Asylum (30 page)

“Would you like to talk about Charlie?” I said.

This was difficult now. She gazed at me silently for a moment. I felt she was telling me that she was not denying to herself how and why her child had died, but that she couldn’t speak of it.

“No, Peter,” she said at last, “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Too painful.”

I nodded. “Do you think about him much?”

A small ironic laugh. “Do I think about anything else?”

I nodded again. “We will have to talk about it soon. I want to give you time.”

“I know that. Thank you.”

Once more I waved away her gratitude. I stood up.

“I must go,” I said. “Bloody meeting with the Ministry of Works. Administration. Drives me to distraction.”

“Poor Peter,” she said.

She stood in the doorway of her room and watched me make my way down the ward, an elegant, elderly man with a sheaf of files under his arm and an institution on his shoulders. I was touched by her solicitude. She was my patient, but she was also a woman of taste, a woman of my own class, and I was not blind to her qualities. In recent days I had more than once imagined her in my house, as she once so frequently had been, among my furniture, my books, my art. Oh, she had a place there, among my fine
objets
, she would be better off there than she was here.

She now enjoyed the privilege of walking on the terrace of the female wing at certain times of the day, and she took full advantage of it. Spring was here and she loved to gaze out at the countryside, her coat draped around her shoulders, for it was
still cool even in the sunshine, and often windy. She was in no hurry to make friends with the women on her new ward; she thought it best to allow this to happen gradually, so she held herself somewhat aloof. It was known that she was married to Dr. Raphael, who until recently had been deputy superintendent, of course, and that Dr. Cleave was an old friend. Her whole story was known, in fact; all the more reason to try and create a little mystery about herself.

In the weeks that followed, her mystery eroded as she was gradually absorbed into the life of the hospital. Although she retained a certain air of detachment she did not pursue it to the point of isolation. She communicated poise and dignity and wore as though it were a veil an air of great sorrow, rather like a heroine in a Victorian melodrama. I watched her perfect a small sad smile, and saw how both staff and patients responded with respect, even with deference. She dressed in somber shades of blue, gray, and black and always carried a book. She was a frequent visitor to the hospital library.

Seeing this, I believed that she was healing, that in the more inaccessible reaches of her being she was facing and accepting what had happened on Cledwyn Heath. I saw her a couple of times each week, and when I alluded to Charlie’s death she would always give me to believe that yes, she thought of little else, she constantly pondered the horror of it, its moral gravity weighed on her soul and was effecting deep change within her.
She began to give the impression of a holy woman, a woman in a process of purification as the profound remorse following a terrible act ate like an acid at her old self and brought to life something new in its place. The hospital thus became a priory, a convent, and she a lady with a great grief whom the monks had taken in so that she might make her spiritual journey in cloistral quiet.

There was a particular bench she liked to use on the terrace, and she made a point of sitting there at the same time every afternoon, between three and four. Sometimes she was joined by another patient, or an attendant, often she was alone. There she sat, her coat around her shoulders, gazing quietly out over the countryside, smoking, and she did not go unnoticed by the patients working in the gardens on the terrace below. One of these was a fit young man with a wild mop of black hair who whenever he paused to lean on his hoe, or his spade, did not turn to the landscape but looked up the hill, to where the lonely woman in the dark clothes sat lost in thought, day after day, between three and four in the afternoon.

When this was reported to me I was concerned. I wanted no one interfering with Stella during this difficult convalescent period, and most emphatically not this particular black-haired young man, a psychopath called Rodney Mariner. He was one of mine. I immediately took him off the work party, stripped him of his parole status, and transferred him to the Refractory Block. It was a purely precautionary measure.

We seemed to be in for another hot summer. The days were clear and still, with long, warm evenings heavy with the drifting fragrance of the first blossoms. I was astonished to think that it was almost a year since Stella had walked along the terrace with Max and me after the hospital dance, it seemed a lifetime ago. I wondered how she was responding to sights and sounds that must remind her of that summer, and I watched her carefully for signs of unusual agitation. But it was becoming clearer all the time that Edgar no longer dominated her thoughts as he
once had, and this seemed confirmed when I discovered that she was troubled now by a different psychic intruder. For it was during one of our conversations at around this time that she told me she was starting to have headaches at night, and that these headaches invariably followed indistinct but terrifying dreams. She was often woken by them, she said. She would suddenly sit up in the darkness with images still alive in her mind, and for a moment or two she would know utter panic at her inability to escape whatever it was that threatened her. And until the dream vanished, until it sank back into whatever chamber of her mind it had risen from, which mercifully took only a second or two, and was forgotten, leaving only a few faint traces to mark its awful passage through her sleeping brain, and a steady, throbbing pain, until that happened her head was filled with the sound of screaming.

I was not surprised to hear this, it was what I’d been waiting for. When she saw my concern, however, she immediately tried to make light of it, she said it was just a silly nightmare, all she wanted was aspirin for the headaches. She wasn’t able to tell me anything more about this screaming, but I had a strong intuition that what we were seeing were the first stirrings of a guilt she had so far successfully repressed. For I believed that what she was hearing were the screams of a drowning child.

I knew then that her recovery was properly beginning, that she had let go of Edgar and allowed herself to start dealing with the death of Charlie. What remained now was to work through the guilt. I was confident that while this would be painful it would be straightforward, and relatively quick, at least in the initial, acute phase. After that there would be no point keeping her here; she could hardly be considered a danger to society. This being so, it was time for me to consider her future: to think about what was going to happen to her in a month or so when she was well enough to leave the hospital, and who was going to look after her.

