Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Every morning that summer several parties of parole patients, each under the supervision of an attendant, and all dressed in baggy yellow corduroy trousers and blue shirts, with white canvas jackets slung over their shoulders, emerged from the Main Gate to maintain the grounds of the estate. Edgar was one of the group assigned to the deputy superintendent’s garden. Stella often saw him when she went out to pick vegetables or flowers, and if there was no sign of the attendant, a senior man called John Archer, she would sit for a few minutes and they would talk. She admitted she was attracted to him almost from the start. For obvious reasons she tried to ignore the feeling, but his presence out there every day made it easy for her to invent pretexts for seeing him. Though what harm was there in befriending a patient? This is what she said to herself, in justification of her behavior.

  How had it happened?

  On this point she couldn’t at first give me any sort of satisfactory answer. She avoided my eyes, she became vague. Perhaps it was just a case of household lust, easily enough aroused, just as easily crushed out, but when I suggested this the dreamy abstraction vanished and for a moment I felt a flare of spirited hostility from her. Then it faded. She was already deeply depressed; she could not sustain affect. She mentioned something he’d done one day that expressed, oh, strength, tenderness …

  Perhaps. I let it pass.

  Then in a later conversation she described it more fully, what it was he’d done that had so charmed and attracted her at the beginning. She’d gone into the vegetable garden one warm afternoon to pick some lettuce, and saw Charlie down at the far end with a patient, the big black-haired man she had been aware of simply as the one working on Max’s conservatory, she didn’t even know his name; this was a couple of weeks before the dance. Curious to see what the boy was up to, she wandered down the path and he shouted to her that he’d invented a test of strength, and that she should come and see. Charlie Raphael was an overweight little boy with pale skin like his mother’s, which in the summer became lightly freckled. He had dark brown hair that fell over his forehead in a thick fringe, and when he grinned you could see the gap between his two rabbity front teeth. That summer he invariably wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals, and his legs were always scratched and muddy from his various outdoor projects.

  Stella sat on the bench by the wall, in the shade, and watched as Charlie made the patient stand there on the path holding a spade horizontally with a hand at either end of the shaft, then, with his knees bent, ducked underneath and grasped the middle of the shaft.

  “Lift!” he cried.

  The patient glanced at Stella and lifted, and Charlie rose slowly off the ground, his face screwed up with concentration and his knees drawn up beneath him as he clung with both hands to the spade. “I’m counting!” he shouted. “One, two, three, four …”

  He hung from the spade to a count of twenty, at which point Stella, laughing, begged him please to allow the poor man to put him down. “Down!” shouted Charlie, and was gently lowered onto the path. “You’re a strong man,” he said, gazing with admiration at Edgar, who seemed not at all strained by the ordeal. Stella told me that it was while Charlie was clinging like a monkey to the shaft of the spade that she felt the first stirring of interest in the man. He had good hands, she noticed, long, slender, delicate hands, and she wondered what his work was, on the outside.

  The next day she again went down to the conservatory to see what he was doing. She freely chose to do so, nothing can excuse or obscure this fact. She found him up a ladder, removing broken glass from the frame of the structure, carefully working it free of the crumbling putty. He was dropping it into a dustbin beside the ladder, and every few moments the drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by breaking glass. When he saw her approaching he came down the ladder and pulled off his heavy gloves.

  “Mrs. Raphael,” he said, standing squarely in front of her, panting slightly and pushing his hair off his forehead. He produced a red bandanna from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his face and then from his hands, watching her throughout with an expression that she described as affable but at the same time mocking, somehow, or rather challenging, as though he wanted to provoke her to show him who she was.

  “You didn’t have to stop working,” she said, quite at ease with this sort of jousting, and liking the man immediately. “I only wanted to see what you were doing.”

  “Edgar Stark.”

  They shook hands. Stella shielded her eyes as she turned away and gazed up at the conservatory. “Is it worth saving?” she said.

  “Oh, it’s a lovely thing. They built them to last back then. Like that place.”

  He grinned at her, indicating the Wall, visible through the pine trees on the far side of the garden by the road.

  “This won’t be quite so grim, I hope.”

  “It’ll be a nice little summerhouse when I’m finished. Settling in all right?”

  “We’ve been here a year.”

  “Is it that long?”

  He took out his tobacco tin and began to roll a cigarette. It smacked of independence, this gesture, and she approved of it. He didn’t behave like a patient.

  “How long have you been here?” she said.

  “Five years now, but I’ll be out soon. I killed my wife.”

  When I heard this I thought, vintage Edgar. But Stella could match his candor.

  “Why?”

  “She betrayed me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He was no fool. Here there was tragedy, and she was sympathetic. The wife of a forensic psychiatrist was hardly likely to shrink in horror from such a confession.

  “Were you a carpenter on the outside?” she said.

  “Artist. Sculptor. Figurative mostly. You like art, Mrs. Raphael?”

  “I have so little opportunity down here. In London, yes.”

