Asylum (25 page)

On her way upstairs, after a last expedition out of doors, which culminated in her hammering on the Williamses’ door and shouting for Trevor, she paused in the sitting room. She had the bottle with her and she was tempted to hurl it through the window, just to see Max’s face when he came out of his room, but it wasn’t worth losing the gin for. Laughing boisterously she made her way upstairs and fell asleep in her clothes.

Max was furious in the morning, so furious she had to apologize. Fortunately she hadn’t announced when she banged on the Williamses’ door in the middle of the night what it was she wanted Trevor
for
.

This, she said, was the pattern of their days, in Plas Mold.

And what of Edgar, what of her lost lunatic lover? To my deep consternation I had heard nothing. He seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and more than once it occurred to me that he was dead. I was intensely relieved, then, at last to get word of a reliable sighting: he had been spotted in the vicinity of Euston Station. This suggested the possibility that he was going north, and I immediately called Max. I told him we suspected that he’d found out where he and Stella were living. What he intended to do, if he was indeed heading for Cledwyn, we could only guess. I told him of the security arrangements the police were making, which put his mind somewhat at rest though not much. It was worrying news, and I didn’t hide from him my own unease.

Then I asked him about Stella. I had talked to her recently on the phone, and I was concerned that she was not being properly looked after. Max was guarded, and when I pushed him, and at last heard the immense weight of suppressed anger in his
voice, I tried to suggest gently that he adopt a different perspective, a more detached, more
psychiatric
perspective. She had suffered a hysterical illness, I told him. She was trying to deal with a huge burden of guilt, and clearly she was having trouble coping. She needed his help.

He said nothing, and I took his silence for assent.

I assumed he would tell her what the police had said about Edgar, but I discovered later that he told her nothing. Did his silence issue from some misguided impulse to protect her from distressing news?

Or was it, rather, cold passive aggression: concealing from her that a man was coming for her who quite possibly intended to murder her?

A few days later another letter came from Hugh Griffin. She almost threw it away unopened, expecting it to be a further plea that she hug her child more often, or some such nonsense, but she thought of that lanky young man sitting forward on the edge of his chair, peering earnestly at her as he clasped and unclasped his long bony fingers, and she opened it. She was in the kitchen, still in her dressing gown, boiling the kettle to make tea. She’d just washed a pair of stockings and hung them over the back of the chair as she couldn’t be bothered to go out to the line. She sat down and read the letter: no plea for kindness and understanding, however, nor a request for an appointment to “talk things over,” instead an invitation to join a class outing to Cledwyn Heath, a tract of wild land a few miles west of the town. It was part of a class project on local flora and fauna. Her first reaction was negative, though as she drank her tea and gazed out across the valley she thought she might be persuaded to go, if they were nice to her.

She announced all this at supper that night, and Charlie was excited; clearly he had been pessimistic about his chances of producing a parent for the event. Max, seeing this, also took heart; poor man, she had worn him down badly over the winter,
he had been depressed for weeks, though it was as much the job as her, she believed. She knew something of his caseload, she knew that the block he was responsible for housed a high proportion of female schizophrenics, women in middle age or older who had been institutionalized so long there was no real hope of change. There was little there to stimulate a man like Max. He would have liked to run the wards with the younger, more acutely disturbed patients, but John Daniels, the medical superintendent, the man Max had hoped would make the work interesting, had taken those cases for himself. John Daniels is an old friend of mine. Max came too late, he told me; it was as simple as that.

The situation remained unchanged through the first two weeks of February. The police had no further reports of Edgar, and Max kept to himself the knowledge that he was out there somewhere and quite possibly heading in their direction. The family sustained its delicate explosive equilibrium, lurching somehow from day to day without detonating the enormous destructive energies at its heart. It was hardest on Charlie, of course; he stayed in his bedroom when he couldn’t be outside, and was silent and gloomy at mealtimes.

Then came news guaranteed to do nothing but exacerbate an already fraught situation: Brenda was coming to visit. Oh, it was with grim foreboding that Max heard this news, which came in a phone call to the hospital one Thursday morning; and it was with sardonic humor that Stella heard it from him that evening.