•  •  •

A few days later I drove up to north Wales to discuss my plans with Max Raphael. Poor man, he didn’t want this visit, he had no desire to have me see how he lived. He hadn’t given up his job in Cledwyn, nor had he moved out of Trevor Williams’s house, but I had the sense that he’d turned into something of a recluse.

I arrived at Plas Mold in the early afternoon and the house, the yard, the fields beyond, all were much as Stella had described them. The Beast was barking, the manure was thick in the nostrils and deeply unpleasant. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of Trevor Williams himself, that barnyard Lothario, but there was no sign of either him or his wife. Max shuffled out of his back door in shirtsleeves and suspenders and bedroom slippers and asked me in. He was thin as a rail. He looked utterly defeated. He led me through the spotlessly neat kitchen and up the stairs to the sitting room, which had now become his study. He offered me a glass of sherry.

The room was spartan in the extreme. No paintings, no radio, no television set, merely an armchair, a few shelves of books, and a desk at the far end looking out over the valley. As he poured me a drink I rose from the armchair and went to the window, though it was not the view that interested me, I was drawn by the cluster of framed photographs he kept on his desk. Most were of Charlie alone, a couple of Charlie with his father. I lifted one to the light. Max appeared at my elbow and gave me my sherry, and together we gazed at his son. I murmured the obvious, that there was no photograph of Stella in evidence.

He sighed. He waved me toward the armchair and turned his desk chair to face me. “No,” he said, “no Stella.”

I told him I saw no point in beating about the bush and said what it was that I’d come to say. He was only slightly surprised. I know what happens to psychiatrists like Max, men whose lives have gone horribly wrong and for whom their own suffering becomes a source of fascination, every provincial mental hospital has at least one. They continue to function, competently if
not energetically, but they are bowed by what seems a great burden of experience, their own and their patients’. They lose all spontaneity and humor and respond to pathology with a sensitivity too acute to permit them any distance from what they see and hear on the wards every day. They blur the line between sickness and sanity and, Christ-like, suffer for all humanity. They can never again be refreshed and they begin to read philosophy, usually of a mystical stripe. This was Max. With an air of gloom and preoccupation he said he presumed Stella was getting on well in the hospital, and I briefly gave him the clinical picture.

He nodded a few times and then sank again into silent frowning reflection. “I think,” he said at last, “you must be careful.”

Caution acquires great importance for burnt-out cases like Max. “Careful?” I said.

“I hardly dare presume to advise you,” he said, and there was a brief, leaden hint of irony in his voice. “You are her doctor, after all. I am merely”—dry cough here—“her husband.”

I waited for more. It was slow in coming. It occurred to me that he didn’t have long to live. I wondered if he had cancer.

“She brought him into the house, you know.”

I said nothing, thinking: if this man were my patient I’d have him on antidepressants.

“She should be in prison.”

“You’re still very angry, of course.”

“Don’t patronize me, Peter. I know what I’m talking about. But I suppose”—another dry cough—“we must look after our own.”

“Which is what I intend to do.”

“You have my blessing. But I warn you.”

Another excruciating silence.

“Of what?”

“Perfidy. Mendacity.”

He sounded like a Jesuit. But I had what I wanted. I murmured something noncommittal and rose to my feet. But he hadn’t finished. He took off his spectacles and began to polish
them on his handkerchief. “Not that it matters,” he said. “It’s Stark you’re after.”

“They are both in my care.”

He glanced up at me but said nothing more.

In the yard he stuck his hands in his pockets and shivered in the wind. He looked up at the sky and said, “One struggles with shame every day. The hardest thing is taking responsibility.”

As I drove away he was still standing there, in the wind, with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the sky I saw clearly what had happened to him. He had turned his punitive tendencies in on himself and was slowly putting himself to death. He had no real interest in Stella anymore.

When I next saw her I told her I was so pleased with her progress that I was thinking of writing to the Home Office about a release date for her; not immediately, of course, but some time in the future. She was guarded in the reaction she showed me, for her pleasure had to be tempered with grief. We talked very much like old friends now. I announced one day that we need not meet on the ward anymore, and the next afternoon she was escorted to my office in the Administration Block. There was no point in keeping her in the dark about my intentions any longer.

I greeted her at the door and told the attendant to come back in an hour. The superintendent’s office is the best in the hospital, a large, high-ceilinged room that gives the impression of a chamber in a gentlemen’s club, all polished wood and old leather in tones of black, brown, and oxblood. There’s a conference table at one end and a big desk at the other, and behind the desk high windows with a deep view over the terraces and the countryside beyond.

Stella drifted around the room and commented on its strong air of male cultivation. The walls were paneled in dark wood and hung with paintings and prints, some the hospital’s but most from my own collection. She noticed several pictures
familiar to her from my house, and stood before them as though reacquainting herself with old friends.

“You remember this one,” I murmured, standing close beside her and indicating a small Italian still life that she’d always loved.

“Oh yes,” she said.

She wandered to the bookshelves and found alongside the standard psychiatric texts several shelves of literature. She pulled out a volume of poetry and was leafing through it when she heard a familiar sound, one she had sorely missed in the last weeks, the clink of bottle and glass. She turned and saw me setting a bottle of gin and a couple of glasses on my desk.