  He wasn’t at all obsequious, she said, this was her first impression, nor did he condescend to her. She said there was something solid and mature about him, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the wildly delusional talk I’d heard on the subject of his late wife. She wouldn’t have thought him so solid and mature had she heard any of that, I thought. But she hadn’t, and so, the next day, after gathering what she needed from the vegetable garden, she again went down to the conservatory.

  He was up his ladder and this time he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Charlie was on the garden wall, and Edgar was talking to the boy about football. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a heavy build, well fleshed out on the chest and hips and belly, with soft white skin. There was no hair on his body, and she thought he might be the sort of man who grew fat later in life. She suggested they might like a cold drink.

  When she came back out with a jug of lemonade Edgar had his shirt on. She asked would he mind if she sat on the bench in the shade for a while. She enjoyed watching him work, she said, and I thought of Max, cerebral Max, as tall as Edgar but stooped, and pale, and forever polishing his spectacles; Max may have conceived the idea of restoring the conservatory, but it was another man’s labor that carried it through. And already his efforts were apparent. Much of the old glass had gone, and the structure was beginning to assume a skeletal appearance. It was strangely beautiful, she said, and when she returned to the house this was the image she carried with her, of that big confident man up a ladder with his shirt off, carefully picking broken glass from the frame of the Victorian conservatory.

  She went back the next day, and the day after. He told her about his son, the boy he’d deprived of a mother; Leonard, his name was, he’d be Charlie’s age now, though Edgar hadn’t seen him for more than five years. His late wife’s family were looking after the boy and they were determined, he said, that he should never know who his father was. It was a story guaranteed to arouse a mother’s sympathy.

  All lies. Edgar had no son.

  One day he asked her if he could call her by her first name, and she said yes, but not in front of
John Archer or Charlie.

  Another time, as he was sketching the design of an iron finial that had rusted badly and would have to be recast, he asked her if he could do her head. She said he could. He had her sit on the bench while he worked, and in a few minutes had produced a strange sketch, all smudged lines, not at all naturalistic, with none of the roundedness and monumentality I saw in Stella, but a curious likeness all the same. She asked if she could keep it and without a word he tore it from the pad and gave it to her.

  “But you must sign it,” she said.

  She kept it in a locked drawer and showed it to nobody, for reasons she was reluctant to look at too closely. Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn’t said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention an event of significance in her day she was practicing a form of duplicity. She rationalized it. She should have known that deception eventually eats away all that is wholesome in a marriage, and she should have faced this, but she didn’t. She chose not to. From this evasion all else followed.

  Oh, but it was so trivial, she told herself, it was absurd to think that talking to a patient in the vegetable garden could amount to anything. But if it was all so trivial, why did she have to conduct this argument with herself? Because of her growing sexual warmth for the man, which she foolishly indulged in this oblique manner, seeking his company, allowing him into her imagination.

  It was not easy at first for her to talk about any of this. I know she was tempted to blame fate, or the vagaries of the human heart, for what happened, the tragic outcome of it all. She had a natural impulse to displace responsibility, we all do, but she disliked the idea of making excuses or hiding behind abstractions. Edgar, the one person she might have blamed, instead she defended to the end. Not once did I hear her hold him responsible for what happened.

  The first I knew of their growing intimacy was the day Charlie fell off the garden wall. There was an old apple tree beside the conservatory and when Edgar was up his ladder Charlie would scramble onto the wall, and from there climb into the tree. He was a fearless tree-climber but, being plump, not too agile, and one day as he was stepping out of the tree back onto the wall the branch broke—he lost his balance—and with a shout he tumbled onto the path and knocked himself out for a second or two.

  Stella was upstairs when Edgar came striding in through the back door with the dazed boy in his arms. Mrs. Bain, the woman who helped with the housework, was sitting at the kitchen table shelling peas. She was the wife of a senior attendant, a man called Alec Bain, and it was he who told me later of his wife’s reaction to a patient who came into the house without knocking, shouting for Mrs. Raphael and using her first name. He wanted to lay the boy down on a bed or a couch but Mrs. Bain lacked the presence of mind to direct him to the drawing room, so he pushed past her out through the kitchen and into the hall. She began to shout at him just as Stella came running down the stairs. She cried out in horror.

  Charlie was all right. He recovered in a matter of minutes, and Stella didn’t feel it necessary to phone Max at the hospital. She held him while Mrs. Bain went for a damp facecloth, showing by the shape of her back what she thought of patients who came barging into the house without being asked and called the doctor’s wife by her first name. Charlie tried to get up but Stella told him he must lie still a little longer. She turned to Edgar, who stood there pushing his hands through his hair.

  “Thank you for bringing him in,” she said. She saw how relieved he was that the boy wasn’t hurt. He clearly felt responsible.

  “No harm done,” he said.

  “I don’t imagine so. But we’ll keep him inside for the rest of the day.”

  “No!” said Charlie.

  “Oh yes,” said Stella.

  Edgar went out through the kitchen door. Stella knew she should try and explain to Mrs. Bain why he behaved toward her with such familiarity, but her old proud carelessness welled up and she didn’t say a word, because she didn’t see why she should.