“And where will she stay?” she said.

“She’s booked a room in the Bull.”

“How appropriate.”

She could all too easily imagine Brenda’s strategy. She had no intention of allowing her son to waste his life and ruin his career moldering in this damp, forgotten pocket of north Wales, but she knew too that inertia was the enemy, inertia and Stella; these were the forces she must fight, if Max were to shine once more in the psychiatric firmament. All of which obliged her to
act, to intervene, to prevent inertia and Stella from dragging him down into a slough of mediocrity from which he would eventually be unable to extricate himself Stella would
coarsen
him, Brenda told me; that was her great fear. I myself was adamantly opposed to this projected visit, but Brenda’s mind was like a piece of forged steel, once she’d made it up.

Max would bear the brunt of it, of course. It had been difficult enough in the early days to sustain wife and mother in any sort of harmony. Now, with Brenda so vividly vindicated, when it was clear to all that Stella was a tramp and a slut and an unfit mother, how was he to oppose his mother’s argument that he must leave her, that he must stop making sacrifices she didn’t deserve? Stella watched with secret pleasure as Max grappled with all this. She suggested they give a dinner party.

“Christ, no!” he cried.

“Why not?”

“You know bloody well. Don’t twist the blade.”

Don’t twist the blade. Was that what she was doing? Charlie at least was happy about the visit; he liked his grandmother, she gave him money and made it clear she adored him. He was all right, in fact he was more animated than they’d seen him for weeks. But not Max. He dreaded this visit.

One wet Saturday Max and Charlie drove to Chester to meet her train. Apparently the first thing to arouse her displeasure was the state of the car. She hadn’t seen it, of course, since they’d come north, and a winter on farm roads had not been kind to it. Nor apparently was she impressed with Max’s state of mind, and she didn’t have anything good to say about the town either. It was just as well she didn’t come out to the house, Stella reflected, for even in Brenda’s bleakest imaginings she didn’t see a messy kitchen with dirty dishes piled in the sink, stockings draped over the back of a chair, and her daughter-in-law still in her dressing gown at half past eleven in the morning, lacing her tea with gin.

Her demands were of course immediate and excessive, and Max had never found it easy to say no to her. She wanted him to eat dinner with her every night, and had realized at once
there was no decent restaurant in Cledwyn, which meant they had to drive the twelve miles into Chester. She was also eager to see the hospital, and meet the superintendent, and she failed to understand that Max’s position now was very different from what it had been down here. Nevertheless she got her way, and it was arranged that Max would take her to see John Daniels.

And what of Stella? What of her tear-stained, gin-sodden tramp of a daughter-in-law? Did she want to meet her as well? No she did not, which suited Stella fine, as she had no desire at all to meet Brenda. I wouldn’t have expected Max to be in favor of their meeting either, but here I was wrong. Max had realized (correctly, as it happened, for Brenda took me into her confidence over this) that his mother’s motive in coming to Cledwyn was a divisive one: she hoped that by spending time with her son and grandson, and excluding Stella, she could establish an alternative family structure. She wanted to demonstrate that this alternative family was viable, that she could assume Stella’s place and take care of them, Max and Charlie both. She hinted that she might be prepared to reinstate his allowance.

Max disliked the suggestion of blackmail, and thought he saw a better way of resolving the situation. He explained it to Stella one evening after supper. His point was, they should seize the opportunity to reverse his mother’s impulse of exclusion and try, now, to bring them together, all four. It was his last brave, doomed effort to save his family. They would have Brenda to dinner and there would be a reconciliation.

How queer she found it to hear him say “we.” Why did he still want her? Why didn’t he accept Brenda’s offer, take up the idea of the alternative family and push her out into the darkness? God knows she deserved it, the way she’d been behaving, and God knows he would have a better life under Brenda’s wing than on his wife’s cold breast. But she agreed to do her best.

