Asylum Part 6

"You won't tell me."

"I am telling you."

He picked up his Panama. "Perhaps it's as well for you that he's gone. Come and talk to me soon. Will you?"

She nodded.

She watched him walk heavily back down the path. Her heart was beating very fast and her hands were trembling.

Vigilance. There was nothing Jack had said that Edgar hadn't already told her he'd say. She made her way slowly back along the path. She was uncomfortably aware of how persuasive the superintendent was, of how easy it would be to succ.u.mb to the warm, paternal tone he employed as he offered her his understanding and support. It required vigilance, and more than vigilance, it required a deliberate act of will to keep in the foreground of consciousness that it was Jack Straffen who was attempting to manipulate her, not Edgar.

Oh, he was cunning, my Edgar. He had prepared her for something like this, and shown her how she should react. He had secured her silence, and his own security, in advance; and without even telling her he intended to escape.

During the period immediately after the escape Stella and Max kept a curious distance from each other. She had good reason to avoid him, but why, she wondered, was he so wary of her? Because he was afraid that the rumors were true. He knew her well enough to entertain a doubt. She admitted to me at the end of a long, emotional session that a year before any of this happened she'd told Max that she was not prepared to be buried alive in a cold marriage, a white marriage, because his own s.e.xual drive was weak, or because he lacked the moral or physical imagination to continue to find her attractive, or because he channeled all his libido into his work, or because of whatever explanation he cared to offer. She thought he had probably discounted the threat implicit in this ultimatum, but now he was faced with the possibility not only that she'd carried it out but that she'd done so with a patient. This was something that must be pushed away, for to see it as feasible was to accept responsibility for the failure of the marriage, at least at the physical level, and perhaps for Stella's disastrously ill-judged choice of a lover as well. Max was not prepared to talk to her about any of this. As far as he was concerned, the best medicine was denial.

So they moved around that large sad house during the last hot days of summer like ghosts, drifting past each other, saying nothing that mattered, barely acknowledging each other. What substance there was, it came from Brenda, whose concern for the rituals of civilized life acted as a sort of adhesive and bonded them into a semblance of a family, which was important for Charlie, whose sense of excitement at this unfolding drama was tempered by the strain of living in a house of ghosts. Brenda held them together and Stella, meanwhile, sustained herself as best she could.

Eventually Edgar slipped off the front pages and then, with no fresh reports of him, the papers lost interest altogether. Gradually the hospital adjusted to his absence and the crisis softened into something approaching normal routine. The weather broke at last, and after weeks of hot dry sunshine it started to rain.

CHAPTER ...

She stood at the drawing-room window watching a sudden shower of rain. After several minutes it turned to a light drizzle, which then gave way to a clearing of the clouds and the tentative reappearance of the sun. The garden glistened and shone. Everything seemed suddenly greener, more vigorous; but not for long. The clouds came back, the sky darkened, and again it rained. This changeable weather persisted for a few days, and we were soon talking about the summer in tones that said, Despite everything it had been glorious but it was over now and England could expect no better. Brenda went back to London, and Stella began to think about getting Charlie ready for school.

She says she never gave up hope. At no point did she turn from him in her mind. She never lost the feeling that he was with her. She had learned to trust him. There was no good reason why she should trust him, and that in a way was why she did; trust, and faith, and love, it seemed, were what they were because they were aroused and sustained regardless of reason, because they lay deeper deeper than reason. She had no idea what was happening to him. My own guess was that he'd slipped into some shadowy London underworld of artists and criminals, but I couldn't be more precise than that; I had quietly talked to everyone I knew who might have information, and to my frustration drawn a complete blank. I knew he would turn up eventually; my concern, of course, was that without treatment, without my guiding hand, he would form a relationship with a woman and his illness would blossom anew. than reason. She had no idea what was happening to him. My own guess was that he'd slipped into some shadowy London underworld of artists and criminals, but I couldn't be more precise than that; I had quietly talked to everyone I knew who might have information, and to my frustration drawn a complete blank. I knew he would turn up eventually; my concern, of course, was that without treatment, without my guiding hand, he would form a relationship with a woman and his illness would blossom anew.

