Asylum Part 5

"Let me give you another drink."

"No thanks, Jack," said Max, rising, "we must go."

Jack didn't apologize further. He knew it had to be done, and he'd done it. It would take a good deal to convince him that a doctor's wife could commit any sort of impropriety with a patient. He was satisfied. This at least was what I imagine Max made of the interview.

I was with Bridie in the drawing room when Jack joined us. I'd been there for the last hour, bringing them up to date on what little I knew about Stella's relationship with my patient.

"Well?" I said.

He nodded. "I'm afraid it's true."

"Oh G.o.d."

"What will you do?"

Jack sighed. "That depends."

"Max doesn't see she's lying?" said Bridie.

Jack opened his hands. He said nothing.

"I suspect," I said, "that he does. But he would rather not not see it. Which is why he let him get away." see it. Which is why he let him get away."

Jack gazed into his whisky. I suddenly saw that he was out of his depth. He was genuinely shocked to think that Stella might be guilty of what I'd suggested. He didn't want to believe it.

Bridie had no such qualms. "To think of it," she murmured, "to think that a doctor's wife-"

She fell silent. It was too much for her too.

"Perhaps," I said, "I should have a word with Max."

It seemed, said Stella, that the evening would never end; it seemed as if every permutation, every ripple of this stone dropped into the still pool of their lives must wash through before she could take a pill and go to bed and properly be alone with the misery walled up behind the facade she had erected against the world. As they drove past the Main Gate she had said to Max: "What will you say to Brenda?"

"I hadn't thought."

Their voices seemed now to be operating in two registers, a front register that functioned as a screen behind which seethed unspoken reservoirs of feeling. Max's front was one of weariness and preoccupation; behind it she felt the storm system of his anger, directed both at himself and at her. Though why he should be angry with her was unclear. Hadn't she explained herself, and hadn't that explanation been accepted by Jack Straffen? But there was no point in going into any of this now.

Max went into his study and without a word closed the door behind him. Brenda's avidity to know everything was barely veiled.

"I sent Charlie up to bed," she said. "He wasn't very happy to be missing all the excitement." They were standing in the hall. Stella put her bag on the table under the mirror and gazed at her reflection. Brenda waited.

"Well?"

"There have been rumors," said Stella. "About me."

Brenda followed her into the drawing room and stood by the fireplace while Stella poured herself a drink. She would have to be told, but Stella was d.a.m.ned if she'd hand it to her on a plate.

"About you?"

She moved to the window with her drink. She gazed out into the garden. The curtains were still open though night had fallen. There was a full moon.

"It's a lovely night," she said. Where is Edgar now? In a ditch or a barn or a haystack, huddled in the darkness, dressed in Max's clothes, eking out his tobacco? Or had he disappeared into some world she knew nothing of? She turned away from the window.

"Yes, about me."

"Stella, please tell me what happened. Or don't, if you don't want to. But I am concerned, you know. I would like to help."

"Someone told Jack there was impropriety in my relationship with Edgar Stark."

"Was there?"

"Of course not. Need you ask?"

"I'm sorry."

She gazed at her calmly. Oh, Brenda was ready to cast her as the scarlet woman and see all of Max's troubles laid at her door, but Stella wouldn't allow her to do it.

I had meanwhile left the Straffens' and driven down past the Main Gate to the deputy superintendent's house. Already I felt a different atmosphere on the estate: there were men about despite the lateness of the hour, there was urgency in the air. This was a delicate interview I had to conduct with Max, and the point of it was to prevent him adopting, psychologically, a posture of isolation. Unfortunately we needed him with us. About Stella I was less certain, but what I predicted was that she would now see that she'd been betrayed, and would become angry not so much at Edgar as at herself. Which might in turn trigger a depressive episode. We would have to be vigilant.

I rang the doorbell. On her way down the hall Stella again paused briefly at the mirror. There was no sound from the study. She opened the front door.

"Peter, come in. Max is in the study."

"Let me talk to you first."

"We're in the drawing room."

I followed her down the hall. She moved with an exaggerated ease, her body denying its tension. Brenda greeted me warmly. I sank into an armchair.

"b.l.o.o.d.y for all of you," I said, as Stella gave me a gin.

"Peter, tell us what's going on," said Brenda.

"All the usual procedures. Jack carries the worst of it of course. He'll be crucified in the press, questions in the House, the whole parole system will be condemned. An escape like this sets the hospital back five years." I was trying to project a sort of weary languor, to cast the whole thing as a nuisance merely and mask the true seriousness of the crisis. Brenda had a.s.sumed her woman-out-of-her-depth stance, designed to appeal to my gallantry and prompt confidences.

"But surely he'll be caught quickly?"

I sipped my gin and allowed a hand to fall over the arm of the chair. "Perhaps. Though we think he may have friends in London."

"I didn't know he had friends in London," said Stella.

"How would you?" I gazed at her rather dreamily.

