Asylum (24 page)

“I hope I didn’t upset you,” he began.

“Not at all. You said there was nothing to be alarmed about so I wasn’t alarmed.”

“Good.”

She knew she flustered him. He was attracted to her, she said, and he was uneasy about it, for she was the mother of one of his pupils and quite unlike the farmers’ wives and schoolteachers who otherwise made up the female element of his world. Amused, she watched him, this lanky young fellow with his long fingers and chalk dust all over his clothes.

“Mrs. Raphael,” he said, “why is Charlie so unhappy?”

“Unhappy?” she said with some surprise. It hadn’t occurred to her that he would say anything like this. He frowned and looked at his shoes and pushed his hand through his hair. Then he gazed straight at her.

“He’s a clever boy,” he said, “but he won’t make the effort, and I think it’s because he’s so anxious. But he won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

“I wasn’t aware there was anything wrong.”

“You don’t see it then?”

“Maybe you should talk to his father.”

“Can’t you help me?”

“He’s the bloody psychiatrist!”

This came out with more bitterness than she’d intended, and the laugh she laughed was brittle even to her ears. Hugh Griffin sat forward on the edge of his chair, long legs splayed wide and his fingers clasped together between his knees. He reminded her of Nick.

“Doesn’t he talk to you, Mrs. Raphael? Why wouldn’t he talk to his mother? Is this the problem?”

“What the hell does it have to do with you?” she said, rising to her feet. She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette.

“Sit down, please,” said this offensive schoolteacher in his wheedly Welsh voice. “Please.”

“I don’t have time,” she said. She had turned her head away from him and stared unseeing at the notice board, smoking with short rapid puffs at her cigarette. He sighed. He seemed unwilling to let her go. He was about to say something more when the door opened and two women came in clutching piles of exercise books to their bosoms and talking loudly. They cast no more than a cursory glance at Hugh Griffin and Stella as they settled themselves at the far end of the room. Hugh Griffin wearily stood up and said he would go and fetch Charlie.

As she left the school with Charlie and walked rapidly to the car she was still so angry with the man she could barely speak. She pulled out onto the road and almost collided with another car, and had to sit a moment and bring her breathing and her temper under control. Nobody spoke. Driving home she said to Charlie without turning her head that his teacher thought he wasn’t working hard enough.

He said nothing.

“He told me it’s because you’re unhappy,” she said.

Still nothing.

“I said I thought you were fine.”

She glanced at Mair, who was sitting beside her in the front seat staring straight ahead.

“Are you unhappy?”

Charlie shrugged his shoulders and looked out of the window. They drove the rest of the way home in silence. He went into the house without a word and straight upstairs. Stella asked Mair if she wanted a cup of tea but she didn’t. So Stella sat in the kitchen and stared out of the window. After a while she poured herself a drink. She knew what was happening, she was starting to see Charlie as an extension of his father, and so
a part of the conspiracy against her. She didn’t want to feel this way about the boy, she knew it was unfair, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

When Max got home that evening she didn’t tell him what had happened. She’d decided she would let Charlie explain it in his own way, and then she’d hear it from Max. But when Max came downstairs after saying good night to Charlie he didn’t talk to her at all, just settled down in the sitting room with a medical journal.

She couldn’t sleep at all that night, and she had the feeling that Max was awake too and listening to her pacing. It was a windy night, the house heaved and shuddered, and though she had a jersey on over her nightdress, and thick wool socks, and her dressing gown on top, she was still cold. She stood shivering at the window and stared at the stars in the wintry sky, her thoughts racing as she smoked one cigarette after another. She remembered the children laughing at her at the secretary’s desk, and that teacher telling her she was making her own child unhappy. She thought about Trevor Williams, asleep on the other side of her bedroom wall, and their dispassionate sex together. Since Mair’s return he had twice coaxed her into a small stone outbuilding and had her bend over a stack of hay bales. He said she had a lovely white arse. His penis always seemed to be hard. Making her way back across the yard she hadn’t dared look at the house in case Mair was watching from a window, though if she was it seemed to change nothing, for she still came over for her cup of tea.

