring him back, but I can help you. I can relieve this suffering. You are not alone anymore. She said she dreaded going to sleep now, she felt as though she were about to descend a ladder into a cellar where she would meet only horror. This was what the night began to mean to her, a pa.s.sage into horror. Its shadow lengthened, it clung on longer and longer in the morning, filling the first hours of the day with its foul psychic aftertaste- Oh, it was a subtle game she played with me. She never saw me in the morning, that was when I attended to my many administrative duties. It wasn't until after lunch that I saw patients, and she freely admitted to me that by that time the voice had faded and her composure was far less precarious. So we talked more calmly about Charlie, and she played down how bad it was, and allowed me to see that she was playing it down, before we moved on to more pleasant discussions about our marriage. Our marriage. It was an idea that clearly still amused her, she smiled whenever I mentioned it, as though I'd made a particularly good joke. Our friendship, at least before all this, had often involved the making of good jokes. This was the best joke of all, though I seemed to be in earnest. I know she had always a.s.sumed I was h.o.m.os.e.xual. Now she must have thought, Perhaps he is, and what he's proposing is more a domestic arrangement with therapeutic implications than a marriage as such. She pictured my house and my garden and I think that even without intending to she began to yearn for it, for it meant peace and sophistication and comfort, and what else did she want? Suddenly she wanted the life I was offering her.

My only concern now was that she not change her mind! I became for the first time in many years troubled with a mild insecurity. I imagined her thinking, Peter every day. Peter at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day. Under the same roof, sharing the same rooms, every day. But then I rea.s.sured myself, and imagined her realizing that I would surely make daily life a cultivated, amusing affair, for she knew she need not fear some ghastly revelation of grubby habits, petty cruelties, unforeseen rigidities; she knew I was in no sense a shabby man. No, she could live with me. She was less sure about sleeping with me. In that department one was invariably surprised, and rarely pleasantly- She led me to believe that she could fulfill my expectations of marriage. She led me to believe she could make me happy, and in the process provide herself at least a modic.u.m of contentment, it would not be difficult given the kind of man I was and what I possessed. Comfort makes for decency, she said. She and I both knew what happened to love in squalid surroundings: that love had burned, but oh, with what a ragged, restless flame! Love like that could never be contained by the sort of life she and I contemplated, it was an inferno compared to the small mild lick of civilized warmth she and I intended to nurse. But I thought we were in tacit agreement by now that those large emotions by their very nature tend to blaze freely and then die, having destroyed everything that fed them. In any case it was over now, all that. Or so she led me to believe.

She asked me to increase her nightly medication and I saw how appalled she was when I suggested that she might be better off without any sedation at all, that by suppressing her dreaming she was blocking unconscious material that could usefully be exploited as she came to terms with Charlie's death. I saw the effort it cost her to bite back the exclamation, Nothing is suppressed! Instead she said that her memories were so much with her during the day, she could at least be allowed to forget while she slept.

"As you wish," I said. I did not pursue it, I did not force her. I was not too worried, although of course in retrospect I should have been. But I didn't see just what a difficult performance she was sustaining, in the teeth of an intense and unremitting pain the precise nature of which I had not guessed at; all I saw was guilt. I decided not to increase her nightly medication. I told her she was on quite a high enough dosage as it was.

I didn't see her for several days. July I had told her; it was now late May. Five or six weeks. She followed her routines, dressing carefully in the morning, visiting the hospital library, taking her book down to the dayroom and reading there by the window unless one of the women wanted to talk to her. She remained composed, distant, courteous, sad.

There is a certain special way people behave toward a patient who is soon to leave the hospital. It's as though she's become something between a patient and a free woman, neither the one thing nor the other. There's an air of quiet celebration, for a patient released is a credit to the staff and cause for hope for other patients. Stella had been in the hospital only a short time but she had diligently maintained her poise and earned general respect. People wished her well and asked her what her plans were. She said she would be living in London with her sister's family. They must have wondered why none of her sister's family had ever come to visit her but n.o.body said anything. She didn't ask me if I'd told the people at the Home Office about this impending marriage.