In an odd way my own intense preoccupation with Edgar's whereabouts and welfare was mirrored in Stella: her s.e.xual and romantic infatuation with him I later saw as a reflection, primitive and distorted, yes, but a reflection all the same, of my own solicitude for a sick man going untreated in what must have been a situation of great tension and uncertainty. She told me about those days, and I recognized in her experience something of my own. The evenings were the hardest, she said. Max would go to his study after dinner and she'd drift into the drawing room. When he went up to bed an hour or so later she didn't go with him, she told him she wanted to read for a bit longer. She'd hear the bedroom door close, and that was her signal to put aside her novel and seriously fortify her drink.

The hours that followed were Edgar's hours. She gave herself over to memories of their summer. She referred to her diary; she had not kept a written account, but by means of cryptic markings on particular days she could remember each meeting, and each act of love, as she called it. There was a way she found of holding an image in her mind as though it were cigarette smoke until she had entirely absorbed it, all the substance and meaning and feeling that were in it, and some images, she said, were more potent in this regard than others. In the cricket pavilion once, a few seconds after s.e.x, he laid his head on her shoulder, and she listened to his breathing subside. Then he lifted his face, and she had no words for the expression in his eyes, no means of describing what it was they silently said to each other during those seconds before their thoughts turned again to practicalities, to haste and concealment. In the stillness, only this wordless recognition, and it seemed to her there was a breakdown of their separate egos, a falling away of personality, a sense of ident.i.ty, a sense that they were essence to essence, fused- I listened patiently to all this and did not ask the question, What of him? What of Edgar? Did he, too, feel that they had been essence to essence, fused? At the time I believed he had deliberately aroused these feelings in her in order to use her, and that once he was clear away from the hospital she would never hear from him again. I was wrong.

One evening around this time Max invited me to dinner. It was just the three of us. We had a drink in the drawing room and the conversation inevitably turned to Edgar. Max was saying that the escape was carefully planned. He kept worrying at it. He had become rather a bore on the subject.

"All he needed was street clothes. He waited until the house was empty. Once he was sure n.o.body was in the house he didn't waste a second."

"Fortunate," I murmured, glancing at Stella, "that you and he are the same size."

"Fortunate for him," said Max, frowning. He disliked this aspect of the thing, this identification, however indirect, between himself and Edgar Stark. He sat forward in his chair, his gla.s.s and his spectacles between his fingers, the spectacles dangling. Since the escape he had been unable to shake off the guilty awareness that after discovering the theft of his clothes he had delayed, and allowed Edgar to get away. He was too experienced a psychiatrist not to have a.n.a.lyzed, as I had, why he'd delayed, and by this time Stella, too, had realized that it was because he'd reached the conclusion that Edgar had entered the bedroom at her invitation. Better let him run than face that.

"Something I've never properly understood," I said, rather maliciously, I'm afraid, "is this business of drink being taken from the pavilion. Presumably he only got your keys the day he took your clothes, which was the day he escaped."

Max shook his head. "I don't think it came from the pavilion," he said.

"How odd," said Stella. I was watching her, she said, in that rather dreamy way I had, when it occurred to her that there was nothing in the least dreamy about the busy, intelligent mind behind those lazy eyes. She suddenly wondered how much I knew about what had gone on in the cricket pavilion. At that moment the telephone rang and she put her gla.s.s down.

"It'll be on the table in five minutes," she said. She went out into the hall and closed the door behind her, and I heard her pick up the telephone.

I learned only later it was him.

At the dinner table I remarked that I'd been right about Edgar still having friends in London. "They knew he was coming," I said. "There was a place ready for him. We won't get him now, not unless he does something stupid."

"They always do something stupid," Max muttered, picking at his curry. Stella glanced from Max to me with the bright, interested look of the good psychiatrist's wife. She was alert, elated even, but it didn't occur to me to wonder why. It should have, considering how grim this talk must have sounded to a woman in love.

"Really, Peter?"

"I don't think so. I doubt we'll see Edgar Stark again."

The conversation moved on. Stella cleared the table and took the plates out to the kitchen. She stood at the sink, staring across the yard, her heart on fire. You can imagine what it meant to me, that call, she said.

Yes, I said, I could.

But I couldn't imagine why, after successfully escaping from the hospital, Edgar was risking everything to see her again. What I have since realized is that it was connected to his art. After making no work for almost five years, he sent for Stella because he needed a new head. And because of what she was, and who she was-but most of all because she loved him-it had to be hers.

