Asylum (7 page)

He paused there. He gazed at me with such a pathetic expression, begging me to believe him, that I was moved to get out of my chair and come around and put my hand on his shoulder.

“And you knew,” I said quietly. “All those years you knew.”

There hadn’t been anything more after that. I sat at my desk and listened to the tape recorder humming in the silence and then clicking off I stood up and gazed out into the evening as it stole across the marsh. Morbid jealousy. The delusion of infidelity. Freud thought it a form of acidulated homosexuality, the projection of repressed homosexual desire onto the partner:
I
didn’t love him,
she
does. But I considered this unlikely in Edgar’s case. For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound, and will in some individuals translate into a pathological conviction of the other’s duplicity.

But what particularly impressed me in Edgar was this retroactive adjustment of the memory so as to bring the early years of the marriage into line with the delusions that so tragically dominated it at the end, to the point that they now involved hundreds of men and a bizarre set of false memories. Insight, I realized, this is what we must work toward, a moment of insight when the inherent absurdities in his thinking undermined the foundations of the delusional structure and brought it crashing down. Only then could we begin to rebuild his psyche.

But now, this affair with Stella, this would set us back months; for in deceiving me he blocked the flow of candid
confidences essential to our reaching our goal, and rendered the psychotherapeutic process a travesty.

They had the French windows wide open for the dinner party and a warm breeze drifted in from the back lawn, carrying with it the scents of the garden. It was all for Brenda. The visiting dignitary expected to be honored by the psychiatric aristocracy of the estate, and Max would not disappoint her. Dinner was seven-thirty. I was the first to arrive, and found Stella composed and in control. My attitude to her had naturally undergone a profound revision since my discovery of the previous week, or rather, since my intuition that there was more between her and Edgar than simple friendship; but I showed nothing of this.

She had had two and a half hours in the kitchen by herself, she told me quietly as she took me out into the garden, Her Majesty leaves me alone if I appear to be actually working. Max had been sent to the pub for brandy. Stella saw me as an ally; she was unaware of course of the suspicion I now harbored toward her. I was sorry in a way that we couldn’t talk about it, about Edgar’s sexuality. She asked me to entertain Brenda, who was sitting in the back garden, so I went out and settled down beside the matriarch, and Stella stayed in the kitchen.

“It is all rather pastoral,” Brenda said with a sigh, as we gazed across the lawn at the back of the house and the trees beyond. “Peter, do
you
have the impression Max is happy? Stella worries that he’ll never want to leave.”

I understood of course that it was Brenda who was worried.

“It’s ideal,” I said carefully, “for a certain sort of psychiatrist. Fascinating population, a few truly glorious specimens, all in an institution large enough to simulate the outside world.”

“But do you suppose he wants to be superintendent?”

I was diplomatic.

“It is tempting,” I allowed, “to run one of these large closed hospitals. To exercise Victorian paternalism on the grand scale …”

I trailed off. There was a silence.

“You sound as though you’re tempted yourself.”

I laughed with light self-deprecation. “Oh no,” I said, “not me. No, it’s a young man’s game, running the big bins. I’m much too long in the tooth.”

She turned toward me and fastened on me a gimlet eye. “Hm,” she said skeptically.

Max joined us soon afterward; a little later the Straffens arrived, and the party was complete. We stayed out in the garden, all except Stella, who was still in the kitchen, and Bridie Straffen, who went upstairs to see Charlie. Brenda guided the conversation, and we three psychiatrists found ourselves directing all our remarks to her, in deference to her matronly authority. Max made sure all glasses were filled and then went back inside, and ten minutes later we were called in to the dining room. Stella had been selfish about the table, and put me at her end, and Brenda down at Max’s, with Jack Straffen between herself and her mother-in-law, and Bridie between me and Max.

We were eating the salmon when the subject of marriage came up, I forget exactly how. But with a table of only six, all can take part in the same conversation. Brenda, I believe, said something about her first husband, Charles, whom she had divorced when Max was a child, and spoke of him in such a way that Max then asked Bridie Straffen why she thought some marriages survived and others did not. Bridie was decisive. She was a large clever woman from Dublin who’d spent the last twenty years successfully playing the role of superintendent’s wife here on the estate. She was boisterous and popular, and her capacity for alcohol was equaled only by her husband’s.

“I made him take the Oath.” She looked at Jack, who lifted his hands.

“What oath?”

I thought she meant the Pledge.

“The Hippocratic Oath,” she said. “‘Do no harm.’ Think of me as a patient, I told him, and we’ll survive. And we have.”

There was a murmur of amusement around the table. Everyone wanted to add to this. Stella’s voice was the clearest.

“‘Do no harm’?” she said. “Most of us are dying of chronic neglect!”

There was a silence. We were all embarrassed. There was too much in the remark, it was too private, it smacked of a bitter truth. She had gone too far. Bridie came to the rescue.

“Dear Stella, you take me much too literally. The point is not that they do harm but that they do as little as possible. They are human, after all. Even Max is human.”

Max had no choice but to agree, and within a few moments the conversation was back on the rails. But in that tiny ghastly silence I glanced down the table and saw Brenda fixing on Stella a bright gaze charged with hungry curiosity.

After dinner we wandered out through the French windows onto the back lawn, and there was talk about the extraordinarily warm weather, the continental summer we were having that made possible our being outside, in the moonlight, at eleven at night, with the air still as warm and fragrant as it had been during the day. Max told Jack what he’d been doing with the garden and the pair of them went off to have a look at the conservatory. In light of what Stella had said about Max’s ambitions I was not surprised to see him attending to the superintendent so assiduously. Jack was due to retire in the next year or so, and would appoint his own successor.

I settled down in a garden chair and listened to Brenda and Bridie talk about houses in general, which led them on to the great houses of Ireland, and from there to their mutual acquaintance the Earl of Dunraven.