"Max said nothing about him having friends in London. Who might be involved, I mean."

"He has friends from the old days. Soho. That crowd."

Stella says she suddenly saw the three of us as though she were on the other side of the window, as though she were standing in the garden, in the darkness, watching a man in an armchair talking to two women, each in a state of rapt attention. Brenda's expression was one of naked curiosity mingled with fascination and horror. Her mask had slipped.

After a few minutes I rose to my feet. "I'd better have a word with Max," I said. "Please don't get up, Stella."

But she did. She stood at the door of the drawing room and watched me go down the hallway and tap lightly on Max's door, then go into the study and close the door behind me.

She doesn't know when Max came to bed. She went upstairs soon after. She took a pill and lay there waiting for sleep. The moonlight filtered through the curtains. The house was quiet. She pressed her face into her pillow and wept until the pillowcase was sodden. She changed the pillowcase and lay on her back staring at the ceiling, having discharged the most immediate weight of her misery. She pondered this new information. It meant one thing only: if he had friends he was probably safe. Holding tightly to this thought she fell asleep.

I am satisfied this is the truth. I. don't believe they planned it together. I don't think she was actively working against us.

It happened much as I said it would. The press resurrected Edgar's case, and Stella was forced into an unwilling recognition of what had brought him here. He had killed his wife with a hammer, and he had mutilated her corpse. Two psychiatrists testified at the trial that he suffered from a paranoid psychosis, and the insanity defense was accepted by the court. I admitted him the following day. Now the press wanted to know why such a man was allowed to leave the hospital on a daily basis and work in the gardens of the estate.

They were dreadful days for all of us. In the deputy superintendent's house Brenda took charge of Charlie, leaving Stella and Max to handle the crisis undistracted. Stella feels she succeeded in concealing her feelings, which were concentrated, of course, on her absent lover. The deception she practiced during these days cost her dearly; she was after all in the heart of the camp of the hunters. Max came home from the hospital most days at lunchtime, and Brenda and Stella tried to create out of thin air a warm, womanly flurry of domesticity around him to give him some sense of his home as a haven, a safe place insulated from the appalling pressures he faced in the hospital at this time.

Everyone was under such scrutiny! There were reporters all over the estate, asking questions of anyone who would talk to them. In a summer devoid of major news Edgar Stark effortlessly dominated the front pages. We felt besieged. Charlie was forbidden to leave the garden. On the one occasion that he disobeyed this order a reporter approached him in a friendly way and, on learning who he was, asked him embarra.s.sing questions about his father, such as what Daddy talked about at lunch. Poor Charlie came home confused and tearful, afraid that he'd done something very wrong in talking to the man but too polite not to.

No working party appeared on the estate. Stella wandered about the garden and the stillness was alive with his absence. She went into the vegetable garden to pick lettuce and gooseberries. Amid all that greenness, all that summer growth, there was no glimpse of yellow corduroy by the conservatory at the far end. The trees hanging over the garden walls seemed weighted with a peculiar dull heaviness, and cast deep pools of shadow. It was all so full-blown, the gra.s.s in the meadow thick and high and the climbing roses blowsy in their second flush, but in the ripeness there was no lover. She wandered down the gravel path, her basket on her arm, and paused by the phlox she'd transplanted from old clumps in the spring. She inhaled the fragrance. A fat b.u.mblebee crawled up a thistle head then lifted into the drowsy air and sailed away. She sat on the bench and picked with her fingernail at a spot of lichen furring the soft gray wood. Then she went into the conservatory.

Even the conservatory seemed desolate, abandoned, forlorn. Like her. He had begun to replace the rotten woodwork, and the new struts and sashes were notched into the sound wood of the original with a clean exact.i.tude of fit. The pattern of old wood and new was pleasing to the eye. She lay down on the cracked stones, among the weeds, where they had first lain together. Against her will the tears came. She brushed them away and rose to her feet, left the conservatory and moved purposefully along the path, stooping to pull slim sticks of rhubarb from the soil. The garden missed him as much as she did. Here and there clumps of flowers were drooping; the hydrangeas had collapsed for want of water. Everything needed deadheading, and the path through the rough gra.s.s of the meadow was sprinkled with dandelions gone to seed. The hosepipe hung unused and neglected on its post by the tap in the hedge. The freshness of the garden was lost.

She mentioned this to Brenda when they were getting lunch ready. "I shall have to do it myself, I suppose."

"What a nuisance. And here I was thinking you were the only woman I knew who'd properly solved the servant problem."

Stella glanced at her. A slight movement of Brenda's lips indicated that she was being facetious.

Stella didn't know what, if anything, Jack or I had said to Max about his failure to report the theft of his clothes immediately. It was hard for her to get anything out of him at all, beyond the fact that the search was now concentrated on London and that there were no leads.

"He's gone to ground," said Max.

"Someone's sheltering him," said Brenda.