The days now dragged with a terrible slowness. Even at this late stage she was not immune to panic. Am I mad? she asked herself. How can I jeopardize everything, how can I be so irresponsible, a grown-up woman, a mother? mother? But the idea of seeing him again dispelled all doubt and hesitation. But the idea of seeing him again dispelled all doubt and hesitation.

On the Sunday night she told Max she was going up to London the next day. He asked her if she would need the car to get to the station and she said she'd take it if he didn't want it; otherwise she'd call a taxi. How polite they were to each other. When she went to bed that night Max was still awake. His voice came out of the darkness.

"Darling?"

She made a sleepy noise.

"This b.l.o.o.d.y business has blighted everything. I'm sorry."

He turned onto his side, facing her. His hand came stealing under the sheet.

"I'm very tired, Max."

"We haven't for weeks."

She turned away from him. He fitted his body around the curve of her spine so his legs were pressed against the backs of hers. Why tonight?

"Go to sleep," she murmured. She could feel him getting hard.

"I've lost you," he whispered.

"Don't be silly. Go to sleep."

I found it all too easy to imagine Stella's experience now: the feverish antic.i.p.ation, the almost intolerable tension as she counted the hours till she saw him again. She had decided to take an early train. She could do enough shopping in an hour to justify the journey and still leave the rest of the day free. From Victoria she took a cab to Knightsbridge and made some hurried purchases. Then she returned to the station and sat in the cafeteria with a cup of coffee. The great gla.s.s roof made her think of the conservatory. She waited. She was wearing a white suit and white high heels. She sat at the back, where she could watch the entrance, and at ten past twelve she saw him come in. He stood at the counter with his back to her and bought a cup of tea; she was both exhilarated and terrified, she said. But then when he turned she had to cover her embarra.s.sment by lighting a cigarette, for it wasn't him, it was nothing like him! He saw her staring at him and she looked away, she frantically signaled indifference, and to her relief he did not come over. A woman alone in the cafeteria of a large railway station to many men looks like prey.

He didn't come. At two o'clock she gave up. She hadn't the heart to do any more shopping. She caught the next train back and drove home from the station without incident. n.o.body was in the house. She lay in a hot bath with a large gin and tonic and told herself that something beyond his control had prevented him meeting her.

She went back the next day. It was easier the second time. Like having s.e.x with him the second time. The transit was made the first time, that was what put her on the other side, that's what shifted her beyond the law, not just the criminal law but the law of her marriage, her family, and her society, which of course was the hospital. Again she was exhilarated, and again she was terrified. Being out there, beyond the law, she told me, was always the most intense experience, this was why it intoxicated her. Romantic women, I reflected: they never think of the damage they do in their blind pursuit of intense experience. Their infatuation with freedom.

Once again she sat in the cafeteria in Victoria. She wore sungla.s.ses and a hat with a low brim so that she could maintain surveillance of the entrance but without drawing attention to herself. Close to noon a tall thin young man slipped into the chair opposite, keeping his eyes on the table. He had hair the color of straw and a patchy beard. He was wearing an old stained tweed jacket and no tie, and the collar of his shirt was grimy. There were spatters of paint all over his clothes. He spooned sugar into his tea and as he stirred it, still without looking up, he said, "Stella?"

She froze. She thought that despite his appearance he was a policeman. It hadn't occurred to her that Edgar wouldn't come to Victoria himself. She began to gather her bag to leave.

"You're Stella Raphael," said the shabby man as his lowered eyes darted to right and left. She recognized at once that his accent was public-school. He was leaning across the table toward her. "Edgar said I was to bring you to him. Well, aren't you?"

Still she saw no reason to trust the man. Her affair with Edgar had been so utterly exclusive, she was shocked at encountering a third party with knowledge of them. She a.s.sumed he must be an enemy rather than otherwise.

"You've made a mistake," she said coldly. "I don't know you and I don't know any Edgar."

She made as if to rise from her seat. The man threw another quick anxious glance around the crowded cafeteria. "You are Stella," he hissed. "He told me what you look like. I'm the one who's been looking after him."

He thrust his face forward as if to challenge her to deny it. She read his fear and desperation. She allowed a silence and didn't get up from the table. He waited for her to respond, his nervous fingers drumming on his cigarette packet. He again glanced around, and it was this that convinced her. It was precisely the glance she had been casting at the door for the last hour; apparently casual, it was a glance with a specific object, and it missed nothing.