She thought about Edgar and their weeks in London, and saw how her memories were starting to fade like old photographs. But she had her other signs. Certain cloud formations, snatches of birdsong, flowers: by means of phenomena once shared with him she sustained a sort of contact with him. Whenever she went shopping, alone or with the others, in Cledwyn or Chester, she scanned the streets for a glimpse of him. A dozen times she’d seen him, and a dozen times been disappointed. It didn’t matter. The flare of feeling, the lift of the
heart, this was enough, even if it was in response to the broad black back of some big Welsh farmer going into Woolworth’s with his wife.

She climbed back into bed and still she couldn’t sleep. She turned from side to side and she was sobbing now. Nobody came to her door. Nobody tapped on her door and whispered, What’s the matter? Are you all right? She thought about her father and remembered how she would drift to sleep feeling his bulk and strength as he sat on the side of the bed and stroked her hair and listened to her murmuring the last of the day’s thoughts. Again she thought about Edgar, she saw them dancing in the hospital, gods among mortals, and she felt no regret, no remorse, it didn’t occur to her to want to change a thing.

She saw the sky grow lighter and then she fell asleep. She awoke late in the morning and after her bath she made a cup of tea and put three spoons of sugar in it and a splash of gin. She felt better after that. She filled a thermos flask and walked to the top of the hill and spent the afternoon up there.

When Charlie came home from school he brought her a letter from his teacher. She asked him if he’d been talking to Mr. Griffin about her, or if Mr. Griffin had said anything to him about her. He shook his head. He looked frightened, as though he didn’t know who she was anymore. She asked him if that meant yes or no and he said no. The letter was polite. He apologized for upsetting her. He repeated that he was concerned about Charlie. Would she and Dr. Raphael like to make an appointment with him, to talk about it? She thought not. She crumpled up the letter and threw it away.

Weeks passed. Christmas came and went. She spent it alone in Plas Mold, she said, getting drunk. Max and Charlie went down to London for three days to stay with Brenda. Max was unsettled when they returned; Brenda had clearly wasted no
time in urging him to leave her. But he did nothing, and life went on as usual. She heard no more from Hugh Griffin, though she thinks he may have written to Max at the hospital, this suspicion aroused by a conversation they had one night after Charlie had gone to bed.

“You have no cause to hate Charlie as well,” he said, with no preamble at all.

They were in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes. He was at the table, turning the pages of the newspaper.

“Has his teacher been talking to you?” she said.

“No, why should he?”

She didn’t believe him but she said nothing, just went back to washing the dishes.

“Has his teacher been talking to
you?”
said Max.

“Not recently.”

“Then when?”

“Oh, it’s too tedious. I saw him in the autumn, I don’t know when, before Christmas. He tried to tell me Charlie was unhappy because of me.”

“But don’t you see how miserable he is?”

She shrugged.

“Stella, don’t you see it?”

She ignored him.

“Christ!” he said. She turned. He was struggling to keep his temper. “Listen,” he said, “I stay here, with you, for one reason only, and that’s because I think that child needs a mother. But if you never show him any warmth there isn’t much point. Well, is there?”

She gazed at him silently.

“Is there?”

“He’s your son,” she said. “He feels about me as you do, you taught him to.”

“That’s rubbish.”

“It’s the truth.”

“My patience is wearing thin,” he said. “For weeks you’ve been like this, no use to me, no use to him.”

“Our arrangement was I look after the house,” she said.

“Yes, you look after the house, but you’re never properly
in
the house, not body and soul. Can’t you get over it? Or don’t get over it, do whatever you want, but why must you take it out on him?”

“You taught him to hate me.”

It was then they both realized that Charlie was standing at the bottom of the stairs, pale and bewildered in his pajamas. Max glared at her then crossed the room and took the boy’s hand.

“Come on,” he said, “upstairs. Time you were in bed, young man.”

He came down to the kitchen half an hour later.

“He doesn’t understand,” he said. “He doesn’t know why you’re like this. Talk to him, Stella, for God’s sake. There isn’t much time left.”