  • • •

  Nothing physical had happened yet, but this incident helped establish a sort of bond between them. It should of course have been severed at this point, as soon as Stella saw that to behave so informally with a patient was bound to cause trouble sooner or later. But it didn’t occur to her. At the time she didn’t properly analyze why she was amused rather than alarmed by the incident, but later she said she thought it was because she found Mrs. Bain’s attitude so ridiculous, as though patients belonged to a lower order.

  He began to tell her about life in the hospital, and she was surprised that she had never understood before what went on other than from Max’s point of view, the psychiatric perspective. Now she glimpsed a new perspective, she began to see how it was to live, eat, and sleep in an overcrowded ward, sixty men in a dormitory meant for thirty, and to put up with plumbing that dated back to the last century and rarely functioned properly. One story horrified her particularly, about a patient in Block 1 who washed his face in his own urine, then dried himself with the communal towel.

  She became involved. Identification, hazy at first, hedged around with friendly detachment, quickened. The idea that this man, this artist, should suffer the indignities of primitive plumbing, lack of privacy, bullying, boredom, and utter uncertainty about his future, all this aroused her indignation. He was in Block 3 now, a parole patient with a room of his own, but he still had to tolerate much that, to Stella’s sense of justice, was incompatible with the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Though she was starting to doubt that he was mentally ill. She thought he was guilty of a crime of passion; and passion, in essence, was good, surely?

  He didn’t push too hard. He was never serious for long. He made her laugh with stories about the Cambridge mathematician who spent his days sitting in a corner of the dayroom doing higher calculus on a sheet of toilet paper. He told her about games of bridge played with such intensity that a patient almost lost an eye once when a dispute turned ugly. He told her that at times he felt he’d joined a superior gentlemen’s club, for he knew bankers, solicitors, army officers, and stockbrokers; old Etonians as well as men from the lower depths.

  “But we all have one thing in common,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re all mad.”

  She remembers the moment distinctly. She was sitting on the bench in the shade of the garden wall, and Edgar was up his ladder, bare-chested, looking down at her and grinning at his own joke. She wasn’t amused.

  “I don’t think you’re mad,” she said.

  His mood instantly shifted into accord with hers.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be here.”

  You shouldn’t be here. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d been angling for? That the wife of the deputy superintendent agreed with him that he shouldn’t be here, this was real progress.

  Then came the dance.

  Stella describes how, the morning after the dance, she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, idly turning the pages of the newspaper. She was uneasy. She had spent much of the night thinking about what had happened. The essence of it, she told me, was that while they were dancing she became aware that what was pressing against her groin, through his trousers, was, in fact, his penis, and it was getting hard. She said she kept remembering, first, her incomprehension when she felt it, and then, an instant later, her realization that it was, yes, what she thought it was; but even as she recoiled from him, even as she opened her mouth to cry out her outrage, she recognized something in his expression that changed her mind, a sort of mute abashed helplessness—he couldn’t control it! It was funny, and it was sad, too; she was moved by the need she at once perceived behind it. So she’d returned his pressure, and this is how they’d danced around the Central Hall, clinging together with his erection pressed between them, Edgar now beaming broadly and she gazing off into the middle distance with a demure and inscrutable expression on her face. At
no point then or later did her composure fail her. She was almost sorry when the music stopped and he turned abruptly and went back to the other side of the room.

  I was not shocked by any of this. I was surprised, however, surprised and annoyed, not so much by the nature of their collusion—Edgar’s libido was strong, as was Stella’s, and both, clearly, were excited by the public nature of the situation—but rather that he would put in jeopardy our work together, his and mine, in such cavalier fashion. For he said nothing to me about what had happened at the dance; and how could I hope to help him, when I was being deceived?

  The day after the dance was one of the hottest of the summer. She took three or four baths at various times, and each time, as she undressed, she remembered the sensation of the erection pressed into her groin. To this point her sexual interest in Edgar had been a strictly private indulgence and she hadn’t considered that it might be reciprocated; apparently it was. This made his presence in the vegetable garden a problem for her.

  It was irritating. There were things she needed: chives, radishes, lettuce. She was not a timid woman, but she had no desire to resume her relationship with him. She realized, quite rightly, that it was impossible for her to in effect acquiesce a second time. She decided that since she would have to go down there and deal with him sooner or later, it might as well be sooner. The next morning she cleared away the breakfast things, brushed her hair, put on some lipstick, then went out through the back door and across the yard. She was in a light summer frock and white sandals and her legs were bare.

  The sun was already hot. The wall that enclosed the vegetable garden was shaggy with large-leaved ivy and furred with moss between the bricks. The wooden door, with its round Moorish arch, had recently been given a coat of green paint. She paused in front of it, apprehensive. The latch was hot to the touch. She went through. The path wound through a profusion of flowers and vegetables, with clumps of catmint spilling onto the gravel. The day was still and shimmering, and insects murmured among the roses. Flowerpots glowed in the sunlight. When she was halfway along the path she saw John Archer at the far end, sitting on the bench in the shade of the wall in his shirtsleeves, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and rolling a cigarette. She had no wish to talk to him but it was too late to turn back. He heard her on the gravel and immediately stood up. “Mrs. Raphael,” he said.