Meanwhile she was escorted to my office every afternoon, and for an hour in that large comfortable room she and I would discuss our plans, which soon evolved from the extremely quiet wedding to the honeymoon in Italy, where I intended to show her Florence, which I know well, and Venice, which I know less well. We would travel in late September, we decided, when the weather was mellow and the tourists had gone home. Then we would come back and settle down to a life of civilized companionship. I told her one afternoon that marriage was held to be the answer to the problem of s.e.x, but that I rather thought that marriage, at least as we conceived it, would instead be the answer to the problem of conversation.

And did the prospect of this companionable marriage make her happy, did it promise to answer for her too the problem of conversation? I thought it did, I thought that was what was going on as she sat on the bench overlooking the terraces, wearing her somber clothes and her air of melancholy resignation, and making her heart's calculations.

I continued to look after the hospital, chairing meetings and dealing with paperwork in the morning, attending to my caseload after lunch. Contemplating the prospect of imminent retirement, I began to prepare my patients for my departure. Only one gave me real cause for concern, and this was Edgar. For of course he was in the hospital, I'd seen to that, where else could he go? He'd come to us soon after being picked up in Chester, on his way to Stella, though whether to carry her off or murder her I had not yet been able to establish. I was holding him in a room on the top ward of the Refractory Block, by himself, which may seem punitive but was not.

We have some details of his movements after Stella left Horsey Street, not many, though I hope soon to have more. He returned to the loft and stayed on for three days by himself, working without rest on the head. On the fourth day someone apparently came to see him, we don't know who, and told him that the police were on their way. He fled with a few clothes and books stuffed into a duffel bag, and ironically it was only a few minutes after he had gone, and the police had arrived, that Stella made her appearance. All the contents of the studio were impounded, and I was later invited to come and see if any of it could shed light on the whereabouts of my patient. What most intrigued me was the art he'd made while Stella was there, the batch of drawings and the head itself, all of which he'd left behind.

He then disappears, absorbed, we think, by an underground network of artists and criminals who sheltered and fed him in the following weeks. We believe he moved constantly, from studio to studio, flat to flat, and I have a mental picture of this big, bearded man in a workman's jacket with the collar turned up and his cap pulled low, appearing at people's doors in the middle of the night and being made welcome; though I imagine the wives were uneasy. One report had him in Cornwall, living in a remote cottage near the sea, but my own hunch is that he stayed in London, where he knew his way around. Until, that is, he decided to go north and look for Stella. As for Nick, he was taken in for questioning and then let go with a caution. His father was a judge.

It was April when Edgar was readmitted to the hospital, and since then he had consistently refused to speak to me. I had no wish to leave him languishing in the Refractory Block, but he gave me no choice. It was frankly a nuisance. I needed to give him a thorough psychiatric evaluation and recommend a treatment strategy before pa.s.sing him on to a new man. I knew he would come around eventually, I'd waited for tougher characters than Edgar, and they'd all softened in the end; but now I didn't have time. So I told him of my engagement to Stella, and I did not employ delicacy. I was blunt, and I was aggressive. I wanted to force a reaction.

We were in a side room off the office at the front of the ward, a bare cell with walls painted green, a single barred window, a heavy, battered table, and a pair of wooden chairs. He was bent over the table, idly fingering a cigarette, rolling it back and forth. He was wearing a hospital shirt and hospital trousers, no belt, no shoelaces. His hair was cropped and the beard had gone. He had lost weight, and he had lost confidence too. He looked young, and oddly vulnerable, like a big unhappy child. I watched him closely. I wanted him not only to start talking to me again, but to give me an indication of his present feelings toward Stella, for I wasn't yet certain why precisely he'd tracked her to Chester. He slowly sat up, and I saw the emotion shift across his features like wind on water, bitterness, amus.e.m.e.nt, skepticism.

"You?"

It was the first thing he'd said to me since his return.

I nodded. But he would not rise to the bait.

"What do you feel about that?"

He shrugged, shaking his head slightly. I sensed the struggle in him.

"I heard what happened," he said.

I allowed a small silence. Then: "I think she deserves a little happiness, given what she's been through," I said, "don't you?"

There was a sardonic twist to his lips.

"Answer the question, Edgar."

Now he bit.

"You answer the question, Peter Peter. The question is, What would she want with an old queen like you?"

I concealed my satisfaction.

"You resent it, then? The idea she could love someone else."