She was far from convinced by any of this and wearily said so. Max went to the window and stared out, his fingers clenching and unclenching in that familiar way. She saw that he couldn’t tolerate this failure; the idea that Charlie was suffering because of his parents’ collapsing marriage embarrassed him acutely. She went upstairs without a word. Charlie’s bedroom door was open. She stood in the doorway. He was lying in bed with his back to her. She knew he was awake and aware of her there, but he wouldn’t turn and face her, and after a moment or two she went into her own bedroom and shut the door.

The following afternoon she was at the sink peeling potatoes when Charlie came shuffling in from school and dumped his satchel on a chair and sat down to change his shoes.

“What are we having?” he said.

“Beef stew.”

“Mummy.”

“What is it?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“If you want to.”

She went on with the potatoes. The window over the sink
looked out across the road to the barn where Trevor Williams kept his tractor. There was a window high in the wall that had no glass in it. A crow landed on the sill with a flurry of flapping wings and hopped around two or three times pecking at the sill. Then Trevor Williams emerged from the building. It was twilight, and she was sure he couldn’t see her clearly through the kitchen window, but he put his hand on his groin and rubbed it, and she couldn’t help smiling.

“Mummy?”

“What
is
it?”

Trevor opened the gate into the field beyond the barn where he’d driven his cattle earlier. She could never understand why he moved them from one field to another, something to do with the grazing, she supposed. He latched the gate after him and set off across the field to where the cattle had gathered at the top end.

“I want to be friends.”

She turned from the window, delighted with his plaintive request but pretending to be dubious.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. Did Daddy tell you to say that?”

“No.”

“Did Mr. Griffin?”

“No.”

She sniffed and turned back to the sink and began cutting up potatoes on the draining board. He sat there with a sulky, angry look on his face that she recognized as Max’s. Another long silence as she put the potatoes into a pot and filled the pot with water and salted the water, turning every few seconds to glance at him with mock suspicion. The boy was not sure how much of a game this was. She could hear the cattle out there in the thickening dusk.

“Turn the light on,” she said, “it’s getting dark in here.”

She started to chop an onion. No sound from behind her, and no light either.

“Charlie,” she said, turning, and saw his little face pucker.

“Oh, darling,” she cried, darting to him and taking him in her arms, “of course I want to be friends! Aren’t we friends already? I thought we were!”

The next day she stood by the house gazing out across the valley. Another windy day, but dry, with an armada of white clouds moving across the sun so that one hill was lit by a pale watery sunlight while the one beyond was plunged in shadow. It was a restless, active sky, and she watched it contentedly for some minutes. Electricity pylons, recently erected, marched across the valley and climbed in a line across the far hills. When she walked beneath them she heard them buzzing and crackling. The sun was higher in the sky, the first hint of spring, and white smoke poured from the chimneys of the brickworks to the east. For the first time in months she felt something stirring in her that might have been hope.

That night she suggested to Max that he look for a job in London. She saw the flash of pleasure in his face as he told her he intended to stay at Cledwyn for at least two more years.

“So you’d better get used to it,” he said.

That night she got drunk. At times Max’s cruelty cut her deeply, she said. There was a certain thrust of the blade he had perfected by now, one that slipped between the plates of her armor and went right to the heart. He left her feeling a fool that she had momentarily forgotten that this was a mortal struggle, a fight to the death. So after dinner she poured herself a large gin and put her coat on and went outside and leaned against the gate looking at the stars. After a while it was too cold to stay out so she went on drinking in the kitchen, gazing out of the window from a wooden chair tipped back on two legs, her feet up on the sill, the bottle on the floor beside her. The trouble with getting drunk was that it made her think about Edgar and thinking about Edgar made her maudlin. When Max came down to the kitchen she told him he was a shit and he said to her in his quiet, furious voice that his patience was almost exhausted, which provoked a further stream of abuse from her, which
quickly sent him back upstairs to his medical journals. Soon enough the tears came but of course nobody came down to see if she was all right, it was just the slut in the kitchen who’d ruined their lives, getting drunk on neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic lover.