"All right," she said. She took out a cigarette, and he leaned forward with a match. His relief was palpable.

"I saw you up here yesterday," he said. "We had to be sure no one followed you."

"'We'?"

"Edgar and me."

"What's your name?"

"Nick."

She said later it felt as though everything had been turned upside down. Instead of her emerging from her full world and reaching out to a solitary, fugitive man, it was he who from the security of his world drew her in. She was the solitary, not he, she was now at home nowhere. The melodramatic behavior of this lanky young man in the shabby clothes only made the situation that much more disconcerting.

What followed had the quality of a dream. The man called Nick led her out to an old Vauxhall parked behind the station, a dirty car with ripped upholstery and litter on the seats and floors and dashboard. They crossed the river at Westminster and then drove east. It was an unseasonably warm, smoggy day, and though the sunshine sparkled on the Thames the air felt stale and dusty and oppressive. There was no wind. It was not a part of London she was familiar with. Narrow streets ran between derelict warehouses built in the last century or the one before. Little light penetrated between the buildings, and all the windows were bricked up or smashed or thick with dust. They pa.s.sed a bomb site behind a chain-link fence, and Stella glimpsed a small black cat picking its way across the rubble in the sunshine. Gra.s.s and weeds covered neglected heaps of broken brick and lumber. There were very few people about, despite the time of day. They had only one brief exchange during the journey, when a question occurred to her.

"What did he tell you I looked like?"

He smiled but he wouldn't say.

"Tell me."

"Rubens."

"Oh, Rubens."

It was a joke they had. Now Nick was in on it. She thought about this. Curiously, she didn't mind. Eventually she saw him glance in the rearview mirror and the car came to an abrupt halt on a deserted street near the river. He threw it into reverse and backed rapidly up an alley that opened into an empty yard at the rear of a warehouse. There were buildings on three sides, and on the fourth, facing them, a railway viaduct whose arches housed a wholesale fruit and vegetable market. It too was deserted. Padlocks hung from the gates and fences.

"Here you are," said Nick.

Stella got out of the car. The air smelled of ripe oranges. The windows of the buildings around the yard seemed to peer down at her like so many blind eyes. Old lorry tires were stacked against a wall, baking in the sun. A sc.r.a.p of newspaper lifted slightly in the still air. Nick left her standing by the car in the middle of the yard and disappeared back out into the street. When he returned a few seconds later he took her to a pa.s.sage at the rear of one of the buildings. It was dark and smelled of urine. It occurred to Stella that she might be murdered.

He pushed open a door at the end of the pa.s.sage. A steep, narrow staircase climbed into shadows. The air was damp and chill. There was a smell of mildew and s.h.i.t now.

"Go on up, then," he urged her.

"Where is he?"

"He's on the top floor. Go on."

He gazed at her with faint amus.e.m.e.nt and she felt she was being mocked, but was she being mocked because she had accompanied him so willingly to this place, or because she hesitated now, a fine lady out of her element and losing her frail resolve? He was no longer comic, he was sinister, but she started up the stairs, what else was she to do? They sagged and creaked under her feet. The air was clammy. A wooden rail, smooth to the touch, was loosely screwed into the plaster. She realized he was not following her and she paused, one hand on the rail, and looked back over her shoulder. He stood at the foot of the staircase, his face turned up toward her. He gestured upward with a long forefinger, keep going up, all the way up.

She pa.s.sed several landings on her way up. At the top a dusty window looked down onto the yard below. She saw Nick opening the door of the Vauxhall and she drew back, knocking over a length of metal pipe that clattered onto the floorboards and raised a small cloud of dust. There was a door on the landing and she hesitantly pushed it open. She was desperately frightened. She was looking into a room so large that the light from its row of windows didn't penetrate beyond the beams down the middle of the floor. Her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. There were doors at the far end, doors in walls from which much of the plaster had crumbled away, exposing the studs and laths beneath.

"Edgar?"

She came a few steps into the room. Her high heels seemed deafening on the floorboards. She was wearing a head scarf and a light tan raincoat with the belt not buckled but tied in a knot, and she had a large bag slung over her shoulder. A bearded figure stood in the shadows watching her. The sudden sight of him caused her to cry out. He moved toward her, grinning, and she ran to him.