He was safe, this was what Stella heard. He was safe, and he was thinking of her; whatever little room he was holed up in, he was keeping his head down and thinking of her. But as the days pa.s.sed, and September came, there were times when she was filled with despair, when she faced the possibility that she would never see him again. It upset her so badly however that she pushed the thought away and remembered instead the conversations they'd had and the understandings they'd arrived at. He would not abandon her, she was certain of this. She did not lose faith. She told herself to be patient, and to take comfort in the fact of his safety, wherever he was. She felt she was in a state of suspension; nothing had ended, but it was changing. She did not try to imagine what would happen next, for such thoughts made her miserable, they strayed into practical questions that were for the moment unanswerable. She simply asked herself what he would want her to do, and answered that he would want her to be, yes, patient, silent, and relieved that he was safe.

She drank constantly, it seemed essential if she were to maintain any sort of equilibrium at all. She avoided practical thinking and remained as much as possible buoyed by a sort of blind faith; that, and gin. There were moments-moments of practical thinking-when she understood that blind faith and gin couldn't remain her sole spiritual nourishment forever; but while she could manage it she would. Everyone else was so utterly distracted by the crisis, by the eyes of the world, that none of them noticed that she drifted through her days in a state of detachment and abstraction, functioning as she was expected to but not ever, really, totally there. None of them noticed but me. I was watching her.

She had one bad shock during this period. She was in the vegetable garden with the hosepipe one morning. The hot weather continued. There had been no rain for weeks. The soil was slightly sandy and needed lots to drink, and to thirst she was particularly sympathetic just then. So she hooked up the hosepipe to the tap in the hedge and set about giving everything in the garden a drink of water. She moved steadily along with the hose, in Wellington boots, light summer frock, sungla.s.ses, and wide-brimmed straw hat, and there was a pleasantly mindless quality to the experience, a quality she sought in all her activity during these strained days. The sound of footsteps on the gravel behind her was unwelcome. She turned, the hose in her hand still gushing into the soil, and less welcome still was the sight of Jack Straffen advancing along the path toward her. Vigilance. Vigilance. She called to him to wait while she turned off the water. She came tramping out of the lettuce patch, the hose on the ground still gushing, and went to the tap and turned it off.

"Max is up at the hospital," she said.

Jack was in a black suit and a Panama hat and looked hot and uncomfortable and very much alien to the greenery all about him.

"I wanted to talk to you. Can we sit down?"

She took him to the bench beside the conservatory and they sat in the shade. Jack took off his hat and set it on the bench.

"Smoke?"

"No thank you."

"A man like Edgar Stark," he said, and then stopped. He tapped the ash from his cigarette with deliberation onto the gravel at their feet and stared at it. He sighed. "We have a number of patients diagnosed as paranoids. Now, these patients, Stella, are every bit as dangerous as our schizophrenics who've killed. The peculiar thing is, in many of them there's not a flicker of psychosis, not a flicker. We don't medicate them. We try and treat them, but not I'm afraid with any great success. We can manage them, we can contain them, but we don't really know how to treat them. Because we don't really understand what they are."

Is he talking about his patients, she wondered, or women?

"Appearances to the contrary, Edgar Stark is a deeply disturbed individual."

"I know this, Jack."

"I wonder if you do. Do you know what he did to that woman after he killed her?"

She said nothing.

"He decapitated her. Then he enucleated her. He cut her head off, and then he took her eyes out."

She gazed from their shady seat down the length of the garden, and found it remarkable how the plants she'd watered looked more alive already than their neighbors. Beside the bench at either end, in the shade, was set a half-barrel that Edgar had filled with soil and planted with winter cyclamen. She remembered him sawing the barrel in half. She'd held it steady for him. They needed water too.

"Shall we have a drink?"

"It's not ten yet, Stella."

"The garden will be ruined without the working party. Look at it."

"Are you listening to what I'm saying?"

She turned toward him. "I don't know what it is you want," she said. "You think I'm hiding something. I'm not."

"Did he ever touch you?"

"No!"

"Did he ever ask you for money?"

"No. Don't you think I'd have told Max if anything like that had happened?"

Jack took his spectacles off. He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He sat up straight and leaned against the bench and stared out into the sunlit garden. He was a big, worried man in his sixties with shrewd eyes and a gray, cropped skull. He was close to retirement. He didn't want this problem. The gold band on his ring finger gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the ivy over their heads.

"I don't believe you're telling me the whole truth," he said.

She didn't protest. She made a shrugging motion and shook her head slightly, as though at a loss how to convince him.

"Stella, if you're in some sort of trouble, if he's persuaded you into something-"

"What?"

"I know Edgar Stark. I understand how he operates. There is no shame in admitting that he has involved you in his case, won your sympathy, set you against Max and Peter and myself. He would have identified you immediately as someone he could use. Did he tell you we were going to discharge him shortly? None of it is true. But I can't help you unless you tell me what happened."

"Nothing happened."

Jack sighed. "Nothing happened."

"No."