Asylum (11 page)

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
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 sexual 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 sex, 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 identity, 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 nobody 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 glass 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 analyzed, 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 glass 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?
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 bloody 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 anticipation, 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 glass 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 embarrassment 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. Nobody 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 sex 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 sunglasses 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 assumed 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 passed a bomb site behind a chain-link fence, and Stella glimpsed a small black cat picking its way across the rubble in the sunshine. Grass 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.