She got back shortly after six, and when she came down from her bath she found Max home from the hospital. He was in a good mood, a rare event these days. He wanted to know had her shopping been successful. His interest was feigned, and it was simple for her to give him the impression of annoyances and frustrations that would necessitate yet another trip to London on Friday. He suggested a walk around the garden before dinner and she thought it politic to agree.

They went first to the vegetable garden, and she found it ironic that, technically at least, this was Max's territory, for she sensed her lover's presence everywhere. He had grown a beard! On a warm evening in early September the air was still and sultry. Summer's growth had exhausted the soil, and all that would remain after this brief interlude of ripeness and maturity was decay. There was a din of birds from the trees beyond the garden wall.

"Did you see Brenda?" said Max as they wandered along the path, pausing here and there to inspect this plant or that.

"I didn't have time."

"No, why would you go and see her? You've had quite enough of my mother this summer. All this other business, of course ..."

His voice trailed off.

"Brenda and I get along if we have to. Actually, I was glad she was here. She was a help with Charlie."

They had reached the conservatory. No further work had been done and it seemed a ruin in its skeletal incompletion, the great white frame glowing feebly in the fading light. Max sighed. Inexorably the conversation had turned to the days after Edgar's escape. Stella could never properly talk to Max about the events of those days, and how they had affected his position in the hospital. If they had. Perhaps they hadn't? They sat on the bench by the wall and smoked. Max asked her again about her day in London and it cost her an effort to shift him back to his more usual themes, which revolved around his work. She asked herself why she was getting all this attention, and remembered him saying in bed a few nights before that he had lost her. It occurred to her then that if she was to see Edgar regularly in London she must get her marriage back to the way it had been. She now required Max to find her invisible again.

He reached for her hand. "I love it here in the evening," he said. "Are you getting cold?"

"I'm a little chilly," she said. "I should have brought my cardigan."

"We'll go in."

They walked back along the path in the twilight, holding hands.

I didn't learn until some days later of this trip to London, or of the one she took later in the week. Stella's position at this time was precarious. In the early days of the affair, desperate though they were, the pressure, oddly, was less acute. Then she had feared that it might be the very constraints of their situation that were driving the pa.s.sion, and that without those constraints and the tension they bred she might find herself limply blankly wondering what it was that had provoked her to take such risks. There were times, she confessed, when she had even hoped, in some corner of her mind, some small place where prudence, safety, and security were priorities, in that place she had faintly hoped to see the thing defused and herself set free of this compulsion over which she seemed to have no control whatsoever- Not now. Now all the structures that had previously sustained daily life-her responsibilities, the family, appearances, routines-all had become sh.e.l.ls merely. She sustained them, but only for reasons of cold pragmatism: she wished to attract no attention and no interference, otherwise, she said, she could not go to him.

So what happened?

She wept a little as she described how she'd gone up the stairs and into the loft that day, and there he was, waiting for her. They wasted no time. They hurried down to the far end of the loft, to a room he called his studio, and climbed a staircase to a sort of sleeping platform, where they lay down together on the mattress. Again I probed her, curious to learn if this s.e.x differed from the s.e.x she'd had with him on the hospital estate, but all she would say was that for the first time they didn't have to be quiet about it. Primitive, urgent-and loud, this was my surmise. Later, sprawled naked on top of the blankets, they talked about the days following his escape, about how, after he'd reached London, Nick had come for him and brought him here to his loft and given him his studio. She said she'd never been in a room like this before. It was raw industrial s.p.a.ce, with grimy brick walls and high ceilings hung with pipes. There were three large dusty windows facing onto a shuttered warehouse on the far side of the street. A huge trestle table pushed up against the wall was littered with drawing paper and other materials. She liked it, she said, this artist's room, it made her feel, oh, bold, and original, and free. She went down and wandered about in her open raincoat, a drink in her hand, picking up objects, examining everything. A little later, back in bed, she told him about living on blind faith and gin while she waited for his call.

"So you didn't doubt me."

She turned to him and shook her head.

"I would have."

"You're not me."

"Who am I then?"

She pressed herself against him, her hand playing across his body, tracing its form, and then his face, rubbing her fingers in his damp beard. They had s.e.x again, the time fled by, and it wasn't until she sat up and said she must leave that the one sour, ominous note was sounded. He stirred on the bed behind her.

"Back to Max," he said.