Asylum (9 page)

Brenda and Stella responded to the announcement of these dramatic events with exclamations of surprise and concern. But it was Brenda who thought of Charlie, who had not come home yet. Stella promptly simulated extreme anxiety; she channeled the emotional impact of Edgar’s escape into anxiety for Charlie. She hoped that Max didn’t notice that the boy’s welfare was his grandmother’s rather than her own first thought.

Max’s curt response was that Edgar Stark had no interest in boys. “He wants to get as far away from here as he can.”

Shortly afterward Charlie came running into the house in a state of high excitement at hearing the siren, and eager to know everything.

Stella went back into the kitchen to finish cooking dinner. He wants to get as far away from here as he can. She stood at the stove with the tears coursing down her face. She heard Brenda come in. She wiped her eyes with her apron and lit the gas under the potatoes. She had to maintain a façade that suggested nothing other than reasonable distress that the hospital would now undergo gross disruptions, to the detriment of patients, staff, and staff families alike. She murmured something of this to Brenda.

“It is a terrible nuisance,” Brenda said. “Very tiresome of the man indeed. And he worked in the garden?”

“He was restoring the conservatory.”

“It’s shocking to think he came into this house. What would have happened if one of us had been here at the time? I understand he’s committed violence against women in the past.”

“I suppose he made sure the house was empty first.”

“What if Charlie had surprised him upstairs in your bedroom? In your
bedroom
, Stella! Don’t you feel violated? That he came into your bedroom?”

“It’s a shock. I haven’t altogether assimilated it.”

“Of course not.”

Brenda conducted this interrogation without once taking her
eyes off Stella. Something in the younger woman’s reaction to the escape puzzled her, and Stella was aware of it. What had she given away? Was it her failure to think of Charlie, when told that an escaped patient was at large in the countryside? Or had she failed to show sufficient surprise; as though she’d
known?
She prayed she could get through the evening without further scrutiny.

But worse was to come. Halfway through supper the telephone in the study began ringing, the hospital telephone, and Max left the room. When he returned he told Stella that Jack wanted to see them both at his house.

“He wants to see you both?” said Brenda.

“Yes, Mother,” said Max with uncharacteristic firmness. “He wants to see us both.”

They drove up past the Main Gate just as it was getting dark. Long strips of cloud, pink, blue, and mauve, were strung across the fading sky, and against the thickening evening light reared the Main Gate with its two square towers and the double gates between. As they’d got into the car Max had asked her why she thought Jack wanted to see her as well, and she’d told him she had no idea. He said nothing more, and they drove in silence until they reached the superintendent’s house, up beside the female wing.

Bridie opened the door to them, looking suitably grave. With a pang of distaste Stella recognized how deeply over a long marriage she had insinuated herself into the fabric of Jack’s working life, and it occurred to her that she would never be in Bridie’s position now. Previously she had thought it hers for the taking, the role of medical superintendent’s wife, and she had mentally spurned it. Now she saw she would never be offered it; the superintendency was lost. She wondered had Max grasped this yet.

Bridie showed them into Jack’s study, a large book-lined room, comfortably furnished, and Jack, his broad back to them, fussed at the whisky decanter and asked them without turning if they would have a drink. Stella said yes with some alacrity. Bridie closed the door and left the three of them alone.

“Make yourselves at home,” murmured Jack, and there was a gruffness and a detachment in him that she had never heard before.

“Bloody business,” he said, when they were settled. “This is my fifth escape. Always hell, even if we get him fast. Edgar Stark.”

He fell silent, frowning at his whisky, and the name of Stella’s lover hung there in the gloom as the evening died and the last of the birdsong drifted in from the garden.

“This is difficult. I’ll come straight to the point. I haven’t told you this, Max. I saw no reason to distress you both by passing on wild rumors. But in view of this afternoon’s events I must bring this thing into the open.”

He paused again. This “thing”—what “thing”? The way Jack pronounced the word, to Stella it was a disgusting thing, decaying, bad. Why did she need to be present for the bringing into the open of something decaying and bad?

