Asylum (2 page)

I am not a gregarious man, and at social gatherings I tend to stay in the background. I let others come to me, it is a privilege of seniority. I stood by the window in the Straffens’ drawing room and murmured small talk to the wives of my colleagues as they each in turn drifted over. I watched Stella listening to Jack tell a story about something that had happened at a hospital dance twenty years before. Jack liked Stella for the same reasons I did,
for her wit, her composure, and her striking looks. I know she was considered beautiful: her eyes were much remarked on, and she had a pale, almost translucent complexion and thick blond hair, almost white, cut rather short, which she brushed straight back off her forehead. She was rather a fleshy, full-breasted woman, taller than the average, and that night she was wearing a single string of pearls that nicely set off the whiteness of her neck and shoulders and bosom. In those days I considered her a friend, and often wondered about her unconscious life. I asked myself was there peace and order beneath that demure exterior, or did she simply control her neuroses better than other women? A stranger, I reflected, would take her self-possession for aloofness, or even indifference, and in fact when she first arrived at the hospital she encountered resistance and hostility for this very reason.

But most of the women accepted her now. She had made an effort to join several of the hospital committees and generally to pull her weight as senior staff wives are supposed to. As for Max, he stood there with his glass of dry sherry, listening with a half-smile of slightly distracted indulgence as various horror stories were told by the women about their misadventures on the dance floor with patients of such clumsiness that they put last year’s plodders and stampers to shame.

Stella did talk about Edgar Stark that night, but not to the company at large, and certainly without any mention of what he’d done in the Hall. It was when she reached my side that she told me the man danced like a dream—wasn’t he a patient of mine?

Oh yes, he was one of mine all right. I suppose it was with a sort of affectionate cynicism that I said this, for I seem to remember that she peered at me closely as though it were important.

“He works in the garden,” she said. “I often see him. I won’t ask you what you think of him, because I know you won’t tell me.”

“As you saw yourself,” I protested. “An extroverted man, well liked, and possessed of a certain, oh, animal vitality.”

“Animal vitality,” said Stella. “Yes, he has that all right. Is he very sick?”

“Pretty sick,” I said.

“You wouldn’t know it,” she said, “from talking to him.”

She turned and glanced at the party, the little clusters of those old familiars, each one distinct and idiosyncratic as tends to be the case in psychiatric communities. “We
are
more eccentric than the general population, aren’t we?” she murmured, her eyes on the crowd.

“Undoubtedly.”

“Max says psychiatry attracts people with high anxiety about going mad.”

“Max must speak for himself.”

This elicited a sidelong glance from those large sleepy eyes.

“I noticed you didn’t dance once,” she said.

“You know I’m hopeless at this sort of thing.”

“But the ladies enjoy it so. You should, for their sake.”

“How saintly you’re becoming, my dear.”

At this she turned and gazed at me. She hitched up the strap of her dress, which had slipped off her shoulder. “Saintly?” she said, and I saw Max looking in our direction, absently polishing his spectacles, his mournful demeanor faltering not a jot. She noticed him too and, turning away, murmured, “And my reward, I suppose, will be in heaven.”

Later that evening I returned to my office to write up my observations. I had been impressed with Edgar’s behavior. Watching him dance with Stella it was hard to believe that he suffered a disorder involving severe disturbance in his relationships with women. He had been a working sculptor for some years before he came to us, and was, as such, subject to the unique pressures that a life in art imposes. About a year before his admission he became obsessed with the idea that his wife, Ruth, was having an affair with another man. By all accounts Ruth Stark was a quiet, sensible woman; she modeled for Edgar and supported
him financially much of the time. But as a result of his wild and violent accusations the marriage became severely strained and she threatened to leave him.