Persuading Brenda, Max knew, would not be so easy. During the conversation that I had had with him in January, when I’d heard the suppressed fury in his voice as he talked about Stella, I’d urged him to put aside his own feelings and see that the
affair with Edgar Stark and all that followed had occurred because Stella was suffering from a hysterical illness. Therefore she was not entirely culpable. Therefore she needed not punishment but care. Therefore she would get better.

Max adopted this line with Brenda. It was not a point of view with which she had much sympathy and in her own distinctive idiom she argued the limits of psychiatry. Max to his credit stood firm. He told her that Stella had suffered a nervous breakdown and that she now required patience and understanding. It was a mark of Brenda’s devotion to her son that she too agreed to his proposal. I happen to know she was as skeptical about the outcome as Stella was.

It was arranged then that Brenda would come to the house for dinner. Forgotten, now, Stella’s disgraceful drunken behavior; forgotten too her bloody-minded carelessness of other people’s feelings, her slovenly ways, her selfish appropriation of the bedroom. No, what mattered now was that she cook dinner and serve it and sustain the appearance of active membership in a functioning if somewhat troubled family. To Max’s great relief she willingly undertook the planning and preparation of the vital meal, she selected a menu and shopped for the ingredients, and this alone, he tried to convince himself, suggested an improved morale, a hint of a possibility of a gradual return to health.

She decided to give them kidneys.

It was a fiasco. Max picked Brenda up at the hotel and brought her to the house. She couldn’t disguise her horror at how they lived. She picked her way across the yard with an expression of disgust on her face, for Trevor Williams had been spreading manure for several days and the yard was running with it, the air was thick with it. She entered the kitchen, gave Charlie a kiss and greeted Stella in a tone of coolness inflected faintly with sympathy, this clearly for Max’s benefit, as he had continued to work the theme of her “illness,” her “breakdown.” Stella was in
an old shabby dress with an apron tied around her waist. Max suggested they have a drink in the sitting room, and Brenda allowed herself to be taken upstairs.

She insisted on seeing over the whole of the house, and was shocked at their sleeping arrangements. Max had failed to prepare her for the shared bedroom. That her son, a highly qualified psychiatrist, should have to live like a schoolboy—! When Stella followed them upstairs she found Brenda perched uncomfortably on the couch as if it carried contagious disease. She gazed at Stella helplessly; Stella had never seen her at a loss for words before.

“My dear,” she managed at last, “I had no idea Welsh housing was so primitive.”

Stella laughed gaily. “Yes, we were very spoilt down south with all those big rooms. We have to make do like everybody else now.”

“So I see.”

Max was alert for toxins in the air. He intervened adroitly.

“We’re not uncomfortable,” he murmured; “there are many worse places we could be living.”

“Oh?” said Brenda. She clearly found this difficult to believe.

“Oh yes,” said Max. “The Welsh are a burrowing people, they like dark houses tucked away under hills, or deep in the woods. They like gloom. This house isn’t gloomy.”

An eyebrow rose a millimeter on Brenda’s marble forehead. It was the index of a deepening skepticism.

“John Daniels was telling me,” said Max, “that depressive illness is significantly more prevalent in this part of Wales than anywhere else in Europe. Except Scandinavia, of course.”

He had just made this up, Stella could tell by the way he said it. It showed how desperate he was.

“I wasn’t impressed with John Daniels,” said Brenda. “Where did he learn his psychiatry?”

“Edinburgh.”

“You surprise me.”

They then began discussing departments of psychiatry in various British universities, and Stella left them to it. She went
downstairs to see to the kidneys and refill her glass from a fresh bottle.

By the time she called them down to eat she had finished that bottle and started on another. God knows I’ll need it tonight, she told herself. The problem was of course that while drink subdued anxiety it also destroyed inhibition; after three or four glasses she became what Max, she told me wryly called “disinhibited.” She was disinhibited as she served them leek-and-potato soup.

“Not what you’re used to, Brenda,” she said, “but needs must when the devil drives.”

“Regional cuisine can be surprising, don’t you think?” Brenda spread her napkin in her lap. She lifted her spoon. “Well,” she said hopefully, “this looks hearty.”