“What rumors?” said Max.

The superintendent sighed. He turned to Stella. “It’s been suggested,” he began, “that your relationship with Edgar Stark went beyond what’s proper for a doctor’s wife.”

“Where has this come from?” said Max sharply. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

“It doesn’t matter where it came from. I don’t need to tell you how these things work. The patients talk among themselves, an attendant overhears, the attendants talk, it soon gets back to me.”

“I’m astonished you take it seriously!”

Stella said both she and Jack were surprised by Max’s vehemence.

“Max. Please listen to me. Of course I am skeptical of rumor. I hear a great deal in the course of the day, little of it with any basis in reality. But this is a large institution, and people talk. Of course I give it no credence. However. I need to know why such a rumor might have arisen.”

“Stella talked to him in the garden, but there’s nothing beyond that.”

“Stella?”

They both turned toward her. Max was angry, and while on the face of it his anger was in reaction to Jack’s accusing Stella of impropriety, she understood that the fact that this interview should even be necessary, plus, of course, his sickening awareness that he’d mishandled the theft of his clothes and in effect allowed Edgar to get away, all this complicated the situation, and his defense of her was not as gallant as it appeared.

“Of course not, Jack,” she said, a tone of disbelief softening the outrage in her voice. “I chat with him sometimes when I go into the vegetable garden. Or I did. I chat to all the patients, I think it’s important.”

“Did you see him every day? I’m sorry, Stella, I have to know where this came from.”

A pause here. She assumed an expression of dignity in the face of insult. She was a respectable married woman whose virtue had been questioned. She allowed that expression then gradually to give way to a pained acceptance of the realities.

“We eat a salad from the garden every day. If I see Edgar I say good morning to him, and sometimes we talk.”

Jack allowed a small pause while he frowned and nodded and watched Stella carefully.

“Thank you, Stella,” he said at last. “I thought it must be something like that. I do apologize. But you understand. I pity the psychiatrist’s wife, it’s a thankless task you perform. We’re the only ones who know the cost.” This was addressed to Max, who also nodded absently and frowned.

“Let me give you another drink.”

“No thanks, Jack,” said Max, rising, “we must go.”

Jack didn’t apologize further. He knew it had to be done, and he’d done it. It would take a good deal to convince him that a doctor’s wife could commit any sort of impropriety with a patient. He was satisfied. This at least was what I imagine Max made of the interview.

I was with Bridie in the drawing room when Jack joined us. I’d been there for the last hour, bringing them up to date on what little I knew about Stella’s relationship with my patient.

“Well?” I said.

He nodded. “I’m afraid it’s true.”

“Oh God.”

“What will you do?”

Jack sighed. “That depends.”

“Max doesn’t see she’s lying?” said Bridie.

Jack opened his hands. He said nothing.

“I suspect,” I said, “that he does. But he would rather
not
see it. Which is why he let him get away.”

Jack gazed into his whisky. I suddenly saw that he was out of his depth. He was genuinely shocked to think that Stella might be guilty of what I’d suggested. He didn’t want to believe it.

Bridie had no such qualms. “To think of it,” she murmured, “to think that a doctor’s wife—”

She fell silent. It was too much for her too.

“Perhaps,” I said, “I should have a word with Max.”

It seemed, said Stella, that the evening would never end; it seemed as if every permutation, every ripple of this stone dropped into the still pool of their lives must wash through before she could take a pill and go to bed and properly be alone with the misery walled up behind the façade she had erected against the world. As they drove past the Main Gate she had said to Max: “What will you say to Brenda?”

“I hadn’t thought.”

Their voices seemed now to be operating in two registers, a front register that functioned as a screen behind which seethed unspoken reservoirs of feeling. Max’s front was one of weariness and preoccupation; behind it she felt the storm system of his anger, directed both at himself and at her. Though why he should be angry with her was unclear. Hadn’t she explained herself, and hadn’t that explanation been accepted by Jack Straffen? But there was no point in going into any of this now.

Max went into his study and without a word closed the door behind him. Brenda’s avidity to know everything was barely veiled.