"She wants to get out of here."

I paused. Naturally it had occurred to me too.

"So you still love her."

"She's an animal."

This I had not been expecting.

"How so?" I murmured.

"You don't know her at all, do you?"

"You do?"

He didn't answer. He'd hunched over the table again, not meeting my eye, gazing at the unlit cigarette as he rolled it about.

"Should I remind you what you do to women when you think you know them?"

I sat across from this murderer as he straightened up in his chair and left the cigarette alone. There was an attendant just outside the door, in case he went for me.

He had cut Ruth Stark's head off and stuck it on his sculpture stand. Then he'd worked it with his tools as though it were a lump of damp clay. The eyes went first. One of the policemen told me it was like something out of a butcher's shop. You wouldn't know what it was, but for the teeth, and a few clumps of matted hair.

It could have been Stella. It very nearly was.

That evening I returned to my office when the hospital was quiet to ponder our talk. He had expressed only cynicism and contempt toward Stella, but I was not convinced. Edgar was a complicated man, and he was more than usually adept at concealing his true state of mind. I considered it quite possible for him to call Stella an animal but think her a G.o.ddess: he had no reason to be honest with me, considering I not only controlled his fate but was about to marry the woman he had once loved and quite possibly still did; after his fashion. But if he did still love her, would he tell me she was an animal?

If he wanted to shatter the image I had of her, and replace it with one of his own making, yes.

I went back the following afternoon. I had a word with the attendants before he was brought down from the ward, and to my surprise he'd had a quiet night. I'd expected to hear that he'd smashed up his room, or gone for someone on the corridor, but he'd done nothing out of the ordinary, and for a second I wondered if he genuinely didn't care what Stella did. But no, all my instincts told me that he cared very deeply indeed. It is of course a clinical commonplace that love and hate closely coexist in the psychic economy. What I wanted to know was to which pole Edgar was gravitating, and to what extent his feelings were pathological.

They brought him up to the front of the ward, and he was dressed as before in hospital grays. He'd been shaved, though not very expertly, there was a nick on his leathery cheek crusted with dried blood. His att.i.tude was as detached as before. When we were alone I offered him a cigarette, which he tucked behind his ear. I came straight to the point.

"Why is she an animal?"

"What made her an animal, or how do I know?"

"How do you know?"

He gazed straight at me. Behind his eyes I saw the seething turmoil of sick thoughts and sane ones. A sick thought emerged.

"I could smell it."

This I had not heard before.

"What could you smell?"

"Rutting. They were always at it. She was the same with me out there in the garden. Always in heat."

"Who was always at it?"

"Nick and her."

"Nick!"

She had been candid with me about Nick. She had allowed him into her bed only once, and that was in the hotel. Edgar was watching me now with an expression of gloating disgust. Was I seeing it again, that spontaneous reorganization of experience to make it conform to a subsequent delusional production? Wasn't this precisely what he'd done to his memories of Ruth Stark, hadn't he inferred a pattern of promiscuity in her, too, that didn't exist? We regarded each other carefully.

"Wasn't that what you said about Ruth?"

"She was a wh.o.r.e. Stella, she'll do it with anyone for nothing."

I couldn't help thinking, with a pang of unease, about Trevor Williams. I covered my mouth with my hand and watched him for a few seconds. He hated her, all right. He hated her and he was as sick as ever, and I felt desperately sorry for him, sorry that everything he felt and thought about Stella was contaminated by this foul falseness.

As I left the room I heard him quietly humming. Then, just as the door closed, he cried: "Cleave!"

I came back in and waited with my hand on the door.

"Well?"

He stood up and I thought he might be about to attack me. But it was gone, the insolence, the bitterness. Now just a desperate sincerity as in a low hoa.r.s.e voice and in a tone of utter reasonableness he made his plea.

"Let me see her."

I was astonished.

"What harm can it do? Just for five minutes."

He had almost succeeded in making me believe he hated her. But he couldn't sustain it. I regarded the poor sick doubled creature before me and felt a great surge of protective tenderness for him. Whatever it was that Stella had given him, he was far too fragile now to live without it.

"No."