One night after they’d been drinking there was a terrible quarrel and he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. What he did to her
after
that indicated to us how very disturbed he was. No one came to help Ruth Stark though her screams were heard the length of the street. Edgar was in a profound state of shock when he reached us. I tidied him up and then prepared to see him through the inevitable reaction of grief and guilt. But to my concern there was no grief or guilt; he regained his equilibrium after a few weeks and was soon involved in a variety of hospital activities.

We were worried about him. Although he functioned at a high level of intelligence he never showed any insight into why he had killed his wife. What troubled me was not just the persistence of his delusions, it was their intrinsic absurdity. He claimed to have a wealth of evidence of Ruth’s infidelity, but when asked for it he produced only trivial everyday occurrences, into which he read bizarre, extravagant meanings. A flushing toilet, a stain on the floor, the placement of a box of washing powder on a windowsill, these were the sorts of things that signified. He had otherwise fully recovered his sanity and was ready to be released, but he remained on this one point unshakable, that the murder was justified. Oh, he agreed it shouldn’t have happened, and he regretted drinking so much, but he insisted that he’d been driven to it by her taunts and insults. I didn’t feel we should let him out yet, and nor did anyone else. He’d been with us for five years, and it looked to me as though he’d be with us another five at least. This was how things stood when he was given the job of restoring Max Raphael’s conservatory.

Every morning that summer several parties of parole patients, each under the supervision of an attendant, and all dressed in baggy yellow corduroy trousers and blue shirts, with white canvas jackets slung over their shoulders, emerged from the Main Gate to maintain the grounds of the estate. Edgar was
one of the group assigned to the deputy superintendent’s garden. Stella often saw him when she went out to pick vegetables or flowers, and if there was no sign of the attendant, a senior man called John Archer, she would sit for a few minutes and they would talk. She admitted she was attracted to him almost from the start. For obvious reasons she tried to ignore the feeling, but his presence out there every day made it easy for her to invent pretexts for seeing him. Though what harm was there in befriending a patient? This is what she said to herself, in justification of her behavior.

How had it happened?

On this point she couldn’t at first give me any sort of satisfactory answer. She avoided my eyes, she became vague. Perhaps it was just a case of household lust, easily enough aroused, just as easily crushed out, but when I suggested this the dreamy abstraction vanished and for a moment I felt a flare of spirited hostility from her. Then it faded. She was already deeply depressed; she could not sustain affect. She mentioned something he’d done one day that expressed, oh, strength, tenderness …

Perhaps. I let it pass.

Then in a later conversation she described it more fully, what it was he’d done that had so charmed and attracted her at the beginning. She’d gone into the vegetable garden one warm afternoon to pick some lettuce, and saw Charlie down at the far end with a patient, the big black-haired man she had been aware of simply as the one working on Max’s conservatory, she didn’t even know his name; this was a couple of weeks before the dance. Curious to see what the boy was up to, she wandered down the path and he shouted to her that he’d invented a test of strength, and that she should come and see. Charlie Raphael was an overweight little boy with pale skin like his mother’s, which in the summer became lightly freckled. He had dark brown hair that fell over his forehead in a thick fringe, and when he grinned you could see the gap between his two rabbity front teeth. That summer he invariably wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals, and his legs were always scratched and muddy from his various outdoor projects.

Stella sat on the bench by the wall, in the shade, and watched as Charlie made the patient stand there on the path holding a spade horizontally with a hand at either end of the shaft, then, with his knees bent, ducked underneath and grasped the middle of the shaft.

“Lift!” he cried.

The patient glanced at Stella and lifted, and Charlie rose slowly off the ground, his face screwed up with concentration and his knees drawn up beneath him as he clung with both hands to the spade. “I’m counting!” he shouted. “One, two, three, four …”

He hung from the spade to a count of twenty, at which point Stella, laughing, begged him please to allow the poor man to put him down. “Down!” shouted Charlie, and was gently lowered onto the path. “You’re a strong man,” he said, gazing with admiration at Edgar, who seemed not at all strained by the ordeal. Stella told me that it was while Charlie was clinging like a monkey to the shaft of the spade that she felt the first stirring of interest in the man. He had good hands, she noticed, long, slender, delicate hands, and she wondered what his work was, on the outside.