“I sent Charlie up to bed,” she said. “He wasn’t very happy to be missing all the excitement.” They were standing in the hall. Stella put her bag on the table under the mirror and gazed at her reflection. Brenda waited.

“Well?”

“There have been rumors,” said Stella. “About me.”

Brenda followed her into the drawing room and stood by the fireplace while Stella poured herself a drink. She would have to be told, but Stella was damned if she’d hand it to her on a plate.

“About you?”

She moved to the window with her drink. She gazed out into the garden. The curtains were still open though night had fallen. There was a full moon.

“It’s a lovely night,” she said. Where is Edgar now? In a ditch or a barn or a haystack, huddled in the darkness, dressed in Max’s clothes, eking out his tobacco? Or had he disappeared into some world she knew nothing of? She turned away from the window.

“Yes, about me.”

“Stella, please tell me what happened. Or don’t, if you don’t want to. But I am concerned, you know. I would like to help.”

“Someone told Jack there was impropriety in my relationship with Edgar Stark.”

“Was there?”

“Of course not. Need you ask?”

“I’m sorry.”

She gazed at her calmly. Oh, Brenda was ready to cast her as the scarlet woman and see all of Max’s troubles laid at her door, but Stella wouldn’t allow her to do it.

I had meanwhile left the Straffens’ and driven down past the Main Gate to the deputy superintendent’s house. Already I felt a different atmosphere on the estate: there were men about despite the lateness of the hour, there was urgency in the air. This was a delicate interview I had to conduct with Max, and the point of it was to prevent him adopting, psychologically, a
posture of isolation. Unfortunately we needed him with us. About Stella I was less certain, but what I predicted was that she would now see that she’d been betrayed, and would become angry not so much at Edgar as at herself. Which might in turn trigger a depressive episode. We would have to be vigilant.

I rang the doorbell. On her way down the hall Stella again paused briefly at the mirror. There was no sound from the study. She opened the front door.

“Peter, come in. Max is in the study.”

“Let me talk to you first.”

“We’re in the drawing room.”

I followed her down the hall. She moved with an exaggerated ease, her body denying its tension. Brenda greeted me warmly. I sank into an armchair.

“Bloody for all of you,” I said, as Stella gave me a gin.

“Peter, tell us what’s going on,” said Brenda.

“All the usual procedures. Jack carries the worst of it of course. He’ll be crucified in the press, questions in the House, the whole parole system will be condemned. An escape like this sets the hospital back five years.” I was trying to project a sort of weary languor, to cast the whole thing as a nuisance merely and mask the true seriousness of the crisis. Brenda had assumed her woman-out-of-her-depth stance, designed to appeal to my gallantry and prompt confidences.

“But surely he’ll be caught quickly?”

I sipped my gin and allowed a hand to fall over the arm of the chair. “Perhaps. Though we think he may have friends in London.”

“I didn’t know he had friends in London,” said Stella.

“How would you?” I gazed at her rather dreamily.

“Max said nothing about him having friends in London. Who might be involved, I mean.”

“He has friends from the old days. Soho. That crowd.”

Stella says she suddenly saw the three of us as though she were on the other side of the window, as though she were standing in the garden, in the darkness, watching a man in an armchair talking to two women, each in a state of rapt attention.
Brenda’s expression was one of naked curiosity mingled with fascination and horror. Her mask had slipped.

After a few minutes I rose to my feet. “I’d better have a word with Max,” I said. “Please don’t get up, Stella.”

But she did. She stood at the door of the drawing room and watched me go down the hallway and tap lightly on Max’s door, then go into the study and close the door behind me.

She doesn’t know when Max came to bed. She went upstairs soon after. She took a pill and lay there waiting for sleep. The moonlight filtered through the curtains. The house was quiet. She pressed her face into her pillow and wept until the pillowcase was sodden. She changed the pillowcase and lay on her back staring at the ceiling, having discharged the most immediate weight of her misery. She pondered this new information. It meant one thing only: if he had friends he was probably safe. Holding tightly to this thought she fell asleep.