She began to hear talk on the ward of the dance. She was asked if she would be going. Her first reaction was to recoil from the suggestion. For weeks she had struggled to sustain an image of herself, despite the humiliation of her change of status from doctor's wife to patient, and it had not been easy; she was frequently aware of veiled contempt from both patients and staff, particularly as she obviously enjoyed special favor with the superintendent. No one had insulted her directly, a tribute, she thought, to her successful incarnation as the woman of sorrows; but to play the woman of sorrows at the hospital dance, this was a performance she did not relish. For she was not at all confident of her ability to behave with serenity in the Central Hall, it would be just too brutally exposed, the fissure in her life. The unavoidable conclusion, the glaring moral of the story, would be that this was just another fallen woman, and a pathetic creature at that. She didn't want that.

But then the familiar dilemma arose, the murmuring inner voice that reminded her of the delicate politics of her situation. Would it matter to me? I was still her psychiatrist. Dare she risk an act of nonconformity? Dare she stay away? There was no knowing, and it made her anxious having to think it through. Oh, but a woman planning her honeymoon in Italy does not quail before the prospect of a hospital dance! And it occurred to her then that this might be the last real challenge she faced in her short career as a mental patient. Well then, face it she would, she would give a last performance as the woman of sorrows.

So she steeled herself for the ordeal and began to consider her wardrobe, her makeup, her hair. She would not be seen as the fallen woman even if the eyes of the entire hospital were on her.

By my calculation it would have been that night or the next that instead of swallowing her medication she held the pills in her palm, and later hid them, probably at the back of her cupboard, perhaps tucked into the lining of a bra.s.siere. Parole patients are trusted and we do not expect them to h.o.a.rd their medication, which is why they are permitted a degree of privacy. At dawn I imagine her standing in her nightgown staring out of the window at the courtyard below and watching the first light bringing up the tones and textures of the bricks. It must have somehow become clear to her that nothing would ever change, that neither psychiatry nor the pa.s.sage of time would obliterate what she'd seen that morning on Cledwyn Heath, the head breaking the surface, the clawing arm.

But whose head? Whose clawing arm?

Shadows shifted in the courtyard. The sun was rising.

I immediately knew something was wrong and I was concerned. She had been brought across from the female wing as usual, and no sooner was she in my office and the door closed behind her than I was peering at her closely.

"What's happened?" I said, taking her arm and leading her to a chair. I sat down beside her.

She didn't want me to suspect anything out of the ordinary.

"Nothing's happened. What could have happened?"

She managed to get some humor into this, as if to say, We both know how eventful life can be in the female wing. Still I frowned at her. I was being the doctor now.

"I don't like the look of you. Are you dreaming again?"

She had told me a few days before that the dreams were far less vivid now, and far less frequent.

"I wake early and then I can't get back to sleep."

"I don't want to increase your medication," I said. "I don't think you want that either, do you? You don't want to be in a stupor all day."

"The medication's fine, Peter, really it is. I always wake up early in the summertime. I don't suppose there's been anything from the Home Office?"

I shuffled through the papers on my desk. It didn't escape me that she was attempting to steer the conversation away from herself. "Apparently we'll hear something by the end of the week." I looked up. "Is it an awful strain, my darling?"

"One can't help feeling anxious."

"Please don't worry. They'd tell me if there was a problem. Are you looking forward to your new life?"

She put her hand on my arm. "Of course I am," she said.

I regarded this sad, beautiful woman and thought of Max, broken Max, solemnly intoning, Perfidy, mendacity. No, it was absurd, and I dismissed the thought.

She never caused the night staff any concern. She dared not, for any disturbance would alert them to the fact that she was unmedicated. Her sleeping body never betrayed her. She was never shaken awake by an attendant, so she had to a.s.sume she appeared to be sleeping soundly. By day the woman of sorrows, by night the dreamless sleeper; in these last days, as she would have started thinking of them, the days before the dance, she was performing all the time, hers was a total performance, with no chance ever to peel off the mask and unfasten the costume, let it fall to the floor and step out of it.

The women around her grew daily more excitable. The dance was of vital importance to the patients of the female wing. What bustle there was! She made small jokes about it. I of course had attended more hospital dances than I cared to remember and smiled as I thought of the tide of suppressed hysteria that swept the female wing in the days before the great event.

"And it's a full moon," I said.

"Oh dear," she said, "that's very bad."