The next day she again went down to the conservatory to see what he was doing. She freely chose to do so, nothing can excuse or obscure this fact. She found him up a ladder, removing broken glass from the frame of the structure, carefully working it free of the crumbling putty. He was dropping it into a dustbin beside the ladder, and every few moments the drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by breaking glass. When he saw her approaching he came down the ladder and pulled off his heavy gloves.

“Mrs. Raphael,” he said, standing squarely in front of her, panting slightly and pushing his hair off his forehead. He produced a red bandanna from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his face and then from his hands, watching her throughout with an expression that she described as affable but at the same time mocking, somehow, or rather challenging, as though he wanted to provoke her to show him who she was.

“You didn’t have to stop working,” she said, quite at ease with this sort of jousting, and liking the man immediately. “I only wanted to see what you were doing.”

“Edgar Stark.”

They shook hands. Stella shielded her eyes as she turned away and gazed up at the conservatory. “Is it worth saving?” she said.

“Oh, it’s a lovely thing. They built them to last back then. Like that place.”

He grinned at her, indicating the Wall, visible through the pine trees on the far side of the garden by the road.

“This won’t be quite so grim, I hope.”

“It’ll be a nice little summerhouse when I’m finished. Settling in all right?”

“We’ve been here a year.”

“Is it that long?”

He took out his tobacco tin and began to roll a cigarette. It smacked of independence, this gesture, and she approved of it. He didn’t behave like a patient.

“How long have you been here?” she said.

“Five years now, but I’ll be out soon. I killed my wife.”

When I heard this I thought, vintage Edgar. But Stella could match his candor.

“Why?”

“She betrayed me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He was no fool. Here there was tragedy, and she was sympathetic. The wife of a forensic psychiatrist was hardly likely to shrink in horror from such a confession.

“Were you a carpenter on the outside?” she said.

“Artist. Sculptor. Figurative mostly. You like art, Mrs. Raphael?”

“I have so little opportunity down here. In London, yes.”

He wasn’t at all obsequious, she said, this was her first impression, nor did he condescend to her. She said there was something solid and mature about him, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the wildly delusional talk I’d heard on the subject
of his late wife. She wouldn’t have thought him so solid and mature had she heard any of that, I thought. But she hadn’t, and so, the next day, after gathering what she needed from the vegetable garden, she again went down to the conservatory.

He was up his ladder and this time he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Charlie was on the garden wall, and Edgar was talking to the boy about football. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a heavy build, well fleshed out on the chest and hips and belly, with soft white skin. There was no hair on his body, and she thought he might be the sort of man who grew fat later in life. She suggested they might like a cold drink.

When she came back out with a jug of lemonade Edgar had his shirt on. She asked would he mind if she sat on the bench in the shade for a while. She enjoyed watching him work, she said, and I thought of Max, cerebral Max, as tall as Edgar but stooped, and pale, and forever polishing his spectacles; Max may have conceived the idea of restoring the conservatory, but it was another man’s labor that carried it through. And already his efforts were apparent. Much of the old glass had gone, and the structure was beginning to assume a skeletal appearance. It was strangely beautiful, she said, and when she returned to the house this was the image she carried with her, of that big confident man up a ladder with his shirt off, carefully picking broken glass from the frame of the Victorian conservatory.

She went back the next day, and the day after. He told her about his son, the boy he’d deprived of a mother; Leonard, his name was, he’d be Charlie’s age now, though Edgar hadn’t seen him for more than five years. His late wife’s family were looking after the boy and they were determined, he said, that he should never know who his father was. It was a story guaranteed to arouse a mother’s sympathy.

All lies. Edgar had no son.

One day he asked her if he could call her by her first name, and she said yes, but not in front of John Archer or Charlie.