When Max and Jack returned from the vegetable garden we all began the preparatory movements of departure. I noticed that Stella again seemed to be finding it difficult to maintain her composure. Her unease grew stronger as she listened to the conversation that followed.

Jack was telling Bridie and Brenda about the decrepitude into which the garden had sunk before Max and Stella came to the hospital. He was delighted, he said, that Max was bringing it back.

Max said, “With help. No one knows more about these big hospital gardens than John Archer. Nothing would have happened without John.”

“And Edgar Stark,” said Stella quietly, almost to herself, I thought.

Jack, Max, and I, we all turned toward her.

“I hear him hammering away all day,” she said, trying to deflect what she later called our terrible psychiatric gazes. “The man works like a demon.”

“A demon indeed.”

“What are you going to do about him?”

This last question was put by Max to Jack. Stella told me she had the familiar impression of an exclusive professional knowledge, something to do with Edgar in this case.

“Do tell,” said Brenda. “I’m intrigued.”

“All very tiresome,” said Jack in that slightly weary tone of voice he employed when something happened in the hospital that was annoying rather than alarming, one of the petty problems that interfered with the practice of forensic psychiatric medicine; though one might argue that these sorts of problems were precisely the stuff of the practice of forensic psychiatric medicine, institutional forensic psychiatric medicine, that is.

“Someone’s been bringing in alcohol. We think it might be Edgar Stark.”

“That’s rather serious, I should have thought. Why do you think it’s this man?”

Jack was vague. Stella thought bitterly, They’re all so damn vague when it comes to their suspicions. Their power is absolute, and suspicion alone is quite enough to seal a man’s fate; they can stall him indefinitely on the basis of suspicion. Now Jack was vague. He had no evidence, but on the grounds that it must be a patient who was bringing it in (though why not a crooked attendant? she wondered), and therefore a parole patient on an outside working party, and therefore one of three or four obvious suspects, including Edgar, then Edgar was under a very dark cloud indeed. Perhaps he was the only suspect? That
would be quite enough to get him pulled off the working party, stripped of his parole status, and set back, in terms of his discharge, months or even years. It was the raw bare face of institutional power she was seeing on the back lawn that night, she was hearing the voice of the master. It hurt her cruelly, hurt her as though her child were being taken from her, and what was worse was that that voice would not be contradicted, because Edgar
had
no voice; he was silent, just as she was now silent on his behalf, unable, although here in the inner council of hospital authority, to speak for him because to do so would not help him. So in her silence she grieved for their lost voices.

What are you going to do about him? Pull him off the working party, keep him inside? Jack didn’t want to discuss it in front of the women, he said as much. The evening was over, it was time to go home. For a fleeting moment institutional realities had intruded upon a purely social occasion. Such things cannot be avoided; wives and mothers, after all, are closely involved in the work of their husbands in a maximum-security setting such as this one. But there are always the deeper secrets, Stella reflected, the layers of knowledge from which the women are excluded. Her lover’s fate would be decided not by an affable wine-warmed medical superintendent in the moonlight of a warm summer evening. No, it would be decided in the cold clear light of day, at a desk in an office at the heart of a complex of old large buildings with bars on every window.

Max and Stella lay awake in their bedroom, side by side in the darkness. As she silently worried at her lover’s predicament, her husband worried at what she’d said that provoked that awful silence.

“They all knew you were attacking me,” he said.

“Don’t be so paranoid.”

“Don’t use psychiatric jargon to me.”

They fell silent. When Brenda was in the house they spoke in whispers, when they spoke privately, despite the thickness of the walls.

“Why did you want to humiliate me?”

“That’s an absurd exaggeration. It was a silly conversation, no one took it seriously.”

“You were drunk. Why did you drink so much more than anybody else?”

Silence then, a brooding, angry silence, a silence thick with resentment. This was Max’s silence. She had said too much, and his punishment was to create this monstrous silence that filled the room with hurt and anger. She turned away from him and flooded her mind with images of Edgar. But she couldn’t suppress the dread she felt that Jack Straffen would revoke his parole, and she wept softly in the darkness. Max made no sort of attempt to comfort her, nor would she have allowed it had he tried.

She had a premonition that everything was about to shatter.

The day was hot and cloudless, and the insects murmured among the old roses as she made her way toward her lover, whom she could see indistinctly at his workbench by the conservatory. Charlie was with him. Edgar put his tools down when he saw her coming and wiped his hands on his corduroys. She had her basket, and in it gardening gloves and secateurs. He had picked broad beans and chard for her, and pulled a bunch of young carrots. She sat on the bench as he filled the basket.

“Mrs. Bain’s left something for you in the kitchen,” she said to Charlie.

“I’m too busy,” he said.

“In you go, darling. She made it specially.”

He frowned at her and she frowned back. “I’ll be back out in a minute,” he said to Edgar, and plodded off along the path.

“What’s wrong? Something’s happened. You’re upset.” He said it quietly, without looking at her.

She told him he was suspected of bringing alcohol into the hospital. She didn’t reproach him in any way, it didn’t occur to her.

“Don’t worry.”

“I do worry.”

She wandered to the apple tree. Through its branches she could see the perimeter wall. Wherever you stood on this side of the garden your view was defined by the Wall.

“What would I do if you were kept inside?”

She sat down beside him again. He took her fingers and brought them to his lips, turned her hand over and kissed the palm. But she wouldn’t be comforted.

“What would I do? I’d come down one morning and there’d be some other patient working here. I’d ask where you were and they’d say you weren’t on the working party anymore. That would be it, cut off, just severed, no chance to say anything at all. I’d never see you again.”

“It won’t happen,” he said, and continued kissing her palm, but she pulled her hand away.